Jess and I ended up sketching out a plan in miniature while Bridget taught my goat... soccer. Let's pretend that's what she was doing. We were still planning, of course, to get other people's opinions, but it was worth having a plan to start with.

That had her and me sitting outside, in the middle of a miles-to-feet mockup of the disaster area, looking at a hovering rock that felt tiny in comparison to the enormous land it was supposed to manage.

Several of my original designs for the tower were scrapped, and that was only the exterior. Apparently, while the tower exterior had plenty of room to engrave, none of the materials we had would take that much power flowing through it, not as dense as it would need to be. Jess demonstrated by making some kind of micro-enchantments on the rock and flooding them with enough power that it glowed, began to melt, and then suddenly popped like a tiny little explosive, spreading teeny tiny shrapnel that was in no way a danger to either of us.

That did, however, dissuade Miun from eavesdropping, as a teeny-tiny fragment of nearly molten rock bounced off of her face just below her left ear.

"Sorry," Jess said instantly, but Miun didn't seem to take her at her word for that.

"No no, certainly, it was my foolish thinking that a so-called hero would be able to keep me safe," she said, holding a hand to her skin and hissing through her teeth. I winced; I hadn't talked much with her, but she was definitely only getting more sour as she reflected on the last day. "I shall save you the trouble by removing myself from this so that my frail body should not be in the way of any such--"

Jess moved up and tried to take her hand, gingerly, but the Naishi woman reacted badly to the touch and scrambled away. I watched, feeling hurt. I also really wanted to comfort her, but after that display, I knew she wouldn't take it well.

The best answer is to get to another stable point so I can make time for her, I decided, and refocused on the floating rocks that... well, frankly, I could make them incredibly detailed, down to person-sized features, but it was still small. Sitting in the middle of a circle almost twice as wide as I was tall, the tower fit in the palm of my hand. Bigger is better, I thought, even if we aren't counting on the levitation cost to use up mana, even if we end up with better materials that can take the enchanting strain... we still need to burn up the planet's excess aether. As long as we're building in the sky, why not settle there? For that, we'll need something more than a big ugly tower.

With that in mind, I created a plate around the center of the tower, one that stretched out for a good mile in every direction. As I stared at it, though, I frowned; it was too... sterile. It needed landscaping, and it also immediately lost any romance of being a town in the sky; if you lived anywhere but the edge, you might as well be on the ground. So, I made the plate's radius larger, and added cut-outs, creating a large hub-and-spoke wheel, then added gentle hills and valleys to the flat areas, finishing it off with a healthy dose of dirt across the top.

"It's not bad," said Jess, who I had forgotten was still there. "But if you're going that way, I wouldn't even connect it to the tower."

"I like the tower," I said, and I realized I sounded a bit defensive.

She shook her head. "Sorry, I mean, the tower can stay." She gestured, the Staff coming to her hand as a wand, and with effort, she sculpted my floating stones so that the tower and the plate completely separated. "We can connect them with magic," she explained as she worked. "We could even do something like... this." She broke the ring into sections, and each section began to float independently.

I studied it, almost unconsciously adjusting the design as we stared at it. The hub and spoke design became several detached rings, each ring broken up into sections, and those sections distributed up and down so that they could float around the tower without crashing into each other. Jess, for her part, added tiny illusions to the dirt, creating farms, villages, rivers, lakes... even a tiny castle or two, which I remade out of stone at what my power told me was the proper scale.

We stared at the model, and I nodded. "I absolutely love it," I said, though I thought my voice might have been drier than I intended. I did love the design, but... it felt weird. It felt impossible. As I looked at it, I guess I realized that I was still in denial that this was going to be real, that there was any way people could spend their whole lives in the imaginary little sky castle we were designing. How could they? It was tiny, impossible. A model, a whimsical fantasy.

I pushed those thoughts away and pointed at the tower. "What about the tower itself, though? I made it huge, but do we need all the internal space?"

"Need it? No." Jess shook her head immediately. "I would probably have at least a big central shaft through it that's empty, anyway. We can accelerate a jet of air through it, cooling the enchantments and also providing a little downward thrust, though it won't matter in the grand scheme of things."

I nodded, dropping the center of the tower out without a second thought. "I was also thinking about vacuum, for lift--again, not that it is going to help, but it will offset a little bit of lift." I Fabricated a plastic sphere in the air next to us, and gestured to it. "Anything holding vacuum would need to be enchanted to keep it that way..."

"That's trivial," Jess said, shaking her head. "The energy expenditure to hold gas out, against air pressure, is essentially nothing; at least, not compared to defending against a magical attack. I wouldn't use plastic, though. The chemistry isn't good for enchanting." We ran through a few options, quickly, before deciding on a strange material Jess thought up that combined large flat sheets of pure carbon with a plastic matrix filling the gaps.

Our first prototype produced enough lift in a standard balloon size that we settled on that for now, added some voids to the top of the tower and around the edges of each floating platform, then went back to studying the tower, splitting it in half so that Jess could comment on the internal structure.

"As much room as you have," she mused, "you might as well have big open hallways, or even massive top-to-bottom chambers, through the center of each ring," she gestured at the half-donut tower pieces. "And even then, given the diameter of the tower, the rooms on each side would be big."

"Should I make the tower smaller?" I modeled what she said, so that the tower was a thick outer shell, then a set of rooms, then a hallway, another set of rooms, and then the inner shell. When that looked too cramped, I broke the hallways up into five-story-tall sections with bridges crossing the gap at regular intervals.

She shook her head. "It's up to you," she said, "but maybe you just want more hallways and more, smaller rooms?"

"That will turn into a labyrinth, and fast." I took the other half and experimented with that. Room-hall-room-hall-room got the sizes down to appropriate levels, but I could tell that it would be a massive pain to navigate for anyone without godly power.

"Yeah... a labyrinth." Jess' voice conveyed a reluctance to speak, and I turned to look at her, realizing as I did that the two of us were seated very closely together, our heads almost touching as we stared at the model. I backed off a bit, but I don't think she noticed. "About that. I am wondering if maybe... that's actually what we want?"

I smiled, in part because I knew no native of this world would understand what she meant. For us, though? Raised on fantasy gaming? "Dungeons. And the magical items we need to create would just be loot."

She nodded. "None of us are specialized in creating creatures or anything like it," she said after a minute, "but it might be possible to use the demon spawn, since they seem to just be crawling out of the dirt anyway."

I looked back at the tower, thinking. It seemed like... an appropriate use of the space, given our needs, but I wasn't sure I liked it. No, that's not right; I was sure that I didn't. "When I started creating a tower," I said, then stopped and sighed, heavily. "...I wanted it to be personal. A moment to my own needs and wants. A--"

"...massive phallic symbol?" teased Jess.

I reached out to swat her head, but she ducked away from it with all the grace of a Hero, if not exactly a melee fighter. "A symbol of safety," I said. "For the Heroes, and therefore for the world. Turning it into a symbol of danger, one people flock to and gamble their lives for power... it's a corruption of that ideal."

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Jess shrugged. "If you have a better idea...?"

I shook my head in return. "Not yet. I'll think about it, and we need to talk to people."

She nodded, and gestured to the model. "For what it's worth," she said, "You could have the dangerous parts all going down." The tower above is yours--ours. Maybe even theirs--either everyone's, or people we like and want to give the space to. The tower below is the dungeon that endangers lives, and it leads..." she gestured to the illusion on the floor representing the massive disaster-hole full of demons and darkness.

I looked down at it, and then with a flex of my will, put the tower back together and placed it an appropriate height over the ground--that was, maybe, a foot. I would have to measure the local atmosphere, but back home, the air got too thin to breathe comfortably at around two miles. That was high, but we'd been told the planet here was slightly smaller. I hadn't noticed any difference in the gravity, and I wasn't sure how high we were above sea level--or how high the atmospheric pressure was at sea level. For all I knew, this planet just had more atmosphere than Earth, and consequently more air pressure.

Either way, I modeled extending the tower downwards, frowning as I recognized that it would be a massive investment in time. "If we do that," I said, "The dungeon should build downwards as they progress. There's no point in building all the way to the ground before that."

She nodded, squatting down next to me as we both stared at something very low to the ground. It felt ridiculous, like so much of this did. "Probably once you start building, add more platforms around it. Safe areas, you know. They can build towns or whatever if they want."

I grinned, shaking my head. "All this gaming knowledge," I said, sounding wry. "Who'd have ever thought..."

"That assumes we can make the dungeon part itself work," she pointed out. "The idea of using the demon beasts as fodder is nice, but it depends on a lot of things working out. And even if we accomplish all of this..." Jess paused, and suddenly sat back, an odd look on her face.

I did the same, looking at her, some part of me suspecting that I knew what she was going to say.

"...even then, the demons are going to be out there trying to kill us," she said. "The real ones. The Generals. The Dark Lord. His Grand Working. All of this," she gestured at the rocky model, "is great if there's only ever one massive hole leaking mana, or maybe two, or three. But if tomorrow, another demon kills another Hero..."

I flinched, and not just at the last part. Because she was right; we were, essentially, just playing around, dreaming of a world that might never be. If she died, or if I did, and if the replacement wasn't the right sort of person, the project would be dead in the water. And if anyone else died... well, that wouldn't matter to the project itself, but if the whole reason why they died was because they didn't have my help and hers in equipping them, training them, and supporting them... if we had tied up all our time and energy in a stupid stone tower that we thought was going to save the world, ignoring the war on our doorstep...

It'd be all our fault. I sat there, deflated, staring at the tiny model of an idealistic future--a few floating rocks, ones that were still vastly too small in comparison to the corrupted land beneath them. War was at our doorstep, and if we spent all our efforts here, there was no question the enemy would strike while we were occupied.

And yet...

"We still need a mana siphon," I said, trying to sound determined. "We can overbuild it so that this is possible later on. But we can't take the time right now to try to create our own skytopia."

She nodded at me. "Right," she said. "And... I don't think we can even realistically ask others, the kings and whoever, what they think of this. They'd think we're gods, able to do everything, or maybe they'd be so starstruck to live in a fantasy that they wouldn't even care if we end up losing people, or even sacrificing people to make this dream come true. Even if those others are heroes, or whole nations."

A thought tickled at the back of my mind as I looked at the tower, but I didn't voice that thought. Instead, I stared at the model, then nodded once, and with a few quick and brutal motions, pared it down to its essentials.

A tower, and a single ring of floating platforms covered with farming space. The tower had spaces that would be mine--no, ours--and spaces that could be shared with important... what did I call them? Mortals? Non-heroes? What an awful, elitist way of thinking. I made an ugly face, not explaining myself to Jess, but ended up reserving a large section at the bottom of the tower, rooms that would be empty unless we felt the need to create some kind of mechanism to extend downwards, and reserving the whole rest of the bottom half for... administrators. People that lived in the tower.

The top half was still far too much space for five people.

An impact nearby shook me out of my thinking, and I found Carli charging in and deftly picking up a large round stone with careful uses of magic, pawing at it until it rolled, then catching the rolling rock with her nose and balancing it on her forehead. I couldn't quite read her goaty expression, but when a moment later she began bouncing the rock on her head, carefully maneuvering her body so that she remained directly under it with each bounce, I couldn't help the smile spreading across my face.

She wasn't just safe, she was having fun. I could feel it through our bond, now that I was looking for it; she was re-purposing goat instincts to play this game, and she was delighted by the exercise.

"Doing great, Carli," I offered, and she half turned so that she could see me clearly. In that moment, she hesitated, and the rock impacted the side of her face instead of the top of her head, the impact on the ground a moment later sounding just like the one from a moment ago.

I felt a full-body wince go through me and moved to stand, but when Carli turned around to chase it, I could see that her head was just fine.

I shook my head and sat back down, flat on the ground, shaking my head.

"Kids grow up," Jess said with a grin, and it took me a long moment to realize that was a pun. I gave her the groan she was expecting, and we both laughed a little, then we both considered the tower.

"I think..." I studied the tower, then nodded. "I think this is what we can come to people with. I'm not sure what we'll do with the tower--what we can offer to them. Safe exposure to higher levels of magic, I guess. If that allows people to become mages that wouldn't otherwise, that's enough of a benefit on its own, right?"

"There's plenty of research to be done," Jess said, sounding optimistic. "And administration, plus... once something like this exists, nobles will be tripping over themselves to have access, even if it's worthless. They'll all want a window on the world from up high."

"Ugh." I had completely disregarded the obvious fact of politics, and how that was going to end up biting us in the ass. "And once they arrive, there will be all kinds of infighting."

Jess just nodded, not looking too disappointed. "We can separate them," she said. "Maybe add dividers, or break the tower into floating sections like the rings," she gestured at the plate. "Maybe just offer people their own island to manage themselves, if they do a great deed in the war against the Dark Lord."

That made too much sense, and I nodded. "It will definitely help us recruit armies," I said. "I just hope it doesn't lead to the senseless slaughter of poorly-armed peasants as some dipshit prince throws away their lives in order to get a slice."

"A slice of the pizza," Jess agreed, still grinning despite what she was saying. "A slice of the pie. Of the donut. Of the big apple."

"Assuming we make it all work," I reminded her, and she nodded, her smile dimming a little. "And that we don't die."

She stared at the model for a long minute, and then cleared her throat. "If we're going to do it... maybe we'll have to rush. Maybe we can't wait to do diplomacy and ask people for advice, for permission."

I just looked at her, not sure where she was going.

Jess kept staring at it, not acknowledging my stare at all. "You weren't there when we were planning it--the mission, I mean, and you just kind of... lucked into checking in on us when we needed you. We thought we had it. We thought everything was going to be fine. Even once everything started to go bad, we had faith in a plan, faith in our powers. Even once we were there, in combat..." Jess closed her eyes, and for a minute, I thought she looked very old. "The only time I had any real doubts was in the last moment, when the Staff told me that John was going to die."

"The power does... make it difficult," I said, unsure of how to phrase it. I hadn't exactly noticed, but I could guess she was saying that our powers made us immune to fear, and therefore rash. That might be a deliberate act of the Artifacts, or it might just be a human response to power. The only way to know would be to ask, and we couldn't, not just then. "We don't really know what our limits are, yet. Without knowing that..."

Jess nodded, but didn't reply for a long moment, one that stretched out for a minute and then two. I could have changed the topic, but... I got the impression she wasn't done, so I waited, even if it felt a little odd to just squat there next to the stone model, letting time pass.

Finally, she opened her eyes and looked at me. "I think I was also meant to play it safe, like you did," she said. "Be a maker, not a fighter. Equip armies, maybe. But we replaced a fighter with a travel mage," she gestured back to where Bridget was, generally. "If we're waiting for other people to make up their minds, we'll fall behind. With fewer fighters, I'm worried the next fight with a demon will be lethal, again. Or worse. Even if we stay out of combat, there have to be other ways for demons to ascend, without heroes. Maybe they have to sacrifice a whole city or something similarly awful, but without us there to protect them, that's plausible. And if we do go out without being ready, that's worse."

I closed my eyes and listened to her. "You might be right," I said, when she went quiet. "But I don't think the two of us should just decide that. Our work with the towers already feels... rushed."

"It is rushed," Jess admitted back. "And this will be, too. Do we have the time to not rush?"

I sat in the self-imposed darkness for another moment before opening my eyes to look at the Hero of the Diamond Mind. "We shouldn't make the decision on our own. At the very least, we'll talk to the others."

Jess nodded, though I wasn't sure what to read in the expression on her face.