My return to Kalamitus' Tower was one I might have had a lot of different expectations for. I might have imagined that Kalamitus would be happy, or that Louise would be waiting, or any number of other things. But all things considered, I wasn't in a mood to try to figure out exactly what was going to happen; when I exited the Fairy Dungeon entrance and found myself back in the empty chamber with the velvet ropes, I just kind of wanted to go find my girlfriend and lay down for a while.

The elevator was not waiting for me when I got there, and there was no obvious call button.

"Seriously, Kalamitus?" I snapped, after a minute or so of standing around wondering if it was just busy somewhere. "Do I have to kneel down in supplication or so--"

A moment later, it appeared, sliding into place very quickly. I cut off my griping, noting as I got in that only the button for Kalamitus' floor was available... again. That got me cross, but I pressed it, wondering if Louise and Susie were really okay with all the waiting around for me and this bullshit. Louise wouldn't complain, one way or another, but that didn't mean she didn't care. And Susie...

Well, I cut off thinking about her quickly enough when I found myself in the presence of the draconic Dungeon God again.

Kalamitus, if I were to summarize my previous meetings with the guy, was a dick. High-handed (ha, flying humor) and irritable, even the things that he did which showed something like humanity were generally off-putting. But it was strange to enter into his presence and feel like he was... suddenly a little bit nervous about me.

"Jerry." The Dragon was suspended in the air, not moving much, and I got the distinct impression of surprise from him. "I, ah, I have to admit I wasn't really expecting you to return."

That... my face fell. The whole fucking point of having Herman there as an arbiter was so that the motherfucking dragon god would take me seriously and try to ensure that I survived. "So you, what, just decided it would be better to let me die and pay a penalty than tell me to give up?"

"It's not that." Kalamitus shook his head and found himself floating over in my general direction, but not getting close enough to be actively intimidating, this time. "My impression of Xzyrtvwartcihz was that he would do all he could to kill you. I bent the odds in your favor, but if he bent them back... I can hardly be blamed for that."

That painted the super-boss antics in a different light, but then, the Slenderman puppet had been exceptionally forgiving, the point where it was obvious that he deliberately spared me. "And you couldn't just give me more training ahead of time?"

"Jerry, Jerry," the dragon clicked its tongue, or something at me. "As a Dungeon God, I'm not permitted to just raise numbers on you, or anyone except my own Priestesses. Administrators, though, can do that to their monsters at will, in certain circumstances."

As though I needed to be told that. I felt like pulling out my Slenderman gloves and dropping them on the floor, then just walking away, as if to say You don't fucking say, asshole, but steeled myself in hopes that we would get through this conversation without it turning into a shouting match.

"But I guess he went easy on you. And, well, you made it through the Fairy Dungeon, twice! Consider me impressed." He squinted at me, and the atmosphere in the room changed. He flicked his head closer, but not in a threatening way, as far as I could tell. "You have a Sovereign's Mark. Why do you have a Sovereign's Mark, Jerry?"

I looked up at the Dragon, doing my best to ignore the fact that due to our relative scale, I was mostly staring up a gigantic nostril. "You can't tell?"

"I don't usually--oh." I could feel a faint flicker the moment Kalamitus tried to read something in me. Merry, with a surge of amusement, indicated that even that brief contact had allowed some things to leak across, though she didn't say exactly what. "You... took my advice about rebuilding skills and applied it rather liberally, didn't you? That's..."

"Foolish?" I felt the smile coming to my face as I finished saying it, since I hadn't actually meant it as a pun. "You don't know the half of it."

The Dragon pulled back and considered me. "Yes," he said after a moment, I think coming to grips with just how very, very fucking strange I was. "In any event, I suppose I'll have to reconsider exactly what the training you deserve is going to entail. It will doubtless involve your new skills and using them to their maximum capacity against an opponent whose skills, while not as... customized as yours, are deeply entrenched and well-practiced. And, as you no doubt have guessed, that is not something I can simply..." the dragon gestured, abstractly, with one clawed hand into the air. "...lecture you about."

"I wouldn't think so, no," I said, dryly.

"In all honesty, Jerry," Kalamitus flexed and stacked his long snakelike body vertically, becoming very tall without, I noticed, affecting how well his voice reached me at all. "it's frighteningly ironic that you, who seem likely to be the first Administrator of your planet, need the kind of help that only a free Administrator can provide. If someone else had completed their Quests, they could provide you with a customized training facility, one that challenged every nuance of your new skills in exactly the ways you need to challenge them. Especially with your Fool's Marked Skill, which will never be enhanced any other way... you need a specially constructed arena to get proper experience with it."

"And yet, all because you insist on completing this other Quest--noble, really, but pointless--you cannot provide that same help to others, despite so desperately needing it just now. And your Quest has a time limit, so it seems unlikely anyone else will sneak in..." Kalamitus shook his head, disappointed. "I'll have to figure out something else."

"Then, can I get some rest?" I think I managed to keep the edge out of my voice, though I didn't care that much if I didn't.

Kalamitus looked away and waved his claw. "Yes, yes. Go join your Priestess friend. Give me... at least a day. This is a fairly unusual problem."

I did give him something like a respectful bow before marching back to the elevator.

Louise did, this time, meet me at the elevator, along with one of the Priestesses of the tower. She met me with a kiss, and... well, not all of this is a story that needs telling, but suffice it to say, that we ended up talking quite a bit through telepathy overnight. It helped me more than you'd think; some things that feel dumb or crazy to say out loud, even when they're true, make a lot more sense when you're just relaying thoughts.

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That's not to say it's a silver bullet. A lot of things that happened to me still don't make sense.

The fairy dungeon was just a station hanging in the abyss? Louise's head was nestled gently against my neck. It... was a little difficult to stay awake, sometimes; that kind of comfort just made me want to rest there forever. But... she did keep me awake and attentive, for a while.

I'd heard they were tubes, and maybe there is something there I can't see, but if they're as poor as they look, maybe this is all they can afford right now. Merry had said that they seemed impoverished, and frankly, there didn't seem to be a lot of people interacting with the Fairies. And yet... considering the source of their energy...

I felt myself shiver, and Louise moved to look me in the eye as I told her about the sacrificed people, assuming that's what they were. That led to an abridged conversation about the apparent resources that the system used--how Merry had overheard Kalamitus talking in units that seemed to make sense when she saw the Fairy Knight tearing apart a person, and how tearing apart magic items and skills produced strange pieces of meaning and magical mechanisms plus some kind of threads and other things that were holding it all together.

Do you think that this whole thing is powered by the Dungeon sacrifices?

Louise's question calmed me down, because the answer was so obviously No. I told her about sitting on the edge of the Dungeon looking out over the abyss, and the massive chained engine beneath that might have been an actual contained star. More than that, there was no way that, after the Labyrinthine Star fought its way through several civilizations before us, unless they threw all the matter away from those places and peoples...

Louise let her head rest on me again, and I accepted her warmth and went on to talk about the Fairy Knight and her relationship with Herman and Sziel-ma'al, which amused her greatly. And then I talked some about Pearland Dungeon, and the girl who I'd saved, then dragged through a short but hellish training session there. This was another place where, I think, telepathy helped; I could feel some nervousness from Louise, and was as forthright with her as I could be about how the girl just wasn't my type.

She seemed to accept it, and she seemed to appreciate me for it.

What she appreciated a lot less was my account of the Administrator trying to kill me, Merry tearing up my skills in the middle of it, and as a consequence me having my primary fighting skill be one that also included mind control around the edges of it. Where we had been comfortably cuddling up to that point, well...

Louise got up out of the bed, stark naked, and went over to where Merry and Cassie were chasing each other in the next room. I'd glanced at them a few times when they passed through the door, and as near as I could tell, Merry was trying to ride the phoenix like she'd ridden the weasel the Administrator left her, and the bird DJ was having none of it.

"Merry..." Louise's voice didn't have the patient, gentle overtones that she usually placed on it, and I think she realized that after a minute and tried to adjust. "Can we talk about... about Jerry's skill?"

Merry, I think, didn't immediately realize she was in for a lecture.

She took Louise's criticism at face value, rather than taking it immediately to heart, I think. "It had to be done then," she said, shaking her head at Louise's (well-meaning and well-rationalized) assertion that the move had been foolish, without the capital-F. "I know it was dangerous," she said, not really sounding particularly traumatized by it, if we're being honest, "but that was the only way for Jerry to know what he needed."

As the only other person directly involved, it still took me a long time to really come to grips with what my fairy companion was saying. Louise didn't take it quite as well as I did, and the two of them argued as I tried to come to grips with what Merry's logic really was.

She'd said something back then about going back to when I was a natural psychic, before the Dungeons, and I'd done what I could to follow the suggestion, but... in retrospect, trying to match the way I thought back then to the way I fought now, trying to figure out just how the two were supposed to mesh... it didn't have to be done then, unless it was really necessary to survive the fight. Granted, I did need to think about it while doing high-intensity fights, but... I shook my head, my mind going back to what Kalamitus said about Administrators making a customized training course. The ideal solution was that--someone making a testing ground where I could fight a dangerous fight, but then stop, sit and think for a while, and go back to it.

For the first time, I thought hard about the job I was basically in the process of signing up to do, probably for the rest of my life.

There were still a lot of questions; there had to be budgets, and I'd be up shit creek if I got that budget by killing people. But at the same time, that budget was spent on rewards... right? That's why my high-intensity fights had equal rewards. Did it also cost budget to disassemble an existing dungeon and rework it? If those things cost budget, did monsters also cost budget to create?

"Jerry," interrupted Louise. "Say something."

Of course I couldn't actually stay on that thought for long. I sighed and got out of bed, putting am arm out to Louise and giving her a side hug before actually trying to insert myself into the conversation that I honestly wasn't listening to.

"I've spent enough of my life," I said tiredly, "not thinking about the future and going with the flow that I know that's all either of us were doing. Merry... I forgive you, and I trust you, and I love you, but not thinking ahead is dumb and it could have done worse than getting us both killed." That was easy enough to say, but I wasn't exactly sure how to keep myself from doing that.

Merry also didn't seem to take it well. I could feel the magic in the air around her pinch, which I thought was probably a sign of strong emotion, but I didn't force her into telepathic contact to find out. The little fairy went over to the table to sit down, and I moved closer to her, leaving Louise standing there and kneeling on the ground in front of my fairy.

Sure enough, I could tell pretty quickly she was crying, and I moved my head close to forehead-bump the tiny woman. "Hey," I said, gently. "I mean it. You're my family, Merry, and I love you. More than you, I'm the one not planning ahead--"

"You don't understand!" Merry found a way to get the words out clearly despite her small body shaking with emotion. "This is all I have, Jay! I can't change the way you think or where you go--"

"Hey, hey..."

"...can't fight, can't do magic, can only cooperate and let you lead, and this is..."

"It's not your fault..."

"...only a few days old, and I'm doing the best I can..."

"I know, Emm, I know." I brought my hands close to the fairy, and she reached out with her hands to touch mine, which was as close as I was comfortable getting. "I'm not mad, and when Louise calms down she won't be either. She's just scared, because there's nothing she could do to help either."

Merry, I could tell, wanted to say something to that, but held her ground, nodding after a moment. "I... I know. And I... I wish I'd known what to do. But I don't, and I'm scared, too. This is... this is so close to just not going well at all, and we're trying, and I feel like I'm the one at the center of all of this and I don't know what to do!"

I had to chuckle at that. How long had it been since I was a kid and just assumed that I was at the center of everything? It seemed like a universal part of being young. "It's okay, Merry," I said, and gave the fairy a kiss on the head. "You don't have to find a solution for everything, or anything. Like I said, you're my family, not a tool. If you never managed to do anything else cool for the rest of your life, I'd still think you were awesome. And I really, really doubt," I carefully maneuvered my right pointer finger to tap Merry on the head, "that you'll go the rest of your life without doing something else amazing. So don't worry about it."

Merry sniffled for a bit, but she had a grin on her face, her eyes closed as tears flowed from them. "Thanks, Jay."

"Always, Emm." I gave her another kiss and stood up to look at Louise, who looked chagrined. I knew she hadn't meant to upset Merry; she was just worried, as we all were. She wasn't perfect; and as I moved up to her, first taking her hand, then pulling her into another hug, I reflected that I had never wanted or cared whether or not people were perfect.

I just wanted someone who wanted me, and when my lips met Louise's, I felt like I had definitely found that.