Charles had turned the telescope away from the Earth and was staring at the moon. Alli was in her normal form by his side, relaxing while Myri took a nap against her fluffy side. Kira was playing with the controls, seeing how far the system could zoom in.

Everyone else had wandered off to do different things and keep themselves busy for the moment.

“Look at that crater,” Kira muttered to herself, taking in the bleak foreign landscape of the lunar surface. “I wonder what the far side looks like. That’s the one that’s supposed to be hiding all the alien stuff, right?”

He snorted. “According to all the crazy conspiracy theorists, yeah.” He stopped and looked at where they were. “Then again, after everything that has happened. Maybe some of those people weren’t entirely crazy after all.”

A ghostly form of a young girl flickered into view. “Oh good, keep it pointed there for a bit, would you? I’ve been trying to wake Luna up for a couple of weeks now. Maybe this contraption will help focus what I am sending to her.”

“Wait, Gaia, we need to talk to you!” Charles cried out as she prepared to leave as abruptly as she had appeared.

“About what?” She snapped, glaring at him. “Do you have any idea how much trouble your presence is causing me? All of you, really!”

“Well, that really. We wanted to talk to you about that, and about what we can do about the otherworlders that appeared. If their system is fighting yours, then it stands to reason that we need to get rid of them as soon as possible.”

“You could just kill them. That would get rid of them.” She stuck a finger in her ear, making a show of cleaning it out and flicking some ephemeral wax to the side. “Look, I don’t really have time to deal with this right now. I’m rather busy. I just wanted to stop by and tell you not to change the position of the telescope for a few hours at least. I’ll send James around later to talk to you and bring some information related to those other things.”

She faded away and was gone, leaving them alone with those parting words.

“She wasn’t serious about us killing them, was she?” Alli projected telepathically, her tail limp against the floor. She didn’t like the thought at all. “I like them. They seem nice. Especially the young girl, Zara. Her bears are incredible!”

“I have to admit, she probably was serious,” Kira said, stepping away from the controls. “However, I also don’t think she actually expects us to do it. I think she was simply looking for an easy way to end the conversation. More than likely, the professor will have a better answer when he shows up.”

Alli shook her head. “It sounds like their appearance isn’t the only thing causing her issues, either. It seems you were right Charles; our new races are too much for the system the gods created. What does that mean for our future?”

“It means that we need to find and rescue my parents. Mom will know what to do. She was able to live on Earth for years without an issue. Something that I have doubts Bob can do as well, otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to go through all of this. So, either she knows something he doesn’t, or he is defective in some way. Either way, she can help us.” Charles spoke with more assured belief than he felt.

Getting them back felt like an impossible goal at times. One he was so close to being able to accomplish, and yet he still couldn’t quite get to the finish line. There was something missing, a basic understanding of the spell, his divine magic, or abilities, maybe the universe itself. He didn’t know, and that lack of knowledge was holding him back.

If he was lucky, then maybe he could learn something from whatever method Gaia used to send the kids back to their world. Assuming that’s what she was going to do. For all he knew, she might just forcefully overwrite their system and declare the matter done for the moment. Leaving them trapped on Earth for good.

It was out of his hands until they met with the professor.

Myri rolled over, her small fist grabbing hold of Alli’s shadow-tinged silver hair. The little girl rarely willingly let go of her, even in sleep.

“Do you realize that the store is currently closed?” Kate asked, as she and Beth stormed into the observatory. “Whoever was in charge of running it and the post office are both gone. The doors are locked and everything.”

“They must have left when no one joined the town after we first created it.” Charles knew there had been someone in both places originally. “I’m sure they’ll come back once we start moving people up here to live full time.”

“You’ll have to upgrade the place some more before that can happen.” Beth pointed out, scratching Inara behind her ears.

Charles groaned and stood. “Fine, I can take the hint. I’ll upgrade the place already.” He saw Kate wink at her companions from the corner of his eye. “Hey, none of that! This is a serious trip, absolutely no fun allowed.”

Kira threw a roll from lunch at him with a laugh. “Go on, let’s see what this place can become.”

A tired Myri yawned and opened her eyes, doing a one-armed stretch. “Hi, Alli.” She mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “What’s with all the noise?”

“Sorry about that, sweetie. We were just having some fun; we didn’t mean to wake you up.” Charles explained, tossing the roll back to Kira.

“Is alright,” She slurred sleepily. “I needed to go to the bathroom, anyway.”

Kate quirked a brow at Charles. “Does this place even have bathrooms? I don’t think any of us have ever been up here long enough to have the urge before now.”

“There must be some inside the dorms, right?” He asked, more than a little concerned. “Alli, take her quick to the gazebo and have her join the town first. I’ll make sure all of the dorms are unlocked and have working bathrooms.”

He took off at a run for the Town System room, intent on making sure that such a simple thing had been included in the dorms. If it had been anywhere else, he wouldn’t even have been worried, but this was space. Things operated under different rules here, including gravity, which was currently only set to the same amount as the moon.

He would need to upgrade that as well. He didn’t want to think of the mess it would cause if everything splashed when it wasn’t supposed to.

Charles bounced into the system room and pulled up the menu in a rush. The satellites he could see on the map could wait until later. Absorbing them would provide some excellent working parts that Charlotte wouldn’t need to fix or play with if she didn’t want to. He had a more important mission he needed to accomplish before he could play around with any of those.

If there was one blessing in disguise to everything, it was that with all the extra towns he had created, there were more funds than ever in the shared UM pool. It was used occasionally when a smaller than average town was first created. But it was mostly left alone and forgotten about except when needed. A portion of the daily taxed mana from each town’s inhabitants was automatically added to it regardless.

Which was good, because all of the upgrades for the space station were far more expensive than for a normal town.

First thing he needed to do was make sure the dorms were all unlocked, that way Myri and Alli could enter them without any issue. After that was completed, he checked on the bathroom situation and made sure they were in working order. They were, although they were only the basic models of everything, and hadn’t been optimized for space use.

It was only because no one had used them yet that they hadn’t been pressurized with water. If they had been then the dorms would have toilet water floating around everywhere.

He would need to upgrade the dorms later for sure, but that would need to wait until there was no one inside them. For the moment at least the current model of bathroom would work, or it would after he did one last upgrade to the station.

With those items checked off the list, he moved on to the gravity problem. It was going to cost him 2400UM to bring the station up to Mars gravity, from its current Moon standard. The price was double what he paid before. Which he thought was a good deal considering Mars gravity was slightly more than double the Moon’s, if he remembered correctly.

Without delaying he paid for the upgrade.

Charles felt his body settle down more firmly on the ground as his weight increased to around thirty-eight percent of what it would have been on Earth. He glanced at the other gravity upgrades and then shook his head. He needed to do some other things to the space station before he could think about doing that again.

The next gravity upgrade was a doozy in concerns of cost.

The shared UM pool wasn’t an infinite resource he could use as he liked. It was there to help everyone, and it couldn’t do that if he emptied it completely.

He switched from the menu to the map for a moment, zooming in on the inside of the station. Charles needed to make sure there was no one inside each of the areas first before he began upgrading them.

******

The first item he selected to upgrade was the greenhouse. The improvement changed it from the regular rowed format to a vertical setup that utilized all the available space to grow more food. It was a more efficient use of space that one of the towns had introduced into the system the other day. It needed a better lighting setup, but the increased output of grown food for the space available was enormous.

On Earth, the upgrade cost a town 250UM, per greenhouse. Here the same modification cost 1250UM. The price increase was always around five times what it would have been down below.

It was for the other items that the prices tended to get a little wonky. Items that didn’t appear in the normal town menus. Those could be extremely expensive, but somewhat understandable, as was the case with the gravity. Or, stupidly cheap, like with what happened when he added additional trees to the main area around the gazebo. Each tree cost a mere 1UM.

With a price like that, he couldn’t resist the allure and decided to add twenty trees to the main area. All of them were leafy in nature. He wanted none of that pine-needle crap on his space station, only gorgeous color-changing leaves.

After that, he added a playground, even expanding the main concourse area a little more to accommodate it.

Charles took another glance at the map at that point and noticed the dorms were empty. It was time to make them better, something more appropriate for space. No matter how much gravity there was on the space station, individual space would always be at a premium. Which meant that different building methods and styles were needed to get the most out of what they had available.

With the push of his finger for added dramatic flair, he sent the order through and improved the dorm to something a little more appropriate. All it had cost was 1500UM.

Thank heavens the materials were coming from the shared town inventory that had been created for exactly this purpose. Nobody was sure if the system could actually create items on its own using spare material. What they did know was that even if it could, it would raise the price to astronomic levels.

He hesitated about making any more modifications to the place, as he looked at the remaining amount in the shared pool. He still needed to reclaim the satellites, which would also cost UM to do.

He hadn’t originally wanted to drain the shared fund dry, but at the current rate that’s exactly what he was going to do.

Biting his lip, Charles decided to reclaim the materials first and see where they stood from there.

On the map, the closest satellites and other debris winked out of existence as they were sucked into the town’s inventory. He pushed it a little farther out, grabbing what he could before the cost became too much to bear.

Still, by the time he was done, the shared pool was down to only a couple of thousand UM. It was exceedingly expensive for the little that he had managed to accomplish. There was a soft ‘Ping’ sound as it finished the operation.

Everything else would have to wait until later. There would be no swimming under the stars just yet. On of the many additions to the station he wanted to make at some point in the future.

With a nod of semi-satisfaction, he closed out of the town system menu and straight into an unexpected notification.

Congratulations, you have successfully added or upgraded over twenty parts of the International Space Station. Part of the Dungeon has been unlocked and a corresponding function added to the town system menu. Additional people must join the town for the full dungeon to be unlocked.

Charles closed the notification and reopened the town menu, unable to contain his curiosity. No one had been able to find the dungeon since it was first created, and while they thought something like this might be the reason, that hadn’t stopped their curiosity.

Right there at the bottom of the available options was a new selection he hadn’t seen before. ‘Dungeon Repair – Item’. Looking into its description more, he began to understand that the option did exactly that. It repaired items, specifically technology. He had a feeling that being created inside a technologically advanced space station had influenced the growth of the dungeon.

The cost and time it took to repair something were variable, but the mere fact that it could do it at all was a boon. It would help free up Charlotte’s time enormously if she didn’t have to worry about repairing every little thing. He doubted it could do the enhancements she did on technology, but who cared? It could fix them, well, somewhat.

From reading the description, he understood that what it was actually doing was combining the working parts from multiple different items to create a working whole. It was definitely different from what his sister did, but if it worked, then he wasn’t going to complain. He opened the option to briefly look it over before going back to the description.

Closing out of the menu for a second time, he went to find everyone and tell them the good news.

He found the group gathered around the new playground, testing all the items out. Kate and Beth were having a competition with Myri to see who could swing the highest, and then launch themselves the farthest. It was a game that nearly every kid had played at school growing up, but it was a sight more impressive, with less gravity.

The little girl squealed happily as she soared through the air and into Silvi’s waiting arms at the far edge of the playground. If she had gone any farther, she would have run into the giant trees he had just planted around the area.

Kate was less concerned about that outcome, trusting in the enhanced constitution her levels gave her. With one final swing, she slipped from the seat, and with her feet pointed, arced through the leafy branches. She hit the ground and rolled, coming up with a cheer.

A moment later, Beth followed after her, trying for a similar performance. Unfortunately, a thick branch got in her way, thinking fast, the teenager bent her body and used it as a platform to jump back into the air. With the additional boost, she was sent sailing past Kate and was declared the winner by everyone watching.

Charles made a mental note to move the trees later.

“I want to go again!” Myri cried out, seeing the older girls’ antics. She wanted to try doing those moves now, too.

“Um,” Silvi looked at the adults in desperation, unsure of what to do or say. “Charles, you’re back” She shouted, spotting him.

“I see everyone is enjoying the playground already.”

“It was a great idea to add one here, especially with the lower gravity, it really adds a new element of fun to them… As you saw.” Krystal remarked with a wave of her hand.

“I might have to give it a try myself later.” Charles grinned, remembering the simple childlike pleasure he used to get from such simple activities.

“How much of the shared pool did you use?”

He winced. “Most of it, but-“ He held up his hand, stopping them from saying anything. “Most of that went towards reclaiming materials around the space station. Some satellites, and other debris. That said, I unlocked a nice little surprise when I finished.”

Charles waved his sister along with Scott and Kira over before continuing. “When I finished doing these upgrades and adding the trees…” He smirked at that; the system had counted each of them towards its invisible counter. Without them, he still would have been a couple of items away from reaching the goal he hadn’t even known was there. “A part of the dungeon was unlocked, and a resulting function was added to the town system menu.”

Scott’s brows drew together in puzzlement. “And what kind of dungeon is it? Did it say? What was the function?”

“No idea on the dungeon, not entirely at least. It did mention that more people need to join the town before the full dungeon will be unlocked. As for what was added to the menu, it’s an item repair selection that specializes in technology.”

Tears of joy fell from Charlotte’s eyes at the news. “Oh, thank heavens, I was going to kill the next person who asked me to repair their bloody laptop for them. How does it work? Did it say?”

He nodded. “It’s a combination menu. You select the main item, and then up to five others of the same item that will be used as parts. It works its way through each of the items, taking what it needs to repair it. If it fails, then you need to select more items and try again, as it just means the previous ones didn’t have the part it needed.”

“So, no enhancement function or anything like that?” Kory wondered.

“Not that I saw, but it could be a later upgrade to the system.”

“That’s fine. The only ones who have been using the upgraded hardware are in the lab anyway.” Kory scratched his chin and looked at his wife. “We’ll have to change up how the shared inventory and pool works, not to mention have someone up here all the time that can use the town system menu.”

She nodded. “We need to make the most of this while we can. The space station won’t be in orbit above the Earth forever.”

“I guess this means you two need to get serious about slimming down that list of people who want to live up here.” Kira teased them.

“Actually…”