Over the course of a few hours, on a fight back home that would last however long it lasted and at least a few days, Mark discovered a few new things about his new body.

  He was hungry as fuck.

  It was only 2 hours after breakfast and Mark had gone back to the fridges in the castle and started eating and eating, while the Elf Lands passed by the big windows, mountains and clouds flowing behind the Dreadnought. Lola and Sally were all too happy to make more food, but Mark had had 4 fake-meat burgers, a giant salad, lots of fries, several milkshakes, and then he had started on some fruit, and that’s when Lola got concerned.

  “You’re still… hungry?” Lola asked, setting an apple pie in front of him.

  The pie had finally cooled enough to properly enjoy, and Mark’s stomach rumbled as he looked upon the crisscross golden perfection of the crust, and the ooey-gooey caramelized apples just below that flaky pastry. Mark’s mouth watered, which felt like a novelty, for the smell of the food was absolutely enthralling.

  “Of course he is!” Sally said, “He hasn’t eaten properly in like 5 weeks!” She touched the pie, inundating it with her crystalline vector. Suddenly, the pie enlarged, going from 30 centimeters across to at least a meter and a half massive. It kinda folded in on itself a little, some weird part of the Size Manipulation making the whole thing deflate and inflate weirdly. “Whoops!” Sally shrunk it back down to a much more respectable, and realistic, 50 centimeters wide. “There we go. Now it doesn’t look like a mutation.”

  Lola sighed a little, telling Sally, “You have thrown off the ratio of crust to filling, my dear.”

  “It looks amazing,” Mark said, shaping some adamantine utensils and—

  “EWW NO!” Sally said, hurriedly TT’ing the pie.

  Mark’s pie scoop tink’d off of the surface.

  “Awww!” Mark said, “Come on, Sally.”

  “No! That’s disgusting,” Sally said, TT’ing the pie differently, grabbing a giant slice for Mark first, and setting it down on a plate that she also Manipulated to be bigger. “That bit of adamantium could have been your ass for all I know!”

  Mark snorted, turned his finger into a fork, and then began to eat with it.

  Lola felt a little bit of joy to see Mark eating so well… But her mood had cooled. She tested, “What would you like after that, Mark?”

  “Homefries!” Mark said, and then he ate a big bite of pie. It was amazing, of course, and he had about 5 kilos left of his pie slice to go.

  “Okay. Something is wrong.” Lola sat down beside Mark, repeating, “Something is wrong, Mark.”

  … Mark sighed, he said, “Yeah. I know. I know what the problem is, too.” He stuck his fork back into the pie, saying, “I’ll fix it in a minute.”

  Sally kinda froze, suddenly unable to enjoy her pie. “What’s wrong?”

  “I removed the fridge from my house, so I think I can’t store any food anymore, so I’m really hungry all the time.” Mark grinned, lifting up his shirt as he said, “But now I have amazing abs.”

  Sally scoffed. “Put your fucking fridge back in your soul… wow that was a weird thing to say.”

  “But I got amazing abs now!” Mark said, smiling.

  “No one needs to be giving young people such unreasonable body image issues, Mark,” Lola said. “You are a public figure, after all.”

  Mark smiled a bit wider. He held up his fork full of pie, saying, “I’ll put it back after this slice of truly amazing pie.”

  Lola nodded, and then she stood back up, saying, “Still want the homefries?”

  “Yes please!”

  Mark ate way too much food, and he had no idea where it went, so later, when he was sitting on a chair in his room in the Dreadnought, Mark was back in his house, exploring whatever was going on with all of that.

  Putting the fridge back was easy, and his hunger vanished when it came back. Most of the food that was originally in there came right back, too. But it was weird. That special spicy fried turkey was back there in a prominent location, looking like a ghost, while the pie that Lola had made, along with all of the other food Mark had just eaten, was there in the fridge, looking just as good as it did when Mark first looked at it. But now that all of that was inside of him, it was kinda disintegrating at the edges. Turning ghostly, like the spicy turkey in the back.

  Being consumed? Maybe. Probably, actually.

  Mark checked out the house’s plumbing. The toilets were clean, the shower was immaculate, and the kitchen sink worked fine. Water flowed through the pipes and then down into a septic system that Mark didn’t know he had, but which was clearly there, underneath the black grasses of the lawn. The septic system was… well. Mark popped off the cap, and then put the cap back down, then he smoothed out the lawn and pretended the septic system wasn’t there at all.

  It was a septic system.

  Water and mess flowed in, and then it seeped into the lawn, and then away. The lawn grew strong and vibrant black, and Mark imagined it simply worked. How? He wasn’t sure… But he felt like he should ask someone.

  Mark opened his eyes and went and found Tartu. He’d probably want to talk about this sort of stuff, anyway.

  “Fuck yes, I want to talk about this,” Tartu said, setting down some tools on the bench.

  “I wanna talk about it too!” Eliot said, sitting across from Tartu’s work bench.

  “Shouldn’t you be watching the scanners?” Mark teased.

  Eliot waved a dismissive hand. “Isoko, David, and Andria are on that, and we don’t see an end to the floating lights in the sky. It’ll be a few days of travel, at least. Maybe a week!”

  Mark paused. “A week? Really?”

  “We’re slow-rolling it,” Tartu said, hurrying along the conversation to get to the good stuff. “So your house has a septic system and plants and water systems. What about that waterwheel you put into your soul that started all of this mess? Where is that. That’s what I want to know.”

  “… Oh. Uh.” Mark sat down on a chair, closing his eyes, saying, “One second.”

  Mark opened his eyes in his house, standing in the middle of the main room. A quick look-see, delving through his soul, provided a surprising answer.

  Mark returned to reality and said, “The waterwheels are adamantium and the main ones are in some tiny pipes underneath the stairs that reach out everywhere. So it’s a part of Union, and the Body, and Adamantiumkinesis. There’s a lot of those mana wheels, and they’re not just in the pipes. They’re in the fan in the middle of the room, and they’re in the hood of the stove. They’re in the bathroom fan, and they’re in the wall AC unit, too. I didn’t even know I had an AC unit, but it’s there.”

  Tartu’s eyebrows went up. He narrowed in, asking, “Does stuff appear when you’re not looking? Or is it not in your current point of view, so you don’t see it? Explain, exactly, why you didn’t notice the AC unit before.” He looked to Quark’s floating ball, adding, “And I want to know if Quark saw any differences when you went looking for this stuff, or if it was always there and you simply did not see it. Was the dream changing as you looked at it again? That’s what I’m getting at. Does it always change, all the time? Or is it mostly static?”

  Mark lined up his thoughts, and then said, “Quark? Did you notice anything while I was inside?”

  Quark flexed silver onto his black orb, appearing in the ‘flesh’ as he said, “Your Binding seems mangled, sir, but if there are any large differences from before, then I can not see them, for when you move things around then everything is out of order yet again. If you are asking if I saw anything in there that wasn’t there already, then I would say I have no way of knowing.”

  Tartu looked to Mark, now, waiting.

  Mark lined up his thoughts, and then said, “I think a lot of this is still settling, and it’s all dreamspace so it can never really settle completely. But it does change with intention. When I took out the fridge I got hungry. When I put it back I felt good. Not full, but not hungry either. The fridge is now about half full, and everything in there is deteriorating at a digestible rate… maybe.

  “If I had to guess why I did not notice the AC unit or all of the pipes before… Well a house isn’t a house without a lot of normal stuff in it, and AC units and pipes and water flows and… and electricity, too, I suppose, is all a part of a normal house, so of course it’s already all in there. So maybe I am actively changing my Binding around every time I look at it?” Mark added, “I didn’t check the walls for electricity, but I could. Should I?”

  “Yes!” Tartu exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Eliot said. “Because if it’s an actual house-shape, then that is something we can work on. But if it works ‘because it works’, then that’s not something we can adjust at all.”

  Tartu said to Eliot, but also kinda to Mark, “Ultimately all of this stuff is taking place in a realm of dream, so it is unknowable how it truly works except that it works based on how you think it works, which is only loosely tethered to actual-reality. There’s some room for change, but ultimately…” Tartu looked to Mark. “Ultimately, how it works is how you think it works. Does a house need electricity? Yes. But does a dream house need electricity? What actually uses electricity in there? Nothing, right?”

  Mark instantly thought of something, and then said, “I use electricity in my brain for thinking, with neurons firing and all of that. So yes, the house has electricity. I’m gonna check now, though.” Mark closed his eyes, looked around, and then opened his eyes, and said, “There are sockets on the walls now, and wires everywhere. Insulation in the walls, too. Adamantium wires and adamantium insulation…” Mark paused, as he felt warmer, but also more comfortable. “Also… I think I just made myself more comfortable, temperature-wise. Huh.”

  “What’s your Status say?” Tartu asked, “You were at 8/11, right?”

  Mark checked… “9 out of 11, now. Huh.”

  Tartu said, “So it wasn’t there, but now it is… And I have no idea what that means.”

  Eliot had no idea, either.

  Mark moved on, saying, “So… Landscaping was said by Eria to be one of the better ways to solidify my health and everything. A proper cycle seems good. So… How do I do that? What does a fully-contained ecosystem need?”

  Eliot instantly said, “It’s not fully-contained. You have rivers going in and out of the place.”

  Tartu said to Eliot, “And wind, too, and the grasses growing and soaking up dream-sun—” He looked to Mark. “Let’s do a full mock-up of your house? And from there we can see about what needs to be added or subtracted or whatever?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Sure!” Mark began shaping adamantium, saying, “I can pretty much do the whole thing like this, and Eliot, you can put it into a hologram model.”

  “Already happening,” Eliot said, vector going elsewhere.

  Mark made himself an adamantium house that mirrored his dream house by going in and out of himself several times to check on everything. He had to increase the size of the mockup to put everything he had in there, and it took a lot longer than he thought it would have taken, if only because Tartu and Eliot kept poking at the house, and asking Mark different questions, making him find parts of his house that he didn’t know existed.

  Did he have shingles, or a solid roof? Since he had insulation in the walls, then he should have normal roof construction, right? What about air flow or handlers up there in the crawlspace? It turned out that Mark did have normal roof construction when he went looking, and that put him up to 10/11 full.

  Mark said, “I’m not sure I like being that full, because my range is shrinking. I’m at 350 meters with Union right now.”

  Eliot asked, “Do you feel okay?”

  Tartu wanted to know the answer, too, but he also wanted to know, “And what does Quark say about all of this mangling of your Binding?”

  “More mangled, for sure,” Quark said.

  “I feel better, actually,” Mark said. “But I’m not sure if having adamantium wood in the walls and insulation is better than having solid walls. The nuance of having stuff makes the range go down.”

  Eliot instantly said, “Change the walls out for solid adamantium, or maybe bricks. It insulates well enough. Keep the wires and AC and stuff like that…”

  Eliot listed off ways to trim the house down, and Mark did pretty much everything he suggested, adjusting the mock-up house as he adjusted his ‘real’ house. He went with adamantium bricks (shaped in hexagons, of course, for extra protection) that clicked together, to lock tight. That afforded Mark the ability to string wires through some of the bricks, as easy as thought. Eliot certainly knew how to work with minimal materials, and working with dreamstuff was a lot easier than working with real, tangible supplies.

  Eliot seemed to be a bit mad that he didn’t have a house himself, but neither Eliot or Mark said as much. A glance at that pitfall seemed way too deep to even get near right now. Eliot still helped Mark, though.

  Simplification turned out to be exactly what Mark needed.

  Soon, the house felt a lot more secure, but he also got down to ‘Utilized: 7/11’.

  “I feel lighter. I was heavier,” Mark said, “But I didn’t recognize it, yet now I do.”

  Eliot nodded, as he tapped away at the air, taking notes, looking at Mark’s adamantium mock-up. “You could probably afford to go for a hexagonal shape for the entire house, as well, and the way you have your furniture arranged needs to be different. But I’m not sure if that will actually accomplish anything.”

  Mark suddenly recalled something that might have been important, so he said, “That Water People language is all about Feng Shui, and how energy moves around stuff. Could I put some of that into the house?”

  Eliot paused in thought—

  “Yes, you should incorporate some Water People methodologies in here, but let’s leave that experiment for later,” Tartu said. “I want to adjust the landscape now.”

  “I have all of the reading material for Water People right here?” Mark said, looking toward Quark.

  Quark was hooked up to the holoprojectors in the room, and so he manifested the Water People book for everyone to see. Eliot looked—

  Tartu shook his head. “Let’s do the landscape. I want to know if you can put specific trees into the House. A goldleaf tree. That stuff sucks metals out of the ground and puts it into leaves. I want to know if you can do that tree, and if you can, then maybe you can make an ‘orichalcum leaf’ tree. That way you can naturally absorb orichalcum from your environment, since you already have Union, therefore you might be able to continually grow your house all the time.”

  Mark was very interested in that idea, but he instantly saw an issue. “I’ve never been able to grab metals from anywhere and bring them into my body before, so I’m even less certain that I could do so in my astral body, in my house.” He held up his hand and raised finger as he listed off things, “I’m not sure how to get Tactile Telekinesis, or if I even can. I still need to work on putting adamantium back into my astral body. I need to figure out how to bring other things from the real world into my astral body, and though orichalcum went in just fine by shoving it into my belly, how the heck am I supposed to be able to absorb that Storm Prism kaiju scanner? Because Eria said I should be able to bring artifacts inside, and she labeled the Storm Prism as an artifact. And finally… I got that shard of a divine mirror and I took that inside just fine, but I have no idea how to manifest it again.”

  Tartu had a think.

  Eliot did the same. “You put it into your eyes, right?” And then Eliot asked, “You can flick on the shard’s power? Just by looking at things?”

  Mark nodded, and he focused, and the world shifted in his sight in a way he still didn’t understand. It was kinda like falling asleep while being awake, and it made Mark feel slightly vulnerable, like he wouldn’t be able to react fast enough if he needed to react fast. Sure enough, though, he saw the world through different eyes—

  Eliot’s eyebrows went up, and he said, “Yes! Just like that. Your eyes changed in the pupils.” He pulled out some stuff from elsewhere, like he usually did, but in a way that Mark had never noticed before. The effect was that of a bunch of metals, plastics, and lenses, most of which were already made and in storage, coming together, pulled from other rooms and shoved into a sensor suite that rested atop Eliot’s head, over his eyes. But to Mark’s dreamsight, he saw Eliot pull a multitude of memories out of various objects, smooth them out, and then turn them into a lens that would see the small things in life. Mark saw hundreds of people wearing Eliot’s headgear, looking through a microscope, as Eliot looked at Mark. Right in Mark’s eyes. “Looks like…” He moved around, stepping left but holding up his right hand, finger up, saying, “Look at my finger, please.”

  Mark looked at his finger, and he saw hundreds of doctors of all kinds all holding their fingers up, asking their patients to look at their fingers.

  Mark also looked at all of Eliot’s softly amber astral body. He also glanced at Tartu and Tartu’s astral body, as the man stood over to the side, watching with his own magical senses wrapped around his eyes. The two of them were so very much different.

  Eliot was like an amber blob that filled an amber ocean filled with the dreams of humanity itself. The entire Dreadnought was Eliot’s domain, and that fact reflected in his own existence, in everything he did.

  Tartu was a teal diamond in the amber ocean, with facets that shifted and changed and reflected plants in the distance. Mark glanced through the Dreadnought, ignoring Eliot’s Power, to view the teal planting boxes in the decks below. Tartu had linked himself to those various plants down there over the last 12-ish days of having his own new Power.

  Mark looked deeper, somehow, he wasn’t sure how, but he saw Tartu’s teal soul below the surface, and then he saw Eliot’s amber soul everywhere, and maybe he also saw their Bindings, but he wasn’t sure if that was true, or not. There were definitely more Binding-like-sigils in Tartu’s soul, though, while Eliot was more freeform and filled with dreams. Tartu’s ‘extra bindings’ looked... tacked-on? Like they were pebbles under the surface, instead of the bottom of the lake.

  Mark was pretty sure he knew what he was looking at, but he still asked Tartu, “Do you have extra Bindings in your soul right now?”

  Tartu arched an eyebrow. “They’re called alterations when you make them yourself. How many do you see? Can you tell what they are?”

  “Ah, right. Alterations… do-it-yourself spellwork, right…” Mark Looked at Tartu. He couldn’t really tell what they were at all, but as he looked, he saw some sigils that he recognized. Lotta hexagons in one, more hexagons in another. Something like tendrils in the third… Mark guessed, “One of them is Protect. Another might be a… a shield spell? And another one is… I have no idea what the heck that one is. It looks like tendrils and reaching.” Mark added, “And there are others. I would have thought your Binding was full, though?”

  Tartu nodded a little, impressed, saying, “My Binding is at capacity, but I’m able to shift my capacity onto some of my plants. That’s probably the tendril-like spell you’re seeing. It’s a mutation of Farmer and naturally arises from that part of my Binding so… so it’s less like an Alteration and more like an extension of Farmer. I’m calling it Roots.”

  Eliot said, “Back to the shard of the mirror… You’ve incorporated it into your eyes. I see little golden glints in your lens and the other tissues of your eyes. Mostly the lens.”

  Mark Looked at Eliot, and he saw Eliot’s influence underneath the surface of everything. Amber glows whorled and swirled under the wood, following the grain like it was a prayer wheel, endlessly creating and flowing like it was still alive in some way. But it was all dead wood. But also, Eliot was there, making it not-dead wood. Filling that wood with dreams.

  Mark said, “One second.”

  And then he dove deeper into the dream, to stand on his porch and to look out into the black, looking for his friends.

  Tartu’s teal was nowhere to be seen.

  Eliot’s amber might be there, in the prismatic black outside of his house, but…

  Mark stepped down the stairs, to reach the ‘end’ of his astral body, to see if he could see Eliot, at least—

  Blinding prismatic white.

  He had infiltrated the dream of the elves, and they were out there, gold-rimmed eyes looking in, but they got scared again when they saw Mark seeing them, so Mark pulled back before someone came out and told him to stop. Eria was very clear about not wanting Mark to poke around with the elven dreamland.

  Mark opened his eyes and he was back in the room with Eliot and Tartu. He said, “If you guys are in the dream near me, I can’t see you.”

  Eliot wasn’t sure what Mark was saying.

  But Tartu nodded a little, and said, “Finding others in the dream is extremely difficult when the person you’re searching for is awake. As I understand it, you have to connect to them in the real world and they have to connect back, and it’s a dance of give and take and then eventually you can see others in the dream that you know. I’m sure you and I and Eliot are pretty close to being able to see each other in our dreams, if we actually tried for it, but it does require actual effort. Any ritual at all between us would probably be enough to fulfill that bridging, though.”

  Mark hummed a little, saying, “Witch work.”

  “Yes.”

  Mark nodded… he moved on. “Got any ideas for what I could put into my soul to enable TT?”

  “No idea at all,” Tartu said. “Maybe some Union-thing. You can already Union with the world and do that Sanding Union, and that should be something close to Tactile Telekinesis. You should absolutely work on making an orichalcum-refining tree, though.”

  Mark countered, “I’m pretty sure that even if that did work then I’d be sucking out the orichalcum from within 400 meters, which means destroying divine things. I’m not sure I’d be allowed anywhere near anyone if I started actively yanking away their metals.”

  “... Ah,” Tartu said.

  Mark added, “It’s the same reason why I still haven’t focused on finding adamantium sources in the wild. They’re there; I can feel them. But they’re in use.”

  “... Point made,” Tartu said, “But you should still figure it out.”

  Eliot said, “I do want to do a ritual to connect to your house, Mark. I want to see it, and I want to be able to make my own. I should be able to, right? I’m a Castellan, after all.”

  Tartu let Eliot finish, if only because it was the polite thing to do, but he instantly, strongly, said, “Absolutely the fuck not. Just seeing is one thing, but actually going over to Mark’s soul? From what Eria said about it all, and what you told us, Mark, you getting a visitor into your power allows you complete power over that person—” Tartu raised his voice slightly, because Mark was about to call bullshit on him. “—and it doesn’t matter if you’d never hurt someone. This is all new stuff! You don’t even know what you’re doing, and the elves have helped as much as they’re willing! No fucking way. I’m not helping you do that, Eliot, and you shouldn’t even consider it, Mark.”

  Eliot didn’t want to accept Tartu’s condemnation, and he scoffed a little… but on the inside he was worried.

  Mark told Tartu, “First off, I would never hurt any of you—”

  “And I believe it! And I know it wouldn’t be on purpose, either. But look, Mark. Please experiment with yourself as much as you want. You’re literally ‘Adamantine Immortal’, now. Ain’t nothing happening to you without your consent. But holy fuck, be more careful with others.” Tartu took a breath, and he pulled back a lot. “I think we have all suddenly lost sight of the dangers of magic because we’re here and everything has been successful… mostly. Kardi and Thrashtalon and Grax…” Tartu didn’t want to go down that path any further, so he shifted, saying, “Your reminding me of the problem with taking orichalcum from the world has caused me to realize I was getting too enthusiastic. We have been lucky as fuck, and we’re all very new at having the Skills we have. So be more conservative with your choices.”

  Mark sighed. “… Fair enough. I need to figure out how to absorb adamantium, anyway.”

  Eliot said, “I’m still running scans on the Elf Lands, too… And I can get back to that.”

  Tartu told Mark, “I wouldn’t even try making Alterations, for the time being. But put, like… a gym in your house, and see if that makes you physically stronger. How about a fighter training dummy? How about books! Can you take in books and literally know all the knowledge they have? That sort of stuff is much more important than inviting people into your house yet.”

  “But what if the Empire assassinates you when we get back, Tartu?” Mark asked, rhetorically. “I have the capability to save all of you and bring you all back—”

  “Just like you’re theoretically an Inheritor for a dead empire,” Tartu said, interrupting. “All of the big stuff is too big right now.”

  … Mark hmm’d.