Serenity was about to dive back into the information on his display when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Blaze chuckled. “You’ve been a bit lost in your work. We’re getting ready to eat while we talk about what we’ve figured out; why don’t you come join us?”

That was Blaze’s way of politely saying that he needed to eat if he was going to stay healthy, wasn’t it? Serenity didn’t have to eat, as long as he had enough mana. Though perhaps that was the point, wasn’t it? He might handle things better in a low mana environment if he actually had real food.

No, Blaze wasn’t that devious. If he meant to tell Serenity to eat, he’d bring food, stick it in front of him, and tell him to eat before he starved. That was Blaze. Which meant this was actually an invite.

One Serenity wasn’t about to turn down. It hadn’t been that long since he’d eaten with Blaze, but it was always pleasant. It had been far too long since he ate with his parents. “I’d be happy to. The cafeteria?”

Blaze nodded and turned away. “Have you heard from Ekari recently?”

That was an odd question. She must have been on Blaze’s mind for some reason. “Yeah. She’s dealing with a rebellion on Aeon; from what she says, it’s not all that serious. The rebellion’s a few dozen people, mostly former high clergy of one stripe or another. It wouldn’t even be a problem if they didn’t have a couple that are high Tier.” Serenity shook his head. He hoped Ekari was right about it being minor. “They’re unhappy that the fall of the Eternal Church means they can’t get unpaid labor from novices anymore and are intent on deposing Ekari to replace her with High Priestess Karin and return the Eternal Church to power.”

Blaze actually paused in his walking at that. “A church to a dead god?”

Serenity chuckled. “It’d seem silly if I’d never seen it. It does make the god’s wishes easy to control. Though I suspect they were already doing that. It would explain a lot about Lykandeon.”

Blaze nodded at that.

“Ekari’s actually more worried about the silence on Lyka; she says there has to be something gathering there but she doesn’t know who to work with or co-opt into her government. She’s afraid that after living under the rule of the Church for so long, everyone who wants change is keeping things quiet, which means she isn’t hearing what she needs to hear.”

“That’s a reasonable worry,” Bethany interjected from the table near the tents. Someone had clearly been busy while Serenity slept, because there were now four chairs and as many place settings instead of just two. Three meals already sat on the table; a fourth place setting was there but the plate was under the “food” section of the dispenser. “The hardest thing to change is the way things have always been done, even if always isn’t actually very long. Get yourself some food; I know we talked about it before, but all you have to do is think about what you want to eat while you feed mana into the spike.”

Serenity imagined a nice dinner, something he wouldn’t take the time to cook for himself. Steak (with blue cheese, of course), a baked potato with all the trimmings, honeyed carrots, garlic mushrooms, and those entirely-too-delicious dinner rolls with cheese baked in, along with two types of butter for the rolls.

It was an entirely unhealthy meal, but one that Serenity probably didn’t need to worry about. Advancing in Tier helped with all sorts of things; his healing and shapeshifting should deal with the rest. The fact that he routinely spent a couple of hours a day either exercising or sparring also helped.

The spike pulled mana out of him, but it also pulled from his essence pool. That made some sense; it probably needed essence to actually make something real. Most mana constructs disintegrated after a few hours and that obviously wasn’t a good thing for food to do. For the others, who didn’t have essence pools, it must either convert mana to essence or pull from another reservoir.

Serenity didn’t pay much attention to what the others had gotten, other than to notice that none had gotten even half as much as he had. Despite that, Serenity still finished first. It was absolutely delicious. It didn’t quite taste like what he remembered; instead, it was better, with flavors he couldn’t identify that added something exceptional to the experience. If this was what the ancients could make from mana, he wanted one of these to travel with!

“You seemed to really like that,” Blaze commented. He still had a fair bit left of his mean, which looked like a wrap of some sort, some kind of flatbread wrapped around a mix of meat and grains. “Did yours taste right? There’s something off about mine, I’m not sure what.”

“It’s all like that,” Lex said. He had a bowl of something. Curry, perhaps? It smelled a bit like a curry and it did look like it was over rice. “Edible and, as far as we can tell, nontoxic. Blaze agrees; he says there shouldn’t be any issues. It just tastes off.”

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Serenity looked down at his plate, then up at the others. They didn’t seem to hate what they were eating but they also didn’t seem to really adore it the way he had. “There was something a little different, but it tasted good. I’m not sure what it was.”

“It was probably mana,” Blaze suggested. “You are a manavore, after all, so that might make things taste different.”

Serenity wasn’t sure where to go from there, so he was grateful when his mother spoke up. “As long as it’s not harmful, I’m happy. I know you brought some food, but we’re out.”

Blaze shook his head. “It’s fine. There are some problems with mana-created food if people use shortcuts, that stuff isn’t healthy and sometimes isn’t safe at all, but I checked for that. The mana content’s unusually high, like it’s trying to pretend to be higher-Tier food without actually being built for it, but other than that it’s fine. There’s actually quite a bit of material on it in A’Atla’s odd status screens; I’m still looking through it all. Whoever came up with it used some very different methods than I’m used to, but they evaluated it for use by at least a dozen different species. I’ve checked and the food still meets the requirements they laid out.”

Blaze seemed inclined to continue, but Bethany nodded and interrupted. “Then that’s enough about the food. We can have real food brought in once we’re at the surface; no matter where we end up, we’ll be on open ocean and that means resupply will be possible. A’Atla was clearly designed with shipping in mind; there are several harbors. One of them is so large that it dwarfs even supertankers; I don’t know what sort of ships they thought they’d get…”

The discussion of the infrastructure of A’Atla and what each had discovered continued on well into the night. Serenity’s discovery of the time scale surprised everyone, but the damage report was far more immediately useful. It changed some of the plans for how they could bring A’Atla up from the depths once they had enough mana.

Lex and Bethany did most of the planning, with Serenity and Blaze mostly listening and suggesting things based on what they’d found in the records. Blaze’s largest suggestion was that they could rise faster than planned; there would be no issue with pressure, because the crew’s area they were in was sealed and kept at something close to atmospheric pressure.

In fact, according to the displays that the others were able to see only after Blaze told them to look, the area they were in was designed for a significantly higher pressure differential than it was currently experiencing. None of them had enough knowledge to be able to say whether it was designed for a planet other than Earth or if it was being shielded from the pressure somehow, but it was definitely a hopeful sign. No one wanted to break A’Atla while they were in it simply by trying to raise it.

It was more than another day before they started. At that point, the mana level was at 110% of the minimum. Lex wanted to wait for 200%, which was still well below the “normal operating level” that had appeared on the screen when the “critical minimum” threshold was exceeded, but no one else wanted to wait that long.

They all gathered in the spire room for the attempt to raise the ship. Realistically, there was no need for any of them to be there; the ship could be commanded from anywhere. It didn’t matter; they all wanted to be together and the “engine” (or maybe battery) seemed to be the best place.

There were, as it turned out, several ways to move A’Atla. The most person-intensive was actually to do it manually, with an actual person managing each individual component. There was a communication system available to coordinate it, but it was positively ridiculous to think that you’d ever actually do that. From what Serenity could see in his systems, it was intended to be a backup method in case the normal controls were cut. It didn’t say that it was designed to deal with battle damage, but that was definitely the vibe Serenity got.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Captain could simply tell A’Atla where he wanted it to go and it would figure out how to get there. That sounded like what they wanted, except for two small problems. Not only could it not actually take them anywhere because they didn’t know where they were and A’Atla didn’t know where anything on modern-day Earth was, it didn’t actually work very well.

It was apparently an extremely early autopilot and had a tendency to set a straight line to wherever it thought it was going and ignore everything else. It was locked out from the Captain’s access with a Wizard’s Override. While Serenity could turn that off, it seemed like a bad idea. Aide could probably control it, but that didn’t solve the first problem of navigation. They needed to take things slow and figure out where they were before anything else.

There was an entire range of options in between. There was one that was clearly a default, where the Captain gave the orders to a crew and then they were carried out; that was out due to the lack of a crew and the lack of access to anything other than a single section with no direct controls.

There was one that was clearly intended for a minimal crew; it seemed to be the one that was used the last time there was a crew on board. It didn’t require manual control of anything, but handed actual movement off to A’Atla while a person still gave the orders. To Serenity, it seemed like the best general option, since it allowed for far fewer people to manage the ship with no appreciable loss in capability. Unfortunately, it still required people who actually knew the ship to give the orders.

None of those were the ones they were going to use. Instead, they were going to use the same setting that ended with them at the bottom of the sea: the only option that wasn’t locked and also didn’t require multiple people who knew what they were doing with the ship.

Captain Lex Rothmer’s first order to A’Atla was simple. “Get A’Atla off the seafloor and floating, but do it gently.”

None of them knew if the “do it gently” part would work, but it was worth a try. They could try to reach the surface once they knew if they could actually float.