Apparently, classes in this sim took a bit of investment.
A creature could get a class in several ways, but the first class you had was one of a few basic starters, and once you had one you could begin advancing it up or adding paths. The prerequisites for each basic class were very simple. For example, to become a hunter one had to kill a creature from a hidden position. To become a berserker, one had to kill a creature that had taken at least half of their health. To be a merchant, one had to sell an item for gold.
The reason that we needed a turnip was so that I could become a mage. Without accessible limbs, I couldn’t qualify as striking a killing blow, and if I didn’t accept the class prompt within five minutes of receiving it, it would automatically be dismissed. So even though I easily qualified for warrior or murderer (an odd class that actually led to many of the most sought after guard advancements) during my voidmaw rampage, the chance was lost at some point during my unconsciousness. Becoming a mage was as simple as casting a single spell, something that anyone could do by waving their hands in a few arcs or saying a couple words.
Again, I had no limbs, nor did I have a mouth. Some spells could be cast by thought alone, though most were locked behind the mage class or one of its advancements or paths. The bare few that weren’t almost universally had expensive, rare, or short lived components.
Except for Equansil’s Turnip Duplication.
Glorious Emperor Equansil was an Archmage who lived on the Isle of Enchanters about six millennia ago. Deciding he was bored with the life of an ascetic, he flew to the nearest continent to get himself a kingdom. The locals were more than happy to accept the rule of a benevolent archmage capable of rending fields in twain and calling tornados from blue skies, and who only desired a small palace where he was waited on by nubile servants. With his backing, they could freely absorb many of the surrounding kingdoms, rapidly snowballing his small section of land into a massive empire spanning half the continent. As an immortal archmage, his rule was unquestioned and he was able to sort truth from lies with a flick of his hand. Everything went pretty well for about four hundred years.
And then came the Unending Winter.
For a decade or so, things weren’t so bad in the Equansilian Empire. Their neighbours crops failed, their citizens froze, and their rivers were stopped with ice. But the archmage was able to counter the effects of the long, cold months by magically making the ground far more fertile and warmer than the air above it. This heated the fields enough to allow hardy crops to grow, and while the citizens were less prosperous and their food was blander, well, at least they weren’t scraping and boiling tree bark to get by.
Then it got colder. A lot colder.
As the Unending Winter dragged on, frozen rafts of sea ice began to expand from the poles down into the rest of the oceans, and the reflection of the sunlight by the white ice reduced the heat the oceans could hold. Moreover, the ice trapped several important greenhouse gasses and angered the ancient volcanic spirits, who left their lairs on the surface to live in the deep magma below the world’s crust. Without the gasses trapping heat and the progeny of the volcanoes to keep springs flowing, even the warmth of the enchanted farmland couldn’t keep grains alive. Tubers and root vegetables could be grown if they could be cultivated with low lying leaves, but there wasn’t enough of the enchanted farmland for the wide leaf spreads needed by these sorts of vegetables. The archmage could only sustain so much enchantment at a single time, and even his prodigious mana pool bottoming out.
So, using his mastery of magic and impossible intellect, the archmage invented a spell that could be cast by anyone, even the lowliest peasant, as long as they had even a single point of mana. It required no gestures or words, could be taught in moments, and performing it was an almost negligible act of will. Truly, a masterful piece of spellcraft. The Equansilian Empire stood to this day, diminished in size and standing, bits lost at the edges after its emperor left to study other dimensions, but still a powerful force in the world six thousand years after its founding.
Even now, Equansil’s Turnip Duplication was considered one of the most elegant and efficient spells ever invented.
Thus, I really needed a turnip.
-----
Of course, finding a turnip in a forest on volcanic mountain on an island in the middle of an inland sea was a bit of a process. Learning about the geography of this planet was fascinating, but the particular issue I had was the isolation of the island I was on. During the Unending Winter (which ended about two centuries after it began) the island was part of a land bridge between the continent of jade and the continent of gold, so named for the materials used in the respective currencies most common to those continents (though silver seemed to be a universal ‘second tier’ currency.) Though there were many tribal settlements on the island, they tended to rely mostly on foraging, and their agriculture had regressed to a kind of ‘drop it in a hole and walk away, it might be a plant when we come back in a couple years.’ The only major crop grown on the island was cassava, a bushy root vegetable that would cause a potent toxin debuff if you failed its milling skill check. The island was a veritable paradise for hunting and gathering, so it wasn’t too important to maintain large food stores for the majority of the year.
Still, we had a fair chance at it. Turnips could grow wild, and the trade routes during the Unending Winter would have carried many as rations. It was likely that at least a few would have been lost along the way, taken root, and grown wild. The owls didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, but could give me the general shape and color of the leaves, from which I could start a search. All I needed were eyes.
The Matron had all sorts of scouting options. I didn’t really want to create too large of a nectar drain, so I limited myself to the smaller bionts. Still a large group, I narrowed it further by aiming for intelligence, independence, speed, and sight. The most interesting option was a fairly quick incubator, so less than an hour after having Matron deposit an egg, we had a new baby. Or many new babies. It was complicated.
The scout ‘creature’ I decided on was actually a mutable swarm combinator, one of many such entities in my library. Comprised of thousands of small, octopodal mites each the size of a popcorn kernel, their gestalt processing and perception abilities were fantastic. They also had the ability to link their flexile limbs together and move as larger units, each part of the swarm pulling or pushing the others to multiply their overall strength. Their most interesting ability was a sort of camouflaging biomimicry, their gelatinous torsos melding into their neighbors while shifting colors, allowing them to look like all sorts of objects or animals. The only part of them that was static was the orange sized, black shell core that housed their repair and replacement organs.
New to this gestalten mind was sapience. The aggregate creature, about the size of a sheep when fully combined, had an intelligence comparable to a young humanoid. The moment it hatched, it began speaking through the link.
“What do you need me for, Progenitor Nest. Are we short on food? Oh, I know, we should eat those feathered things up there! They look dangerous, but they’ll probably be full of organics from the smell of this place!”
“Relax, child,” I sent to it with mirth, “we are quite well for nectar. Those owls are going to assist the colony.” Sending a flow of sterner thought, I continued with, “They are also extremely dangerous, so do not attack them.”
“You’ve already gained the trust of a local power structure? Wow…” the flowing mites sent with a feeling of awe. “That will make it much easier to propagate. You’ve not even mutated yet! I’m so lucky to have been instantiated by such a clever progenitor…”
Setting aside the many questions that that raised, and hoping that the owls really weren’t tapping my broodlink, I said to them, “Our scout entity has hatched. We’ll start searching for a turnip now.”
Of course, explaining to the energetic carpet of tiny eyes what we were looking for and why took another several minutes, but it left with a promise to find and return with a turnip, “even if it took ten million mites!” I very much hoped it didn’t.
With the new scout searching, the owls left, informing me that they would know when we had possession of the vegetable. I awoke my brood from their enforced torpor, and I was left to contemplate the whirlwind of new information I had received over the last hours.
The fact that this sim had deities was surprisingly comforting. I probably didn’t have to worry about apocalyptic threats popping up before I was ready, as generally ‘gods’ were run with the intention of either being the ultimate combat challenge for a sim, or they were a sort of caretaker system with the power to stop external disasters before they got too bad. With how long this sim had been running, I was leaning toward the latter. Of course, the sim artist could easily change things up at any time, but my assumption was that such major events would be foreshadowed by portents and oracular visions. Luckily, I had an oracle nearby in case things started heading that way.
Of course, it could be that I was the apocalyptic event. A biological swarm with the ability to eat anything and make massive hordes of high powered combat lifeforms? I was basically an otherworldly invasion in a can. Maybe I couldn’t remember why I was in this body and sim because I was working with the artist, acting as a major plot event intended to shake up the normal routine? Neither of the owls had ever seen another being like myself, but I didn’t have any desire to conquer the planet. Maybe that would happen later? It was too soon to be sure, but I would be surprised if that was really the answer. I probably wasn’t the kind of agent who signed up for that sort of thing.
I was also beginning to understand that my reluctance to expand was a major hindrance. I loved each of my brood, their lives worth more to me than anything else this world had to offer. But I wasn’t doing any of us any favors by denying reality. If we didn’t have an army to fight an army, all of us were going to die.
I could easily produce a dozen nectar blooms at this spring alone. With that much nectar, I could have an army of thousands of creatures, spread across the island, and take over the biosphere. It would take a few days, a week at most.
But how would I care for my children when hundreds would die each day just to clear out the strongest beasts? That much loss would harden me to them, and I didn’t want that.
I knew I needed to gather a stronger force, but where should I draw the line?
-----
Shortly before midnight, my new constructors hatched. It took them quite a bit of effort to get out of the nursery; they were the biggest sort of creature a tiny nursery could grow. They were similar to Matron in general shape, ratlike with pointed snouts and pale white skin. They were much thinner, though, had no hive rising from their backs, and stood on six thick tentacles. As soon as they made their way from the nursery, they extended those tentacles to their full lengths, towering twenty meters up on precariously thin supports. This showed the lateral orifice on their undercarriage, a mouthlike opening with a pair of wide tongue-like tubes of an ivory hue, that extended from their neck to the last third of their torso. This was the method they would use to excrete and spread their biological solvents and adhesives.
These adorable little things would be the real powerhouse that allowed our colony to ensure our safety, and we welcomed them with open limbs.
As soon as they were ready (and Matron deemed them clean enough,) I set them to work on the palisade. Their tentacular limbs were incredibly strong when compacted, allowing them to move the heavy boards without needing to bother the flower crew. The adhesives they produced were just as effective as Sam’s, and they could lay them on with much more precision and speed. About the only part of the process they couldn’t manage by themselves was the shaping of the wood, a task that the flower crew excelled at. This meant that I would be able to send my gathering force out much more often, and the whole project would be finished in hours, as compared to days.
Sam really hit its stride as supervisor. The build-rats were excellent workers, but their senses and processing were far weaker than the little slug’s, so they worked far more efficiently under Sam’s direction. Ralph had a great time buzzing over their work site to allow Sam the best vantage to observe from, the sluglike builder’s eyestalks twisting and pulsing as it examined each join with an expert eye.
Once my construction crew was up to speed, I turned my attention to the skill of Fleshwarping. I had a limited palette to work from, but I was interested in the lightning cage ability shown by the power hog boar. The actual manipulation of the graft to ready it for application to a lifeform would probably be fairly difficult in a normal situation, but I had direct access to the biological structures of my progeny, an information pool that would be nearly impossible to gather without vivisection in other circumstances.
Each of my children had a fairly standardized biology, with morphological divergences only altering what needed to be changed for their individual use cases. For example, the musculature that drove the wings of my aciditos was basically the same as that used by my snikes, size and location notwithstanding. The black scale was the same material as the black shell, grown through differently shaped structures in the skin; even the brightly colored shells and quills of the pinecrabs were basically this substance, differing pigmentation and layers of silicate matrices allowing for very different presentations.
I used this knowledge to prepare a pseudo-genetic ‘graft’ for my pinecrabs. Their external spike structures could be made to hold the filaments copper and organically deposited quartz granules shaped into the arcane glyphs needed to invoke the lightning shell when mana was channeled through them. The mana attuning glands used by the power hogs made this process even simpler, taking a complex technique of mental calculation and spiritual transmutation and duplicating it via simple rhythmically repeated muscle contraction.
I took aside Mica and Topaz, explaining to them the possible risks and side effects taking on such a graft would entail. Their response was an enthusiastic bubbling from their mouthparts, emitting a scent that Probe compared to the three day dead opossum it had discovered during its first outing. When I tried to simplify the message to ‘pinecrabs get strength, but maybe are in danger,’ their reply was basically the same with an added tint of ‘same environment, differing only in light cycle.’ Praising my babies for their bravery, I had them put claws on my shell and activated Fleshwarping.
Fleshwarping skill check: 198/54. Success! (Rolled: 59, + 100 subject data, +39 Processing, + 0 skill level.)
Skill: Fleshwarping has reached level 4!
Fleshwarping skill check: 230/54. Success! (Rolled: 87, + 100 subject data, +39 Processing, + 4 skill level.)
Skill: Fleshwarping has reached level 7!
The process was incredibly simple. Once I had the fleshwarp I intended to apply fully visualized, I willed the change onto the pinecrab’s bodies. A surge of thought I wasn’t able to remember, and the roots of the change were in place. My subjects were immediately ravenous, their rapid growth and repair systems seeing the lack of the grafted systems as ‘damage’ and ramping their metabolisms up to ‘fix’ the issue. Dick worked its magic, refueling them with nectar twice over the next half hour, the fleshwarping able to take full advantage of their highly tuned biology and complete the graft in wonderfully short order.
I decided to restrict the experimentation, unwilling to risk any unforeseen issues wiping out my colony’s defenses. If everything went well, I would consider the application of the graft to my remaining anvils, and then see what else the electrical mana channels could be used for. I was reluctant to use my soul well for any forging, as I didn’t know when I would be able to safely refill it, and the on-the-fly application of a regenerative forging could possibly save one of my broodlings when mundane healing was ineffective.
With that, my agenda was down to waiting for my scout swarm’s acquisition of a turnip. Oddly, despite the likelihood of my colony’s need to fight in just a few more days, I felt at peace with the gentle tempo of my build-rat’s construction and the contrasting percussion of my wrestling pinecrabs. My family was building a home in this strange world, and I knew we could overcome any obstacle through teamwork and cooperation.
-----
The sun was beginning to rise when I felt a sudden surge of success from the scout mite swarm. Willing the link open, I was instantly bombarded with “I did it! I did it!” sung in a hundred different tones. Apparently it was still capable of linguistic communication while divided into distant enough portions to need to act as multiple entities. I congratulated it, then sent my aerial defense forces to gather the vegetable and return with it safely. I didn’t trust that some sort of animal wouldn’t jump my team the moment they pulled the turnip from the ground. We had too much at stake.
I was proven right, sadly. On their approach to the dry riverbed the turnips grew from, the scout swarm alerted me to a pair of three meter tall, silver spotted white badgers headed straight for the turnip patch. I ordered it to uproot one of the vegetables and carry it up a tree, to hopefully save one from the bulky animals’ hunger. As soon as it assembled enough sub-bodies to form a digging tool, the badgers started running at the mass, the air fogging in their wake and frost falling from their shaggy coats. Working as quickly as it could, the swarm drilled through the stone riddled soil, pebbles and dust flying in a great, swirling arc around it. Just as it seized the vital reagent, the lead badger reared up on her hind legs, thick bluish ice enveloping her forepaws. The scout swarm, already coiled from its drilling, sprung away as the badger slammed her glacially extended claws into the riverbed with a hissing chatter.
Twisting its mass into a jagged line, the scout swarm landed against a large oak. It rapidly ascended the tree, its serpentine shape allowing it to move through the bark with ease, and terror of the monstrous beasts behind it gave it a surge of power unlocking hormones, allowing it to burn energy swiftly and making it willing to harm its mites in the effort to save the majority of the mass.
The lead badger clawed at the tree behind the swarm, frozen sap cracking on the oak’s damaged surface. The rents she left in the tree formed frost that expanded rapidly and shattered with each potent crash of the badger’s ice enhanced claws, widening the damaged area much faster than she would have with normal slashes. In a matter of seconds, the old oak let out a deafening creak and began to fall.
The scout swarm slithered to the top of the leaning tree and jumped to the nearest, some kind of silver leafed maple. This turned out to be a stroke of luck; as the female badger tried to slash at the golden bark, a shield of silver leaves flew from the branches and intercepted the claws of the beast. In the same moment, a spear of golden sunlight lanced from the tree’s crown and into the badger’s thick hide, causing a narrow but deep puncture in shoulder of her left forelimb. With a hiss of rage, the badger shook her great torso and rolled into a tight ball.
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For a moment I hoped that the creatures would be scared off by the tree’s magical defense. Then a pale, translucent shell of ice and vapor built itself around the badger, leaving only her joints, paws, and the lower half of her snout bare. Around each joint were spikes of pure, clear ice half a meter long which tapered to a jagged point.
The massive badger’s male partner followed suit, and they both started raking at the tree, ignoring the golden projectiles glancing off their supercooled armor. The maple had many leaves with which to shield itself, but there was still a limit: each time they came to its aid, the tree’s bark blanched slightly whiter, and its glow dimmed. It seemed to be using its living essence in place of a mana pool, or perhaps it was somehow made partially of mana. I was unsure, but whatever was happening to it didn’t seem like something it could handle forever.
Luckily, it didn’t have to. Less than a minute after it started, my scout felt the air defender’s broodlinks open to its mind. In seconds, silicate spikes three centimeters wide and a third of a meter long started impacting the heads of the badgers, shattered shards filling their eyes and snouts. The snikes had arrived.
Less helpful were the aciditos, who darted around the crown of the tree, trying to find a path to grab the scout mites and their turnip prize. The storm of metallic leaves swirled through the branches leaving no safe area to land. The tree’s “agitation” was impeding our rescue efforts.
Within the argent whirlwind, the scout hugged tight to the maple’s trunk. Each golden lance caused a pulse of heat, but the air around the badgers was becoming colder and colder. Already some of the mites lowest on the tree were sluggish and weak, the frost condensing on them and weighing them down. Some were so cold that they were unable to maintain connection to the swarm, losing cohesion and dissipating. I could feel the hivemind’s fear as each dying mite carried away a bit of the whole’s self. If too many were lost, the personality it maintained would be changed irreparably; a sort of death.
The snikes kept up their pressure, their hardened crystal spikes unable to so much as dent the ice armor, but the distraction of the impact was causing the badgers to snarl and hiss at them, reducing the rate they took down the tree. Then a lucky bolt struck through the joint gap at the male badger’s rear left hip, ripping straight through the hide, meat, and bone and impacting against the other side of the armor where it shattered into splinters.
The fierce edges of the glass like splinters tore through the beast’s flesh, blood pouring through the join as he thrashed at his leg. With a high pitched whine, he dragged himself away from the tree to give himself time to examine his wound.
Of course he couldn’t really manage that without releasing his armor. Caught between anger at the pests that injured him and the pain of his wound, he decided to take the intelligent road and retreat, hissing as he hobbled away from the tree.
His partner, however, was now all the more angry. With a snarl of rage, she heaved herself up on her hind legs, turned toward the snike who had scored the lucky hit, and spat. The spray of steaming liquid froze the air around it as it flew, a visible vortex dropping in its wake.
Quarrel rose swiftly away from the viscous mass, but felt itself dragged down as the spray passed below it. The disrupted air currents were causing a massive downdraft, and it took all of Quarrel’s ability to avoid being slammed to the ground by it. The badger was right behind the spittle, charging at the space where Quarrel would have landed had it not righted itself. My snikes all rose swiftly, newly wary of their foe.
The aciditos were now terrified, and I had to burn a massive amount of stamina to open the link to each one and press calm into their minds or they would have scattered. Their combat use may be limited in this engagement, but they would be vital to the retrieval efforts. The snikes had no limbs to carry the turnip, and would have a rough time landing even if they did.
The snikes, however, seemed to come up with something like a plan while I was calming the little acid spouts. They started pouring spikes into the same spot on the badger’s face, just above her left eye. The badger shook and danced to avoid the onslaught, but the snikes were designed to hit far smaller targets at far longer ranges.
While the snikes weren’t anywhere close to even chipping the armor, the badger had to be getting one banger of a headache from the constant impacts. At the height the snikes were firing from, there was little chance of another spittle spray reaching them. Nor did she try, instead attempting to dodge around the maple to hide from the crystal rain.
When she pressed herself into the base of the tree to cover the snike’s target, the next stage of their plan began. With the badger’s face and head pressed against the tree, she couldn’t see as Bolt spiraled down towards her. Careful to avoid the silicate shards and silver leaves, Bolt lined up its shot, and sprayed bile between the maple’s trunk and the female badger’s left side. The boiling liquid did nothing to the badger’s glacial armor, but the bark of the tree started to whistle and dissolve.
The tree didn’t like that at all. In place of the thin golden spears, a massive golden sword blade thrust from the maple’s withering trunk. With a horrid crash, it tore through the badger’s already damaged left forelimb at the shoulder, severing the limb at the joint. With wild, pained eyes she ran away from the blackened tree as fast as her remaining limbs could carry her, the ice armor sublimating from her and leaving only a crystalline patch over the gaping amputation wound.
It took awhile for the tree to calm after that. My snikes hovered around the tree’s crown while the aciditos landed on the branches of a nearby oak. The spinning leaves eventually settled back onto their twigs, still seeming to blow in a breeze that didn’t exist. Nothing else even came close to the battlefield; the steaming, frosted turf and thousands of crystal splinters weren’t much of a welcome mat to the creatures of the forest.
When everything was ready, I made sure that my aerial defense force brought back samples of the severed badger limb and the glowing, golden sap that left the maple’s bark undamaged when it oozed over it. The whole event took less than half an hour. The battle itself, from the first claw smash to the female’s retreat, had taken around four minutes. I marvelled at my ranged strikers, the speed at which they had defeated to massive and probably overleveled foes far outside of my highest expectations.
Still, the fight had revealed a weakness in my force. Controlling the instinctive reactions of my brood consumed stamina when they were over one hundred meters; if the battle had gone on much longer, I would have run dry and there would have been no way for my creatures to plan and communicate. Dick didn’t have nearly the range to act as a transceiver for their link, and even if he had they likely wouldn’t have been able to borrow enough mental resources from him. While they couldn’t use it to its fullest extent, all of my progeny offloaded some of their processing needs into the broodlink, where my mind picked it up, worked through it, and sent it back through the weaker large area network.
What I needed was a tactician, smart enough to handle the planning needs of a fighting swarm while able to stay within a hundred meters of a moving battlefield.
After searching through Matron’s combat tagged genes, I found what I needed. A pseudo-scout with lockdown nets, it could hop large distances and hover for short durations. It was also a capable sub-commander, intelligent enough to tactically handle skirmishes on its own, and it could later be mutated into much more potent military roles if needed (though it was noted that none of its forms would be particularly competent at logistics or engineering.)
Matron deposited the egg in the nursery, her little cleaning bats carrying it to an open nectar nipple. I idly wondered what sort of personality a tactician would hatch with; would it be aggressive? Paranoid? Demanding? Subservient? I looked forward to whatever my baby wanted to make of itself. I would have to wait and see in four hours.
As my turnip collectors returned to our little settlement, so did the owls. I had the meat and sap samples loaded into one of my barnacle pores, where they were swept into a digestion vat to be turned into nectar.
Flesh Tasted: Frosted Tip Badger
New Fleshwarps are available!
I was disappointed that the tree sap didn’t unlock anything useful, but the new options would have to wait.
“Your minions have returned with the turnip,” the Blessed Oracle sent to me. My scout swarm, most of the mites it had sent returned by now, seemed to feel something from the Oracle’s mental speech. I had to still it, as its curiosity wasn’t worth annoying our guides.
“Yes, Blessed Oracle. How should I begin?”
“I will expand your mind, granting you knowledge of the spell,” she said. “Most often, simply seeing the spell’s sigil with one’s own eyes would be enough to learn it, but in your case there are no eyes to see. This will take only a moment, do not resist.”
I felt a pressure in my mind, like an intrusive thought that instinct demanded I reject. Repressing the imperative was very uncomfortable and difficult, like resisting the urge to writhe while being tickled or controlling one’s diaphragm to stop a hiccup. Not that I could do either of those things in this form, but the point stood.
The scout swarm’s agitation at being held still was spreading through the broodlink, causing the rest of my brood to feel uncomfortable and aggressive. Not willing to lose my chance to gain a class, I forced a calm signal through the link, a sense of relaxation and lethargy radiating strongly through all of my children’s minds. This seemed to pacify the scout swarm, and I hoped that it wouldn’t get so upset in the future. Maybe having a fully sapient broodling was going to be more work than I expected.
The Blessed Oracle finished the donation of knowledge, and I could see the steps needed to cast the spell more easily than any of my other memories. Apparently the Archmage Equansil didn’t like repeating himself. With the turnip less than a meter from me, I willed my mana through the visualized spell sigil, and suddenly there were two turnips sitting side by side. The large roots were identical, and I was ecstatic.
Skill: Spellcasting has reached level 1!
“Cast the spell four more times, and you will receive the class acquisition option,” Quonorol said, hopping up to the turnips.
An instant of will, a puff of focus, and there were six identical turnips before me in a short row.
Skill: Spellcasting has reached level 2!
Class Unlocked! Would you like to become a Mage? (0/10 class slots filled)
Yes, I thought to the sim’s System.
Class Acquired: Mage!
Spells Learned: Ember Spray, Spark Jolt, Condense Water, Chisel Stone, Magical Hand!
Level 4 Mage Reached!
New Class Talent Point!
New Class Levels! Attribute Adjustment Complete!
Info: Self Stats I sent.
Name: Nest
Race: Star Seed
Class: Mage
Level: 4
Experience: 15/400 to next level
Health: 46/46 +0.1/min
Mana: 64/69 +.3/min
Stamina: 39/280 +1/min
(Info: Self Stats for more)
Attributes
Agility: 10 (0)
Movement: 10 (0)
Strength: 36 (0)
Toughness: 26
Processing: 51
Organization: 48
Instinct: 39 (29)
Charisma: 20
Skills
Scan (8), Induce Fear (3), Unarmed Combat (4), Awareness (18), Fleshwarping (7), Spellcasting (2)
Talents
Broodlinked, Fleshwarper, Font of Nectar, Soulforger
1 Class Talent Point (Mage)
(Info: Class Talents (Mage) for more information)
Status Effects
Senseless, Sessile, Fortress Shell
(Info: Attribute, Talent, Skill, or Effect for more information)
The changes to my resources, regeneration rates, and attributes were intriguing. I should have been keeping track to see what did what, but the basic rule of “more levels means more power” was fairly obvious. Checking the mage class talents, I could see all sorts of useful and interesting ones, but there was one very obvious talent that I needed right away.
Mage Class Talent: Gestureless Caster purchased!
I felt the world blossom before me. With flight and sensing spells, I could move and see through my own power. Magical hand alone would allow me to do so much more, and further telekinetic spells were sure to open to me. Speaking through the wind, or mind to mind. Helping construct and gather with earth magics. Watering crops for nectar distillation. Helping our defenders with fire and lightning. Maybe even healing magics.
“Thank you, Blessed Oracle, Quonorol. Our colony owes you a debt.”
The owls preened for a moment before the Blessed Oracle said “we acknowledge your debt, and absolve you. Now, send your brood to gather weak enemies for you to slay. Time is short, and you need power. My husband and I will find a book of spells for you to learn from before the elf prince arrives. Take care.” With those instructions finished, they flew away again, fading rapidly into the shadows of the trees. My reservations at aggressive killing would have to be put on hold, apparently.
Before I sent out a hunting party, I gave thought to naming the nameless. The build-rats seemed to take to the names Euclid, Archemides, Pythagoras, and Hypatia.
The scout mite hivemind was a different issue, of course. After I gently explained to it that we couldn’t name each of its hundreds of thousands of mites, it bounced from name to name. Its problem wasn’t a dislike of any individual name, but rather the intense enthusiasm for every name. Eventually, I gave it a choice between two names. Otto, or Anna. It said it couldn’t decide, so I gave it the option to be either, depending on what it preferred, as long as it answered to both names if needed. It agreed instantly, happy to have at least some mutability in its name.
With all of that complete, I instructed the swarm to split into three groups and gave each a squad consisting of two pinecrabs and a snike. I kept back jade, Mica, and Topaz, ensuring that the colony would have a defensive screen if needed and that the lightning cage crabs were given more time to recover. I made sure that the teams would only grab predators; I figured that predatory animals would have higher levels, and I didn’t want to kill anything that wasn’t already aggressive.
Once they were off, I directed the build-rats in their duties, had Dick transfer nectar between the nectar-shroom and the storage cyst, and considered what we could do to enhance the settlement. Time wore on, the hunters delivered two hundred and thirty experience in flammable wolves and snakes, and the hot lizard eventually returned to its rock. By noon, everything had fallen into a rhythm. One I was uncomfortable with, but at least we were safer…
Around noon, the chrysalis containing Jasper and the egg containing my tactician were both almost ready to open. I signalled the hunting parties to return, and my brood gathered in anticipation of their new and improved siblings. Except Sam and the flower crew, who were busy digging our moat and dumping the dirt behind our wall.
It was Jasper who came out first. The purple chrysalis cracked slightly at the top, and from the crack emerged a massive amber blade. Swiftly cutting through the hardened silk, Jasper emerged a new arthropod in a flood of golden nectar.
Its quills were gone, as were all the spikes and two of its claws. Its shell had shifted to a solid black, smooth and sleek. The missing claws had been replaced by translucent amber blades, two meters long and half a meter wide, two centimeters thick and flat on the top but tapering to a wicked edge along the bottom. The blade had no tip, rectangular instead of pointed. Its other two claws were wider and longer, coated on the inside with a sticky mucus. A mouthlike sphincter at the base of the claws held a long, bulbous tongue coated in the same yellowish white mucus, which could be projected up to eight meters to catch a foe and haul it back to Jasper’s embrace, where it would rapidly be beheaded.
The family welcomed it back, excited about their sibling’s upgrade. It bubbled and drew its blades across each other, joy pouring into the link at its new status. Once all of the other pinecrabs got a chance to pinch Jasper’s new blades and sleek shell, we all got back to the important task of waiting to greet the new baby.
We didn’t have to wait long. Minutes after Jasper pupated, the tactician form hatched from its egg. Sliding out of the nursery, a tall, thin quadruped landed gently. Four legs stood under a thin, extended oval of an abdomen with a pair of leaflike wing cases. Its thorax rose as a graceful, curved “S” shape, with a triangular chest and shoulder region. It had a long, thin neck and a large, pyramidal head housing two sets of serrated mandibles, a mammalian mouth, and a single segmented eye complex with an iridescent hue. It had a pair of thick arms that dropped from its shoulder plates, rose back to nearly the same height after the pointed elbow, and dropped again into a pair of spinnerette studded needles. Its link to the brood seemed oddly weak, but its link to me was the strongest I’d yet felt.
“Who is the commander of this force?” it sent, the mental voice soft and high.
“Me, I supposed.”
”Nest is!”
Otto and I spoke simultaneously.
The creature bowed to me, eye twinkling in the sunlight. “Ah, a seed progenitor. I am quite happy to be working for one of your importance. Where is the primary colony from here? I will need to confer with their birthing masters; the force they granted you is pathetic and an insult to my master and our mission as a whole.”
Taken aback, I took a moment to reply. “This is the only colony I know of, and I’m fairly sure we’re the only settlement of our kind on the planet.”
The mantis like creature went very still, no longer scanning the dirt backing our walls or the pinecrabs jostling each other.
“You have had no contact with any other Star Borne?” it asked, with no detectable emotion.
“Uh, yeah. I think we’re it. I just woke up one day and we’ve been building up from there,” I said, worried at her mannerisms.
Still motionless, the mantid tactician seemed to take a moment to let my statement sink in.
“Muahahahahaha! First landing! I will rule everything!” it shouted through the link, glee and ambition pouring off of it in waves. The rest of the brood started to jump and dance. Those that had the limbs for it, at least. The pinecrabs bubbled, Francis the signal wasp whistled and buzzed, the aciditos and snikes flew figure eights, and Probe spun in a circle atop my shell. Matron seemed unimpressed.
“Hmm,” I sent, “we’re not really aiming to take over, I’d rather we didn’t upset the balance here. Also, I’m not really handing over control of our colony, I’m not sure what you think was happening here.”
“Oh, no!” the tactician sent, embarrassed, “I didn’t mean to imply that, sacred master! Many apologies. My meaning was that I would be most senior in your glorious military, and I just assumed…”
“Assumed?” I asked, curious now. The brood seemed to catch on to our calmer mood, and returned to simply examining my new child.
“Assumed… that you’d allow me to mutate to control the later leaders of your armies…” the tactician mantis sent demurely, scratching Jasper behind its uppermost right cleaver joint.
“Oh. Sure, there’s no problem with that. There aren’t many plans for expanding the defense force unless we need it, though.”
Ducking its head, the tactician vibrated its wing case. “Thank you, sacred progenitor. If I may be so bold as to suggest, we would most likely be served by a larger… ‘defense force’. Our kin will most assuredly perish should any significant threat notice us.”
“Really?” I asked. “Where are you getting this information?”
It tilted its head at my shell. “The ancestral archive. Surely one of your command vessels must… have…”
It glanced around. “...You have no other command vessels.”
“Yeah, I didn’t really feel a need to hatch any before now. The only problems we’ve encountered so far have been wild animal and elf attacks. I decided to hatch you because maintaining a direct tactical link to a distant fight is draining.”
“...I see.” The tactician peered about itself. “All of these emplacements are the result of our unenlightened kin’s expertise? Impressive.”
“Yeah, Sam’s great at the whole supervisor thing. Explain what you need, and you’ll have it done.” Sam, feeling that I was conversing about it, sent a pulse of acknowledgement through its link from where it was directing the build-rats and the flower crew.
“Sam? The general landing construction symbiote is a Sam?”
“Yeah, all of my babies get names. Which reminds me, what do you want to be?”
Seeming confused, it responded “I am a first tier tactical node and restraint deployment platform.”
“Alright, but what do you want your name to be?” I asked patiently.
“I don’t understand. Why would I need a name?”
“All of us have names,” I said, “I’m Nest, for example. We’ve got Ralph and Sam, Matron and Dick, Francis and Probe, everyone has a name.”
“I see,” it said. “I think… may I be called Victoria?”
“Sure, Victoria’s fine. You were saying something about our defenses being insufficient?”
Rubbing its forelimbs together, Victoria nodded. “We have far less military power than is recommended for a new landing colony. Even one without a focus on… expansion. We should hatch several more combat focused bioconstructs. I would also suggest hatching enlightened breeding, supply, and manufacturing nodes, so that my sacred ancestor isn’t required to directly control the unenlightened. It is… unbecoming.”
“Wait, I’m not supposed to guide my brood?” I asked, a bit insulted.
“No, sacred one!” Victoria said, aghast. “I simply meant that the direct supervisory labors should be entrusted to lesser beings. Our archives are optimized for such things. We live only to serve your vision.”
“Ah, I think I understand,” I sent. “Sapient children like yourself have memory stores for the types of tasks you’ve been designed for. Alright, I think I see the value there. Don’t be surprised if I have input, though, I think I’ve had us prepping for this elf raid just fine so far.”
The mantid tactician leaned toward me, eye focused directly on my shell. “Preparing for what?”