I wake up as gracefully as can be accomplished given my sleeping arrangements being what they are, and after my morning ablutions make my way downstairs, hearing the clicking and ticking of my waiting homunculi. Seeing the seven little mutants in their clockwork harnesses and their diligently obedient faces picks me up way more than it ought to. I even notice that one of them -- not that I can even tell them apart -- has already prepared a meal for me. Just shelfruit hashbrowns sprinkled with different herbs, but it’s warm and pleasant. I need to find some sort of oat or something. There’s plenty of grasses around but they don’t really seem to go to seed the way I’d need for rice or oats. Maybe … hrm.

“Alright... today I want one domestic worker as always, one farmer and one gardener. I want one of you working on creating bolts of reed linen using an upsized loom now that you guys have reasonable reach. I want another of you creating burlap bags to better store the stuff in the root cellar. I want another of you to work on cultivating a domesticated grass. Focus on the seeds being large and plentiful. We’re going to need a lot of this so it should have double the farm-plot space as the carrotatos and shelfruits. The last of you will be domesticating the clusterberries, and building a juicing station and barrels to store them in. This will all begin once all seven of you have completed building a dry-goods warehouse adjacent to the greatoak and connected via tunnel to the root cellar. Also; new general rule: if there isn’t already a building to house the work or product of work for whatever you’re doing or making, there needs to be one. This obviously excludes “naturally outdoors” things like farming. Got it? Okay… break!”

My minions scatter off in a whirring and clicking chaos that somehow manages to come across as orderly. As they do, I set myself to extracting the numbing moss’s essence of exhaustion and, well, numbness. The basic idea here being to create a tonic that I can deliver via splash over a couple of blackbirds in order to capture them and work on extracting from them their essential intellect. My Primitive Biopunk knowledge tells me that once I have the essence I can use a similar method to what I used on the homunculi and basically culture it in vats. That will be … useful.

The work of actually creating those growing vats requires imbuing quartzite crystals with basic sanguinism “grow/heal” essence so that they can accumulate natural or directed light and redirect it down with a low-grade “grow and be sustained” beam of energy. What I wind up with after most of a full morning’s work is little better than an infrared lamp over a bunch of petri dishes, but not having to go through the full process of extracting essences in the future will be a life-saver for repeated work, like the domestication essence that I use as a testing option for the system. My little guys will be able to simply scoop up essence from the correct dish and let it regenerate rather than have to go through multiple alchemical steps to obtain it from the raw source. That should speed up the work significantly.

I also extract the stamina-negating essence from the numbing moss into another dish, clearly labelling both by way of scratching out the essence name on the side of the stone dishes before placing them on the new shelf under the grow-lights. The stuff doesn’t exactly accumulate instantly, but after a few hours the amount I have left over after harvesting for my knockout potions should be enough to make four or five more of them.

I quietly gear up in my “adventuring” gear, again looking like some kind of swashbuckling steampunk pirate, but this time carrying a pair of easily broken clay vials. The nice thing about the knockout potions being drawn from that numbing moss is that the enhanced volatiles will disperse their scent through the air and even if I don’t directly hit the birds they should still wind up falling asleep. It doesn’t take me long, once I go out the pondward gate, to find a small cluster of the birds roosting on a tree. What takes a little longer is tying one of the vials to the front of an arrow so that I can fire said arrow at the branch the birds are on. I don’t want to get too close to the little bastards; they can be vindictive when they are messed with. I’m banking on their simply not having evolved in tandem with human or tool-using beings to fail to associate the arrow with me.

I miss my first shot wildly due to not having the balance correct and not guessing the distance I can fire the arrow correctly, but luckily the vial was sturdy enough that when it landed in the soft dirt it didn’t break, so I still have another two shots left after that first one. The second still largely misses -- I don’t get any of the tincture itself on any of the birds, but one of them actually winds up hopping closer to where the vial had broken to investigate it, and winds up essentially chloroforming itself out of the tree. This, for me, is a wild success.

I quickly dash forward, scoop up the fallen bird, and make a sprinting run back towards the manor even as what seems like half a murder caws and chases after me. I’m careful to carry the little guy in the crook of my arm so as to avoid injuring it as I run and squeeze myself through the gate, but the focus on getting away from the birds causes me to fail to think through the fact that animals that can fly can, well, fly over walls.

I’m screaming about Alfred Hitchcock being an asshole even as I make a mad dash back to the alchemy lab while trying to cover my head from the buggers. Once I’m in, their pecking and pestering at the windows and door of the shed takes an annoyingly long time to taper off -- and I’m fairly convinced it only happens when one of my homunculi “checks in” to see if my shouting had been about changing my orders. One thing’s certain: blackbirds really do not care for giant spiders. I cannot claim this doesn’t endear them to me.

I’ve never actually extracted essence from anything living that wasn’t myself before, and I’m not altogether certain how to go about doing it with the blackbird without injuring it before I finally decide to give up on that agenda and simply start whipping up a sanguine healing tonic to feed to the critter after taking sufficient samples to get what I’m after. Once I get that taken care of, I sit down to start attempting to extract from blood and quill samples what I’m after from the bird, and despite what I’m expecting to begin with the process of identifying the exact traits I’m after for extraction is actually quite intuitive. After alchemically rendering down the blood and feather scrapings together, the fluids seem to part into a colorful mixture in the cauldron and I just know which blots to extract with the pipette to get the essences I’m after. Specifically; the intelligence and social behaviors. After giving it a little thought I realize that it’s a synergistic overlap of the Standard Alchemy and Primitive Biopunk knowledge. As I realize where that synergy is coming from I also notice that my mana bar is filling back up -- and I hadn’t even noticed that the process of extracting those essences from the lavalamp-like psychedelic fluid filling the alchemical cauldron had cost me MP in the first place, though given the sheer intensity of concentration necessary for it I can hardly claim that is surprising. I take special care to start culturing more of the essences as there’s so little to begin with and I don’t want them getting contaminated.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Once I actually heal the bird, it shows signs of starting to wake up so I carefully give it a small dose of knockout tonic again, and now that I’m finished with her I arm back up and climb up a tree near where I originally found her flock and set her down on a branch to recover on her own, hopefully in familiar enough territory that she can go back to her life without incident.

It’ll take a little while for the tiny essence samples I’ve acquired to actually grow into a sufficient size, so I spend that time making larger clay pots to use as grow-vats for what will become my security “dog” workforce. The most difficult part in that all things considered is that each one will require its own dedicated grow-light focused inside of the vat, and the process of infusing sanguine growth essence into quartzite is delicate and therefore not really amenable to any kind of bulk operation. By the time I’m finished with the production of the clay jars and their blood-red quartzite lamps, I check on the intelligence and socialized essences and decide that there’s enough for maybe three attempts at what I’m about to do.

For this work I intend to return back to the stock spiderzilla, and after a bit of fertility-inducing sanguinism get a clutch of healthy egg-sac from a female. This process is made infinitely easier now that I have access to the knockout tonic, mind. Bringing the egg-sac back with me to the alchemical lab, I physically remove a small group of four or five eggs at a time out of the several dozen in the sac and begin the process of infusing them with the intelligence, flocking, and domestication essences. I also add just a bare drop of my own and homunculus essence to the mix on momentary thought. Each of those three small groupings of eggs are then left to slowly mature in the growvats. It’s my hope that by not using my sanguinism directly in maturing them they won’t count against my mana cap. They also won’t be connected to me as completely as my homunculi, but by having included my own and the homunculus essence I should automatically get instinctual acceptance as part of their ‘flock’.

After this, I scribe down everything I’ve done throughout the day back at the research bench -- sadly this fails to unlock anything -- and carry the new journal back over to the study’s library. Rather than sit around and watch my minions work -- and let me tell you, it’s surprisingly soothing to watch a bunch of adorable horrorbeasts clanking around in walker exoskeletons like mutant Tachikoma -- and head over to the weaving area. I snort when I find that it’s actually a tent made of burlap. This won’t do long-term but for now it adds “color” to the place so fuck it. After looking around and seeing that there’s sufficient tools and workspace to do what I intend to do, I head over to the dry warehouse -- much more ruggedly constructed -- and pick up a pair of bolts of reed linen. I can tell they were made today because they are as wide as the previous loom was tall. I then proceed to allow myself to go into fugue-state again with the intention of sewing up a set of three sets of shirts and double-layered pants, with scalehide elbow and knee patches for durability, as well as proper boxers. On the assumption that this won’t take all that long to complete, I also decide to set up a proper pillow and mattress for at least myself, using the collected reed-tuft as a “pillowtop” stuffing.

When I come back from the fugue I find that surprisingly this time what I made was exactly what I’d envisioned, though the mattress wound up being much more like a bedroll due to not having enough of the tuft stuffing material. Still, laying that over the straw-and-burlap mattress will give me the most pleasant sleeping experience I’ve had in months, so I’m not going to argue about it. Rather than sit around and closely investigate my memories of the fugue state, I simply enjoy the feeling of well-fitted non-scratchy fabric -- especially given that it’s been getting hotter of late during the days and the linen is much lighter than the burlap ever was. It actually feels weird to have sleeves again, though. But hey, I’ll get over it.

Heading down to the back wall of the alchemy lab where I arranged the growvats, I crack open the seal on the first just enough to investigate what’s inside, and find myself bombarded by three fist-sized furry spiders. In their juvenile eagerness they escape through the crack rapidly and crawl up my forearm with their abdomen waving to show their joy.

I should really be worried about the fact that I both am not bothered by the babies crawling over me and have intuitive understanding of what their behaviors mean. Somehow, however, I’m not. I had originally intended to harvest the first generation I’ve created to try to make a more sophisticated generation but after seeing the sweet little things I just can’t bring myself to do it, and instead crack open the other three seals as well, netting myself a total of 13 of the spider pups.

It isn’t until I start feeding the little things on live fish that I notice that their forelegs actually have what appear to be multi-jointed tripartite claws rather than what spiders normally have. My mind immediately fills in that this is a product of the influence of my own essence being added into the mix that produced them, and isn’t all that surprising. It will be, however, useful in that it means -- however basic and undeveloped -- these little guys could be trained to be tool users. Watching as they voraciously dig into the fish I’ve given them -- one trout to a pair -- I nod to myself in affirmation that despite their increased domestication compared to the feral spiderzilla, they still have the aggressive instincts of a predator. This is critical to my plans for them. Leaving them to their vicious repaste, I make my way over to the pond-side gate after gathering up a sampling of the enlargened reeds and another bundle of burlap, and start to dig out and construct a basic den for the little guys. Once they fully grow they’ll need more space, but that will come later. After finishing my construction I return back to the lab, where my new miniature murderbeasts are lazing with “the itis” after consuming their first meals. Picking up the dessicated fish corpses and moving them over to the designated rubbish bin for later cleanup, I carefully avoid disturbing the little things as I bring them over to the temporary den -- den or nest? I’m going with den -- for them to sleep in properly.

No real idea if they’re truly going to work out as I hoped, but at the very least I’ve now got my own small pack of highly social subsapient tool-using giant spiders to train into a guard force for my home. My Primitive Biopunk knowledge tells me that they’re going to wind up growing to about 15 to 18 or so pounds when fully mature. Slightly larger than ordinary spiderzillas and my homunculi but not incredibly so.