Andria was barely holding on, and she knew it, so she retreated to her room and then laid down, and then she let herself go. Mithril flowed outward, across the sheets, across the walls, up into the corners of the wooden room and then no further. Eliot had done something to the walls in the room to prevent Andria breaking anything, taking a page out of Elf Land, where everything was exactly the PL it needed to be to act like normal stuff. Everything in Andria’s room remained mostly whole.

  Except for her.

  Andria was glad that her room was so far forward from everyone’s, because she turned over onto her pillow, buried her face in the ripped-up softness, and she screamed. And then she cried and sobbed and everything hurt. She zoned out like that for a while, letting the facts of the day, of her life, just exist. Eventually the tears stopped because her brain had gotten tired of feeling sorrow, and that was good enough for now.

  She remained in bed.

  It was about time for dinner, and Andria was pretty sure Mark had gotten through his first round of ‘interviews’ with Lola… Gods. This was so fucked up.

  Andria sat up in her bed, tucking her legs under her, and then she prayed.

  Hello, Goddess. It’s me. I’m scared. I don’t want to ever deal with kaiju ever again, but I need to, don’t I? I can kill kaiju… but that was terrifying, too. Feeling the guts of that lava strider… moving through the stone to get to them, to save them? It was too much—

  Andria sniffled, the tears coming again.

  —I was good at it! I never want to do that ever again! That thing reached back through and I broke—

  Andria thought about the Manipulation Kaiju again, about those eyes and those many blue-scaled arms, and how… Andria touched her neck, and her upper chest. It had been bad. So, so bad.

  If it wasn’t for everyone helping me survive the Manipulation Kaiju… That thing ripped my head off of my body. Spiraled mithril out of me and took my head off. You don’t die if you’re just missing your heart and half of your upper chest. But it… It was bad. I almost died.

  Andria sniffled, and the tears fell freely. And then she snorted, laughed once, and knew it was going to get worse, and yet…

  And yet I have to stay here, don’t I? I have to stay with them. I want to stay with them, too. I like all of them! And the Dreadnought is the safest place I know of in the entire world… but they’re all kaiju-killers now. Maybe Eliot and Sally will stay home… Maybe Tartu, too. And Derek is great! And David is like an older brother and Lola is nice. Isoko…

  Why the fuck does Isoko have to be in love with… with…

  Mark.

  Goddess, I look at him, and I see dreams fulfilled. I see Prosperity shining behind him and through him and I’m trying not to love him, and he certainly doesn’t love me, but when he holds my hand I think… I think there could be something there? But he holds Isoko’s hand, too, and… Isoko is great, too, I guess. I don’t want to like her, but… oh hell. She’s awesome, too.

  Andria sighed, her heart feeling lighter.

  I know I need to stay here because if I get separated from them, then I’m dead. I can already tell.

  Pluta, I pray to you, help me.

  Tell me what I need to know, please.

  For a moment, the room was empty. It was just Andria, sitting on her knees on her bed. She had pulled the mithril back and held her hands up, palms together, hoping for an answer.

  And then Pluta stepped into the room and sat on the bed like Aunt Myrtle used to sit on her bed, back when Andria was living at Arcology Seattle, at Citadel Pluta.

  Pluta said, “Mark knows nothing about you, which is partially your fault, partially his, and partially no one’s fault at all. To fix this, you need to take this interrogation/documentary and make of it everything you possibly can, and that includes putting yourself out there to the man you want to love, even if he isn’t capable of loving you back how you want. Yet. He’s still figuring out how he wants to love others, Andria. So dry your tears, buck up, and stand tall, because everyone is going to see this documentary. Everyone.” She added, “And for divinity’s sake, girl! Don’t let a little bit of world-wide threats get to you. Monsters are scary and Empires even more so, but you’re made of sterner stuff than this!”

  It was like a cleansing wind came through and rearranged all of Andria’s thoughts.

  Pluta was right, of course.

  She always was.

  Andria smiled a little, sniffled and cried once more, and then she said, “Thank you.”

  “Anytime, Andria Metallicmore.”

  Pluta vanished into Elsewhere.

  … Back into the dream, the Veil, or the Other Side of Sight, Andria supposed.

  Andria rubbed her face with her hand and then again with some tissues grabbed from a broken tissue box, chuckling once. “This has been a trip for a lifetime. Several lifetimes.”

  She fixed herself up in her bathroom, ignoring the crack in the mirror that she had probably caused earlier, and then she went to the door to the room. There, a button rested against the wall. It was glowing blue and it was labeled ‘REPAIR’. Andria pressed the button a few times and some arcane energies in the walls flexed and captured some of Eliot’s Castellan magic. A soft wave of power leaked out into the room, spreading thinly against the scratched walls, the broken mirror in the bathroom, and across the sheets of the bed.

  Man-made Manipulation was Eliot’s original Power, and that Power stemmed from the Arcane spell Repair. It was a simple functionality for Andria to create a working enchantment, linking together the Castellan reservoirs of the Dreadnought to a basic Repair magic, doing the most basic repair work onto all of Andria’s stuff without actually needing Eliot to fix up the place himself… Well. Maybe not that ‘simple’ at all. It had taken Andria a week to work on that problem and then solve it, pulling at it the whole time with Prosperity in order to figure out how to make it work at all.

  She couldn’t have done that years ago, back in Crytalis, or at Citadel Pluta. She couldn’t have made such a thing just 4 months ago, back at the settlement.

  But now she could.

  Andria stood tall and left her room, holding her head high and feeling secure, knowing that bad shit was coming down the line and that she’d be able to handle it well enough. She had never gone into any of the entertainment industries because she thought it a great waste of time, but there were certain things that she enjoyed a great deal… like a naked man covered in blood killing monsters. That was very attractive. And so... a documentary? About all of this? She could get behind that, too.

  Soon she was in the dining hall and most everyone had arrived by then.

  Sally was making a lot of food along with Derek helping out, and though Sally seemed like an end-point of Prosperity to Andria, where things would break and be remade in that breaking, Derek was a lot more malleable and stereotypically prosperous. He wanted to get magical knowledge, and he had probably gotten more than he ever expected to get by hanging onto Mark. Andria was the same.

  All of them were, really.

  Another Derek walked out of the team making food, bringing Andria over a big milkshake, saying, “Hope you’re hungry! We got lots of burgers frying up.”

  Andria smiled as she took the shake, though inwardly she was wincing, thinking about her growing belly, as she said, “Thank you, but… it’s not that I don’t love milkshakes and burgers, but…” Andria left the rest unsaid, unsure if she should even say anything. It wasn’t like she ever cooked around here. Usually she ordered food from places around the settlement.

  But she was putting on the kilos!

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She used to have a perfectly perfect stomach! Maybe not abs, not like Isoko and certainly not like Sally, but she was taut! Nowadays, she had a little pudge on her, and it made her sick.

  She owned a really nice vegetarian place in the settlement that made fantastic salads, but there wasn’t much of that happening around here.

  Derek grinned. “Mark wanted a burger and Sally wanted shakes, so it is what it is for now. I got a salad for you in storage, though.”

  Andria really liked Derek. She sniffled a bit, making herself not cry, as she said, “Tha— thanks.”

  “No problem~” Derek said, dissolving, as another Derek put down a plate on the long table, calling out, “Here you go!”

  Tartu, Mark, Isoko, and Eliot, were all deep in conversation on the other side of the long table, talking about the initial interview that Mark had had with Lola. They noticed Andria coming in, but they had immediately gone back to talking amongst themselves, voices thick with passion.

  Mark was still as amazing as ever.

  Andria sat down to a large salad tossed with dark balsamic vinaigrette and all sorts of fruits. Apples, little oranges. Almonds and raisins and berries, and even some fruit medley filled with various things from the Crytalis area. It looked divine.

  Possibly the smallest burger Sally had cooked up in the last hour accompanied the salad. Andria smiled at the tiny thing, and then she looked up and caught Sally nodding at her.

  Sally was pretty great, too.

  Lola sat across from Andria, eating a salad of her own, with some soft blue yapapa fruit dominating the plate. She made some small talk, “I’m rather thankful that Tartu managed to figure out how to make balsamic vinegar. Good food really does make this whole event more manageable.”

  “It does, for sure,” Andria said, sticking a fork into a bit of apple, smiling. And then she said to Lola, “Thank you for bringing me that yapapa fruit when I was holed up in that recuperation room. It made me feel a lot better than I thought I could have felt at that moment.”

  Lola brightened. “Ah! I am glad you liked it.”

  “Of course I did! Our family had a whole grove of those trees on the Storm Coast before my father sold it all off for…” Andria shook her head a little. “It reminded me of home.”

  Lola asked, “You never really talk about home, or otherwise. I don’t mean to pry, but it will need to be spoken about for the story we’re putting out, and apparently I am tagged to do the interrogations, though I do wonder if Mark and everyone has truly realized what they are asking of me… But they will find out. Is there anything you specifically don’t want to discuss? I can stay away from those topics while the cameras are rolling.”

  Andria seemed to be facing the music sooner than anticipated.

  She had some balsamic-covered apple.

  She had some of her salad.

  Lola thankfully let the topic lapse.

  But soon Andria was ready, at least a little, to talk about her home. That’s why she had raised the topic with Lola, after all, and Lola had picked up what she was putting down. It just took Andria a bit to come around to the whole idea that yes, this was happening.

  Andria dropped a metaphorical bomb, “My father committed suicide to escape the family debts while I was away at Citadel Pluta. That was about 3 years ago. I had just come out of Tutorial, but I hadn’t seen him in years. I had been living at Citadel Pluta since I was 11. When I came out of the Tutorial and was Chosen by Pluta, Aunt Myrtle was so happy for me. My father only saw how he could abuse me like he abused my mother, until she died in a boating accident when I was 10. That’s what caused me to move to Earth to be with Aunt Myrtle. For about 6 months after I came out of the Tutorial, I went back to Crytalis, to the homestead… It was good. And then father started gambling again…” Andria sniffled, took a breath, and then a tear fell as she tried to play it off, “I’d like to stay away from all of that… or maybe I can come up with something less confusing for the documentary. I’ve just never… talked about it. Who wants to hear about me? No one, I’m sure. I’d much rather fade into the background and help others. That’s why I wanted to be a smith in the first place. Making weapons and artifacts for others is much more important to me than my own situation.”

  The guys had stopped talking over on the other end of the table, but Andria did not look at them. She couldn’t. She only looked at Lola. Lola also ignored the others.

  Lola asked Andria, “Did you like killing that kaiju, when we all worked with you to do so?”

  Andria wanted to brush off that question the same way she had a few weeks ago, when everyone was asking her that except for Mark. They were all eager for her to be on the kaiju squad, for one more person on the kaiju squad was another city protected from the worst threats the Two Worlds had to offer.

  “The worst, most immediate threats in the Two Worlds are kaiju, for sure,” Andria said, “But we’ve seen worse things out there. Systemic threats and subtle killers. I’ll step up if it’s necessary for me to step up, but with at least two more direct kaiju-level killers coming out of this, meaning Isoko and Sally, and with the protections afforded to civilization through Tartu, Eliot, and Derek, I think I’ll stay in town and make sure everyone else is as prosperous as I can make them.” Andria turned, and faced the guys. They were all looking her way—

  Mark was staring at her in a good way that made her heart beat hard.

  Andria focused. She said, “If we do that thing that we talked about where we make kaiju killers on the regular, ferrying people out here and baptizing them in prismatic mana, then we’re going to need a stronger society in order to give those real powerhouses more opportunities to use their powers to do good things. That means we need more settlements. More connections between them. The power we’ve already created here can solidify much of the Central Cities of North America, and the shores of Aluatha, and maybe some Inheritor stuff will help make the world that much more secure too, but who knows about that last one.” Andria added, “Chances are, as soon as this stuff gets out, people will be coming out here to do all of this on their own. Those who survive will be the ones we stand with in the future. So we likely won’t even have to do anything but let people know it is possible, and civilization will greatly expand outside of our direct oversight, even if a lot of people will die in that action. Because that’s what it’s all about, right? Making things better for everyone. Making Prosperity happen, even if the risks are terribly dangerous.”

  Mark said, “Glad to have you here, Andria.”

  Andria knew she blushed. She ignored that, and focused on her salad, saying, “Thank you.”

  Conversations resumed, most of them talking about the future now, though Andria wasn’t sure what they were talking about exactly or how any conversational points got from A to B or anything like that. She was kinda out of it, for the moment.

  But Andria did find herself saying to Tartu, “These are really good berries.”

  Tartu said, “The berries are a byproduct for the mana that the bushes themselves produce, but I have found that when the berries are better, the mana is better, too. And when people enjoy the berries, that is when the mana they make is the highest of all. I have no idea why that happens, but I vaguely recalled discussions about that in arcanaeum, so I’m hoping that father would be able to tell me why that happens when we get back.”

  Andria knew the answer to this, and she was a bit surprised that Tartu didn’t. She easily said, “Enjoyed-by-people berries produce more mana than fallow berry plants because people are enjoying them. That’s how Prosperity works. One thing makes another thing do better, and everyone is better off in the doing.”

  “I’m aware of the basic reasoning, but the question remains: why does it work like that.”

  “Oh! Ah ha. You mean like… the arcane reason why. The manawork reason.” Andria shook her head a little. “No idea!”

  Mark said, “Probably has something to do with dreams creating dreams. I know I need a purpose to manifest adamantium properly.”

  Andria went, “… Huh.”

  Tartu, however, got into the weeds with magic, starting with, “The discussion of ‘why does mana exist at all and why do mana producers vary in quantity’ is a deep dive into realms that we do not understand, and cannot understand. All we can see are effects. Some actions done to a thing that produces mana will cause that thing to produce more mana, while the same actions done on another day, to the same thing, will cause less mana. The experiment that proved that mana is an unknowable function of reality was the Tink Sound experiment of 25 Post-Reveal, which was itself based on older methodology from the Orange age of Okuana, about 700 years ago. In the new Tink Sound experiment, they hooked up some fireflowers to some machines that made a ‘tinking’ sound when they were about to get attacked. This caused the fireflowers to ignite, to throw out undifferentiated fire mana, to ward off any nearby prey. All of the flowers were hooked up to machines and studied for a few years, and what they found was that the flowers did not need to be actually attacked to make them make more mana. They made mana when they were trained to make mana.

  “The researchers removed all outside people, all training attacks, and had machines do the entire work for them, and when the tink-sound was played the fireflowers continued to produce a lot of mana. Even new plants grown next to the old, trained plants, made more mana when they were tink’d. The point is that mindless things can make mana just fine. Slimes do it, too. So there is no basis for the idea that ‘dreams make mana’.

  “So it has to be some other thing that makes mana.”

  Mark countered with an interesting question, “Do things near humans make more mana, or less mana? Did those researchers think to mind-wipe themselves and check to see if the flowers were still making just as much mana as before, after they fully severed themselves from the imposed-System of the tinking?” Tartu pulled back a little, and Andria did the same, while Mark added, “And another thing! Intent matters in spellcasting—”

  “Nuh uh!” Tartu said, easily finding a conversational parry. “Anyone can make alchemical silver and pour it onto stuff and give that stuff the temporary strength of mithril. If you know how it works, you can figure out why your batch of alchemical silver is going to function well or poorly, but you can still make the potion even if you don’t know how it works. This stuff is called ‘magic’, but there is very little ‘magic’ like how they talk about on Earth.”

  “Explain rituals then,” Mark said.

  Tartu rolled his eyes and then got into the weeds.

  Andria kind of tuned it out. Overall she agreed with Tartu; she preferred real things, with real cause and effect. But Mark had a lot of allure to him.

  … The salad was delicious. She focused on that.