My plants grow very slowly, it seems. Maybe it’s just because I skipped my first one growing, or because these new two are just bigger or something, but while I can see the sprouting now after what I assume is an hour, I still don’t think whatever magic orbs can do works very fast.
Whatever, I know now that I can make plants.
But should I be making plants? I made the plants by ‘eating’ other plants near me, and I’m certainly looking like I make less plants than I eat, so this can’t be sustainable… Right?
I don’t really know what else an orb is to do, but I do have some ideas.
If I can make plants with air, plant, and water magic, would I be able to make my own creatures and stuff with the right magic available? The bunny had blood, bone, and whatever brown is, so if I had those in my orb, could I make a bunny?
I don’t know if I should, but I feel like I should try to test that, if I get my hands on the materials. Hmm… Wouldn’t that mean I’d need to eat a living creature? I don’t know if I really want to do that…
Actually, I think there should be some bugs around. Excellent, one of those mosquito-beetles, I don’t feel bad about experimenting on you, do I? I do.
March of progress, and all that, what are you made of? Only brown and red, it seems, so I guess red really is just blood, but what is brown, then?
Oh well. I can pick up the beetle with my magic hands, but taking it apart like I did the plant is much harder. Maybe the intent to ‘kill’ the bug would help? No, that’s not it… Ah… maybe physically eating the bug, yeah, that seems to have done it. Although I can only pull out the red? The brown appears to be staying where it was…
My non-magic vision shows me the corpse of the insect, which makes me think that brown is just the color bodies are, and red is the ‘flesh and blood’ color, but no time for that now. There isn’t nearly enough blood magic for me to do anything with, so I guess I should just spend however long it takes me to get tired to pick up and ‘squish’ all these beetles…
An hour later and I think my plants are finally done ‘seeding’. I think I’ll call the process of the plants appearing into existence seeding, since they aren’t growing like mad now that they’re in the shape I wanted them to be.
I also have a sizable stockpile of ‘red’. Not enough for me to make anything bigger than, say, a hummingbird, but definitely a quantity to match the small horde of beetle corpses I put next to my plants in the hopes that it will help them grow eventually.
I need white I think… The birds that sometimes fly above me have some, but I don’t know if my magic hands would be able to catch them… Can I make bone magic with what I have? I mentally crack my knuckles and get to testing.
The answer appears to be no, at least not by any method I can think of, I’ve tried everything short of making a plant to try and grow bones. Time for a little-
Nap. Excellent. It’s morning again, and my plants have established themselves nicely, which is pretty cool. Also, it hadn’t been the plan, but me killing all the ferns around them for the materials to make them will give them lots of space to grow, which is fine by me.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
I’ve got a plan for today, even if it takes all day: Make a creature. Probably something like a spider. My thought process is as follows: Squishing beetles all day is all well and good as far as gathering blood magic goes, but what if I made a spider to do it for me? And while I’m at it, why not harvest my own plants every now and again for their plant and water magic? It seems like a good way to farm magic, at least to me.
Spiders… Eight legs, stretching the red tendrils of magic out into eight legs is easy enough, as is giving it all the parts a spider needs. Don’t know what any part of a spider is called beyond spinnerets and pedipalps, but I do know where the parts go. My little creature looks like a spider shaped out of blood magic, but it isn’t working when I try and ‘seed’ it…
Right, structural points, not outlines, fixed. Still nothing? Maybe some water, then. No?
Ok, new plan, beetle, I’m commandeering you.
How do I turn a mosquito-beetle into a spider… I pull a bit of red out of my orb, and ‘attach’ it to the ends of the insect’s legs, as well as forcibly move all of the legs backwards a bit, to fit two more tendrils of blood magic, and just to be safe, I slap some water magic on all of it, because it can’t hurt. Oh, right, I need to fix its body. A bit of squishing and stretching, plus a couple globs of blood magic since I didn’t have enough in the beetle itself… and voila! It feels like this beetle will become my perfect little spider in…
Hold on a minute…
What did I just do? At the start of this, I was against killing the beetles, I mean, I still am…
Looking at it without magicvision… It’s an abomination, currently, looking nothing like a living creature, and a lot like I smashed a bug with a mallet and then kept it alive somehow…
I… need some time to think about this… I’m going to-
Bed. Ah. It’s nighttime again. And no time to think, I see. I distract myself for a moment by focusing on my plants, but I don’t think there is any way around it… I don’t like what I did to that beetle, but I did it without hesitation, and without thinking about it, and…
Where is the beetle?
It actually takes a decent amount of searching to find, even though I had left it just sort of floating a foot or so off the ground. Eventually, though, I spot it. My spider, brown and black spots on what is unmistakably a spider about the size of a quarter, spinning itself a web in between the leaves of my plants. I’m… shocked it survived, but I like spiders, so I’m glad it did.
I know I shouldn’t… I like spiders, and I don’t want to hurt this one… but… I think I need to pick you up again. Sorry, friend.
I don’t think I can undo what I did to it to make it a spider… that seems to be a rather permanent process, but… I think I can do a better job at making it a spider. I spend a couple hours, checking with magic and regular sight, to make sure that my added blood magic and the spider’s shape look a little more natural, and I place it on the leaves of one of the nearby trees this time. I’m not sure how to give it the ability to reproduce, but hopefully it comes self equipped?
That might be too optimistic… Regardless, I feel bad about just picking up a beetle and mutilating it into what I wanted it to be, so I’ll try and give this spider the best chance it can have in life… I know it doesn’t have the ability to care, but still.
I’m not a human anymore. I think I’m only subconsciously forcing myself to think of the way I’m doing things as the way a human would do them, but that isn’t much comfort when the old me, the human, wouldn’t have mutilated a beetle for… what exactly? How had I justified it? Right, for the purposes of greedily gathering more magic.
Knowing that hasn’t helped me with visualizing how to do things, though, so what exactly am I to make of this information? I really wish I had someone to ask about this…
I guess I’ll try and make something again, just to have something to do. Maybe another plant? Actually, making a plant that bugs and stuff want to eat, so that my spider can camp it out and eat the bugs, yeah, I’m doing that…
Something like milkweed… It’ll be good practice to teach myself how to give things flowers, too. It’s not exactly easy to sculpt the plant magic into the shape I want, and it is certainly time consuming, but I think it will at least look like milkweed, in the shape it’s in. Hmm… I wonder what happens if I put blood magic where I want the flower to be. I don’t want a weird flesh plant, but hear me out:
What if the blood magic makes it more attractive to living creatures? That’s the intention I’m putting behind it, anyways, and into the ground my attempt at what I’ll call baitplant goes.
I should name my original plants. How about Green Sea, since the intent is for them to take up as much space around their roots as possible. Then naming my spider… I only have the one, so I should give him, her, or them a proper name. I will call my spider Abel if I find it to be male and Cytra if I find it to be female, Alex if it has no gender, done.