The two of them spent the rest of their time waiting for the others to arrive by trying to find signs of Lisa's influence on the city seed's growth. They noticed that some of the residential buildings had features copied from her home--notably her house's red brick.

"Why?" Lisa scoffed, running her hand over the surface of a building. "It's literally just wood molded into the impression of bricks."

"The city-seed doesn't discriminate between stone and wood," he explained. "All it's done is try to emulate things from your positive memories." Lisa spent most of her life in that brick house; Bath wasn't surprised that the city-seed had used it for architectural inspiration.

She frowned, looking at the building intently.

She doesn't like the brick?

"Lisa," he began, "is there something you want to change?"

"It's just...a little weird," she admitted. "It's one thing to make buildings look like trees because of all the time you and I have spent in the forest, but making buildings look like my old house..."

After hearing about her discomfort, Bath began manipulating the dragonleaf structure, smoothing out the brick-like indents. Since the entire city-seed was within his essence range, he did the same to every other similarly-constructed building. Lisa jumped back, clearly not anticipating the sudden change.

She laughed nervously, saying, "Bath, you really didn't have to do that. It's not a big deal."

I don't understand her, Bath thought. If the building was making her feel uncomfortable, then why keep it?

She placed a palm on the building's woody surface. "The city-seed made this building the way it did because of me," she murmured. "If the city-seed is really an intelligent lifeform like you seem to imply it is, then this city is its body."

Bath narrowed his eyes. "And?"

Lisa turned toward him, eyes bright and full of energy. "I can't just change its body to match my own aesthetic preferences," she said.

Bath just stared at her. But that's exactly what you're supposed to do, he protested internally.

"Lisa, the city-seed is a plant," he said firmly. "It doesn't care what you do to it."

She gave him an incredulous look. "Didn't it choose to look the way it does now?"

Bath sighed. "Yes."

"So who am I to force my will on it?"

"You're being unreasonable," Bath replied, shaking his head. "You're supposed to change the city-seed. That way, it can better meet the needs of its inhabitants."

"What if there was something about my appearance, for instance, that made you uncomfortable?"

Bath groaned internally. "Lisa..."

"Wouldn't I have the right to my own bodily autonomy?" She looked at him expectantly. "You wouldn't just change how I look without asking, right?"

"But there isn't anything about your appearance that makes me uncomfortable." She could have antennae and a proboscis for all he cared.

"But if there were something..."

He raised an eyebrow.

She suddenly had a gleam in her eyes. "What if I looked like Jabba the Hutt?"

Bath had to give this some thought. "Still wouldn't bother me."

Lisa narrowed her eyes. "Seriously? You wouldn't care if I looked like a giant, disgusting slug frog?"

This conversation is going to end well. Instead of answering, Bath shot her a lopsided smile and began to walk away.

"Come on," he said. "Let's see what else we can find."

Lisa snorted and shook her head, but followed along. They continued to silently view different areas of the city. A few minutes after they left the brick-wood building, Bath decided to better explain his point of view.

"Lisa," he began. "It may seem odd to you, but I genuinely don't care about appearances."

"You expect me to believe that when you made the quasi-wasps?" The attractive wasp-women didn't exactly support Bath's previous statement.

He rolled his eyes. "While I don't care about appearances, most beings do," he explained. "You'd be surprised how exceptional a quasi-wasp is at gathering intelligence." Even he'd been mildly surprised at the ease with which they'd been able to steal access codes and sensitive information.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Lisa blinked. "Wait," she began. "I thought they just...hacked into government systems."

Bath shook his head. "Some of those systems were too difficult to break into from the outside. A good quarter of the quasi-wasps spent their time paying personal visits."

Hearing this, Lisa burst into laughter. "You actually made them sexy to seduce people into giving them information?" Bath could see tears of mirth in the corners of her eyes. "How the hell did that work? No matter how attractive they are, they're still wasps!"

Bath cocked his head. "Well, I also gave them human pheromone glands as a back-up," he added.

Lisa shook her head. "You didn't think anyone would be suspicious that a human-wasp hybrid was trying to ask them for access to classified information?"

"I think you're overestimating human males," he said hesitantly.

"And I think this is just another example of one of your ridiculous plans," she smirked. "The kind that you probably should have run by me first."

"You were busy with everything else," Bath said dismissively. "Besides, if the plan was so terrible, why did it work?" The wasps had succeeded in getting relevant information needed for the hacking team to get significant footholds in various security systems.

"You were lucky," she said. "Lucky that you thought to give them a pheromone backup, at the very least."

Bath sighed. "The point I was trying to make is that I don't care about appearances for appearance's sake. Why, Lisa, did I make the Church beautiful?"

Her mouth thinned into a line. "Because gods don't have imperfections."

"Right. So if you looked like Jabba the Hutt, and thus couldn't fulfill your role as the Church, I'd change your appearance. If a building in this city-seed doesn't foster a peaceful, secure environment, I would change it."

"Utilitarian as always," she commented. "Which is fine for you; you're the Dragon. You're supposed to be a hardass."

Bath chuckled. "And you're supposed to be the idealist?"

"Exactly," she replied in a mock-serious voice. "The visionary pursuing a better vision of the future. At her heels are the snapping jaws of the tyrannical dragon..."

"That's my line," he retorted. "At my neck is the idealist's choke collar."

A complex expression washed over her face. "A choke collar, huh?"

Bath flashed her a smile with teeth. "Believe me, Lisa," he began. "Though I know you think that I'm the real power behind COTD, and that everything here only exists because of my actions...at the end of the day, the one they should be worshiping is you."

"We're partners," Lisa insisted. "People worship both of us." Her lips curled up in distaste as they formed the word "worship."

Bath knew that she didn't fully believe what she said, but let the issue drop. The humans will probably never realize how close they were to my crosshairs. While Lisa knew that he'd began taking violent actions in the name of preventing further escalation of the greenhouse effect--namely by causing gas-powered cars to explode--she didn't know that if push came to shove, had they never met...he probably would've wiped the human scourge out to keep the planet's natural balance in equilibrium.

Though none of that matters now, he thought. The entire world is my oyster.

---

Since Juserin's borrowed voyager was far faster than the arcs while traveling over land, Dean arrived at the city-seed only two hours after they initially commenced its growth. It took three more hours for the other ships to arrive.

To clear up any confusion about their whereabouts, Lisa and Bath had told the sapients aboard the kursi and the verdora arcs, respectively, that they'd been flying with Dean in the voyager. Nobody had asked too many questions: many had seen the Knight and Lisa talking in the past, while Thaddeus was, by now, a legend amongst the verdora. None of them doubted him, though the Delelens had seemed a bit dejected when they'd realized that they'd need to stay behind on the verdora ship.

While waiting for the arcs to arrive, Lisa, Dean, and Bath decided to hang out in one of the gardens. The two humans lay reclining on dragonleaf lawn chairs while Bath--in the guise of Thaddeus--lay in a hammock.

"You seem oddly relaxed," Lisa commented.

Dean glanced over in her direction. "Do you know how many city-seeds I've established on this trip?"

"Nope."

"Neither do I--it's too many, though."

Lisa scoffed. "What's the harm in establishing new city-seeds?"

Dean sighed, but before he could answer, Bath provided an answer of his own.

"Lisa, do you know how many PP Dean has at this point?"

She huffed in exaggerated annoyance. "Do you guys think I'm a stalker or something? I literally know nothing about Dean's PP."

Dean gave Bath a menacing look. "Of course you know. It's more than I'll ever be able to use, and I get more of it with every passing month..."

Bath chuckled. "Guess, Lisa."

"Hmm...Maybe...two-thousand?"

Dean continued to groan in the background.

"Multiply that by two," Bath stated.

"Holy crap," Lisa blurted. Then she turned to Dean. "Stop being such a baby; you should be happy you're swimming in PP." With that much PP, Dean was probably the equivalent of a billionaire on contemporary Earth.

"I can't go anywhere with this much PP," he pointed out. "The squirrel quasies won't leave me alone."

"What?" Lisa asked, perplexed.

Bath thought back to the strange scene he'd seen back on Vast Desert: Dean had entered a dressing room to pay Aberash--his "friend"--a visit before her musical performance. At that time, a contingent of quasi-squirrels had all demanded his signature.

Bath hadn't actually paid too much attention to the quasi-squirrels, given that they mostly oversaw the mundane goings-ons in the city-seeds. He was suddenly curious why they had earned Dean's ire.

"Why do quasi-squirrels ask for your signature?" Bath asked.

Lisa's eyes widened. "They ask for your signature?"

"They use it as currency," Dean said, face expressionless. "I still don't understand." He didn't even question how Bath knew about the squirrels' signature-collecting.

"Wow," Lisa exclaimed, covering a laugh with her hand. "I see how it is. How's it like to be famous?"

Dean's mouth curved into a grimace. "They literally watch me everywhere I go."

Lisa placed a finger to the corner of her mouth. "You know, the past few city-seeds, I haven't seen many squirrels around."

Bath smirked. "I actually picked up on that a few planets back. You dumped a solid percentage of them on Equinox."

Dean closed his eyes and shifted in his chair. "I will neither confirm nor deny."

Both Bath and Lisa were laughing now.

"Ha ha," Dean intoned. But soon enough, even he was smiling.

---

The arcs eventually arrived, parking on an open stretch of valley bordering the city-seed. Everyone streamed out and headed into their respective apartment rooms. By now, they moved like a well-oiled machine, every person knowing exactly where to go. Moreover, during their flight, they had been briefed on the protocol for taking off the following morning. This freed them from the need to attend informative strategy meetings that typically took part the evening before the departure.

Without anything to attend to, the temporary inhabitants of the new city-seed, Brickwood, relaxed and prepared for the final planet to come.