Now that I got my second look at the little semi-circular bite taken out of the plateau, it wasn't as perfect as I'd kind of assumed after my first brief look. While I could still envision a tower that rose straight up in the opening, it wasn't all that even, and the rock sloped away faster than I'd originally estimated, so it would end up pretty far away from the plateau when they ended up at the same height.

I also took to heart the idea that the area was haunted, instructing my bracers to scan for any sort of spiritual activity, but that wasn't one of their main functions, and all they could really tell me was that the plateau was somehow maybe-vaguely magical, but they were terrible at explaining what that meant or might mean. I did circle the plateau once again--a bit faster than the walking pace I'd set last time--just to ensure that my readings on that were consistent all around, but it seemed that the town's dislike for the plateau wasn't founded on anything that the bracers, at least, could detect.

So I returned to the area I'd intended to base the tower on, and cleared away the burned remnants of my shirt's sleeves, and instructed Carli to stay away, before stepping up to an area and doing my best to visualize it in my mind. The Bracers of Jade Will glowed brightly as I concentrated, and with a rush of adrenaline and psychic power, I lifted a perfect circle of ground two stories deep and thirty feet across out of the ground, as though it were a child's wooden toy block.

"Judge me by my size, do you," I quipped, as I moved the entire thing--a mixture of dirt and rock--out and away from the hole and set it down, letting it slump and crumble as I removed my focus from it. I dropped down into the hole, catching myself only at the bottom, and took a look around at the now-crumbling dirt and rock walls around me. This part was easy to visualize, and I took my material only from the plug of ground that I'd just removed, and Fabricated a solid--dare I say flawless--wall of stone an inch thick surrounding the giant hole in the ground I'd just dug.

Not bad for two minutes of work.

My next order of business was Fabricating supports that would serve to hold up the various levels of my basement. Lacking access to a piece of good steel that I could copy, and not knowing the ingredients or ratios thereof, I decided instead to make diamond I-beams (since I knew what carbon was, the bracers could do that easily) and basically teleported them into place, so that they were firmly embedded into the stone walls, just densely enough that I could put a good floor on top, but not so densely that they took up all that much space or material. I didn't know enough engineering to be able to predict how much weight they could hold, but I wasn't expecting to have stone golems or whatever jumping up and down on them; I was pretty sure they would hold several people's weight, and that was all I figured I'd need, certainly for now.

The only floor I actually put in place was the ground floor, and that I did by simply making a single large, thin sheet of stone and setting it down on top of the beams, so that it was essentially flush with the stone lip of the basement wall. As I did, I discovered that the floor wasn't level, which made me question whether anything I'd just laid down was--and no, as it turned out, I'd just hollowed out a hole that was straight down into the ground relative to where I'd dug, and that ground wasn't level. That led to me redoing the five minutes of work I'd just done--ugh!--using an old trick I'd read about, and and using channels in the ground filled with water to provide a perfectly level floor, which I filled in afterwards. Redoing the hole so it was straight up from there was annoying, but nothing difficult, and setting the floor perfectly flush and perfectly level on the ground just felt right.

I stopped to take a break, letting the bracers cool off. The divine artifacts were insanely powerful; nothing that I'd just done was a reasonable thing to ask someone to do, and it had all been done trivially. Whatever its power source was, it had to be substantial, and all the more reason to be worried that the gods would be grouchy about how I wasn't out there defeating the Demon Lord along with the rest of them.

Well, all the more reason why I should make sure Jessica could reach me.

After a brief break, I used the rest of the material I'd excavated, plus several more large rocks scattered over the ground in the general area, to create a two-story cylindrical tower on top of the foundation I'd just laid, the wall itself being a single piece of stone whose outside I patterned to look like bricks. This wall was thicker than what I had used for the basement, but most of that thickness was empty space--as in, I literally created vacuum in the stone to serve as insulation, though I had no idea how long it would last. My memory was that gasses, especially very small atoms like hydrogen, would eventually bleed through most materials and fill in any vaccuum, though I suspected that an inch of solid stone wouldn't readily yield to air pressure.

It took no more effort to secure the tower top to the basement, add the second-floor supports, and add a roof, than it took to do the rest. The perfectly flat roof would, I knew, be trouble for most people using most materials--it would create standing water, and be prone to leaks--but I also figured that I would be adding floors to my tower soon enough. And... it's not like I was worried, even if somehow water decided to pass through the solid stone I'd laid down. I suspected what I had done was too flawless to leak, but if it wasn't, it wouldn't take much effort to find and fix the leaks when the rains came.

With the basic shape roughed out, I cut a hole for the door of the tower, resealing the vacuum voids immediately after, and created a paved path leading up to the tower, one that was actually a single piece, though again I disguised it as bunch of bricks, dumping dirt in between them to cover the fact that the stone underneath was continuous. I didn't have the path leading too far away; the only really practical thing I could do would be to pave all the way to town, and that was too much. But a little path to the front door would bring a touch of order to the surroundings, and I appreciated that.

That done, I went back and created more thin stone floors and mounted them on the supports. The result was annoyingly resonant--you could hear my footsteps all too clearly, because the stone I'd made was too thin. Instead of using more material, I ended up taking the material of the floors stretching it vertically a little, leaving cavities inside the stone that screwed with the way sound moved through it. The result was almost exactly as strong as before, but footsteps didn't land quite so cleanly, and it sounded fine.

Of course, that wasn't the only problem with sound echoing--the smooth stone walls made every scuff of my boots sound ridiculously loud, especially when I stood in the center. I was able to add a rough pattern to the inside walls that didn't look too odd, based on anti-echo panels I knew I'd seen in movie theaters. It's not that I really understood how they worked, but I figured quickly that if you messed with the surface enough, sound wouldn't bounce cleanly, and that was good enough for a first attempt. Sounds were still louder than they should have been, but not too much.

For now, I had no stairs going up and down the tower, only holes where the stairs would be--not that I would ever need stairs, but it was, again, something that seemed natural, and if I had guests, especially Earthling guests, they might appreciate not having to use magic to get from the teleport circle to the outside. I was going to get to that next, but got distracted when I realized I hadn't seen my goat in a while.

Carli, I discovered soon, had decided on her own accord to become a mountain goat, for all that I'm pretty sure that wasn't her genetic heritage. It was only our link through the bracers that helped me find her, since she had gone around the corner and was working her way up the sheer cliff face, using some part raw goaty talent and some part active psychic power to very carefully pick her way along a series of ridges that were too narrow for me to feel at all comfortable with my linked baby goat relying on them.

It was barely a flex of my bracers to get me up to where she was, and she turned to look at me, smiling proudly with her mouth and her mind as she saw me coming, only to turn her attention back to the next little leap, which she made with incredible aplomb.

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"Carli." I hovered just next to her, reaching out and petting her head. "You shouldn't be up here."

I can do it! The goat turned one eye to look me full in the face. My instincts were still to have someone staring with both eyes, but goats, like most herbivores, didn't have their eyes set like that, and so Carli could only look at me with one. I'm a great goat!

"Are you going to be able to get back down?" I don't know if goats were like cats in being able to get up but not down things, and I wasn't sure that I trusted her, not yet.

Sure! I can do it! Goats can. I'm a great goat. She tossed her head, and I thought I got the sense she was eyeing the cliff below her, maybe nervously. I can do it.

I sighed. "If you can't, you don't get to complain when I get mad at you later," I said, trusting that the bracer's power would, at the very least, stop her from killing herself by falling off a cliff that she had climbed herself. It was, maybe--probably--a stupid thing to believe, but I also didn't want to end up being forced to chase her around all the time, stopping her from doing something dumb. Either I could trust her, or this was all a terrible idea and I might be better off letting her splat her brains at the bottom of the cliff.

I'll do it! I'm fine!

I just sighed and returned to my psychic masonry.

After examining the tower for a while, it occurred to me that I really had made a building that was virtually airtight, and while that was great for thermal insulation, it was bad for... you know, breathing. So I carved in some extra air channels here and there just to ensure that the solid stone box wasn't going to suffocate me, then created diamond staircase frames and laid more thin stone panels down on top of them. With that done, I ended up staring at the ceilings from below and being dissatisfied, so I created some frosted glass sheeting that I then stretched across it to hide the diamond I-beams, latching it to the underside of the beams with a technique that was more instinct than science. The ceiling looked odd, but the shining diamond beams were odder, and it's just as well they weren't visible.

That left me probably ready to actually carve the glyph that Jessica had talked about, but I'd told her I'd call back in days, not an hour, so I dismissed offhand the thought of doing it right that minute. Instead, I stepped outside, first looking for Carli, and finding her a few dozen feet further up from where I'd found her--but also, I caught sight of several people walking my way from town.

So I scooped up my goat, against her protests, and brought her down with me to see what they wanted.

It was about half of the elders, and predictably, the half that didn't like me. I met them a ways away from the tower, at a point where what I'd done was only slightly in view, the rest concealed behind the curve of the plateau wall.

It was the crone who'd been gossiping who spoke up as soon as we had all gotten into conversation distance. "We don't think that a person like you ought to be messing around with curses," she said, as though what she'd just said made any sense. "If you're going to insist on trying to build a house here, you'll get no help from us." There were several nods from the other elders.

"I was never expecting help from any of you," I said, I think reasonably.

The man who'd been thick on the sarcasm before snorted. "So, what, you think you can just make a house appear out of nothing? Very heroic of you." He shook his head. "I don't know what you think you know about construction, son--"

"Can we talk while we walk?" I gestured towards where my house was, wondering just how close we'd get before the irony of what he was trying to say smacked him full in the face. I started moving in that direction without waiting for him to reply.

"Don't interrupt--rude..." he said, and the group started following. They were, I guessed as we went, all in fair shape for their age, though clearly none of them were joggers. "A proper house... shows... that a person has respect for the dangers of the world. Sure you can throw together some ramshackle collection of wood planks or a mud hovel... stick yourself in some crappy little cave, if you have no respect. A proper craftsman takes pride in his work, pride in the years of experience it takes to learn how to build a proper house..."

"You're doing a lot of work to tell me that I need you, when I'm pretty sure what you're really saying is you don't want me here," I said, trying to keep humor in my voice. Carli bleated as I finished, in agreement.

"You can't just move in without our say-so," one of the other old men said. "I know you think you can--to say nothing of thinking you can handle the cursed mountain--but you ain't some kind of hero, kid. You don't know anything of how..."

I wasn't looking back, but I got the strong impression that he stopped walking and was staring at the two-story stone hut that had appeared out of nowhere. I smiled, still moving forwards and not turning back, wondering how many other people had noticed something yet.

"I've already moved in," I said. "But unless you want me closer to the town when something else comes up--"

"What we don't want is you messing around with forces you can't control," complained the crone. "So you can levitate yourse..."

She also stopped talking, and I continued walking for a little while longer, until I could tell by the sound of it that everyone behind me had stopped. So I turned around and looked at them, trying to keep the look on my face at a manageable level of smugness. The four of them were all staring, now, and scattered over a fair length of pathway. I lifted my arms, in a sort of shrug-ish way, and dropped them.

"I may not be able to control all the forces in the world," I said. "I'm not invincible, and I'm not so full of hubris that I think that I can absolutely everything. I was only one of five heroes, and I don't think that I can do the things they do, better than them. I get you being scared of curses, haunted places, and things that go bump in the night."

"But the things on my forearms were given to me by a god, face to face." I held up my forearms, as though that was any particularly useful demonstration. "I didn't make a big fuss over it because I don't want to. I'm not here to gloat. I was planning on taking a lot longer and hiding who I was for a long time, but for right now, I have to do some work, and I don't think I can do that stealthily. So now you elders, at least, have to know."

"You don't have to like me, and you sure as hell don't have to force people to do anything for me. I'll do what work I can myself and pay people for the rest. And if you have any legitimate concerns, I'll listen. But 'don't go there, it's haunted' isn't a legitimate concern. If anything, going places others don't is part of what a hero is supposed to do. I did look around, and I don't sense anything out of place. But even if the place is cursed... I'll deal with it, or my friends will." Well, calling us friends was stretching the truth a bit for the moment, but hopefully, me actually doing my job would help with that.

"How did you..." The crone's voice was cracking, and I admit, it made me smile.

"Want a tour?" I gestured, and I let my tongue go ahead of my brain, thinking about what I said only after I said it, though not in a foot-in-mouth way. "I haven't made any furniture yet, and I didn't put in windows, so the lighting is terrible. Eventually, I plan to make it much taller, but there's no reason to do it all on the first day."

The four elders didn't move any closer, or say anything else for a long moment. Eventually, the sarcastic one cleared his throat. "Well... I suppose if anyone is going to deal with these things, maybe it's for the best if it's you."

I pointed at him. "That's the spirit," I said. "In the meantime, if something else comes up that you need my help with, let me know. Fair?"

The elders still just stood around for a moment, but one took a step forward. "Is that really real?"

Instead of demonstrating that it was real by inviting him over, I picked up a rock and reshaped it into a small model of Carli, and dropped that in the elder's hand. He touched it, flinching for a moment like it was hot--I hadn't considered that, but maybe it was, and the bracers protected me from it?--but was soon exploring it with his fingers, feeling the smooth rock and the minute details. The others looked at him, and it, but didn't try to touch it.

"Keep it," I said after a minute. "It's not an illusion. The bracers let me reshape the world. Hence..." I gestured up the way towards my home. "And that's why the other heroes need my help, and I need a place to work. But..." I remembered, not too late, who I was talking to. "I'm not trying to mess with the peace of the town. I'm not intending to draw a bunch of clients here, or monsters, or anything else."

"Why not?" The last of the four, who hadn't talked so far, broke in. He was a painfully thin man, looking more withered than most people I'd ever seen. "If you make things, you can bring in business from all over."

"And they'd mostly be paying me and not you, and I don't need all that much from the town," I said. "Plus, a lot of them would want to stay."

"'Course they'd stay," he replied, ignoring the nasty looks the other three were starting to give him. "This place is dying," he glanced at the non-sarcastic male elder, as though the two had arguments on this topic, "it needs new blood."

"Not this again," his apparent verbal sparring partner replied.

"We can discuss it at length later," I interrupted. "For now, I hope I've satisfied you that I'm not going anywhere, and you probably shouldn't try to make me."

The four turned to look at me, and all of them had variations of a sour look on their faces.

"Fine," said the crone, bitterness thick in her voice. "But don't you think that we're done with you."

"The only way you'd be done with me is if I left," I called as she turned to depart. I suppose I could have made a threat there, instead or in addition, but I didn't see a need to.

If there was any harrumphing or reply, from her or anyone else, I didn't hear it.