Repairs took a little while. During that time, everyone had small discussions on whether to move or not, since Isoko was still asleep. Soon, everyone who could put their mana into the Storm Prism to see if any targets were nearby, while Quark, David, Derek, and anyone who wanted to, tried figuring out the map to Kabberjaw that Elkatracks had left them.

“Because we’re going to Kabberjaw next, right?” Eliot asked.

“Yes,” Mark said. “Isoko will be awake and capable of doing something at the scale of dragons, if not directly being able to kill one, so I think we can handle Kabberjaw now.”

Tartu said, “There will be a fight when we get there. Maybe not an actual fight, but at least a political one, about poaching.”

“Yeah, and I’ll tell them to suck it,” Mark simply said.

“As long as you can back it up with power, then that might be for the best, considering your first threat was a never-ending blood feud if they should touch us,” Tartu said, “Which I am thankful for, by the way. Don’t think I said that yet.”

Eliot instantly teased, “He could have gone further.”

Sally said, “If dragons kill me then I want a pile of dragon skulls for a gravestone, Mark.”

Mark grinned. “Duly noted.”

Conversations moved on to prismatic mana targets.

Eliot and Sally were still working on mana manifestation, so they got nothing.

Tartu’s target was 32,000 kilometers away, which surprised everyone.

“Why so far?” Mark asked.

“Endless Daihoon extends all the way to the moon and forms Daihoon’s ‘magnetosphere’, which is not a magnetosphere at all but it is analogous to Earth’s magnetosphere, and that’s fucking huge, Mark,” Tartu said.

“… Well yeah. I guess— Second question! Why were all of our targets only 10,000 kilometers away— Wait.” Mark winced. “I know the answer already. It’s because those were just the closest ones.”

“Correct,” Tartu said. “You all probably have more targets further out.”

Eliot asked, “Could we adjust the Storm Prism to locate allof the targets and then I can do some maths to rank them by power to see which ones are best?”

“… I mean…” Tartu hummed, then said, “Theoretically… Andria?”

“I have no idea,” Andria said.

Tartu hummed, and then said, “Probably gonna run into the points-at-the-moon problem, but want to try it anyway?”

“Yes,” Eliot said.

They got to working on that, eating up another hour.

It turned out to be a much, much harder problem than either Tartu or Eliot or Andria expected it to be, because the ‘points at the moon’ problem was indeed the problem.

Andria’s target was 10,500 kilometers away.

Mark’s target was 8,700 kilometers in the very other direction.

Kabberjaw, meanwhile, was only 2,500 kilometers ‘that way’, toward Daihoon, and maybe, like… ‘east-ish’? Mark was pretty sure Endless Daihoon didn’t have a real ‘north’ or ‘south’ so he wasn’t sure how to describe any particular direction to anyone. But they had a map and they knew how to navigate the dreamlands at least a little, and so after a small discussion about ‘do we want to piss of the dragons more, or not’, and deciding that ‘not’ was the best answer, they got flying in ‘that direction’, toward Kabberjaw.

Mark soon got into a deep, philosophical discussion with Tartu about the nature of ‘north’ and ‘south’ and Endless Daihoon, as Mark prowled the edges of the ship, looking into the storm for threats.

“How can you even say that the Northern Crossing is ‘north’, though?” Mark asked. “There’s no magnetic force about it.”

“What would youcall it then, Tyrant King?”

“I’d say it’s more ‘West’, but only when facing certain directions. East could be the Southern Crossing. North is obviously the moon, and south is the planet.”

Tartu scoffed. And then he smarmily said, “Point out the moon or the land in the sky, please.”

Mark, undaunted, said, “I can’t see magnetic north or south, either, but you’re the ones who are making the compasses, not me!”

Tartu ripped into Mark, saying, “You have no idea what you’re talking about—”

The world stilled and the storm shivered as Isoko woke up in her little house, which promptly exploded with a burst of silver power.

“Isoko’s awake again,” Mark said.

Isoko, hovering above the deck and Full Platinum again, stared at the destruction she had wrought against the Dreadnought… And then she looked over to Mark, a few hundred meters away, and called out, “You left me alone on the deck!? And naked?!”

With a grin in his voice, Mark called back, “You did that yourself! And after Eliot made a nice little hut for you, too!”

“… Oh shit.” Isoko floated upward and looked out. “Ahh… that debris floating away would be… a hut? Yes. I see it now.”

Mark smiled brightly as he moved toward her, asking, “Wanna see your scanner readout?”

“What?!” Isoko detonated the world again with another shockwave, calling out, “You scanned me while I was asleep?! I didn’t get to see first!”

Mark really, really wanted to throw Tartu under the bus, because Isoko was actually, really upset, so Mark said, “Can you control yourself right now to not lash out? Because Tartu ain’t getting near you while you’re awake. No one is. And Tartu needs to be near you to let the scanner work.”

“… errr.”

“Canyou turn off Full Platinum right now?”

Isoko paused. And then she pulled back, saying, “One… Second… uhhh.” Isoko dimmed a bit, trying to turn off her Full Platinum, her skin barely turning normal, appearing briefly like tan underneath a thin mirror-like film. But then she lost focus and her body turned Full Platinum again. Wind shocked away from her in spinning, twisting eddies as she looked at her hands, saying, “I can figure it out eventually— Show me my readout!”

Mark gladly showed her.

Isoko gasped and held her chest, the sky clearing completely for kilometers around, everything turning soft and breezy. Eliot was already fixing up the Dreadnought, splinters getting smoothed into the deck.

Isoko teared up again, saying, “Sky Shaper, Full Union, andPlatinum Body. A Tri-Talent. Holy fucking shit.”

Mark teased, “Almost as good as mine!”

Isoko laughed, and it was a shockwave of platinum pushing against Mark and then cracking the sky with minor lightning. Isoko paused a little, then looked out at lightning dancing through the sky on silver waves. “… So I think I need to learn control.”

“Yes. Lots and lots of control exercises,” Lola said, speaking up on a speaker Eliot had installed near Isoko. “First off, I believe Tartu and the team have a gift of illusionary clothes contained in an adamantium buckle and mithril belt.”

“Oh yeah!” Mark said, watching the ground open up and a little box pop out of a tube in the ground. “I did give over some more adamantium for that.”

Isoko grinned and reached down for the belt—

And it was like a sandblaster reaching down onto wood. The wood disintegrated and the belt went flying.

Isoko desperately scrambled for the belt, but she ended up flying in the other direction, tumbling a few times before she could right herself.

Mark snatched the belt out of the air with a quick bit of adamantium, while Isoko was thoroughly embarrassed. Soon, Mark put the belt on her, too, fighting against her the whole time, until the belt touched her skin. In that moment of contact the belt turned platinum with Isoko’s Tactile Telekinesis and the magical item settled onto her body—

Illusionary clothes popped up onto her body, like a white sun dress with a tan sash, and Isoko chuckled as she swished a hand through the illusionary fabrics.

“Thank you so much, guys!” Isoko said, wholeheartedly.

Eliot had rebuilt the speaker and the floor, so Tartu said, “It’s not your style, I know, but we’re going for a theme here with the team.”

Eliot said, “Sally is also gonna need some illusionary clothes, for sure. Maybe I won’t, though! Hope not. We’re still working on comms, too, but now that we see that the belt works, I’m sure we can make some comms easily enough.”

Mark said, “Maybe everyone needs an AI Familiar, too?”

Isoko said, “I am absolutely NOT ready to have a kid; no offense, Quark.”

“None taken, miss!” Quark responded.

“Moving right along…” Mark said, “Now that Isoko is awake, are we going to Kabberjaw? It’s on a water layer, right?”

Eliot said, “I want to swing by Purple Palace, too. The other one is out of the way now, but Purple Palace is between here and Kabberjaw.”

Isoko asked, “Can we stay in this layer for a while? I want to, uh, be able to walk around and figure out what the fuck I’m doing here.”

“Sure!”

Eliot said, “We got a ways to travel in this layer, anyway.”

And so Mark took his position back on the forecastle of the Dreadnought, and Isoko flew to the front of the ship. She got as far away from everyone else as she could, while remaining on the ship. It was a good nod toward safety, but Isoko was not safe at all right now, and she knew it.

She was quite pretty, though, as she played in the clouds and the storms, brushing them forward or backward, stilling them, churning them into lightning and tornadoes, and also Unioning with the world, bringing in the Good and expelling the Bad. Lola spoke to her from a comm device up there, and eventually that comm device became a hologram floating in the air beside her, and Eliot delivered a little adamantium ear clip that would serve well as actual comms.

After a brief mistake of blowing the bit of adamantium off into the sky, Mark retrieving it and helping Isoko put it onto her ear, Isoko had her comms back.

“Eyyyyyy! Welcome back!” Sally said, on Channel 4.

“Missed you, Isoko!” Eliot said.

Derek, Andria, David, and Tartu all gave small welcome-backs.

Mark leaned back on the stone of the forecastle, and teased, “Now you better hurry up and learn everything there is about your new Powers, because I want to go inside and watch a movie!”

Isoko instantly said, “Well go inside then! I got this handled.”

Mark scoffed.

Isoko huffed right back at him. “Go!”

“Nahhh.”

Isoko rolled her eyes and then took off flying, higher and higher into the sky, and Mark followed, a lot slower. Just enough to feel her joy, for real, through Union. He kinda really loved her emotions right now. It made him feel better about everything, too. Soon, Isoko came back, announcing that the sky was clear for kilometers around.

And then, Isoko’s lessons shifted to plant growth and whole sections of the Dreadnought suddenly burst into moss and tiny cleaner plants. Some of the stained, prepared wood of the ship even started growing again, branching out into new leaves and new roots. Eliot frantically called for Isoko to stop that right now as he began repairing everything.

“So apparently we need an anti-plant growth shield,” Eliot said. “That’s my mistake. There are plant kaiju out there and they would have done the same thing.”

Sally said, “And we need a kaiju-carry option!”

“Right right. Sleipnir won’t be the only kaiju to almost fall out of bounds and take Mark and whoever with it,” Eliot said.

“When we get the grav crystal at Kabberjaw we can make a hover platform,” Tartu said.

“Coming around to the idea of working with dragons?” Isoko asked, teasing.

“Ilike the idea of dragons-from-Contracts,” Sally said, “Can we talk about that again?”

Tartu sighed and said, “Okay, so—”

“Isoko,” Lola said, stepping briefly into Channel 4.

“Sorry ma’am!” Isoko said, and then her light went off on Channel 4.

Lola’s light went off, too.

Isoko went back to playing with the sky and with Union, in a very macro-sense.

Mark watched all of that as he listened to Tartu and Sally talk of dragons and demon Contracts and why ‘It would never work out!’. Tartu had a lot of the same reasonings against dragons-as-Contracts that he had against dragons themselves, from the facts that dragons simply could not operate at the level of people and thus would always be outside of any well-functioning society, but to hear Sally and Tartu talk about the subject reminded Mark about a lot of things. They were going after that size alteration Power, Titan’s Strength, for Sally, after all.

In a lull in the conversation, Mark asked, “Are there ways to shrink dragons down to people-sized?” He added, “I’m pretty sure that Addavein is looking for such a way right now, just so we’re all clear about that. But I haven’t asked anyone else about that sort of thing yet.”

“Is he, really?” Tartu asked, suddenly deeply interested, and also pissed off.

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“Why so pissed off?” Mark asked.

“Because… Ugh. I don’t know anymore. I suppose…” Tartu collected his thoughts, and then said something deeply personal. “If I were like you, and I might be after a prismatic mana power up… WouldI care about the plights of the little person? Of normal society? Like, I’m not saying you don’t care—”

“Okay good, because I was about to get mad,” Mark said, flippant.

“Anyway,” Tartu said, “If I

got a major powerup that allowed me to determine how the world worked… would I still care as much about lesser people, or would I see them as people to be humored and placated and controlled? Because that’s what rulers do, you know. They give people candy to placate them —I don’t mean actual candy. Earth has a good saying about this. ‘Bread and Circuses’. It’s basically the whole Hero/Villain Program. We give programs to distract from the pain of it all, and if you’re really big in the HVP, then you’re one of the gladiators in the circus, keeping the crowd looking into the theater instead of looking out there at the horrors of the world.

“Which is good, in a lot of senses.

“No one needs to look at horrors all the damned time.

“HVP is hope. HVP is power applied properly. And I really like that. It’s how I can make a difference. I can tell stories that help people live their lives and ignore the fact that they can’t do anything about anything, just like me, because I can’t do anything about either.

“But if I had the power of a realsuperhero… If I had the power to decidehow the world worked…

“Well. Then it would be wrongof me not to use that power on as large of a scale as I could. And once you get to that size… When do you stop seeing people as people?

“And now you’re talking of dragons being human-sized, and trying to relate to humans.

“Is Addavein becoming small like an emperor stepping down from his throne to slum it with the plebs? Because that’s what it seems like to me. All of us on this boat are kinda like plebs rising up and becoming emperors, and… if we’re emperors, then is it even right for us to do HVP anymore? Or should we all be doing… a whole lot more.” Tartu said, “Anyway… Addavein trying to become small kinda ticks me off. Like… Like a demon trying to infiltrate the world. A bunch of power, pretending at being a person, and that’s my ramble for now.”

Mark found himself agreeing with a lot of Tartu’s words, but also… not. And yet, they still resonated. Mark said, “I really do like hanging out with you, Tartu. I never really thought about it that way.”

Tartu felt delighted at that, in a weird sort of way.

And then Mark hit ‘em with the, “But you’re wrong, and emperors should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they make sure that the coliseum is defended and functioning well.”

“But see! That isthe goal of the emperor. But if they’re playing among the lessers then they aren’t doing a good job, so there’s a balance—”

“Ugh! ‘Lessers’,” Sally countered, unable to hold back anymore.

And thus began a big political discussion.

Mark mostly waited through the discussion, not really caring to interact with demons-from-Contracts for now, until he found the appropriate place to throw the conversation into another direction. Soon, he found a spot.

“So Doomo tried to assassinate me several times and I wanna know what I should do about that—”

A bunch of things happened kinda all at once.

“Ah, here we go,” Sally said, settling in for A Talk.

Isoko stopped concentrating on the sky and the wind resumed. Mark caught words from Lola’s projection near her, saying that now was a good time for other things, anyway.

David said, “I’m putting the ship in park.”

Tartu took a deep breath, muttering, “Oh gods— Okay!” Tartu oriented, stopping whatever he was doing downstairs, and said, “Okay. Yes. Let’s talk about this.”

Eliot, Derek, and Andria all sort of stopped what they were doing. Derek not so much; he could do thousands of things at once.

Mark began again, “Okay, so… Doomo tried to kill me, along with the goblins —which is just what they do so I don’t care about the goblins right now— and some third force, possibly Xerkonan, with the corruption ooze, also tried to kill me. I don’t want to talk about the ooze-incident unless anyone has any new info that might have come out when I was fighting goblins?”

“Nothing that I have heard,” Lola said, “And I have tried to hear a lot.”

That seemed to be the consensus of everyone else.

Tartu brought the conversation back on track, “The only real issue is Doomo’s attempted assassinations.”

“Right, yes,” Mark said, “So I already tried extending a peace offering by saying that Doomo was the one that warned us all about the bad goblin shit coming —which was a lie, but it was one designed as an offering of peace after the first attempted assassination— and then I went and killed goblins, and came back, and then—” Mark took a breath. “Then, he sent the archmage twins after me again and that white webweave woman with the illusions and shit. They were trying to capture me while simultaneously pretending that they were saving me from a sudden summoning from Addavein, who was already on Daihoon, so he could not possibly summon me, since you have to be on another world to do that.” Mark finished with, “So that last attempt might have just been a concentrated lie, or an opportunity attack of some sort. Was it an assassination? Probably, in the end. But at first it didn’t even look like one, and I am not going to treat it like anything other than what it could have been, which was yet another assassination attempt.”

Like he was waiting for a moment to speak, Tartu instantly said, “By all rights you should leave the Empire behind. Individual actors have been good to you, like Aurora and Walaria, but can you trust Doomo? Of who Walaria is useless against, and Aurora is going to fall in line with, if the issue were pressed?”

“Waiting for the ‘but’ here,” Mark muttered.

“But!” Tartu said, “You could cool the waters by responding with even more lies about how good Doomo has been. Perhaps you could lie that he sent you a gift basket of flowers as a peace offering. A basket of rain lilies.”

He said that last part like Mark should know what it meant, and while David and Derek suddenly understood something, no one else did.

“That sounds so fucking stupid, Tartu,” Sally said, like she was talking to a child.

Undaunted and ready for someone to say that, Tartu eagerly countered, “There’s precedent! And I know you don’t get it, but it’s a rather famous story about unity in Empire. Something like 500 years ago, before Aluatha was really Aluatha, before the Imperial Family and Gedahowla the Bright and her Grand Draconic Coven, one of the Islander Kings of what would become the Barrier Islands of Aluatha tried to assassinate one of the Grand Mages of Sototh, which would eventually become South Aluatha. In that time, the islands were always fighting the lands of Sototh, but Aluatha came in and applied pressure and they got the Grand Mage to simply lie about receiving a peace offering from the Islander King.

“A gift of rain lilies.

“It was a complete fabrication.

“It cooled the rhetoric a lot, though, and it brought the people together at the table,” Tartu said, “And you can do the same.”

Sally instantly countered, “Nice story, but there’s so much propaganda there that I don’t even know where to start, but even if it was a 5% true story, then it would only work if all sides were actually willing to discuss things; if both sides were equal. Mark is a big deal but he’s not the Empire, and so Doomo obviously doesn’t give a shit about Mark’s wants. The Empire has demonstrated this much time and time again.”

Tartu said, “Yup.”

“… That’s it?” Sally asked. “That’s your rebuttal to my rebuttal.”

“You’re rather correct, Sally,” Tartu said. “It only works with both sides wanting the same thing, and when both sides are rather equal, and Mark is not the equal of the Empire at all… But you can still trythe peaceful option. And if that doesn’t work then you can bring a lawsuit against Doomo and see how far it gets. Even bringing a lawsuit at all means that you’re willing to work within the system instead of killing people. Even if you don’t do the rain lily option, I think a lawsuit is a fair step up from whatever this talk could have been.

“I do not want to talk about actual treason and murdering the First Prince, but we’re all aware that’s the other option here. So let’s just get it out there. So you kill him. Then what?

“Then you have the entire Empire aiming at you.

“That’s a non-starter.”

Sally said, “Well… Yeah.”

“Well I don’t wantto kill him,” Mark said, because it was the right thing to say, even if pretty much everyone there realized it was at least half of a lie. Mark hummed, laying back to stare at the sky, saying, “Yeah… Lilies first, then a lawsuit in a month if he doesn’t play nice? Sounds decently peaceful.”

Pleasant silence.

The conversation in Channel 4 moved on.

Derek asked about Kabberjaw, and Eliot, Tartu, and Andria started working on a better layer scanner. They were already working on a few different things, though, from some way to hold dead kaiju up, to prevent them from falling through the layer when Mark killed them, to better speed for the ship… and the list went on.

Isoko spoke up, “Soon as I figure this out, I should be able to solidify the air in a big way. I think I got half of it. Watch!”

She lifted her hand to the right side of the ship, toward some clouds streaming by, and detonated a silver sheen out there like a shockwave passing along a plane perpendicular to the ship. Was that the goal? Mark wasn’t sure. Isoko was suddenly unsure, too, as she grabbed the wind and stabilized it in a small area—

Isoko promptly tore herself into the deck of the ship, breaking wood and almost breaking herself.

“Ouch,” Isoko softly said, her voice barely heard under a thundercrash of breaking wood.

Mark was there with a quick Union of Good/Bad, but Isoko had retreated to Full Platinum the very second she realized she was driving herself into the deck of the ship. She was hurt. Bleeding. But okay. Mark reached down with a handle of adamantium and Isoko gripped it and Mark pulled her out, free of the ship. The very second she was free of touching the ship, the air grabbed her and threw her upward into the sky but she held onto Mark’s handle and Mark held on to the ship.

Isoko gripped that handle strongly, her TT warring with Mark’s control, barely edging into his kinesis. She was panicking a bit, getting torn into the sky, so Mark shifted the metal and grabbed her back, holding her wrist with a shaped hand, and Isoko relaxed.

She still flailed about on the edge of Mark’s grip like a fish on a line, though.

Mark held on, joking, “Looks like I got a weighty one on the line tonight!”

“Oh shut up!” Isoko called out, “This is very difficult!”

Mark grinned. “Looks that way, yeah! Want me to let you go, to fly around in the sky?”

“NO!”

Mark tried not to smile. Sure, Isoko was panicking, but she was fine.

“Just! Just… Hold on.”

Mark held on.

Isoko slowly, surely, calmed down, her vector of panic quieting, replacing with certainty. When that happened she slipped back down onto the ship… Mostly. A thin platinum air separated her from the deck of the ship. Right now her Powers were kinda like a collection of magnets, Mark thought. Isoko was trying to force similar poles together, and that took a lot of force. But then, when she finally overcame that force, practically kicking at the ground, she slammed to the ship’s surface. The nearest several meters of deck turned platinum. When she connected and her control was inside the ground, instead of in the sky, just as it had happened with her illusionary clothes belt, Isoko walked around freely.

Mark asked, “Did your grandma have this problem?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. We weren’t under Curtain Protocol like you, or at least not as deeply… but I kinda stopped asking Grandma about all of this stuff when I didn’t get any Wind Powers at all. I never saw Lee have any issues like this.”

“The problem has to be a combo of TT and Sky Shaper, yeah?”

“I think it’s more of a problem of macro-level control and the habit I got into of alwaysrunning Union,” said Isoko, walking around on the deck. “When I run Union now, I go Full Platinum. I can’t really… separate the actions anymore.”

“Ohhh… So turn it all off?”

Isoko leveled a glare at Mark. “While I’m out in the middle of Endless Daihoon, yeah sure.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “I can protect you, so just do it, and then try to work things individually, from the ground up.”

“Bah! Fine.” Isoko took a breath and then calmed. Slowly, every part of her disconnected from the world. She closed her eyes and her Full Platinum slowly faded, her uncovered skin turning pale again, her platinum hair turning black, and her Union disintegrating. She softly told herself, “Calm, calm, calm.”

Over many minutes, Isoko’s Full Platinum faded.

The sky stormed again and mist flowed in and brushed against Mark and Isoko, and still, Isoko calmed.

Mark put a wind block in front of her so she wasn’t blown off of the deck.

Eventually, she stood completely herself, platinum faded, the deck no longer sparkling, her vector firmly in her own body, once again. Isoko’s vector had softly filled much of the world, like a tint to the background, but now she wasn’t out there at all.

Isoko opened her eyes and looked at Mark and grinned, saying, “So that wor—”

Full Platinum came back and Isoko went flying, tumbling into the stormy sky and the storm burst away into a clear blue heaven. She stabilized fast, way up there.

Quietly, so quietly, Mark heard Isoko curse, her words whipping away in the wind.

Mark looked up at her and said to himself, “She’ll get it eventually.” And then Mark said into Channel 4, “How about we get a micro-rift open to Earth or Daihoon and get some internet and connections up in here to help Isoko? Maybe her grandmother will know tricks.”

Isoko spoke through her comms, “Please!”

“Sure,” Tartu said. “It’s close to dinner time anyway, yeah?”

“Are we only doing 1 meal a day?” Andria asked, and then added, “Because I can do that; I don’t feel hungry. But… I like food.”

Andria was holding back; she was not hungry at all, but she desperately wanted normalcy. Any kind of normalcy would do.

“Mark is doing Unions of Sustenance and Deprivation with the plants every now and then, and I will be teaching Isoko the same,” Lola said, “But we can do more meals…”