The weeks flew by back on Abyllan, with Zoe relaxing back home with Emma and the cats. She used her Foizo on the Moon skill several times in the earlier days, but decided that if it was doing anything, Eliza would have noticed and might not enjoy the dungeon shifting around without her knowledge.

Zoe stopped by in Korna for a few hours to chat with Lila and let her know about Eliza’s extended departure to the moon. She seemed rather lonely, but without Eliza there to act as a middleman and keep them together, they just didn’t have much in common, so Zoe didn’t stick around long.

Most of Zoe’s time was spent wandering through Foizo, appreciating the many numerous shops that had opened in town, but she also spent some time in the library reading through many of the books. One was about her — she’d seen Andrew with it before and was interested in seeing what it entailed.

The book was, in a word, pretentious. Zoe was one of the main highlights of the book — the saviour of Flester, the silent protector of Foizo. But she wasn’t the only one mentioned through the book, Diana was as well. So was Joe, and several others Zoe didn’t recognize. Some mage by the name of Hildegarde had apparently been instrumental in the exploration of Flester’s ruins.

But so little of it was accurate. Zoe saved the citizens of Flester, flying them from the dangers to the protection of Foizo? She laughed at the thought. Zoe helped her friends, and they helped the rest of the people. Zoe didn’t build Foizo, she didn’t even really want it to be a thing at first, beyond giving her friends a place to feel safe.

The silent protector of Foizo? Laughable. Maybe if Foizo was being attacked, she’d put herself in danger to protect it. But Zoe thought she’d be far more likely to rescue her friends, just as she had when Flester was attacked. What would be different? Maybe she’d be a higher level, capable of handling the danger. If the same elemental attacked Foizo, would she be able to fight it off, on her own?

Doubtful, Zoe imagined. Flester may not have had any royal guards, but they weren’t weak. Would Zoe be able to fight off the entire city as well as the elemental had? Even with her elemental advantage, given her prowess with her water magic, she just couldn’t see how she’d fight off such a high level elemental. At least, not without the town being destroyed despite her best efforts.

It spoke of her passions for Foizo, her dedication to the town and even estimated how much gold she’d invested into its development. According to the book, she’d invested over three thousand gold into Foizo! Laughable, really.

She felt like a celebrity reading through a magazine written about them by somebody who’d never actually met her. The guesses and assumptions they made were ridiculous, and the picture they painted of her was somebody she’d hate to be.

Some of it was truthful — Zoe did help out the people of Flester to an extent, she was the first to clear the dungeon. She did often create hordes of little green bowling balls that wandered around healing people. But so much of it was filled with outlandish lies and falsehoods that it made Zoe question anything the book said about the other people. Or if they even existed, at all.

Several of the other books she checked out were much more interesting. One went into the details of the failed invasion on the kingdom several years earlier, when Zoe was involved in a bit of a mess up in Korna. It talked about the different plans, what went well and what didn’t. Another was on the history of Flester, though it had no mention of its destruction or of Foizo.

How long would it be before those books made their way to Foizo? It had been long enough that Zoe had no doubt they were already written — other, larger cities with more interest in history would surely have up to date records of most cities. At least, not quite so out of date.

But Foizo? From what Zoe could see, there didn’t seem to be any book about Flester that also mentioned its successor. Many books were written on Foizo, on Flester’s Might and it’s influence on the surrounding area, on Inkley. But there was no singular book, no singular record of Flester’s history that also contained information about its destruction.

Were there other towns out there that hadn’t heard of the destruction yet? Or were historical documents just less interesting to people? With a dungeon nearby, Zoe couldn’t blame them, she supposed. Read through some books or throw yourself into a dungeon to seek riches and power? The choice was rather simple for her.

But the thought that there could be small towns or villages, somewhere out in the wilderness, that hadn’t caught word of Flester’s destruction was sad, in a way. Though it raised the question too of what Foizo was missing. Were there other cities out there, destroyed and rebuilt, never to be known by her? On a grander scale, on Abyllan, she knew there was.

The planet was massive, there were tens of thousands if not millions of other civilizations spread throughout the surface. Possibly even more deep within the surface or on the ocean floors. Even if Zoe wanted to, she’d never have the time to see all of them and learn their histories.

But even just within the Injellar kingdom, were there other disasters that she’d never heard of? Towns that had been ravaged and destroyed, and news just hadn’t reached Foizo yet?

There were a couple of schools that had been built up in Foizo, some of which had even been running for several years unbeknownst to her. She felt a little bad that she hadn’t noticed, but it did make reading through the book about her even funnier. How was she some secret protector of the town when until the last year or so she wouldn’t have even been able to name more than a small handful of different shops?

Two weeks passed, and Zoe made the trip out to pick up Eliza with growing anxiety. Would she be safe? Would somebody have come to raid the dungeon, slaughtering everybody including her? Maybe the dungeon itself would have turned against her without Zoe actually being there — though Zoe doubted that happening at least. She couldn’t see them going against her orders and treating people harshly, not to mention Eliza had command over the dungeon and was fully capable of escaping even if she wanted to.

The many hour journey was one of the worst experiences Zoe had ever had, which surprised her. Her heart raced, and even with her magic keeping the atmosphere around her at an exact temperature she found herself dripping with sweat. Her mind raced with all the possibilities of finding Eliza’s corpse on the moon, or even of not finding anything at all. Arriving in her dungeon and hearing Greg tell her that Eliza had already left was just as terrifying. Would she be able to make it home on her own? Would she be able to find her way back home once she was on Abyllan?

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Probably, Zoe imagined. Logically, she knew that Eliza had a means of getting home in a pinch. The mana cost from the moon might be too high but if she could get back on the planet and at least somewhere near Korna, she’d be able to get home just fine.

But she couldn’t stop her emotions from rampaging, right up until the moment she saw Eliza sitting down at a table in a very different looking kitchen in her replica home. Eliza’s home now, she imagined. The cavern had been completely redone, all the rooms that Zoe built were torn out and replaced with whatever Eliza felt would fit better.

“Oh, you’re back already. Has it been two weeks?" Eliza asked as Zoe apepared.

Zoe nodded. “Yeah.”

“You alright?” Eliza asked, her eyes wandering up and down Zoe’s body. “You look stressed.”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Zoe sighed. “Was just worried, honestly.”

Eliza scoffed. “About me? I told you I’d be fine.”

“It’s been two weeks, with you alone on the moon, and you don’t even actually know if you could make it all the way home by yourself. I dunno. I was fine back home but the hours I spent travelling here were pretty anxiety ridden. I’m glad you’re safe, though.” Zoe said.

“It’s been boring, honestly. I never thought I’d say that about living in a dungeon I can manage myself, but it has been. I have so much control over the dungeon, but that really doesn’t inform me on anything else. I’m not really learning anything new, here. I’ve done so much, tried so many things, but there’s nothing to learn. No hints to the system’s underworkings that we haven’t already seen, no new system messages given to me for trying different things. Greg’s been completely useless in figuring out anything new.

“Owning a dungeon seems fun, and I’d love to do it myself. But I’m not sure how to harness the mana it’s storing. I don’t seem to have any control over it, aside from using it to remodel the dungeon. Maybe you have more control over it, being the true owner of the dungeon? I’m not sure.

“But anyway, I found a few limits on the skill. We can’t dig down. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to dig down into the moon. Not sure why, but maybe it’s because Foizo isn’t underground? It seems there are rules around what the dungeon is, and any modifications we make to it need to fall within that. There’s also a height limit — that tall building out there is as tall as we can go. Horizontally, of course the boundary is the dungeon walls.

“I was curious if we could make something similar to what the Springs of Gir had with their sub dungeons but I wasn’t able to replicate anything like that no matter what I tried. I made some different buildings that looked somewhat similar, but it wouldn’t spawn any drakes. I also tried to create different animals, but I wasn’t able to do that. It seems that at the very least, the enchantment you gave me gives me no control over creating any lifeforms of any kind.

“The cold is another limitation. No matter what I do, I’m not able to make an area that stays warm. We can make it much warmer than it is now, but the little frost people don’t seem to like that very much. But we can’t get it above freezing. Even if I try to manually do that without the dungeon’s help, the dungeon’s mana just eventually overpowers it and destroys whatever heat source I create.” Eliza sighed.

“It’s fascinating, being a part of this. But it’s also frustrating, not being able to see all the answers I had hoped we’d have. It’s a dungeon, that you own. And I get to manage, to an extent. And yet despite that, there’s no answers. How, exactly was the dungeon created? I know what you did, but what did the system do to make that happen? I’d love to replicate what you did one day, and watch the mana as the system forms it into a dungeon. But what we have here doesn’t seem to be a source of information so much as a place to test things. A shame, really.” Eliza rambled.

“I used the skill back home, did you notice anything?” Zoe asked.

“I was going to ask you that. I didn’t notice anything at all. What did you try to do?" Eliza asked.

“I tried to change the table back. It didn’t do anything at all? I guess there’s a limit on the distance, or maybe I just needed to put more mana into it?” Zoe wondered aloud.

“Well, next time I’m willing to come back here and stay for a while I’ll help you test that out again. But for now, I would really like to get home. For a general update, there were no other visitors to the dungeon that I was aware of. They haven’t found any other animals to use, and the experiments with the little bugs have not proved fruitful. You’ve got a gem here, but it’s not a very valuable one. Not to mention its on the moon so very few people are ever going to show up anyway.” Eliza laughed.

“That was kinda the idea. I didn’t want it to be around people in case it was dangerous.” Zoe said.

“I respect that, but next time make one closer to home. If we could get people here to raid it more often and properly see how the dungeon works when it’s being raided, then we could maybe see some more information. But dragging just me out here takes almost a day. Let alone an entire party, and keeping that many people alive in this atmosphere? Zoe, it is extremely unpleasant here. Even in the warmer areas, it’s painful to breath.” Eliza stood up from the rather comfortable looking woolen chair she was sitting in and tossed the heavy purple blanket to the floor to stretch her limbs out.

“Back home then?” Zoe asked.

“Oh, please, yes. I can’t wait to get somewhere warm. If you ever get a heat rock, try making a hotter dungeon nearby. Maybe they merge and make something more bearable.” Eliza laughed. “Thank you again for the opportunity, Zoe. I may not have learned as much as I’d hoped, but I wouldn’t change my decision. Not learning anything important is knowledge itself. Being a dungeon owner isn’t the same as being a part of the system, we know that now. We know that there are limitations and restrictions on what we can do, on what it can be.”

“Well thank you for doing all of that testing for me.” Zoe laughed. “I wouldn’t have been quite as thorough, I imagine.”

Eliza chuckled. “I had little else to do. I’m surprised it’s been two weeks already though, the time flew by up here. Hard to tell when a day’s passed, really.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, then.” Zoe said.

“I did. Thank you very much, Zoe. But I am very excited to get back home and put on a fire.” She laughed.

Zoe smiled and grabbed Eliza’s outstretched hand.