Nine doublings later, and Moonlight was a fortress. It’s probably the strangest feeling you could ever experience. Imagine standing in a place where the geographical reality of it changes virtually in an instant.

You’re standing there, outdoors, and a giant wall rises in front of you… from nothing. It’s almost upsetting, the somersault it causes for your brain. You could likely consider it a form of trauma. Overstated? Maybe. But, everything was different about the village, and it only took minutes.

There was panic all over. I could hear the screams. Normally, I’d tell you the echoes carried on the wind, but the wind had dropped to near nil. These huge, solid walls, or rather this one smooth perimeter wall completely enclosing multiple square miles caused an insulating effect to where the wind dropped to near stillness. Long shadows thrust large chunks of the land into darkened pockets. We were inside a castle that had no roof, basically.

Crazier still, I had a bunch of Water Chestnut Obliteration left swimming around my insides. So much unused magic. Fourteen doublings worth.

“What are you going to do?” Proctor asked.

We were walking alone along the giant wall, since everyone else either saw me as a witch, and took off running, or they were so enthralled by what had happened, they had to check other areas around the village to see the changes for themselves.

“I don’t know,” I said. But, it was a bit of a lie. We were walking east toward the gate archway gap Denton had left when we’d originally mapped where the perimeter wall would go.

I was pretty sure that’s where Kestrel was headed. No doubt, his first priority would be to build a main gate for the village. Whether it was prudent or not, we’d allowed for one exit/entrance to Moonlight once the wall was built.

I led the two of us to the village gate, and we stopped to take in the grand arch we encountered.

The archway was probably a hundred feet tall. Absolutely massive. If it wasn’t for the fact it was made out of ‘poured’ concrete you’d think it was something out of ancient Rome.

“Kestrel’s capable of building a portcullis to fit this size?” Proctor said.

“A port… what?” I said.

“Portcullis,” Proctor said. He took a beat to see if I’d clue in.

I didn’t.

“A form of gate,” he said.

“Ah.”

Yeah, yeah, Proctor’s smarter than me. Part of me did worry though, if he turned out to be a better ball player too, what would I even need to be around for. Just because the System chose me to run things? Whatever, I was glad to have him around.

We walked beneath the arch, gawking upward at its enormity. The gateway itself was, as I’d said, about a hundred feet in height, while it was also a good twenty or thirty feet wide.

“Even Trevor could navigate this with ease,” I said.

“Several Trevors,” Proctor said.

It caused me to giggle. “Maybe that’s what we should’ve called the ball team. The Moonlight Several Trevors.”

“You can be a bit weird,” Proctor said.

He wasn’t wrong.

“Speaking of weird,” I said, and I kept leading us outside the village walls over to the trench Gak and his friends had been digging. “Dare me to use the rest of my soda powers on this little project?”

A line appeared on Proctor’s forehead. I read it as genuine fear or concern.

“May we just think about this for a moment?” Proctor said.

The spot where our village’s gate was located happened to be where the trench diggers had begun their work. Once through the gate onto the outside of Moonlight, we would’ve had to descend eight feet to reach the trench’s bottom, and walk about twenty feet to get to the other side, and back on level ground.

“You’d think we were preparing for war,” Proctor said.

Strangely, I did feel a new sense of vulnerability once we walked outside Moonlight’s wall.

“We do need to get that gate shored up,” I said.

“We’ll be fighting our battles on the ball field,” Proctor said. “I’m not certain we need to rush the gate construction.”

“You want another one of those creatures coming around?” I said.

“What did you have in mind?” Proctor said.

“What about-” I couldn’t even finish my thought, and Proctor was right there with me.

“Shipping containers,” he said. “As a temporary barrier.”

“Yes,” I said, enthusiastically.

“But, how to move them.”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s not like we have elephants.”

“We have a Trevor,” Proctor said.

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“He’d still need help.”

“Indeed.”

“Besides,” I said. “I was thinking about those containers, and wondering about using them for housing.”

“Oh, clever,” Proctor said.

“I’ve seen shipping containers made into houses before, and always liked the idea,” I said. “I think I might do that for my own housing, and if I could, I’d want to set it up near the site of the ball park. We could do the same for you. We could even set up a couple of the containers as shared housing for some of the players.”

“Or, perhaps as ball club office space,” Proctor said.

“We’ll have to figure it out,” I said. “In the meantime, let’s do this.”

I descended to the bottom of the eight foot deep trench. The sun had poked out from behind banks of clouds, and its heat radiated upon me from where it bounced off the considerable bright concrete backdrop towering above us. It was probably the warmest I’d felt in Moonlight since I’d arrived. The mud under my feet felt softer too.

“How am I going to do this?” I said. “It’s deliberate touch, right? The thing is, I don’t want to make the trench any deeper. Eight feet is fine. We don’t need it to be sixteen feet deep or more.”

“Eight feet?” Proctor said. “That’s your estimate of its current depth?”

“What does it look like to you?” I said.

“Ten, perhaps.”

“Okay, well, the point remains,” I said. “We don’t need the thing to be twenty feet deep, do we?”

“Your prerogative,” Proctor said. “It was your idea to construct the trench or moat in the first place. I do believe in medieval Europe there were moats at least twenty feet in depth. Which is not to say, that’s what we should do here.”

“Ten feet is fine,” I said.

“Agreed.”

“But, obviously we want it to extend all the way around the village,” I said. “When I did the concrete, it built it up, and out. Know what I mean? I only want one of those.”

“Perhaps voicing this openly, as you are, will cause the System to automatically grant your request,” Proctor said.

“You think that’s how it works?”

Proctor shrugged. “You have me at a loss.”

“Should I just try it, and see?” I said.

“You’re talking about a super power, basically,” Proctor said. “It’s difficult to leave that up to ‘just try it and see’. The implications of what you do here could be massive.”

“Massive?”

“Catastrophic.”

“Great.”

“No pressure,” Proctor said.

He could be a real comedian at times.

“Okay, System,” I said, gazing up into the sky. “I only want to extend the length of this trench. You got that? I don’t want to make it any deeper than it already is… cool?”

I glanced back at Proctor who was still standing at the top of the trench. His pursed lips, and hands on his hips told me he was entirely unconvinced. About what, you might ask? Well, considering he looked like my fifth grade teacher discovering I hadn’t actually read the book I’d written the report on… he just seemed unsure of everything.

I squatted in the soft mud, holding my hand close to the ground.

“I’m going to do it,” I said.

Proctor nodded, solemnly.

THWACK!

Once my vision adjusted from the lightning bolt I was horrified to discover I was twenty feet below Proctor’s vantage point. The two hundred meters or so of trench that ran west of me remained two hundred meters in length. I’d doubled the trench’s depth, but not its length.

“Oh man!”

“Dear oh dear,” Proctor said.

“Now what do we do?” I said.

Proctor pressed his lips together and bellowed like a horse. “Less than ideal,” he said.

“You think?”

But, it only took a few seconds, and inspiration appeared to grab hold of him.

“It could be because you’re at the trench’s bottom,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve made it deeper, because you placed your hand upon the bottom,” Proctor said. “What if you were to climb out of there, and try placing your hand upon the side?”

“Wouldn’t that just make the trench wider?” I said.

“Could do, but, regardless what I’d said before, we may have to try it and see,” Proctor said.

I crawled up the steep embankment on the trench’s south side, which put me twenty feet opposite where Proctor was standing at the base of the perimeter wall.

“Here we go,” I said.

BAM!

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Twenty feet opposite Proctor became forty feet in two seconds. The thing was still about two hundred meters long, running east-west along the village’s southern wall.

“Look at the size of this thing!” I shouted across to Proctor.

“A proper trench, I’ll grant you that,” he said.

“It’s the freaking Panama Canal,” I said. “Any more suggestions? I can’t make this thing any wider. Well… I can, but I don’t want to. And, it’s already deeper than I’d wanted it.”

“Hmm, yes.”

Proctor folded his arms. It was hard to tell from across the chasm between us, but I’m pretty sure he was frowning, as if in deep thought.

“What about going to the far end, over there?” He said. He pointed two hundred meters west of us. “Perhaps if you touch the inside edge of the trench at the one end of it, it will cause it to duplicate length wise.”

“Do we have a choice at this point?” I said.

“Of course,” Proctor said. “You could choose to let the power of the soda wear off with time. Sit alone, and touch nothing. Or, you could use it on something more innocuous, say… multiply the area of scraped terrain over at the ball park site. Viable options, each.”

You might consider it reckless, but those options didn’t appeal to me as much as seeing what would happen if I’d followed his first suggestion. Call it morbid curiosity.

Or, maybe I was chasing that dopamine hit you get from seeing spectacle. You get it even from seeing bad spectacle. You know what it’s like. Sometimes you want to do a thing, even if doing the thing means disaster, often because you actually want the oddly satisfying feeling of bearing witness to said disaster.

Humans are so screwed up.

Whatever, I was just looking for an excuse to play with my temporary super power. I’m sure Proctor saw right through me.

“Nah,” I said. “I like your idea about touching the ground at the trench’s end. It’s the next logical choice. I could see how the System set things up that way. Could work.”

“Could also result in a forty foot deep trench,” Proctor said.

“Or also, it might make it eighty feet wide,” I said. “This is crazy. It’s like we’re playing a world building sim, but we’re actually inside the game.”

“Uhhh…”

We just stared at each other for a moment.

After about a minute of self talk, where I’m basically telling myself to relax, and not give myself a stroke, I’d made a firm decision.

“Alright, I’m doing it!” I yelled, and I ran to the end of the trench.

Proctor slowly walked along the perimeter wall on the trench’s north side. He stopped though once I’d reached the far west end where I was about a hundred meters from him. Once again, I crouched, and reached to hold my right hand over the muddy embankment.

“Here goes nothing.”

SMASH!