Isoko laid on top of one of the side towers of the main castle of the Dreadnought, spread on a towel, sunning herself in the strong light of whatever desert-and-sky layer they were in right now. It was a calm layer. Pretty close to Mark’s destination, too. Whatever Malaqua had done when he grabbed the entire ship and moved it across uncountable layers and reality had both shortened the remaining trip and brought them a moment of peace. There weren’t many layers like this.
Just open sky and orange desert. Dunes rolled under constant wind.
And nothing lived here at all.
Isoko sipped her mango smoothie, and adjusted her sunglasses and her bikini.
Sally lay beside her in a similar state of dress. It was weird to see her short, and even shorter than Isoko, but Sally was comfortable being short. Sally could be any height she wanted to be now, and she didn’t much care for being big all the time.
It was just the two of them.
It had been 2 days since the shitstorm with the gods and Kardi, and everything was wrong with the world. And Mark was an elf, legally, under the System. No one knew what that meant at all and Mark wasn’t willing to pray to Freyala yet to find out. But at least he was talking about it. Muttering.
Making up his mind.
That shard of Drakarok’s spear looked interesting, too.
Sally tried not to be jealous. She had her own Powers to work on, anyway.
Tartu was drowning himself in work. He woke up, was excited for a moment as he turned his moss bed into a spread of fruit trees and strawberry vines, and then Mark told him about Kardi. Everything died around him at that moment. Even the Dreadnought’s hull began to rot and decay, and mushrooms began to grow for meters around him. And then Tartu went to work, figuring out his new Powers.
Tartu was working right now, and his mangos and strawberries made some pretty good smoothies. He had even figured out a milk tree, which was why they had some ice cream for the smoothies.
Delicious!
Eliot was hard at work figuring out some sort of mana farm with Tartu, but mostly he was fortifying the Dreadnought for a final task, whatever that task might be. He was also trying to figure out some anti-Luck fortifications, but there was no way to do that without being exposed to Luck in the first place, so he was making plans for a trip to Memphi to talk with Credenza later.
If luck was on their side, then maybe that would actually happen.
Andria was back in her workshop, having gained enough control over herself to not break things when she didn’t want to break things. But she wanted to break a lot of things right now.
Isoko felt the same way.
… Isoko had complicated feelings about Andria.
Isoko said to Sally, “So Andria is moving on Mark. Do you think she has a chance?”
Sally took a relaxing breath, and then she said, “To hear the tale, she did a lot down in the lava layer when Mark was guarding me. But also, you did a lot when you killed Eliot’s target. And Mark is gonna have people he loves. Not a singular relationship. Not sure he’s capable of that. Not really.”
Isoko thought about a big topic that she had been steering clear of for a while, but now… Isoko asked, “You loved him in high school, right?”
“Tried to make it work, too.”
Sally stopped there.
Isoko didn’t prod further.
Isoko soaked up the sun, wondering what the last leg of this journey would bring. So far there had already been a divine meeting of the ‘Full Pantheon’ at the back of the Dreadnought, which is something that Isoko was still having trouble reconciling. Thrashtalon was a member of the Pantheon. He wasn’t just the Betrayer God of humanity, he was also a Betrayer of the Pantheon, as in currently betraying them. Because he was still in the Pantheon.
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… Isoko set that thought aside, as well.
If anything came of any of it, then Isoko would tackle it at that time.
“Do you think Mark is going to be okay?” Isoko softly asked.
Sally had no answers.
Currently, Mark was at the bow of the ship, legs dangling off of the front, staring off into the sky. Thinking. His thoughts were pretty big. Big enough for Isoko to feel them. Isoko would go down there after she relaxed a bit more, regaining enough mental energy to tackle more big shit, and then she would tell him that whatever other people said about him didn’t matter. The System, the gods, the trolls online on every HVP show that they had ever released, Empire Aluatha and Okuana and Xerkona… None of them mattered. All that mattered were the people that you surrounded yourself with, and how you felt at the end of the day. Did you do enough? Did you satisfy yourself, at least? Did you help someone else?
Mark was overqualified in all of those arenas, by far—
Mark’s vector flexed toward Isoko and his thoughts seemed to relax, a tension bleeding out of the air like pus from a wound. He felt better after that. More secure.
Isoko finished off her mango smoothie then softly told Sally, “I think Mark is going to be okay.”
Sally hmm’d, and then she asked, “Want some more milkshake?”
“Big banana and big strawberry, please! Lots of ice cream. And I still say it’s a smoothie.”
While she was still laying on her towel, Sally reached over with a Tactile Telekinesis stick, which was just any old stick that could transfer forces onto objects, and she poked into a bowl of chilled fruit. The banana and the strawberry came out of the bowl, dripping and half frozen, and Sally transferred some forces into the fruit at the end of the stick. The banana burst out of its yellow skin and the strawberry dropped all of its seeds and the green part onto the ground. The white banana flesh and the red fruit got four times as big, and then Sally plopped them into the intake-valve of a giant smoothie-making machine Eliot had made earlier, and which Sally had brought up to the top of the castle.
Sally poked her stick at a metal container, also sitting in ice, and then she lifted and upended that container over the same intake that the big fruit had gone into. With another application of weird Size Manipulation, the ice cream (thanks Tartu, and your weird milk tree experiments!) began to triple in size, but the container remained the same size as before. This resulted in a rush of ice cream pouring into the smoothie machine—
The ice cream container grew, along with Sally’s body, but Sally shrunk herself back down, refocusing, and the ice cream container burst in a sudden conflict of forces. Ice cream, cold and frosty, went absolutely everywhere. The metal container shredded under the pressure.
Isoko wiped milk-flavored ice cream off of her stomach, and then she licked her fingers, saying, “You’re getting better control.”
Sally sighed and tossed the broken ice cream container to the side along with some other trash she had made, wiping off her face and her chest, saying, “Cold.”
Isoko started giggling, and she had no idea why, which, of course, led to Sally giggling, and then it was a whole bunch of giggling. The machine whirred in the background, though, and soon the girls had fresh smoothies in giant cups.
Isoko asked, “It’s as thick as a normal smoothie, so it’s a smoothie.”
“It’s milk and cream and it’s a milkshake,” Sally retorted.
“But it’s all fruit, and Tartu’s milk tree is still a tree. That means smoothie.”
“It’s as many calories as a milkshake, so it’s a shake.”
“But how could it be the same calories? You took a bunch of things and made them bigger. They still have the same amount of calories as before. This is a low calorie, full flavor smoothie!”
Sally retorted, “Eliot measured the calories. I’m absolutely shifting something out of the world or out of my mana when I make things bigger. I’m less hungry when I make things smaller, too, which means I’m taking stuff in when I make things smaller. Mark might be right about the dreamland connection… or the mana connection.” Sally stared at the sky, adding, “Or whatever it was he was spouting the other day.”
“There is a lot happening right now,” Isoko said, commiserating.
Sally didn’t want to commiserate anymore, though, because she said, “So Andria is making a move on Mark—”
“Right now?!” Isoko sat up, feeling out the world… “No she isn’t. She’s in her workshop.”
Sally was grinning.
Isoko said, “If this was a less good smoothie I would throw it at you.”
Sally laughed. “It’s a milkshake.”
Isoko nailed her with a, “So it was weird how Drakarok and Thrashtalon looked like funhouse mirrors of each other, wasn’t it?”
“Uuuuughhh! I’ll stop teasing about Andria, I swear!”
“Thank you. Only I may freak myself out about Mark.”
Sally snorted.
