After getting the Fungsoeng people under oath and under the command of Lepochim, Bath used his long-range manipulation to peel off numerous fronds from the original house seed that had already completely encompassed the Ritus estate.

He recognized the need to give the genetically-engineered plant species a name.

'Intelliplant?' he thought to himself, frowning. That didn't seem right at all. 'Why did Lisa saddle me with the specifics of this plan?' Bath lamented. He acknowledged his inability to deal with the nitty-gritty details of plans.

Lisa was more than a little aware of this fact, which was exactly why she'd given Bath this burden.

'Solarplant?'

Bath shivered. 'That's just terrible.'

He thought of several other names before finally settling on 'dragonleaf.' It perhaps wasn't the best name, but Bath thought it would tie in rather well with the 'Church of the Dragon' narrative Lisa was working on.

Satisfied, Bath contacted the many dragonleaf sprouts and sent various designs to them. Dragonleaf sprouts would have all the limited memories of their parent plant, so what Bath focused on doing now was further specializing each sprout for a certain environment. Having lived all over the world since the origins of life on Earth, Bath was extremely confident in his ability to provide the right plant for every climate.

'Arid brushland, low-rise mountain, tropical island, wet jungle...'

After he was fairly confident that he had one dragonleaf sprout for each environ, Bath went over to the computer at the corner of the living room. He opened up a word processor and began to type of a set of instructions for the organizations that would be receiving the plants.

He realized almost immediately that while he had a plant for each region of Earth, he didn't actually know how many distributors he would be delivering the plants to. In other words, there could be many distributors for the Sahara desert or the Amazon rainforest.

Looking at the screen, Bath realized he'd need to do some research on who he could deliver the sprouts to.

Bath stared at the computer for a full five minutes, as though willing it to assist him by sheer will. 'Where do I even start?' Bath sighed. He still wasn't sure if he wanted to keep the delivery of the sprouts low-key or make a huge impression from the start.

'Well, it is the church of the dragon,' Bath said to himself pensively. 'You know what, Lisa told me to make the plan. She knew what she was getting herself into.'

Besides, Bath had a feeling operating through an organization like the UN would be a big headache. They'd probably screen his little sprouts, put them under microscope and whatnot.

'No, I'm going to have to do this myself,' Bath decided. 'But that means I'm going to need some neophytes to explain what's going on.'

Bath's face lit up. 'Why do I need anyone other than myself, especially since I have the translator?' Bath felt his plan slowly falling into place.

---

Somewhat early in the morning.

"So, Bath," Lisa said while helping herself to a plate of eggs made by a chef Ritus had on payroll. "What's the plan?"

"It'll be a surprise," he replied with a bemused expression. "Aren't you just dying to find out what I have planned?"

Lisa rolled her eyes. "I'm mildly curious."

Bath gave Lepochim a few instructions about what kinds of things he would be expecting from the kursi and their mind slaves in a month. Lepochim accepted the instructions without complaint, seeming to rather enjoy the autonomy he'd have while Bath was away at Alens "studying."

Bath took Lisa into his avian chest cavity along with all the dragonleaf sprouts and then soared off to Alens. He and Lisa hesitantly returned to their dorms, Lisa in particular not looking forward to questions about where she'd been for the past eight days.

"He's fucking back!" Bath heard one of his suitemates call from above. Bath's lip twitched as he walked up the stairwell to his suite and finally waltzed through the front door into the common room.

"How have you all been?" Bath asked, as though nothing was amiss. Without a sound, two of the boys fled into their rooms. Unsurprisingly, Dean, the boy who'd been the last to leave when Bath had pulled his insect stunt, was the one who remained.

"Well," Bath snorted. He turned his gaze to Dean, his eyes softening. "Dean. You play a sport."

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"...Yeah."

"Great. How about I make you a deal. I'll give you, um, permanent steroids. You tell me how they are, and you get to keep them and everything."

"If they're permanent, why is getting to keep them a reward? Besides, I can't do steroids if I'm playing sports," Dean said hesitantly, treating Bath as though he were a sleeping bear.

"Oh, forget about the sports then," Bath said dismissively.

"But I'm here on a basketball scholarship."

Bath's eyes narrowed. "I guess that is a problem. Hmm, I guess I'll just find somebody else."

Dean's eyes suddenly grew wide. "Wait! What kind of steroids?"

Dean already felt a ton of pressure from back home to go pro. He was supposed to be his family's golden ticket to a better life. Just going to Alens wasn't good enough; no, he needed to do even better, in their eyes.

However, Dean knew he probably wasn't good enough to go that far.

Bath gave Dean an innocent expression. "Only the kind that'll make you into a monster. Curious? Moreover, they won't actually show up on any steroid screenings. The only way anyone would know is if your performance rapidly improves. Which it will, but you can just go easy on everyone."

Dean felt a bead of sweat fall down his neck. 'How do I know what he's saying is true?' Suddenly, Dean felt like slapping himself. This is a guy who somehow controlled a whole room full of bugs. A guy who'd randomly disappeared for the past eight days right after school started. Dean still didn't know how he controlled the bugs, but he was fairly certain that there was way more to Bath than what he saw now.

Maybe, this steroid thing he was talking about...

"You promise nothing is going to show up on any drug tests?"

"Promise."

"Got anything to back that up? I really can't lose this scholarship."

Bath gave him a cold grin. "I'd stake my life on it."

---

Bath went to all the classes he had on Monday afternoons, then went back to the small natural cavern where he'd stashed the dragonleaf.

'Time to get the ball rolling.'

Before he left, he sent a disembodied mouth Lisa's way and told her to keep an eye on the news. This caused her to aim a slap towards the mouth, almost making contact before the mouth's spontaneous dissipation.

Bath chuckled as he flew off.

"How do I want to do this?" he asked himself. He'd already decided that today wasn't the day to reveal the dragon of the Church of the Dragon, so that was already excluded from his plans.

He decided to start in South America, to target major population centers and accelerate the spread of the dragonleaf.

He abruptly changed his mind just as he prepared to enter Rio.

"What if people use this stuff on historical buildings or murals?" Bath said aloud to himself. "It'll reflect terribly on the Church of the Dragon."

Bath paused in contemplation. "I guess I can start from the rural areas to limit those kinds of disasters. Once people get a better understanding of what dragonleaf does, they should be able to decide for themselves if they want to use it."

After modifying his plan, Bath took a sprout customized for the local climate and found a medium-sized town of little repute.

"I guess this is as good a place as any."

---

Lisa's jaw dropped as she watched the news updates on her phone via Twitter. She was currently in a club meeting for a creative writing organization and didn't want to leave, but at the same time...

The news updates sounded outrageous!

Apparently, over the past few hours, giant green houses had been popping up all over the world, most prominently in fairly impoverished and rural areas outside of cities. Since then, news reporters had been visiting the recipients of the strange grassy houses and asking all kinds of questions.

The general response they all were left with was (according to twitter):

100 random people spotted all over world, give out sprouts. Does anybody know them? #greensprouts

Strange volunteers claim green sprouts will create house #magicbeans #fairytale

Update: house sprouts can be duplicated by taking sprout from existing green house. #fairytale #greensprouts

Breaking: requirement for green house discovered: must touch green plant sprout and envision a dragon. Any dragon. ??? #dragonhouse

Plant apparently called dragonleaf. More updates coming. #dragonhouse #dragonleaf

According to the twitter reports, the hundred "volunteers" only stayed in a given location for a maximum of one minute before disappearing. Moreover, at each location appeared a different group of one-hundred volunteers.

In short, they appeared out of thin air, gave out the sprouts, and left, as though they were mere mirages on the wind. People probably would've written the whole thing off as a hoax if the "volunteers" didn't leave behind the mysterious dragonleaf sprouts. Already people from all over the world were traveling en masse to the locations of the original dragonleaf distribution points to observe the phenomenon and, often, to obtain a sprout of their own.

Lisa suddenly saw a post on Twitter that worried her.

Update: dragonleaf planted in public park, destroys baseball diamond

Lisa's face quirked. 'I guess you can't control everything, huh.'

Lisa wasn't too concerned, however. Governments would likely begin to issue strict controls for where dragonleaf could be grown. Since it apparently couldn't grow without a person intentionally envisioning the form of a dragon while holding onto a dragonleaf sprout, the spread of dragonleaf wouldn't be too much of a headache. After all, the government could just find and prosecute people who decided to grow dragonleaf on public property.

"Have you guys seen the news?" a girl at the table spoke up, interrupting a conversation Lisa hadn't been paying attention to.

Lisa's head snapped up. "Yeah."

"What?" someone else asked, wondering what was going on.

"I don't even know, it's so bizarre," the girl said.

"It seems like there's a magical plant that makes houses when you touch it and think about a dragon," Lisa said with a straight face. "And it's just randomly appeared all over the world."

"..."

The room was silent. This sounded like something one of them could have written. No, actually, it was too weird for that. All the people in the room looked down at their phones and began checking news sites.

"Wait, actually..."

"No fricking way this is real..."

"Fake news? But it's being reported everywhere..."

Lisa couldn't blame them. 'You're really something, Bath,' Lisa thought to herself while shaking her head. Since the meeting was effectively over now that they were all voraciously checking the news, Lisa excused herself and left the building. As soon as she was alone, she began to laugh.

'The big WD, huh?' It was being put into motion faster than she'd anticipated and in a way that she could never have anticipated. She shook her head as she walked back to her suite.

"You're really something else."