Zoe sat in her library while books floated through the air around her. Some were being placed back onto the bookshelves while others were being pulled away and flipped through by fluctuations in space. Fennel was nowhere to be seen — probably sleeping at the window in Emma’s room, while Oliver laid in the doorway watching the books drift around.
It had been a few years since the dungeon formed in Flester’s ruins, and Zoe found herself engrossed in the wealth of books contained in the dungeon’s library. Political documents for cities she’d never heard of, or ones that she had and knew very well didn’t operate like the books said. Animals she’d never recognized, dungeons she’d never heard of.
Flester’s Might was a veritable hoard of knowledge that may or may not be accurate. Unreliable narration taken to its logical extreme, Zoe supposed as she wondered about how much of the information was useful. Most of it she just took as fantasy, fiction to waste away the time.
But where did it all come from? Did the system make everything up, or was it all pulled from some alternate version of Flester? Zoe shrugged and clapped the book she was holding shut, a gesture she took more pleasure in now that she no longer needed to hold them with her hands. An intentional gesture, rather than a casual flippant moment.
Space in the room twisted around and the books that floated around her snapped shut and placed themselves back on the bookshelves. Zoe tossed the book she was holding in the air and caught it with her Space skill, shoving it back onto one of the several bookshelves that lined her library’s walls.
The skill was wonderful to have, Zoe found. Not powerful enough to lift herself with it — and the grand gestures that Zoe remembered John showing off in his shop were little more than a dream. But it was a convenient skill to move lighter objects around. Pots and pans she used to cook, small tools she used for her Carpentry.
Books were the most convenient use of the skill though. Paired with her sphere of vision that surrounded her, Zoe could float books through the air around her and read whichever she needed. Everything around her had become a surface for her to work on, to write notes and keep things ready for when she needed them.
One day, Zoe would like to see if the skill could be used for simple teleportation. So far, it hadn’t been much more than a thought that drifted through her mind. Now and then she’d feel the urge to rip a book from the bookshelf and grasp it in her hand, skipping through space like it wasn’t even there. But it never worked, and the more often she failed at it the more often she envied Emma’s class, whatever it was.
Being able to cross through space so effortlessly as she did was nice. To reach across and grab a cup resting on the counter without getting up, as though it were right next to you all along. Or to feed the cats without needing to get out of bed.
Though, Emma often envied Zoe’s ability to carry others with her. The grass was always greener, Zoe supposed. She’d just have to break the barrier down so there was only one grass. One lawn? Zoe wasn’t really sure how the idiom worked or what it meant. The neighbour’s grass was always nicer? Some kind of play on yourself being your harshest critic?
It didn’t matter, Zoe supposed as she Cosmic Stepped to a glimpse of the kitchen she saw through her Cosmic Vision. Emma was cooking at the stove — something that never seemed to be the same whenever Zoe looked at it these days. Different grates were always being tried, different ventilation systems and heating methods. Zoe didn’t mind the change, she wasn’t the greatest designer when she made her home so very long ago. The fact that so much of it remained as she’d first made it was surprising enough to her.
“Hey,” Emma said as Zoe appeared. “I’m going to Flester’s Might in a bit if you wanted to come?"
The dungeon had become quite the feature of Foizo ever since it appeared. Mere days after it was first created the first groups arrived, eager to throw themselves at the danger. And more just kept showing up as time dragged on, filling Foizo and forcing them to expand their walls to keep everybody in.
A shanty town was made just outside the north-eastern gate of Flester’s Might, with dozens of inns and thrown together shops. Reminiscent of Gafoda, though not quite as squalid considering Foizo’s proximity. Resources were much easier to bring in and many of the people who lived in Foizo even took up jobs working in the new town that had appeared. The commute wasn’t bad enough for most to worry about it, and only got better as the road leading to the dungeon was refined and trees were cleared.
Emma and Zoe both spent more than their fair share of time in the dungeon, though neither had much reason to stay in the shanty town. Inkley was the name for it, for now. It seemed every few months they decided on a new name. Timothy was the first, thanks to the sculptor leaving an enormous statue of Zoe’s group just outside the northern gate that the town formed around. It was beautiful, and the spitting image of Zoe and her friends, who found it far more amusing than Zoe did.
“No, I’m good thanks. You have fun, though.” Zoe answered.
The levels from the dungeon had begun slowing down in their recent attempts, though it was quite fruitful at first. Zoe was sitting at the highest she’d ever been — level two hundred eighty seven, with just over five thousand stat points to distribute.
Sixteen hundred she split between strength and dexterity to bring them both up to one thousand, with eighteen hundred each into intelligence and wisdom. The remaining one hundred ninety six she dumped into Endurance along with the three she got from her Trailblazer feat.
Emma wasn’t far behind, having reset her class again to replace her initial space magic class with her Archmage class. Zoe helped her fight some of the lower levelled elementals in the dungeon to get her level back up and she reached her cap at one fifty two, taking another generic magical archer class that gave Emma access to some more elements. The class abilities reminded Zoe of her Seasoned Persistence, though lacking its healing and Alacrity.
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Zoe’s Nature’s Assistance skill proved to be an indispensable utility for Foizo as she stuck around for a while. The skill lasted far longer than she would have expected it to — months, if it didn’t need to use its mana for any purpose. And with so much more mana to spend, creating them only took a matter of seconds. Foizo was flooded with the little green bowling balls wandering around, dumping mana to heal anybody who touched them.
One day, Zoe would leave and the healing that flooded Foizo would go with her. But it was a nice experience being able to help out so much without needing to put herself out much. People didn’t need to come and ask her for help, or beg her to heal their injured friends. They could just pick up a bowling ball and take it with them to heal whoever they needed.
Many of the people in town didn’t even know where the assistants came from, they were just fuzzy balls that wandered around Foizo and on occasion, vanished. Who made them just didn’t matter to most people.
“Alright,” Emma said as she sat down at the table with a fried egg sandwich dripping with grease. “I’ll bring back any books I find that are interesting, and later tonight we can try again with getting me the Time skill?”
“Sure,” Zoe answered. She had both Space and Time as general skills herself now, but couldn’t manage to get them to combine yet. Was there some other piece to the puzzle that Zoe didn’t know? Or did she just not understand how they worked together well enough for them to combine?
Emma ate her breakfast and then vanished, leaving Zoe alone in the kitchen. She vanished moments later, appearing several kilometers in the air above Foizo, before she vanished again and appeared another four kilometers above. With all of her intelligence, Zoe was able to teleport much farther with each step, and with so much wisdom her mana may as well have been unlimited.
Zoe wasn’t sure how long it took to fill up her almost seven hundred thousand mana, but it was less than half a second. Maybe a third? If she wanted to trust that the sky would be free, she could travel hundreds of kilometers in less than a minute.
And sometimes, she did. Trips to space had become a regular occurrence for her, ever since her first visit with Emma. It was a fascinating place to be, floating far above the planet. Looking down on it from so high up it looked no larger than a large basketball.
In minutes, Zoe was far in outer space. Floating, surrounded by a sheet of earth and air to breathe. The sky was beautiful from so high. Stars that shone in the distance, planets that drifted through space. Even Abyllan threatened to fly away when she was so far away from its gravitational field, and at a point Zoe found herself needing to teleport towards it at times just to keep it from flying away as it hurtled through space.
The moon was so bright, unobstructed by the atmosphere held to Abyllan’s ground. The sun’s rays burned into her skin and Zoe wondered how her teachers would feel about her staring at the blazing ball of radiation without protection if she could go back and talk to them now.
But there were two problems that made her anxieties peak when she floated hundreds of kilometers away from the barren planet she called home. If she ran out of mana out here, she would die. And it wouldn’t be very quick, either.
She’d tried letting the vacuum of space rip her apart a few times, letting the air bubble she maintained around herself fade away gradually until she had nothing left. It was one of the most painful experiences she’d ever had, as though her body was boiling from the inside out and also freezing at the same time. Her tongue swelled, and her flesh bubbled as the pressure pushed on her body.
And the second problem was perhaps the more realistic problem. If she ever ran out of mana, then she’d have bigger problems than space ripping her apart. That would be like if oxygen were just abruptly ripped away, or grass vanished one day to never be seen again. No, mana was a fundamental part of reality here. Maybe even home, she often found herself wondering.
The much more real problem, the one that truly kept her from visiting the moon or flying to some of the stars that lit up the sky was navigation. She had no way of knowing where Abyllan was in the universe once she took her eyes off it. There was no compass that would lead her home, no star that would direct her to her planet. If she ever couldn’t see Abyllan, then she’d never make it back home.
And that terrified her, more than anything else. Maybe she could make it to the moon and still see the planet, maybe she could even visit some of the planets she could see far in the distance without losing Abyllan. But what if she did? What if something happened and she couldn’t find her way back?
What would be the chances of ever managing to make it back home without some shining beacon telling her where home was? Zoe shivered as she began to teleport back down to the planet. Even once she had a beacon, something about the vastness of space just terrified her anyway. It made her feel so small.
Back home, she looked out over space and saw it as empty. They were the only intelligent life to be found anywhere in the universe, the only proof that life could even exist. A perfect coincidence that lead to the beautiful green planet she grew up on. And even then, it terrified her.
But here? Knowing there were others out there, others that had even visited Abyllan before. Others that had never even heard of them. Maybe her home planet was floating out there, unaware of such an important truth to reality. That made it so much more exciting, but on the same token, so much more terrifying. Even if she could make it back home from another planet, that was only assuming the other planet wasn’t populated with some plant that consumed vampyric Zoes for fun.
Still, the pull was strong. How could she step into space, prove to herself that it would be possible, and then turn her back on it? Every child’s dream was to be an astronaut, and Zoe was at the precipice of so much more than any astronaut could ever even dream of. All she needed to do was find some way back home.
Zoe teleported back into Abyllan’s atmosphere and let herself fall back down to the planet. She spotted the mountain Foizo was set on and teleported back down to it, then into her cave. Oliver looked up from the hallway when she appeared and walked over to flop down at her feet.
“Yes, hello little Ollie. Have you been a good boy?” Zoe asked as she bent down to pet Oliver’s belly. “I was just in outer space. Can you believe that?”
Oliver meowed as he rolled over. Zoe laughed. “Yeah. Maybe we’ll take you up there one day. Probably not though, buddy. I don’t think you can understand it so you’d just be really scared.”
Zoe walked down the hallway to her library then climbed up the ladder to her enchanting room. It had been quite a while since she sat down and spent some time experimenting with her enchantments. Maybe there was some combination that would act as a beacon. Or if nothing else, she’d be able to make some more toys for Sally to annoy Peter and Lauren with.