Fortunately for me, watching a ragtag group of bees and humans and penguin trek through a dull and depressing forest landscape was… pretty boring.

I say fortunately because there was so much other stuff to do.

“Okay Beatrice, where should we begin?”

“In your case, Mother? Egg-laying.”

Honestly, what was I expecting? I had certainly warmed up to the idea of laying eggs since I had done it so often, but it really wasn’t something to look forward to.

“I look forward to it.”

Sure, but I’m saying it’s not something normal people would look forward to. Besides, there were significantly more interesting things to do. I was sure that I had barely scratched the surface of B-boxes, and there were plenty of things I probably hadn’t even thought to do.

I needed a way to distance myself from egg-laying. The obvious answer had to be other queens, right?

“Indeed, it is possible for a queen to lay other queens. However, my mother typically sent us away when we had matured enough in order to create our own hives. I suppose it would be possible to have other queens do your job….”

Hm. But the only way to unlock the queen subtype…

“Would be to lay more eggs.”

Of course. Of all my tasks, that was ultimately the most important. And so, I headed back to the central hive and settled into my room. Beatrice, meanwhile, said she was going to try and figure out how to continue such things as my Forest Revitalization Project while still expanding the hive. Now all that was left was to wait patiently for the workers to file in through the super not-so-secret side passage to the food compartment. Well, at least I could follow through on my vision of dinner and a show. Said show being the private and sensitive memories of this world’s humans.

“Hiya, Ma!”

“Oh, hi Bella! Are you still helping Belle with the new honey thing? How are you faring? I know you prefer being out and about.”

“Yup! But it’s been tough sitting still here for so long; I don’t know how she does it all day. But, wouldn’t you know all that stuff?”

“Er, I have a pretty good idea of the hive’s goings-on, but I haven’t exactly been keeping up with each bee’s personal thoughts, unfortunately. It just feels better when you guys consciously tell me what you’re thinking anyways.”

“Gotcha! In that case, I need some help.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah… I don’t know what to do with myself! I’m gonna be totally honest: everything just feels wack! Going around and gathering stuff is what I like doing, but it’s just been feeling dull. I like doing stuff with the food too, but that’s also feeling dull. But at the same time, those are the things I wanna do, no matter what!”

Well. That honesty was actually super refreshing. For once, I didn’t have to interpret things or straight-up read minds to know what was going on.

“Any other details you can give me?”

“Hmmmm. Well, right now I just want to help Belle with the honey, but I’m scared about that too. Just doing the same thing, over and over… I like it, but I don’t!”

“I think I get it. You like doing a certain thing, but you don’t want to do certain things all the time, except you actually do.”

“Exactly!”

“She certainly shares qualities of yours. Seriously, what in the world are you two even talking about?”

“Here’s a thought: why not try doing the same things differently? I think a problem might be the sameness of everything. It’s a bit contradictory that you like doing the same things but probably crave some variety. But in that case, that’s exactly what you might want to try. You like gathering, but as Ben has made painfully clear, the forest has gotten waaaaay too samey. He might be endlessly entertained by it, but I bet you want to gather something different.”

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“But… how am I supposed to gather new things?”

“Sadly,” I shook my head, “that probably isn’t possible for now. But you have other things you want to do, right? Like with food? A really hard challenge might be coming up with something on the level of the meat honey, but I have a better idea.”

“How about doing stuff with honey? It’s efficient and tasty, but what if you could make it even better?”

That last part was where she got a gleam in her eye.

“Make it better…? Do stuff with it… Aha! Perfect! Thanks, Ma!”

She zipped away, and I was a bit concerned. It was good that she was inspired, but wasn’t she still in the middle of working on the honey production? Though, as Belle’s workers began to buzz into my room carrying wax bowls full to the brim with honey, it was made apparent that they had probably figured things out.

As the workers placed the bowls nearby and rushed back to get more, I started to inhale the sweet, smoky nectar. Mmmmm. There were just so many advantages in turning the rotted and fresh meat into this stuff. It would basically never expire, it could easily be stored in the natural honeycombs that were formed by Bess, and of course, it was delicious.

Ah, and there was one more thing.

After just one of the small bowls, I already had more than enough material to start laying. This honey was a perfect foodstuff for us bees, containing all the stuff I needed to lay eggs with as little volume as possible. I hadn’t realized it, but the innovation of Bella and Belle’s honey was actually probably the most important thing the hive had developed yet.

It was another example of a reoccurring issue.

My knowledge of the old world was limited to what I, well, knew. We had made meat honey; did something like that exist on Earth? I didn’t know. What I knew of honey was that it was made by bees using flower nectar. That preconceived notion clouded my judgment and stifled my creativity. I was so focused on the fact that we had no flowers to make honey with that I put little to no thought into potentially making honey through other means.

“That is exactly where I have observed the strength of each hive member’s individuality. With all bees being directly and unequivocally controlled by the queen, the only things that can be done are limited by the queen. Combining a typical hive’s organization and efficiency with the individual contributions of the members is something only we can do.”

Even so. Was I letting go of the reins too much? Too little? It was honestly probably neither, but the situation with the humans had made me feel like I was losing my grip. In reality, I was. We had lived in a bubble, our hive uninterrupted by the outside world. Even the Scavenger War had felt… close. But now, the world was opening up. For the first time, we would be leaving the relatively safe borders of the forest.

It was scary.

The best I could think to do was to prepare accordingly. I set out to accomplish Beatrice’s plan for eggs and started pumping out warriors and Linkers as fast as the honey could fill me up. While I got into a rhythm (surprisingly difficult when it involved eating and puking in sync), I thought of how else I could prepare. I needed knowledge of the outside world, so I’d start there.

But where to start in that starting place? I had at least four lifetimes to chew through and not a lot of time. I had to be picky. What would be most helpful and time-efficient?

To me, that meant Mind.

The simplest thing to observe would be the humans’ systems, so I took a gander at Yelah’s screen.

[Name: Yelah Welay]

[Age: 26 years]

[Profession: Mercenary]

[Status: Addled]

[Abilities:

* Friendly Immersion (Lv. 8)

* Humanity Factor

]

[Mind: 4th Degree]

[Tapped Mind: 0% / 26%]

[Mind Locks:

* Life (5%)

* {Knowledge} (~25%)

* {Combat} (~60%)

* {Profession} (~65%)

* Yiwi (5%)

* {Misc.} (80%)

]

Oh. Okay. Where to even begin?

Top to bottom should be simplest. Yeah. Well, the first thing of note was the Profession tab, as opposed to us bees and our Subtype tab. After that, there was the depressingly small list of Abilities. Like, only two?

That said, what she lacked in quantity, apparently Yelah made up for in quality. A quick check told me that not a single bee had an Ability anywhere near level 8. The closest ones were Ben’s Big Look which was at a whopping Level 4, along with Beatrice’s Aide Report, also at Level 4. And at that, I was pretty sure neither Beatrice nor Ben had leveled up their Abilities in some time, which meant reaching that high of a level was incredibly difficult, or at least time-consuming.

[Friendly Immersion:

Level 8

Acquired by: By choosing to reinforce the bond with your companion, Dip, you developed a method of being as close as possible to your companion without being the same creature.

By synchronizing your Minds, enter a complex state of existence with your companion. Through upgrades, you are capable of entering this state using less effort, in less time, with minimal backlash. You share and enhance your companion’s capabilities, and vice-versa.

Level up: ???

]

Wow. What an Ability! Thinking back on the fight against the team of mercenaries, this Ability put some things into context. It was actually way more intense than I thought. It seemed more like the two entered a sort of quantum state where they were simultaneously each other. Or something.

Was something like this really fair?! It seemed a bit overpowered for some mercenary who got her ass whooped by a swarm of freaking bees. At the very least, it reinforced the idea that Abilities weren’t something you were necessarily given, but neither was it something that you fully created yourself. Rather, it was some arbitrary system that granted powerful Abilities based on things you want or try to do or something along those lines.

So, what then of the other Ability? It had no level, which I had only observed on obscenely powerful Abilities like my own Combined Mind or on sort of weak ones like Venomous Stinger. Though, it could actually be the mark of something you are born with rather than something weak. But weren’t there Abilities we bees were born with that could be leveled?

[Humanity Factor:

Acquired by: Humanity

Human. The Human, Human of Humankind, when Human. ??? Human! Humanhumanhumanhuman. Hu???man???Hum???an.

Access forbidden. Tread carefully, Enno Cordano and Queen.

]

Shit! I slammed the proverbial book shut. What the hell was that? A personalized message amid incomprehensible gibberish was rarely a good sign. I had never seen anything like that before.

My surname was there. Whatever had sent that message knew everything there was to know. I quickly checked everything that wasn’t the Humanity Factor but found nothing out of the ordinary. A cursory investigation told me that all four of the humans, those being Yelah, Grehn, Rette, and Vlugh, all sported this humanity Factor Ability, but I didn’t dare open it. Dip didn’t have it, and of course, I had never seen anything like it on any of the bees.

Why the caution? Cryptic warnings and bad experiences hadn’t yet stopped me when it came to many of the matters of Mind, but this felt different. Even thinking about that Ability sent chills down my metaphorical spine. Something was stinky when it came to humans here.

I had to know more. Maybe I was deterred from learning about the mystery of humans directly, but I could at least inspect the systems of the other humans. Of course, that would be easier without the alarm bells that were blaring in my head. Wait, wha-

“Mamalama. I’m freaking out!”

“Mother. I don’t, like, mean to alarm you or anything. But we’ve, like, encountered more humans.”