Bomberman, Pommy, Draegaria, Kalnithi, and the Mandala returned to the ground floor of the palace's main building, where they were met by Yedari. He fluttered to a stop in front of Draegaria and bowed before speaking. "Your Highness, the masters have confirmed that the magick still flows strongly in the metal," he said.

Draegaria nodded. "Good. Have the masters bring them to the audience hall."

As Yedari left to carry out Draegaria's orders, Pommy looked up at Bomberman. "Pommy wonders what they'll give Bomberman," he said. "Pommy bets it's something cool!"

Palace servants and residents alike began to crowd the floor, curious about the occasion. Bomberman was thankfully relieved of the presence of the masses when they entered the queen's audience hall, which was the only closed-off room on the ground floor. Still, he could see the potential eavesdroppers hovering right by the entrance as Ridaye gently pulled the heavy stone door shut.

Yedari eventually entered the audience hall, flanked by a man and a woman both in faded blue robes. The woman carried an ornately carved wooden box whose lid was covered in glass mosaic tiles. As she approached Draegaria, she knelt and held the box out to the queen, who took it gently from her hands.

"Bomberman," Draegaria said, "for your display of excellence at the trial, and in accordance with what was agreed upon earlier, I present you with these." She flipped the lid.

Inside the box, nestled in a tiny bed of soft blue fabric, lay a pair of thin prisoner's shackles carved with runic designs. No chain bound them together; only two metal links remained hanging on either one. The shackles themselves shimmered faintly white.

Bomberman reached out hesitantly, then drew back. "What are these?" he asked.

"These are Tereus' Shackles." Draegaria nodded at the man and woman, presumably Thilon and Kijra. They snatched the shackles from the box and quickly fitted them around the ankles of a startled Bomberman. "The legend goes that a man named Tereus had wronged Enkidion in some manner, and so Enkidion exacted his revenge on him by stripping Tereus of his wings and fitting these shackles on him, so that he would always be landbound no matter where he went.

"The shackles will allow you to stand on any surface, no matter what direction the surface faces. All you need to do is to determine what you wish to stand upon, and then imagine that surface as the ground beneath your feet."

Bomberman stared down at his new accessory. The shackles hadn't looked too heavy to begin with, but he was still surprised that they felt very light and comfortable on his ankles. He shook out a leg, jangling the chain links against the metal.

Draegaria continued in her explanation. "Once you are standing on a surface, you will able to traverse its entirety until you mentally change surfaces again." She held out a persuasive hand. "Go on. Look at the ceiling, and imagine it as the ground."

Bomberman eyed the ceiling far above him, painted with surreal murals whose details he couldn't make out from his lowly place on the floor. He shrugged. Here goes nothing. He imagined that particular patch of brown and green with dots of pink below the soles of his sneakers.

In half a second, Bomberman's world flip-flopped (as did his stomach). His feet swept out from under him, and he found himself hurtling towards the ceiling. FWMP! He landed safely on the peeling paint, throwing up (down?) dust and paint chips. He bent his head back a little to get a better view of the ground floor, catching sight of applause and cheers from those in the hall. "Whoah," he finally breathed.

"Walk around," Thilon encouraged. "Jump, if you like. You can see quite plainly that although that is the ceiling from our standpoint, you are able to walk on it as though it is the ground."

Bomberman slid one foot in front of the other, still trying to get used to his new vantage point. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, but it was weird, for sure: he kept on expecting to simply drop down at any moment. He walked around the base of a chandelier, and noticed a pillar across from him that sported a purple-and-green banner hanging from it. Bomberman thought of the pillar as his down direction...and down he went. Or sideways, technically speaking. He landed right next to the banner, causing the fabric to ripple a little. Another wave of applause rose up.

"Looks like the fledgling's got it," Ridaye remarked. "I knew he had it in him."

"Save your praises," Elida said dryly.

"That's so cool!" Pommy squealed, clapping. "Pommy wants to try!"

"Are you comfortable with those?" asked Draegaria. "You do not feel that they hinder you?"

Bomberman flipped off the wall and landed on the floor. "The shackles themselves feel fine, your Highness," he said. "But I might need a little more time to get used to them. I've fought in the air before, but I've never done anything like this."

Draegaria nodded. "There may be a suitable place for you to practice not too far from here." She headed for the door. "I will leave you in the care of Yedari and Thilon. Yedari is the head of my shamanic guard; Thilon is a master of spell-weaving. Should anything go amiss, those two will be quite capable of handling matters."

B-O-M-B

Bomberman was led to another place near the outermost limits of Philomel, this time on the western side. It was the foundation of a long-destroyed building, with rocks and bricks everywhere. Platforms of varying size, however, remained floating in the air, suspended by a mysterious force and serving a mysterious purpose.

"This will be an ideal place for you to familiarize yourself with the shackles, I believe," Draegaria said. "There are enough aerial platforms for you to learn how to maneuver, but enough solid ground to ensure your safety."

Bomberman started to nod, but thought it would be more appropriate to bow instead. "Thank you for...for your trust and your assistance, your Majesty. I'll do my best to repay you." He paused. "Er...is there a certain time you need me to be finished by?"

"If you are talking about plans for the rest of the day, I will have Yedari and Thilon bring you back for dinner. Otherwise..." A sad smile. "Philomel has waited long enough for a chance like this. It can continue to wait for as long as you need." With spread wings, she took off for the palace again.

Yedari regarded Bomberman with a formal nod of the head. "Thilon and I shall maintain some distance from here, in case you do not feel comfortable with us watching you. We shall be tending to our individual duties in the meantime, but if you need anything, you may call for us."

Bomberman nodded in thanks. Yedari and Thilon flew away.

"Come on!" Pommy said. "Do more cool stuff, Pommy wants to see! Besides, we should hurry up so we can save Lilith and this city!"

Bomberman's already melancholy mood was further dampened by the memory of Lilith's kidnapping. There wasn't really anything he could've done to save her, and yet... "Yeah. Let's get started."

Doing the actual orientation (as Bomberman had begun to call it) was ridiculously easy. In fact, Bomberman found that he could do it simply by setting a surface in his sights and thinking to himself 'down'. It was adjusting to the orientation, however, that could cause potential problems. He had no particular fear of heights, and there was no cranial blood rush that would normally occupy such displacement in body orientation. But, Bomberman mused as he wandered idly up the side of a larger stone platform and stepped onto its top, the ability opened up new horizons in possible battle movement and strategy, and he would have to be more mindful of how a different perspective affected his usual tactics. He jogged to the other side of the platform, jumped, and landed in a half-crouch on the side of a higher platform. For good measure, he did a no-handed backflip, testing the limits of the shackles.

Pommy yelped from the ground. "Don't jump like that, Bomberman, myu!" he whimpered. "You might fall!"

"Nah, it's fine." Feeling suddenly bold, Bomberman leapt up the side of yet another platform, landed in a handstand, pushed off from there, flipped up, somersaulted, and landed on the top of that same platform. Fwp! He waved at Pommy...trying his best to hide a slightly shaky landing. "See?"

Pommy wavered between being impressed and being annoyed. "Myuuu," he muttered, going to sit down against a pile of rubble. "Bomberman's just a show-off."

Bomberman rolled his eyes. "You said you wanted me to do more 'cool stuff', didn't you? Anyway, like I said, it's fine. I think the way these things work is that no matter where I'm standing, I'm always going to be 'stuck' on that surface until I decide to change surfaces. It's sort of like if this thing"—he tapped the platform with his foot—"were a giant magnet and I were a piece of metal: no matter where I go or how I move, I'm going to end up back here." He paused. "Okay, that's not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea, don't you?"

Pommy decided to move to a shadier part of the building foundations. "It looks cool, but does Bomberman think this will really help him against Ashtarth?" he asked.

Bomberman shrugged. "I don't know what Ashtarth's abilities are," he said, and he was suddenly struck by the hard truth of his words. He wondered why he hadn't asked before, especially since everyone seemed to talk about just how great Ashtarth was. He vaguely remembered something about Ashtarth flying without wings and ripping off other people's wings—maybe it was wing envy? With a wince, he made a mental note later to pester Draegaria about it.

"Does Bomberman think Ashtarth is the Astral Knight here?" Pommy continued.

Bomberman crossed over the edge of the platform and walked down its side. He hobbled slightly; his head was clear as day, but his stomach still had to do battle with vertigo. He hopped to a lower foothold. "I'm almost certain of that," he said. "The crap he's pulled in Philomel, suddenly stomping in and acting like the big boss...it reminds me of what I heard of Behemos in Nereid."

"Is Bomberman going to kill him?"

A silence.

The whisper of wind.

The chirp of songbirds.

The soft thump of sneakers on stone brick.

"B-Bomberman?"

"No." A pause as Bomberman landed upside down on the underside of what used to be a roof. "No," he repeated, this time more firmly. "I don't do that sort of thing, remember?"

"Myu, Pommy remembers." Pommy looked away. "Pommy was just checking, that's all. Pommy thinks that's very noble of Bomberman."

Fwmp-fwmp! Two successive re-orientations. Bomberman stood on a wall, next to a crumbling window frame. "Call it what you will," he said, kicking at the climbing vines strangling the granite, "but that's how I was taught—how many bombers are taught. It's a hard thing to learn to do when you have the power to blow up half a building with a flick of your hand, but I fight to disable, not to kill."

"But Ashtarth killed those people when they went to go see him. Does he actually deserve to live for something like that?"

Bomberman sighed. "Pommy, you're asking painfully deep questions for a mindless living creampuff."

"Myu?"

"The answer to your question, in all honesty, isn't as easy as yes or no, even though I say it is." He somersaulted and zoomed clear across to the wall on the other side. FWMP! He turned to face Pommy, his white hair ruffled by a wind passing through. "I could kill the bastard, yes. But what good would it do in the long run?"

"He wouldn't be doing bad things to these people anymore!"

"But it won't bring back the shamans he killed. I could just as easily"—easily?—"put him out of commission in such a way that he won't be able—or want—to do things like that here anymore."

"But how will Bomberman do that?"

"...I don't know," Bomberman admitted. "And I never really do know until the last possible moment. Let's talk about something else—Draegaria said that she wasn't aware of any type of machine being built anywhere in Philomel."

This made Pommy even more depressed. "Myu, but every planet in the black hole is supposed to have one, right?"

Fwoooosh-tmp! Bomberman landed on terra firma—the closest thing to it on these floating islands, anyway—and straightened out his clothes a bit. "Kalnithi said that there were other tribes on this planet, which would meant that there are probably other settlements like Philomel as well." He frowned. "But I can't imagine that Ashtarth would want to stray that far from home base, even to hide something like the generator. I'm almost positive that it's in Philomel somewhere."

"It must be really well-hidden if no one can find it here," Pommy said. "Pommy doesn't think that there's many places to hide something like that."

"Right thinking, marshmallow." Bomberman strode over and sat down on a fallen wooden beam lying on a pile of rocks. It shifted slightly with his weight, but soon stabilized. "And from what I can glean of what Draegaria's told me, it doesn't seem likely that Ashtarth had help from the BHB soldiers in hiding the generator. Since people tend to hide things in places that are familiar to them, the generator might be..." He blinked in sudden revelation. "The shrine...it would have to be somewhere near Procne's shrine."

"Or even in the shrine itself!" Pommy added. "Maybe that's why Ashtarth told no one to visit him at the shrine, because he was busy hiding it in there!" He looked victorious. "Okay, so now we know where the Gravity Generator is!" His ears drooped. "But what about Lilith? And the others that Procne took?"

Bomberman shook his head. "We have no leads on that other than the possibility that Ashtarth and Procne are linked somehow, so we can't really dwell on it too much. We'll focus on Ashtarth first, and then the generator, and then we'll see what's happened to Lilith and the others." Lilith was okay, he told himself. She had proved herself every time Bomberman had seen her, and this time would be no different. Admittedly...he'd only seen her a total of four times. I'm worrying way too much about someone I've just met, he grumbled, feeling frustrated with himself. This was the type of thing that would get—and had gotten—people killed out in the field.

At the memory of the redhead, Bomberman took out the Fire Stone and the Water Stone from one of his jean pockets, the treasures that Lilith had asked him to collect and protect. Side by side, the two gems just barely took up the width of his palm. His fingers curled around them; he felt their powers resonate and mingle within. Did Jun know that there were more Stones like the Fire Stone? he pondered. The only thing that was ever definitively proven about the Fire Stone was that it was a relic of an ancient civilization that used to exist in the area around Diamond City. I guess if you believed in the myths, you would think that there would be different elemental equivalents of the Fire Stone, but Jun's not the type of person to buy into that sort of thing. But if there are other stones like the Fire Stone, does that mean...? Lost in his thoughts, Bomberman almost didn't notice that his fingertips were digging into his palm more than they should have been when he was holding something. Alarmed, he stood up and opened his hand. It was empty.

"Myu?" Pommy looked up at Bomberman. "What's wrong?"

"The Stones..." Bomberman muttered, turning his hand every which way. "They're gone."

Pommy yelped. "What? Did Bomberman lose them?"

Bomberman shook his head. "I was just holding them a minute ago!" He did a quick test and found that he could still feel and access the powers of the two elementals. The hand he'd been holding the Stones with tingled faintly with both a burning and an icy sensation. Bomberman shook his hand out, more out of disbelief than of any real attempt to retrieve the Stones again. "The only thing I can think of is that the Stones somehow went into my hands," he concluded, blinking.

"Really?" Pommy made a face. "Can you get them out again?"

Bomberman couldn't. "I'll just ask Lilith the next time I see her," he said, flexing his fingers. "On the bright side, it'll make it harder for the BHB kleptos to steal the Stones from me, and now I have more pocket space." He checked the sun, estimating it to be about late afternoon; he had maybe an hour or two to continue practicing.

Ideally, he thought, stepping onto the wooden beam he'd been sitting on and then leaping to the bottom of a platform from there, he wanted to deal with Ashtarth as early as the next day. It was a risky plan, considering that he knew next to nothing about Ashtarth's powers and that he would have to confront those powers with powers that were unfamiliar to him. But Bomberman didn't think it would be productive to spend more than a day asking around about Ashtarth's abilities, given how little information Draegaria herself had been able to extract from the Channeler. There was also the disheartening possibility that there would be absolutely nothing he could do against Ashtarth, but he'd worry about that once he found out about the specifics.

For now, Bomberman decided to concentrate on getting himself acquainted with Tereus' Shackles. It was the only thing he had any control over right now.

B-O-M-B

When the sky was half-indigo with twilight, Bomberman and Pommy entered the dining hall for dinner. To Bomberman's mild dismay, he saw no sign of Draegaria anywhere.

"Her Majesty is on the top floor, overseeing a ritual to invoke good fortune for tomorrow," a servant answered when Bomberman asked him. "She will not be down for dinner tonight."

Bomberman had to resign himself to eating his dinner. It was poultry again, but this time it was roasted and marinated in an herbal mix that smelled only slightly better than his lunch, and it was accompanied by a dinner roll. As he picked at the roasted bird leg with his fork, a swish of fabric nearby caught his attention.

Smiling down at him was Elida. She had her plate of food in hand, as well as a goblet of a pink-colored beverage. "Hello," she greeted. "You would not mind terribly if I sat next to you, would you?"

Bomberman shook his head. "Not at all!" He motioned to the chair next to him.

Elida nodded her thanks and sat down carefully, tucking her multi-layered skirt under her legs as she did so. She dug into her good, daintily spearing a sprig of herbs on the end of a two-pronged fork. "You were very impressive at the trial today," she said suddenly after chewing her food.

"Oh...thanks."

Elida laughed. "You're a modest one," she said. "How refreshing. Too many of the young men around here are cocky and vain." Before Bomberman could thank her for her second compliment, she continued: "Ashtarth was much like you are, you know. He was powerful, but he never flaunted his skills or boasted about them. He only used his abilities as needed." She lowered her eyes. "Before this whole disaster with Procne, that is."

"Say," Bomberman cut in, feeling guilty about the interruption, "what are Ashtarth's powers, exactly? Outside of being the Channeler, I mean?"

"He controls the wind," Elida said. "It's how he can fly without wings—he simply rides on the wind as though it were an animal. He can call up a breeze or a tornado at a moment's notice, and he can make the breeze pierce one through the flesh and the tornado gently cushion someone's fall."

Bomberman felt the food that he'd managed to eat quickly run suicides inside the walls of his stomach. He had never dealt with wind attacks before, and hadn't even thought about the possibility through all of his training at Bomber Base. Fire and ice and and whips and laser cannons and robotic spiders and half-cybernetic wannabe galactic dictators? Okay, fine, he could handle all of those. But wind? Wind was invisible. How was he ever going to dodge an attack he couldn't see coming? The only consolation he had now was that at least he had the night to mull it over.

"To be honest, though," Elida continued after swallowing a piece of meat, "I don't believe anyone really knows the full extent of Ashtarth's abilities. When he killed those shamans...I heard that he said it was a tame death for them compared to what he could do." She bit her lip. "I would not doubt that Ashtarth's strengths are more than what we can comprehend, but to say such a thing...that could not have truly been him."

Bomberman nodded absently, more from not knowing what to say rather than from any real agreement.

"Bomberman, your name was? Forgive me for impressing on you like this, but...please try to save Ashtarth."

The already-unappetizing dinner got even more disgusting as Bomberman swallowed his current bite.

Elida smiled regretfully. "You don't know him," she muttered, her voice soft as feathers. "You have no obligation to him, or to anyone here for that matter. But you seem like a good person. You'll try to save him, won't you?"

Bomberman tried to smile reassuringly, but only felt his mouth press itself into a tight line as he said, "You didn't need to ask. It was already on my list from the start. But..." He let out a controlled breath and looked away. "I can't do anything except promise to try my best. I...I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you."

The air around the two turned wintry cold. Whether it was just Bomberman's imagination or from any magickal powers that Elida might have had was unclear. Still, it was obvious that the young woman was far from pleased. She took a shuddering breath. "Right," she said slowly. "Right...of course." Elida stood up, taking her plate and almost knocking over her goblet in the process. "Forgive me for bothering your mealtime." She walked off.

Bomberman resisted the urge to smack his head into his plate. He was willing to fix anything and everything that he could, but life really wasn't giving him much to work with here!