It was only a few minutes later that I realized my mistake. I didn’t know where Malkivia was. It says something about how often I managed to self-sabotage, that my first thought was to consider if I was doing it again. I wasn’t. Even a few seconds of consideration had me rejecting the idea.

Giving an annoyed look to the tiny Goddess and the still grinning wild Goddess, I asked, “So? Where is Malkivia?”

Denda shot me a look of dumbfounded surprise. Clearly, this wasn’t one of her games or a plot. She honestly forgot that I was relatively new to this world. Conflict burst into giggles while pointing at Denda’s face, and the entire thing felt to me like an older sister mocking a younger sibling. However, I couldn’t be sure about the relative ages between the two.

Rubbing her face in exasperation, Denda said, “Right. So, it’s a volcanic island off the coast of…, and you don’t even know the name of that continent, do you?”

Looking up to the sky, she grumbled for a moment before she glanced at Conflict, then back to me before vaguely pointing to the west.

The process of finding Malkivia was a helpful learning adventure. Gods have severe limits and a lot of power. But, power means those limits are less strict than they first appear. Anywhere I have been, or anywhere touched by my Spatial Domain, I can teleport. The easiest way to travel would be to step into the Hall of the Gods and then back into the mortal world. I would expect that the other Gods have similar limitations and loopholes. Anywhere someone has whispered. Anywhere touched by Fate, anywhere a secret has been kept (or possibly told?), and so on. In practice, this meant that anywhere I’ve used my senses with my spatial manipulation ability. Not where I’ve bent space, but where I’ve sensed it. Denda helped me figure out the limits, and I’m sure she was helping so she could find out more about my abilities, but it was worth it to have her help me. Of course, I pretended my limits were smaller than they were. I trusted her for the most part, but that was only up to a point.

My senses stretched around twenty miles from my avatar. Still, I could only really discern or understand a few miles around myself. Somewhat like the difference between seeing the horizon and seeing the details of a house in the distance. I decided for my peace of mind to limit myself to ten miles. Then, I leveraged the cheat that was being a dungeon core.

I split off a few instances of myself within my dungeon to use my scrying spell to my ten-mile self-imposed limit. Then I created small spatial tunnels to the new locations and leapfrogged outward. Each new instance of my dungeon-self spawning further and further, spreading in every direction. Each jump took about five minutes or so. It should only take my other me’s a day or so to jump across the entire planet at that speed. I’m betting that it will take more time and effort as I reach further and further away, so I wouldn’t bet on it taking less than a week. Still, it wasn’t much of a limit, and I’ll bet that the same could be said for the other Gods.

I funneled all this information back to a team of me’s to create a map featuring rivers, streams, cities, and anything else I might find interesting. My week-long process just became a whole lot larger and complex. Still, no reason not to abuse every advantage I have.

Denda could have brought me right to the island, Conflict had no problem teleporting me to that battleground when we first met, but she didn’t want to spend the Essence to do it. It seemed a bit petty to me, but then, she didn’t have a stream of Essence besides her faithful, so I could kind of see why she wouldn’t want to pay for my lift. After all, we had as much time as we needed while Essence was limited.

While creating dimensional portals took my other me’s minutes, stepping in and out of the Hall of the Gods was a much faster process. I didn’t do it as fast as I could. I wanted to hide my top speed just as I tried to hide how far I could travel. But, given the patient look Denda was giving me, I doubted I had her fooled. Still worth doing for practice, if nothing else. It took almost seven hours of constant teleporting before we finally reached the ocean, which was a new complication.

Denda smirked at me as she appeared in midair, standing on apparently nothing. I could do the same, I’d discovered a way to do it only recently, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to demonstrate that trick just yet. But it didn’t look like I had much choice.

Teleporting out to sea, some ten feet over the crest of the highest wave, I bent space into a five-foot round platform below me with every direction pointing upward. Essentially, the bottom of my shoes was pressing up into themselves for as long as I maintained the bent space. It was a roundabout way of using space itself to support my body by pressing back against it, magically. I missed the timing and distance the first few attempts and fell more than a foot, bouncing off the too soft sheet of bent space. I was quick to intensify the effect, but it still looked like I landed on a trampoline at first.

“Why are you wrapped around me like some demented monkey?” I demanded of Conflict as the sharp-toothed Goddess smiled from over my shoulder.

I could feel her shrug as she shifted her weight, but she said nothing while I waited for her response, hovering about the ocean. I refused to move while I could practically feel the embarrassment rolling off my new backpack. I could wait. The sun was shining, while the sea spray was pleasant and relaxing. The Hall of the Gods was only a shuffle away over the dimensional wall if I got bored. I could build Denda’s temple later. It was taking long enough to get there, but what were a few more days or weeks? My other me’s were slogging through piles of sightings, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t still productive.

Conflict laid her head on my shoulder and, with a humph of annoyance, her sweet-smelling breath blew into my ear and across my face.

“I have no conflict with the sea or the sky. The sky ignores me, and the sea embraces all willingly,” Conflict said petulantly.

Rolling her words around in my head for a moment, I couldn’t help from laughing when I realized her, oh so serious words meant that she couldn’t walk on water or fly. Not that I would have been able to either just a few days ago, but still, the level of annoyance in her voice tweaked my sense of humor. I shouldn’t have laughed, at least not out loud. She bit my shoulder in response. Her nibble barely dimpled my skin. I wasn’t even sure Gods could hurt each other no matter how hard the bite was, but given her shark-like teeth, her nibble made me jerk in surprise and caused her no end of entertainment.

“Stop flirting and come on!” Denda shouted at both of us before she hurried ahead. Her method of travel was weirdly disconcerting. She would step to the side, or at an angle forward, or even stepping back, yet she would appear miles ahead, leading us on.

Our island destination consisted of almost nothing resembling a city. Only a vast craggy valley formed from shattered dark grey and black rocks leading to the sea. The creatures living in the valley had no clothes or homes, and their most complex tools were jagged stone knives. The only possessions they seemed to have were things washed up from the sea and seashells or coral, and they had few of even that.

My divine instincts suggested that I could shift myself beyond mortal sight if I experimented with my dimensionalism somehow, but I couldn’t be bothered. Instead, I slipped back into the Hall of the Gods while peering beyond the dimensions to watch the long-limbed creatures and how they lived.

“You know, you can get off now,” I said, not even bothering to try and shrug Conflict off my back.

“Nope!” she said while squeezing me tighter. I wasn’t getting a sense of attraction or anything from Conflict, more of a need for closeness and contact after her long exile. It didn’t really bother me, so I ignored her strange cuddling.

The creatures were vaguely human-shaped, with long arms reaching the ground and large, lightly webbed hands and feet. Their skin was a covering of oddly uniform, hexagonal chitin fused to each other with flexible edges. They had smiles that matched Conflicts, but they seemed weirdly peaceful. Their appearance would have been disturbing to the human me, but to my new senses, they appeared relatively placid. Denda’s appearance resulted in a quick surge of interest, multiple members swarming her. They would quickly pat her shoulder or lay their large hands on her in a reverent motion, then rush off again.

These creatures, whose name in their language just meant ‘people’ and sounded like gargled rocks, had as bucolic a lifestyle as I could imagine. Their environment was, by almost any other species metric, horrific, but they fit it perfectly. Their rugged, flexible outer covering allowed them to scamper over the rough volcanic stone without injury. They were obligate carnivores and ate nothing but fish and other seafood that swarmed along the shoreline. A shoreline surrounded by horrific sholes of jagged rocks unpassable by most sea-going ships.

Oh, and they were definitely Denda’s chosen people. Denda had the triple domains of Fate, [Thieves], and Cunning. I don’t know how much she had molded them or if she had found them as they were; both were possible. There was nothing on the island except rocks and what could be hauled from the sea. Food was abundant and required only a tiny bit of effort to obtain. Still, these creatures had the perfect pastime to match their patron.

They were massive thieves.

They constantly, and playfully, stole the few seashells and other baubles from each other. It was like a massive game of tag, hide and seek, man on the mountain, and capture the flag. All wrapped up together and played non-stop. Day and night, storm or fair weather, along the edge of the still-active volcano or down into the sea, they hid, snuck, ambushed, and stole what few treasures they had from each other.

Constantly.

When they were tired, they would find a crevice and sleep. Hungry? They would slip into the sea and snag something to eat. Courting consisted of stealing something or sneaking past someone to prove themselves to their favorite…then, the new pair would celebrate their success together at the drop of a hat. Likely, only the need to constantly communicate and work together for their next heist allowed the species to speak and reason.

They were perfect for Denda.

They also drove Conflict absolutely nuts. My new backpack basically snuggled in and hid herself in my neck. I don’t think their conflict-free lifestyle was physically painful to her, but I wasn’t sure of that either. She certainly wanted nothing to do with them.

The ‘volcano’ produced only a little lava that bubbled up in very weak burps of gas and liquid. Mainly, the low central mountain of the island belched free large jagged stones that slowly tumbled across the island to the sea. The complete island reformed and reshaped itself yearly. Nothing was stable. Nowhere was unchanging, and given a few decades, every part of the island would either be covered by new stone or would have tumbled into the sea.

Where could I build a temple that would last more than a year? My pseudo-deal didn’t specify that Denda’s temple had to endure. Still, the very idea of making something so important so transitory offended me as a Dungeon Core and as an artist.