With water done, the only quadrant to worry about was air. Searching for any possible way up proved problematic. We knew that there were still crawlers up there; a message to Jack could get to their leader in two jumps from me, or Lacie could message someone named Todd and he could message someone who knew less of what was going on.

  They were in a weird cloud city, and hadn't been able to assault the castle. They blamed us, although I think Jack had come around to not believing the stories, and Todd apparently trusted Lacie implicitly. Unfortunately, we didn't see a way to go up and help them.

  The bubble was intended to have ways up, but between Vitorio's massive bomb and our detonation of the contraption, they were all destroyed.

  The first intended way I found was while helping the goblins bring the Gnomerenaught into port. There had once been a wing of biplanes that launched from a way-too-small launch deck. All eight had been doing a bombing run on one of the other goblin cliff-cities when the second blast went off and sent them into the depths.

  Lacie: Did the planes have fuel? And the ship?

  I checked with the goblins.

  Maddy: Yes, they have a volatile mix called Goblin Grease With Gnomish Additives. It looks like oil that glows. I'm not sure how safe it is.

  Lacie: Can you get me some? That sort of stuff is really useful.

  Lacking a handy container—the ship had a single massive tank—I took the three empty or mostly-empty glass Rev-Up containers out. I didn't feel very confident, but the goblins assured me they could transfer it safely, so I had them fill that those with fuel. All together, I got Lacie 60 gallons of fuel.

  Dropping that off, I headed back out and started searching for the land quadrant. Before that point, we'd still been well ahead of most bubbles. After several days of searching, I found a massive plant that was crushed and killed.

  Maddy: Can you check this out, nature-witch-lady?

  Lacie: I snort-laughed at that.

  I laughed, then went and got her. We could have rushed, but instead we just walked and talked. This world wasn't worth just rushing everywhere. We got to the mostly-buried mess.

  She looked for a bit. "Yeah, that's a giant beanstalk."

  "That was seriously supposed to be the plan?"

  "Yes. Let me try to revitalize it."

  "Can you do that?" I asked.

  "I mean, not officially, but the regeneration spell does work on trees."

  I watched as she spent an hour repeatedly recasting and enhancing the spell. The beanstalk twitched and shifted, seeming to revitalize, but in the end sank back down, looking worse than before.

  "Nope," Lacie said. "Beanstalk's a bust."

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "Well, I'll start trying to dig into the maze again tomorrow."

  I put an arm around her shoulder and we walked slowly back.

  After a long dinner in the restaurant—we found out that goblins were as high-risk with their food as their explosives—I headed back to the center of the bubble, the ruins above the core.

  I couldn't dig in, but the goblins were quite interested in looting it. I mostly watched as they began placing jacks and struts to open up mostly-collapsed passages. Eventually, we got to the core. They were quite happy—I think they were just scared they'd anger the two of us—to split the remains of the core with us.

  Lacie came out for that. She didn't have the strength to pull an Oversized Bronze Mechanical Actuator With Panel into her inventory, so I was carrying those. She could take countless pieces of copper tubing directly. The blast had, in fact, mostly destroyed things. The thing is, with something that big, destroying "most" of it still leaves a lot.

  As Lacie calculated it, 1-meter panels covering the exterior of a kilometer-tall column with a 13-meter radius meant there had originally been 95000 panels on Calcul's Complex Contraption. After splitting them with the goblins, I had 807 in my inventory.

  Digging through, we eventually figured out that the whole had been powered by a daisy-chain of 8 small soul crystal devices that, for some weird story reason, worked directly with mechanical power, or something. It felt like nonsense, a fact that was worsened as the blasts had left little evidence.

  Most of what we really learned was from finding the blackened remnants of the cart Calcul had ridden up the side of the thing in. Looking at how well preserved it was, Lacie said, "I bet the shield was powered by the same blast. The shield deflected the blast, then overloaded, and this is all from the overload."

  That was all well and good, but more important was that the system was supposed to have launch-tubes to send people in "whirlygigs" to other places. So, that was the third method of travel, also a bust.

  Despite being trapped, I was feeling good, chattering away as we walked home. It felt like home, going back to her personal space. It was tiny, like the dorm rooms on college tours. We were supposed to be in college in a few more months, and then maybe I would have been visiting her dorm there.

  If they could send us anything in a fan box, maybe I could get a low-level box with a poster or something. The room needed a poster.

  Before I could joke about that, Lacie stopped us. She wasn't looking as chipper as I felt. "What's up?"

  "We need to talk." She glanced around, found a slab of rubble to sit on, and took out the Rev-Up bin.

  I licked my lips, nervous.

  "Why do you have a ton of Rev-Up Amazing Cure-All Vitamin Immunity Shots in your inventory?"

  My mind became roaring static. "It's fine. I'm fine." I don't know why I said that.

  She looked at me, her eyes somehow cutting and soft at the same time. They hurt me. "What happened?"

  "Nothing. I'm fine. Let's just head back to—"

  "You don't sound fine." She lifted the Rev-Up bin again, glanced at it, and pulled it into her inventory. "I can't see your inventory, you know."

  "I, well I guess I forgot. But yeah, I took a bunch when I killed a Krakaren early on. They might be valuable, and all that."

  "You told me you gave me everything, and it was really a lot of things. Stuff that was valuable and stuff that was worthless. But you hid these bins."

  A tightness filled me. Not a small thing, but a tightness in every muscle, every tendon, like my body was fighting a battle in total stillness. "It's nothing. Just leave it alone. We should head back—" I almost said home, and it cut deep, because it suddenly felt less like home.

  "You know, this dungeon, it does weird stuff." She held up her right arm. "The first floor, a boss sawed off this arm and replaced it with a ratkin arm. Then, when I got to the third floor, I was able to change into something new, and I picked this, and now I don't have a ratkin arm, but also the rest of me has changed. Even when bad things happen, sometimes you can fix them, if you find someone to help you."

  "I'm fine," I snapped.

  "Yet you're tense enough to snap, and you're crying."

  "I'm not crying," I said, realizing that, in fact, I was.

  She stood up, slowing her approach when I twitched away. I held still, let her wrap her wooden arms about me. They weren't soft the way they used to be, but as she pulled me close, her touch was perfect.

  My strength failed me. I fell into her, sobbing.