The dreamlands roiled around the Dreadnought, ever shifting from land, to sea, to sky, and then to other variations of vistas. The layer ahead was the target. Sally’s destination was inside that layer. But there was a problem.

  It was a land layer. Solid as dark dirt and looking like an expanse of volcanic rock. Parts of it were even red. Clearly volcanic.

  They were headed right for it.

  Mark yelled out, “We gonna be okay, Eliot?!”

  Eliot was on it, the edges of the sphere surrounding the Dreadnought solidifying into golden fire as he yelled back, “I need that Purpose as strong as possible, Mark!”

  Mark solidified himself and though he was already doing 100%, he tried for 110%. Maybe he got a bit more out of himself. Hard to say. But then they were right up against the black dirt layer and there was no turning this ship around anymore.

  The Dreadnought’s shield touched the black land and the black land cracked like obsidian glass, shattering inward, the golden shield flaming bright hot, and the land melted ahead. Andria ran backward, away from the bow of the ship, moving fast on caltrops of mithril. The bow of the ship crushed into earth and stone.

  Many things broke, wood cracking, shield crackling. Mark was too focused on Purpose to falter now. They were still in the dreamlands and if they stopped then they’d all fall into the deep dream. It was better to crash than it was to falter.

  And then, like a car crash was wild and crazy in the moment, it was suddenly over.

  The dreadnought was 3/4ths in the layer, and the layer was black and molten with lava pouring out of tunnels in the stone, only to hit the deck of the Dreadnought and slick off, acting more like glowing red mercury than lava. Gravity was pointed in multiple directions. Some of the lava slicked off forward, toward the front of the ship and back into the layer. But behind Mark, near the hover ring and the castle, the lava poured out of tubes, into the golden air of the Dreadnought, and then ‘down’, which was more like ‘to the side’ when looking at it from the perspective of the layer—

  “Compensating!” Eliot called out. “We’re going all the way in!”

  Mark glanced beyond the Dreadnought, looking at the dreamlands, watching as a river crushed against the back of the ship. Dreamland waters became steam blasting forward, filling the space with moisture and heat—

  Suddenly the golden shield of the Dreadnought pulsed, shattering the land in that pulse, pushing out of the front of the ship, revealing a crushed bow and broken wood everywhere, but it was ‘fine’. The ship’s shield pulsed harder and obliterated the land ahead, like a balloon expanding into sand.

  The Dreadnought ‘sailed’ forward a good 200 more meters, and then abruptly stopped. The river at the back of the ship went back to the dreamlands. The ship was now firmly anchored in deep, volcanic rock, with obsidian tunnels everywhere in the rock and some of those tubes filled with lava. The shield pulsed some, pushing lava away from the ship, but then the shield crushed inward slightly, and the lava flowed freer—

  “Still compensating!” Eliot said, deep in the bowels of the ship, where everyone was worried. “Isoko! Funnel the heat out into the dreamlands!”

  Isoko didn’t announce anything. She just did it. Wind whipped through the shields of the Dreadnought, pouring out into the dreamlands, causing a hurricane to bloom out there and rain to rush inward, to turn to steam as it entered the space.

  Mark said, “I probably shouldn’t do a Sanding Union, because it’ll fuck with the ship, right—”

  “Do NOT!” Eliot said, “Do not do a Sanding!”

  “Didn’t think so,” Mark softly said, mostly to himself, as he watched the ship right itself and the rain flow in with the wind.

  Lava cooled unnaturally fast as a lightning storm shocked the dreamlands overhead, flashing brightness into the hot depths, contending with the glow of Castellan fire across the pearl-like surface of the Dreadnought’s shields. It was a broken pearl surface, but it was getting better with every passing moment.

  20 minutes later and the ship was merely lodged into the layer instead of crashed into the layer.

  Eliot announced, “All clear! We’re secure! These are the most dangerous types of layers, and I’m glad we came here now and not earlier. I’m not sure we have any safe way to get to the kaiju.”

  Mark said, “I’ll have to take Sally out there myself and Sand the way forward, leaving the Dreadnought here.” He asked, “How far away is the kaiju?”

  Silence and worried vectors followed Mark’s question.

  Tartu soon answered, “About 230 kilometers that way. Quark should be getting the readout now.”

  Sure enough, Quark got a readout and Mark made note of the heading in his vision.

  Mark asked, “You wanna do this, Sally?”

  Sally argued a little with some people in the ship, outside of Mark’s vision, her vector stabilizing rapidly while Eliot’s vector went unstable, and Isoko was worried, and then Andria stepped forward.

  “I’ll kill it,” Andria said, in the comms, as she stood by the castle. She hadn’t made it all the way inside, and she didn’t have to; it was safe out here, now. “I think my mithril can make it through the lava and into the kaiju and I can already feel stuff out there with my Mindless Manipulation. I think there are slimes in the lava. And I can kinda… see out of them? I’m figuring it out right now.”

  Mark smiled. “I’m all for doing it that way!”

  Eliot said on the comms, “Okay, so… This is going to be unpopular, but Sally needs to pick a different target—”

  “No!” Sally said, also on the comms, bringing the discussion out into the open. “Why?!”

  “Because,” Eliot said, “You’ll start changing sizes and you’ll crush yourself against the stone and die. That’s solid volcanic rock out there!”

  “You don’t know that, Eliot,” Sally said, “The normal scanners can’t see past 100 km, and what they do see is a lot of lava spaces and open tubes.”

  “I’ll be there with her to Sand the world around her,” Mark said, before anyone else could say that Eliot had a really good point, which he most certainly did. “We have concerns, but they’re solvable. Are we close enough to scan for the thing?”

  “... Not in any real way,” Eliot said, “The Storm Prism only sees the kaiju because it focuses on the astral body and kaiju Call of the kaiju. We’re still trying to figure out how it worked at all with the Manipulator Kaiju back with my kaiju since it wasn’t Calling at all, but we think it was working on subvocalizations… if you want to call them that.”

  “I think it’s correct,” Tartu said, as though he was defending himself from a conversation he had had with Eliot before. “The whole thing is a design from Second Princess Walaria and half of it is magic which can do funky things, like apparently ‘hear quiet kaiju’.”

  Eliot said, “Basically, our scanners are borked in this depth of shit. You and Sally, if you went out there, could be headed into anything at all, and we wouldn’t know. It’s supposed to be some sort of size-changing kaiju anyway, so it really could be any size, shape, or cause any sort of scenario at all.”

  “I’m almost there already,” Andria said, interrupting the building tension. “There are sooooo many lava slimes in the middle of the layer. It’s like… a whole vein of them. They can’t see for shit but I can still hop from one of them to the… other…” Her voice drifted off as her vector went elsewhere.

  Everyone on the ship waited.

  Mark instantly started flooding her with a Union of Adamant and Ethereal in preparation for whatever was coming. Small drops of mithril curled out of the air around her, but then they faded away as she pushed more and more of herself into her distant self, aiming elsewhere, focusing on something far, far out of sight.

  Moments became minutes.

  Mark almost asked about whatever she was seeing, but then Andria’s vector snapped back into her body, and she was lesser than before. In pain. The pain faded fast.

  Andria still winced, in a delayed sort of fashion, as she said, “I think it’s a hedgehog and know it is made of pain. Ouch.”

  “You were able to find it?” Mark asked, surprised in a lot of ways. “You could do what… jump from slime to slime?”

  Andria rubbed her head a little and then stopped because the pain was fully gone, almost as fast as it had started. She was surprised by that. And then she said, “Once I connected to one of them I sort of understood what was going on in their stimulus-response sorts of lives, and how they were all spread out. Basically the slimes follow the lava and make the tunnels and there’s a giant vein of lava in the middle of the layer, maybe a good 20 or 30 kilometers wide. The very center is open air and we could travel in the center if we got that far, but it’s past 200-ish kilometers of solid stone. The slimes congregate on the surface of the lava— It’s sort of like a tube with gravity pointing outward— Anyway… a lot of the kaiju in the layer are inside that tube. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but the slimes live a life of flowing through the tunnels, and they know to stay away from some places because they’re scared of those places.

  “I went in the direction of the scary places and the second I looked at something that slime popped.” Andria continued, “I assume it was the kaiju, since it was in the rough area we’re looking at and it emanated a Call and Retribution is important to Sally’s kit. It felt like being stuck with a thousand needles, and that was just with me looking at it.”

  Mark instantly said, “No one is to engage the kaiju at all. Andria, pull back completely. I’m going to go get it myself, and only myself.”

  Sally stepped out of the castle with a divine glow in her voice and eyes, as she stated, “Drakarok will protect me from the Retribution. I’m coming with you.”

  Mark was concerned for a moment, but someone else was a whole lot more concerned.

  Eliot came up from behind Sally and yelled, “Sally! It’s fucking 1300 degrees out there! And PL 75 at the MINIMUM! It will NOT be easy! This is not a simple stroll through the Wilds!”

  Sally turned, picked up Eliot into a hug, and softly told him, “I’ll be alright.”

  … Eliot hugged her back, saying words that were too soft to hear.

  Derek watched on, thinking that the two of them were in love, and this felt like too much of a private moment to intrude. From Andria’s vector, she felt the same way. Isoko, David, Tartu, and Lola did not seem that way, but the whole event gave Mark pause. Mostly it gave Isoko some pause, and that bled over into Mark thinking that something was happening that he hadn’t registered at all, until that moment.

  … Mark wondered if he had missed some obvious signs that were obvious to everyone else over the last few months, or even since before the settlement stuff. Sally hung out with Eliot all the time, but that was normal hanging out, right? Isoko was thinking that maybe it hadn’t been ‘normal hanging out’ at all. Derek was happily looking on and not saying anything, though, like he was glad something was finally happening that he had seen circled around for months.

  Sally set Eliot back down and Eliot was unhappy, but he held onto Sally’s hand and she held onto his, and they had more quiet words.

  Soon Eliot let go and said, “Let Tartu grow some of those anti-heat fruit for you before you go, and one of those full-needs fruit. They’ll last a day. They won’t last nearly long enough because you’re going to be stuck down there while you come to terms with you new Powers… Shit, Sally. You’re really doing this?”

  “I am,” Sally said, “And I’ll take the fruit.”

  Tartu spoke up on the comms, “I have some of those growing in the garden already. Let me check my notes… row 4 column B for the anti-hot-environmental-hazard fruits. Icenut is the one you want. It’s blue acorns. Full needs fruits are on row 1. Breathleaf and mealfruit. Column A and B. Clear leaves and a bright red berry about the size of a fist. Take a lot. Your needs will skyrocket when you get bigger.”

  “Sounds good; thank you, Tartu,” Sally said.

  Mark waited.

  Soon, Sally came back out wearing some illusionary clothes, because all of hers were going to get burned away anyway. It was hot out here, but Sally looked like she was standing in some deep air conditioning. She also seemed happy. Full. With a smile on her face and her blond hair in a bun, Sally stood tall, saying, “God damn, I love mealfruit. It’ll only last for 6 hours, but holy fuck, it’s good.”

  Mark grinned. “Ready to get a power up?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sally said, eyes focused, golden light shining behind her. “I’m ready.”

  Mark wrapped Sally and himself into a somewhat-dome of adamantium, cutting off all light, but Quark started flicking out sigils and the adamantium shell turned invisible, the light coming back. Sally got a chair, and Mark lifted them off of the Dreadnought, saying, “I’m going to Sand the world when we get far enough away from the ship. That should make travel a whole lot easier… And scanning, too?” Mark added the last part as a question.

  Eliot said, “Scanning through sand is easier, but we’re going to lose communication when you get too far down. I’ll throw together some relays that might survive for a little while, but not for long. They’ll try to follow you and keep communication lines open… I hope.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Mark nodded. “Quark can compensate a little using the scans we already have… Where was it Andria?”

  Andria said, “Go straight in and then to the left. All the life in the zone is located on that lava tube in the middle.”

  Mark looked to Sally. “Ready?”

  “I’m ready!”

  Mark took off into the air, caltropping his way across the Dreadnought and then launching over the bow, aiming at the golden shell surrounding the ship. He reached for the land ahead and gravity suddenly shifted, aiming forward, and Mark fell down into the obsidian and stone ground, Sally gripping onto the invisible chair under her ass. Mark was still floating in the middle of his ‘vehicle’.

  The vehicle was heating up very fast. Mark was fine, but Sally was sitting on a hot seat… Hmm.

  Mark asked her, “You want something else besides a chair?”

  “I’m good, Mark!” Sally said, her Tactile Telekinesis wrapping around the air around her hands and body, holding onto a separation between herself and the world. She looked at him, asking, “Are you okay?”

  Mark smirked. “I’m a little warm.” And then he looked at the land below him, beyond the invisible surface of the adamantium shell. Lava pooled and obsidian protruded and rocks floated. The Dreadnought was safe beyond its golden shield, about 10 meters ‘up’ that way, but lava was pouring out of broken tubes to the side, rapidly filling in the land with fresh, molten lava… or was it magma? Mark asked, “Is it ‘magma’, or ‘lava’?”

  “It’s molten rock so I’m gonna call it ‘lava’ no matter what the English teachers call it,” Sally said.

  Mark nodded.

  And then Mark did a small Union of Earth and Bubbles, keeping his vector close by so he didn’t disrupt the Dreadnought overhea—

  The land fountained into billowing black dirt and bright sparks and Mark’s little vehicle was completely unable to sink, because of course it couldn’t sink. Even with Mark’s weight, the air in the vehicle made it a whole lot less dense than airy rock. So Mark reached down into the airy rock with a propeller of adamantium and he spun that blade into the sand.

  Mark didn’t get very far.

  It was like pushing a balloon into water.

  He bobbed up and down a few times.

  Mark laughed a little, then said, “I need to increase my weight a whole lot, Quark. Do the weight-gaining sigils.”

  Eliot called over the comms, “It’s gonna be such a long trip if you can’t actually go down quickly.”

  “I’m good, Eliot,” Sally responded. “We’re both good. See you later.”

  “... See you two later,” Eliot said.

  Quark’s hands started flashing in his contained sphere, and then Mark felt himself get heavier. He landed on the bottom surface of the vehicle, and Mark told Sally, “I’m adjusting the vehicle’s shape, now.”

  Sally was looking down at the tumbling black sand and bright fiery globs of lava, as she said, “Not enough of a fatass, huh?”

  Mark moved himself to the bottom of the vehicle and his weight seemed to double, and then triple. The heat of the lava was already warming him up, and it felt good, really. Like being warm after being cold for a long time. The vehicle began to sink, and with some help from Mark’s spinning rotor it moved.

  Mark said, “I would have thought adamantium would have been heavy enough, but the air makes it a bit tougher since I want to keep the pressure in the space atmospheric-normal.”

  Sally said, “I’m good with the pressure. I took some anti-pressure fruit, too; I forgot what Tartu called it.”

  “Neat!” Mark called on the comms, “See you all soon!”

  “If it’s too much then come back,” Eliot said.

  Isoko said, “Good skill!”

  Lola said, “See you soon.”

  The world wrapped around them, lava turning to airy sputters, obsidian and stone blasting upward in great gusts of sand. Mark further changed the ‘earthdynamics’ of the vehicle, putting a taper on the top and the bottom, making the push through the dirt easier.

  And soon they were sailing down through sand.

  Occasionally they hit pockets of lava that turned to brilliant sparks that passed over them, before the world turned to black sand and darkness, with only the lights of Quark able to provide light at all. It was not an easy trip. ‘Laborious’ didn’t even cut it. This was gonna be a fucking slog.

  But Mark was adamant, and so he ‘drilled’ forward, occasionally stopping the Sanding Union to switch to Good/Bad or that Homeostasis/Agitation Union to dump heat away. Mark was perfectly comfortable in this lava-filled environment and Quark was too. Sally was even okay. But the less stress on Sally’s temporary fruit-enchantments right now, the more stress they could put on them later, when Mark had to actually fight the kaiju up ahead.

  Still, though, Sally turned more and more nervous as they went deeper and deeper.

  Quark had already said it was going to be a 5 hour trip.

  They were at hour 1 and 15 minutes right now.

  Quark announced, “Connections with the Dreadnought have failed. We are alone, now.”

  Sally sighed.

  Mark decided to take Sally’s mind off of the trip, asking, “Sooooo? You and Eliot, huh?”

  Sally instantly and vehemently said, “Nope! Not having this conversation!”

  Mark grinned. “We could talk about claustrophobia instead?”

  Sally shimmered golden, and suddenly she was perfectly okay, her entire body turning a bit spiky. She said, “Let go of some of the adamantium shell. I can help drill better so we don’t have to spend 4 hours avoiding the topic of me and Eliot.”

  Mark snorted as he ‘let go’ of some of the shell.

  Sally’s vector flooded into the surface, golden radiance shimmering against the black. The entire drill felt like it was suddenly ‘lubricated’, or something like that.

  Mark turned on the power, Sanding the world and ripping his rotor into the sand. His weight did most of the work, but the rotor gave them a real direction to follow—

  Lava. So, so much lava. Everything was lava for a good 10 minutes, and everything felt truly, utterly crushing. Mark’s Union turned the lava into violent air, battering the outside of the hull, but he had made the drill well, with a spherical inside and architecture meant to hold back pressure. Most of the strength of it came from being adamantium, of course, but a bit of architecture held the rest of it together—

  And then gravity turned weird.

  Mark was still moving in one direction and he had never deviated… probably. Quark’s sense of direction was drawing a line in the world behind them, in Mark’s vision, but suddenly the lava submersible was headed ‘up’. Still on the correct path, but being underground with weird gravity was incredibly disorienting.

  Mark asked, “Quark? Is your travel line still correct?”

  “Calculating!” Quark said. “Attempting to handshake with the Dreadnought again… Handshake failed.”

  “Ah… okay,” Mark muttered. “Are we lost now?”

  Sally was holding herself onto her chair, but gravity had her hair floating up.

  Mark was now ‘standing’ on the roof of the vehicle, and suddenly that was too much of an imbalance. The whole thing twisted and Mark was back on the bottom again and Sally’s hair was falling down again. Quark’s travel line was down below them, with the estimated target up above them another 4 hours away.

  Mark said, “Shit.”

  Sally, however, was perfectly confident as she looked up, in the direction that they probably needed to go, and said, “Cut the weight spell and ascend, Mark.”

  “Handshake reestablished!” Quark said, the travel line in the vision adjusting by a fraction, but it was still mostly where Quark had calculated it to be. “We’re on target for a 3.8 hour trip!”

  “You guys okay down there?!” Eliot voice came over the line, garbled and staticky.

  “We’re good,” Sally said, “The gravity switched back there so now we’re ascending toward the center of the space… probably.”

  Mark said, “Cut the weight spell, Quark.”

  Quark cut the weight spell, and now that ‘up’ was in the right direction, Mark’s Sanding Union of Earth and Bubbles sent the adamantium drill-vehicle right through lava, and then into black dirt and other stuff, very, very fast. Sally held onto the drill with her Retribution, and that made them practically fly through the stone.

  “Good lusuuuushhhhh…” Eliot voice drifted into static.

  “Connection failed,” Quark said.

  Mark pulled back his rotors and smiled, saying, “This is a lot faster, now!”

  Quark said, “Recalculating time to arrival… 2 hours.”

  “Thank Drakarok,” Sally muttered.

  “I’ll have you talking about Eliot soon enough!” Mark said.

  Sally faltered, embarrassed but weirdly happy. And then she refocused, and the Retribution glow to the drill came back in full force. She softly said, “… We’re still figuring it out.” She clarified, “I’m still figuring it out.” She muttered, “Eliot is very… very sure about everything, and that’s…” She went quiet.

  Mark felt supremely happy for them, so he simply said, “I’m happy for both of you secret-keepers. I just wanna know how you managed to keep it a secret so much! I can’t even feel your vector around him, or him around you.”

  Sally winced. “Yeah… we’re… I’m still figuring it out. All of it… It’s probably nothing, Mark.” She sighed, looking up, saying, “It might be nothing at all.”

  Mark’s eyebrows went up.

  He wisely said nothing at all.

  But then Sally quietly asked, “You really felt nothing at all? From either of us?”

  Well that’s a fucking loaded question.

  Mark said, “I felt a whole lot of normal friendly emotions— Sally, I’m not good at sensing love. Isoko would be much better to talk about this stuff with, but… You two do spend a lot of time together, and you do a lot of stuff together, and yeah, I know you’re closer with Eliot than you are with Isoko, but in a different way.”

  Sally could have taken that flopping answer any number of ways. Mark was very happy when she just grinned and chuckled. And then Mark was less happy when she said, “You really don’t feel love, huh.”

  Mark frowned a little. “It’s not like I don’t want to. I just don’t. But… the connection to Addavein is doing something weird with me in that direction. Like… You heard about when I had the hots for Aurora that one time, right?”

  Sally’s eyes went wide with joy. “Oh my god! That did happen, didn’t it!” And then she asked, “Did Isoko smashing open that Manipulation Kaiju get you going, too?”

  “I choose not to respond to that.”

  Sally chuckled, sending vibrations of Retribution throughout the vessel with every breath. “Sorry, sorry… I know I shouldn’t laugh…” She smiled softly, and said, “I hope… I’m not sure what I hope for, Mark. But I do hope for you, in a lot of good ways. You deserve good things in your life. More good things than this world seems capable of giving you.”

  Mark felt love, in that moment, from Sally.

  It was better than a warm hug.

  Mark said, “I hope for good things for you, too.”

  Sally scoffed. “Oh please. I don’t deserve shit.”

  “Bah! That’s my friend you’re talking about there! I think she deserves all the shit I can give her!”

  Sally smiled softly.