A minute passed, then two, then three. Yet, nothing happened. Ethan strained, concentrating with everything he had, but there wasn’t any movement of mana from his body to Nine’s.

“Is it working?” Nine asked, looking up at him from where she lay on her bed. “I mean, you said trial and error, but I figured you had at least the basics down.” Her tone was casual, body relaxed, but there was a sheen to her eyes, and a tightness in the hand that held Ethan’s where it rested on her neck.

“Sorry, just give me a little time. I’ve never done this before. Mana transferal wasn’t covered in high school.” He replied, trying to keep the mood light. When another ten minutes went by without any change, however, he began to panic. They talked about their current situation while he worked, filling her in on the crash. After an hour, with him still not sure why it wasn’t working, Nine finally said.

“Alright, well, I’m exhausted. You can keep trying if you want, but I’m going to bed.” Again, the words were said dismissively, but as Nine rolled onto her side, putting her back to Ethan, he still caught the glint of tears in her eye. “Lay down with me and if you need physical contact just, watch where you’re touching, ok? The way you’ve been holding my neck feels a little too intimate considering we only just met today.”

“Right, sorry.” Ethan said, snatching his hands away. He heard her chuckle faintly at the move, and thought she might be holding up ok, until the chuckles turned to quiet sobs that shook the bed. Wincing in self-admonition for his failure, Ethan lay down behind her and reached a tentative hand over to rest it on the side of her neck. It was practically the only exposed skin he could reach, considering the skinsuit she wore, and the fact that he couldn’t just hold her prosthetic hand.

Grabbing his arm, Nine pulled it over herself like a blanket and pressed her back against his chest. Getting in close, she brought his hand up to her cheek, using it like a pillow. Ethan, unsure of what to do, just went along with her. Letting her settle in and holding her while she cried.

He knew there was nothing sexual in her actions. She was hurting, scared, and alone. She hadn't told him anything about herself, but he was confident she hadn't been on that ship, in that pod, willingly. He didn’t know if she had family out there, he didn’t after all. What he did know was that he saw so much of himself in her that he couldn’t just leave her in pain. Not when a little comfort from another human being was all she needed from him.

Eventually, her sobs subsided, and her breathing grew more even. He was pretty sure she’d fallen asleep, but he didn’t want to risk waking her to find out. Instead, he continued to visualize himself feeding her his mana, pushing it into her, draining himself. He just couldn’t make it happen.

As time passed and he listened to Nine’s calm breathing, his own mind began to wander. He tried to maintain his focus, but eventually he found himself drifting towards sleep. As the exhaustion from the day washed over him at last, and he couldn’t control the direction of his focus anymore, one final thought passed through his head as he nodded off to sleep. He just wanted to heal Nine.

A moment later, he felt the draw on his mana pool. It wasn’t like a video game, there was no gage, or bar that he could watch decreasing. Instead, it felt like his life force, the energy that animated and strengthened him, was being drawn out. At that realization, his eyes snapped open, and he concentrated on the feeling. No sooner did he actively focus on the flow, however, it cut off, and he was left with the vague feeling that about half his mana pool had been drained.

“…did it…work?” Nine asked sleepily, lips tickling Ethan’s palm. Before he knew how to answer her question, she let out a tired sigh and snuggled deeper into his chest, her rhythmic breathing resuming.

“Yes,” Ethan whispered too quietly for her to hear, “it worked.” After that, Ethan spent the rest of the night holding the sleeping girl in his arms. Unable to sleep, he tried desperately to remember how he’d managed to transfer the mana. Only hours later, when he was sure that ship dawn was close, did he finally start to nod off again. Just like before, his mind settled on why he was trying so damn hard. He just wanted to make Nine feel better. Just like before, the mana flowed out of him without any need to force it on his part at all.

Ethan felt the drain, only this time he fought his desire to seize control of the flow. Instead, he ‘watched’ with the new sense he was beginning to develop, as it moved from him, to Nine. Much of the mana was lost, disappearing into the air without reaching its target, the small amount that penetrated, however, moved to where he imagined her heart to be, then in rhythmic pulses it dispersed throughout the rest of her still human body.

Fascinated, Ethan didn’t stop until his well had run dry. Fighting the nausea that overwhelmed him as his pool was over drawn. Thankful he was already lying down, Ethan pondered over what had happened. All night, literally all night, he’d done his best to force his mana to move. To capture the feeling of kill energy and replicate it. To push it from his body to hers. In the end however, all it had taken… was him relaxing control over it and having a strong desire for Nine to feel better.

“Figures,” he muttered, head spinning like he’d been out drinking all night and then took a spin in a low gravity VR roller coaster. He wanted to throw up, but he held in the desire. He wanted to eat a mountain of ration packs, but he knew the feeling would pass from prior experience. Yet, what he wanted more than anything, was to try to heal her one more time.

So, he waited, unmoving like he had been all night, until his mana pool refilled about halfway. Then, he tried again. Relaxing control, and letting his instincts guide him, Ethan thought only about making Nine feel better. About how he wanted her to be healed. Sure enough, the mana moved again, seemingly of its own volition, from his body, into hers, where it once more entered her heart before being pumped through the rest of her frame.

Stopping well short of bottoming out his pool, Ethan’s face split into a wide grin. He’d done it! It had taken all night, but he’d figured out what to do… Well, he got out of his own way and let his body do what it already knew how to do, if he wanted to be accurate about it. With a feeling of victory firmly set in his mind, Ethan finally dropped off to sleep.

Only to be woken up what felt like five seconds later by Nine, who’d evidently decided it was time to get up and was attempting to shove him off the bed.

“I didn’t invite you to share my bed and get handsy with me all night for you to fall asleep you know.” Nine said, looking a little better after getting some food, a full night’s sleep, and some mana into her system. “If you aren’t going to work, then you can just go back to your own damn bed…” she’d pushed his unresisting arm away from herself and sat up while she spoke. Looking at Ethan in what he could only describe as embarrassed anger. Not that he’d had all that much experience in reading women’s expressions. It was his brother who’d been good with the ladies. Ethan hadn't ever bothered with them, knowing he didn’t have anything to offer the opposite sex.

Despite that naiveté, or perhaps because of it, he didn’t hesitate for a moment to reach out and grab Nine around the waist with one hand to prevent her from getting out of bed and pressing his other palm lightly against her cheek. Right over the red spot that had formed on her skin from being pressed against his hand all night.

Trying to focus on… not, focusing on his mana, Ethan willed Nine to feel better, to be healed. Then he watched in his mind’s eye as the mana moved from his hand into her body, and realized he must have slept for at least an hour, because his mana pool had been fully recharged.

Nine started when he grabbed her, and Ethan noted in his periphery that there was real anger in her eyes, not that he was aware enough at that moment to react to it, as focused as he was on staying open to his mana pool. The look passed a moment later and was replaced with wonder as she felt the mana flowing into her body. Ethan didn’t know what she felt, for him it was like a warm currant of water flowing through his fingers and into her face, but he could tell she felt something, because she clapped her hand over his and pressed it tighter into her now grinning cheek.

“I knew you could do it,” she said after he’d wrung himself out. “Never a doubt in my mind. A night in my company was all it took too… hey are you ok?” Her deliberately teasing tones shifted to one of real concern when Ethan, who’d sat up when she’d woken him, fell off the side of the bed.

“And you’re sure you’re, ok?” Nine asked for the twelfth time, as they sat on her bed some time later, eating their way through a stack of ration packs. Well, Ethan was eating his way through a stack of them. Nine had eaten one. That was considerably more than she’d managed the day before, however, and they both counted it as a good sign.

“I’m fine,” Ethan said, also for the twelfth time. “I just over did it a little bit. But I’m still learning, so it’s bound to happen, right?” Ethan had spent the meal bringing Nine and Davis up to speed on their situation, and what had happened to him since he arrived. Well, almost everything. He didn’t mention his brother, or the fact that he’d had the wasting disease.

“I still don’t understand how any of this is possible,” Davis, who they’d woken up when they made their food run to the bridge, said through a mouth full of mashed potatoes. “I’ve only been a ship’s technician for a few years, but I’ve never heard of dungeon bosses. To be honest though, I’ve never been anywhere near an actual ship core before. I mean, I know they exist and make space travel possible, but human technology handles so much of what’s on our warships that we… that is to say, the crew… always just considered the cores to be nothing more than a part of the engines. A piece of the ship, a component, not a living entity.”

“Me either,” Ethan said with a shrug, looking at the kid who’d come out of his shell the instant they started talking about spaceships. “The trip out to the Neptune rift took us like eight months in the Luna. I never even suspected during that time that she was here either.”

“That’s something else I can hardly believe,” Davis said, taking another bite of mashed potatoes, only this time with a healthy glop of gravy on top. “What in the world possessed you to drive this tiny boat all the way to the outer reaches of the solar system? This sized ship was intended for trips between the Earth and the moon. Mars, if you didn’t have any other options. But not this far. Our warships only took about a month to make the trip out here from earth. Shortly after the rift was declared a contested zone, and civilians were ordered to steer clear.”

“Well, Ma… my Captain, had his reasons.” Ethan almost said his brother’s name, but changed the word at the last minute, not wanting to open that particular can of worms. “Though, since he didn’t make it through the planet’s explosion, it doesn’t feel right to talk about them anymore… but what do you mean, declared a contested zone? I never heard anything about that.”

“Well, you might not have,” Davis said with another shrug. “It only happened about six months ago, when the damned Martians… I mean, when the powers that be began fighting over who could access the rift. If you’ve really been on the way out here for eight months, then you would have left well before the notice was sent out. Though, we’ve been here for a few months already as the forces on both sides built. I’m sure there were beacons set out to warn civilian shipping away.”

Ethan, who hadn’t missed Nine’s side long glance at his near slip earlier, couldn’t bring himself to answer. Since he knew full well that despite any warnings that anyone might have sent out, nothing stopped Mark once he’d made up his mind about something. Instead of responding, he just opened the tab on another ration pack and began shoveling it in.

“It’s been about an hour,” Ethan said after he’d swallowed the pack’s contents without tasting it. Without another word, he reached over to place his hand on her cheek once more. To his shock, she flinched back from his touch. “What’s the matter?” He asked, confused at her withdrawal.

“Not now,” Nine said, quirking her lips in a worried smile. Lips that Ethan noticed were no longer split and cracked today. “I feel worlds better than I did yesterday, and you clearly over did it working on me last night. Let your body rest, and we can try again later.” Ethan tried to argue, but she was steadfast in her refusal. Eventually, he was forced to give up.

“Alright then, if, you’re sure.” He said, climbing to his feet and offering her his hand. “It’s been long enough I think, and I promised Luna we’d spend the whole day working on expanding her domain into her cargo hold.”

“Finally,” Davis, who hadn't waited for a hand, and simply clambered to his feet when Ethan mentioned working on the ship, said with a grin. “I’ve never heard of a ship core’s domain. I can’t see it either, despite you having pointed it out to me. But fixing ships is something I know how to do. Hell, I’ll take that any day over fighting with those damned goblins.” He shuttered on the last word, before regaining his composure and looking up at Ethan with a grin. “Where do we start?”

Ethan, who honestly didn’t know the first thing about spaceship repair, only shrugged. Undeterred, the kid peppered him with questions. Did he know how much damage the ship had suffered, was the ship still in its original configuration from the shipyard, who’d done that awful patch job in the middle of the corridor, and did he know where the blueprints for the ship were kept. For the first few questions, Ethan didn’t have the answers, one of them he pretended ignorance, but the last sparked an idea in him that got him thinking.

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“I’m not entirely sure,” he said after thinking about it for a moment. “But I might have an idea, follow me.” With that, he led the way into the insanely overcrowded bridge. Looking around in shock at just how many plants and rodents Luna had been able to fit in here since yesterday.

“I thought overloading yourself with plants and stoats wasn’t the best approach for your long term growth?” Ethan asked once the three of them had squeezed their way onto the cramped space.

Good morning, Captain. Good morning, technician Davis. You are correct, this level of expansion is unsustainable and will begin failing soon. However, since I have not had anything more important to spend the passive mana on, I decided to stock up. So that I can afford to expand my domain when you finally get around to fixing my cargo hold… You have, finally come to get to work on fixing my cargo hold right?”

Ethan frowned at Luna’s blatant disregard for Nine. Just as he ignored the whispered, ‘screw you too bitch,’ the bald woman muttered under her breath. Instead, he focused on the idea that had brought him in here in the first place and looked up at where the words had just appeared in midair for all three of them to see.

“Yes Luna,” he said still feeling uncomfortable talking to her with an audience. “I told you we’d work on it all day today and I meant it. We are having a little bit of trouble figuring out where to start though. The Ensign had a few questions about the lay out of the ship, do you happen to have the blueprints available to show us? It would make the task simpler if you did.” Before he’d even finished asking, Luna had projected a 3D, cut away version of the ship onto the air, which slowly circled above their heads.

Ethan looked up as the ship slowly rotated, thinking that, in this cut away view, it sort of looked like a horizontally swimming fish. The bridge was the head and was dimensioned thirty by thirty feet. Directly behind that, the spine of the ship was made up of a five foot wide corridor. To either side of the corridor were a total of ten rooms. They measured ten by twelve feet, the longer side, along with the corridor maintaining the approximately thirty foot wide nature of the ship. Behind the rooms on the far side from the bridge, was the tail of the ship, the captain’s cabin. It was close to thirty feet wide by ten feet long. Ethan added it up in his head and came to a livable length of around ninety feet.

That was the main level of the ship, with a room height of twelve feet at the bridge, and eight feet in all the cabins. Above the cabins, Ethan frowned as he saw a crawlspace that ran the width of the ship, but that couldn’t have been more than three feet tall. Before he could ask about the space however, Luna shifted the few from the main level, down to the cargo hold.

Setting the thought aside for later consideration, figuring the crawl space wasn’t going anywhere. Ethan looked at the cargo hold. It was like the belly of the fish and covered the same footprint as the rooms up above, except it only had a ceiling height of six feet, instead of eight or twelve, and consisted of one big open space.

“Whoa, that is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Davis said with genuine excitement. “Can you show me the construction of the hull in greater detail?” He asked, walking as close as he could get to the projection through the mess of the bridge and peering at it intently.

Certainly, Ensign Leo Davis.

Luna wrote across the air, while simultaneously peeling back the layers of the hull to show how each panel was riveted together. The thickness of each panel and how it varied depending on what part of the ship it was from. Not to mention the overall makeup of the materials used. Ethan hadn't known just how much of the ship was made from polymers. It was only the outer layer, the layer of armor designed to protect the ship from the void of space, which consisted of a several inch thick layer of steel. Well, not steel exactly, but an alloy that Ethan had never heard of, so he mentally translated it to steel for ease of his personal comprehension.

As you can see, despite my small hull size, my previous Captain had a good eye for ship construction. Do you see the layers built into each section of my hull? Very unlike my current captain, who… well, do you see his idea of an improvised airlock over by the hatch into the corridor?

“I did, that was Ethan’s work? Well, I suppose that explains who did the patch job in the corridor, and who made the armor he’s wearing. Now, when it comes to the domain expansion… is there a reason you can’t just take over what’s there despite the holes in the hull? Ethan told me that it was you who sealed up this room. If you can affect your domain enough to change your hull shape than shouldn’t you be able to expand your domain outside your hull right now?” Davis asked, frowning at the schematic floating above him.

I can’t seem to expand my domain beyond the hull of this ship. Once my domain has permeated the hull, I do have some sway over its size and construction, or at least I will once I have the mana pool to actually do anything beyond making house plants and vermin. But there are several restrictions. Restrictions that I haven’t been able to figure out yet in their entirety. I have the feeling however, that if you were to enter the cargo hold and fix the damage to the hull, and seal off the section that isn’t already in the red dungeon’s domain, then I should be able to take it back.

“I see, then does that mean that…” Ethan and Nine exchanged glances while Luna and Davis had a rapid fire session of twenty questions. Ethan was pretty sure that Nine was just as lost as he was, though at least the ship core wasn’t insulting her work right in front of her face. After a while the pair of them made eye contact and left the bridge to wait in the hallway, outside Luna’s domain.

“Can she hear us out here?” Nine asked, once they’d moved about halfway down the corridor.

“I don’t think so,” Ethan said with a shrug. “We did some testing the other day, and unless she was acting, she couldn’t hear a word said outside her domain, even when my entire body was inside the bridge and only my head was in the corridor.”

“Alright, then I don’t mind telling you, that ship core is a real bitch.” She said without a trace of humor. “And I don’t trust her either. I heard your part of the conversation last night, no don’t say anything.” She said, raising a hand before Ethan could comment. “I don’t plan to pry into your reasons, but I know she didn’t want to save me, or for you to either. How I personally feel about that aside, if you had to threaten her to throw you a bone on something as inconsequential to her as me… what’s going to happen if we actually manage to return control of this ship to her?”

Ethan, who’d explained between the night before and this morning about the situation they faced, frowned at her words. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with her, because he had the same fears. It was just that, as a dungeon boss, Ethan’s life was tied to Luna’s. A small fact that he’d kept from Nine, not thinking it affected the situation enough to be worth talking about.

“I hear what you’re saying, but unless you can think of another way off this rock, then we’re sort of…” Ethan trailed off as Davis exited the bridge and joined them in the corridor.

“Sorry about the wait, I know it’s crowded in there.” He said as he joined them, Ethan moving to the side so the three of them now stood in a triangle facing each other. Ethan looked the kid over as he talked, thinking he looked much better with a few hours’ sleep, a few meals, and getting rid of that earth military skinsuit.

“Did you come up with a plan then?” Nine asked, not bothering to comment on the state of the bridge.

“Sure did, we’re going to go down through the patch job Ethan made in the corridor. We’ll scope it out, and then after Ethan points out the exact dimensions of the red dungeon’s domain, Luna will make the materials we’ll need to seal the rest away from it, creating a complete room for her to expand into. Since, for whatever reason that seems to be a requirement.”

The three of them discussed their options for a few minutes, before gathering up three helmets that Luna had managed to create from one, she’d apparently absorbed on the first day of the crash. Ethan tried once more to heal Nine, but she told him that he needed to be in top shape for the work ahead and they could do a session before bed that night. After that, all that was left was for Davis to grab his tool kit, and for them to close the blast doors on either side of the floor Ethan had patched with emergency panels.

That task fell to the kid, who cut away the sealant with a knife that got red hot with the push of a button. Holding the panel to the side, the kid motioned to Ethan to go first. He smirked, realizing that despite being an introvert who worked and played games alone at home, here and now, he’d somehow become the one who charged headfirst into danger while his companions waited for… While he was thinking about how much he’d grown as a person, and as such, not moving towards the newly opened hole, Nine had taken it upon herself to jump down into the blackness below them. Exchanging a look with an equally confused Davis, Ethan followed her into the cargo hold, flipping on his helmet light as he went.

Once inside the hold, Ethan looked around the dark compartment. He frowned, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. While simultaneously checking to see that Nine was ok. She was quite alright, already moving aft of the ship. Following after her with his gaze, Ethan saw the cargo hold narrowing down after fifteen feet or so. The floor and side walls crumpling up on themselves until they created a shape like a crushed fist filled with rocks.

“That would be where the ship slid up the crater,” he said through the helmet-to-helmet speaker system. “You probably both saw the trench out behind the ship. Guess it crushed the cargo hold… but not until it emptied it out first.” He added with a frown looking around the mostly empty space.

“Oh wow,” Davis said, who’d gone towards the front of the ship once he’d dropped down. Spinning around, Ethan looked to see what the kid found so interesting. To his eyes, he saw the kid standing right in front of a shimmering red distortion in the air that sloped back towards them sharply. Just on the other side of that distortion, were a number of objects floating around in apparent zero gravity.

Among them were the trio of coffins containing the crew members Ethan had floated down here. It looked like they’d failed to adhere to the hull with the glue he’d put on them. On the bright side though, since the back of the ship had been crunched, there weren’t any openings that led right into the void of space.

“How is this possible?” Nine asked, coming up beside Ethan as the pair moved to join Davis. “We have gravity right here, but… just a few feet away there is little to no gravity at all. I don’t understand…”

“It’s the red dungeon’s domain.” Ethan said moving forward until he stood right on the edge of the red tinted distortion. “It didn’t extend this far the first few days, but after that, it half swallowed Luna’s domain. Though, from what I’m seeing here, it looks like we are on the absolute edge of its reach. Since it slopes down and back towards the crater here. It’s like we are on the very edge of a ball, where the slope stops going down and starts going under… perhaps that doesn’t make sense… here, I can trace it with a marker.”

Ethan really didn’t know how to explain what he was seeing, but once he traced out the domain with a permanent marker Davis produced out of his tool kit, it was easier to see. Like a gently curving line on the walls, and a near straight line along the floor and ceiling. Ethan could even see the blue shimmer along the roof that denoted Luna’s domain.

“Here,” he said, handing the marker back to Davis. “If we build the wall on that side of the line, then Luna should be able to expand into it without being effected by the red dungeon’s domain.” Ethan said, tracing the line with his fingers as he spoke.

“Fascinating,” Davis said, looking past the red distortion without seeing it, to the floating objects that seemed to defy gravity just beyond. Much of which consisted of ship debris, and small chunks of rock and dirt clouds. There were a few items of note in there as well. The three coffins, and a half dozen crates that looked to have been attached to the bulkhead right near the nose of the ship. Ethan was curious, but figured they’d better seal off the room before they looked into whatever was down here.

“I’ll make a sketch, but thankfully there doesn’t look to be that much damage. At least from the inside. I may have to go outside the hull to be sure. Something I plan to do anyway in order to get the bridge opened back up to its original size. Still, for now I think all we’ll have to do is build a wall with the emergency panels. Ethan, would you go back up and start bringing them down please? I think based on what I see here, we’ll need… five crates full? Maybe more, if I cut each edge piece to maximize space by following the arc of the red domain. It looks like…” Ethan, Who’d once heard the expression loose lips sink ships, now wondered if it required loose lips to fix them too. Since, the normally stoic ensign couldn’t seem to control his mouth when spaceships came up.

“Sure, be back in a minute.” He said, no longer really listening to Davis. Turning to Nine, he gave her a half smile and a shrug. “Mind staying here and seeing if he needs anything else while I go get the panels? If he does, then you can tell me before I jump back down here with the crates.” Nine, who despite looking better than she had since waking up in the pod the day before, was still weak as a kitten, and he didn’t want her moving around more than she needed too, until he’d got her back into top shape. Besides, he had to duck to keep from hitting his head down here.

“I guess I can take one for the team,” she said in a low voice, with a mock eye roll as she took in his stooped posture and glanced at the still chattering away young man. “But understand that you’ll owe me.” She added with a wink, before heading over to engage the young man in a, mostly, one sided conversation about the repair work.

Feeling more lighthearted than he had in days thanks to the banter. Banter with people who didn’t look at him with pity or disgust, Ethan climbed out of the hole and returned to the bridge. After telling Luna what Davis had asked for, he carried the boxes, one at a time, over to the hole in the floor. Then, checking with Nine to make sure they didn’t need anything else, he dropped them down one by one and followed after them.

Once back down in the cargo hold, he saw that Davis had left the confines of the red domain, and as such, the confines of gravity and atmosphere. He was moving around the front section of the cargo hold, measuring and marking the walls and muttering to himself happily as he did so. Ethan, who was suddenly feeling apprehensive at the sight of the ship tech floating around beyond the limits of the red distortion, walked over and dropped the box he was carrying.

“Hey kid,” he called out, coming right up too, but not crossing the line between gravity and vacuum.

“Hhmm?” Davis asked, voice muffled around the marker cap he held between his teeth as he marked out… something.

“Did you feel anything when you went out there? Anything weird when passing beyond the area with gravity?”

“Weirder than having gravity and oxygen where you are, then having it be gone when I took a step you mean?... I don’t think so… why?” The feeling of apprehension grew, and when Nine moved to join him, he waved her back away from the line, he’d drawn to outline the red domain.

“Hold on a second,” he said walking right up to the line. “I just remembered what happened last time I walked across this line outside Luna’s domain. Let me just…” as he spoke, Ethan walked that last step across the line. He didn’t feel anything, but he hadn't before either, not walking out anyway.

The ceiling down here was only six feet tall. Ethan, being several inches above six feet, didn’t find it difficult at all to brace himself between the floor and the ceiling. This kept him from instantly floating up, like the much shorter ensign had. Turning around, Ethan took a deep breath, before dropping his eyes to the line he’d marked, and stepping back into the dungeon domain only he could see. Ethan shivered then, as a chill went down his spine. The feeling of being watched swept over him again, just like before, and Ethan’s face paled.

“Shit,” he whispered, looking up to find Nine standing right in front of him, her eyes brimming with concern.

“What is it?” She asked, grabbing onto his arm with both hands. “What’s happened?”

“It’s the dungeon,” Ethan said, already moving towards the opening in the ceiling. “I felt it, feel me, when I entered its domain… it’s happened before. And it sent goblins last time. Wait here, work on the wall, and… whatever you do kid, don’t cross the line.” With those parting words, he was up and moving aft towards the threat he knew was coming.