It’s been a few days.

They look nothing like milkweed, and they smell just so, so foul. On the positive side, they have fruit. Well… I don’t know if it counts as fruit, but my baitplants have a cluster of yellowish orange sacs with flesh, juice, and seeds inside of some more protective leaves at the tips of their stalks, so I guess that technically makes them berry plants? I don’t know how plants are classified, but I’m calling it a berry.

Oh, and the mosquito-beetles love them, so much so that Cytra started setting up webs to catch the eager bugs all on her own, without me moving her there. The wasps, though…

One of them tried to attack Cytra, so I squished it, and then I threw the wasp’s blood magic at her with the intention to… I don’t really know, I guess I just didn’t want wasps to attack her, but it does appear to have worked as intended, at least in that case.

With the rapid success of my baitplant, I placed a few more around my orb, and even managed to find a way to fit them inside of the green sea plants without them competing, which is pretty cool.

Anyways, yes, I found out Cytra’s gender! It turns out I was just doing things a bit wrong. If I use the same intention I use to feel what the leaves of my plants look like on Cytra, I can get quite a bit of information about her. The structural integrity of her body and her gender, for example.

Granted, ‘structural integrity’ and ‘gender’ are wildly unrelated, so maybe that’s just what I found out because that’s what I wanted to know?

I’ve also tried ‘splitting’ my healthier green sea plants the same way you can split the proper hosta plants I based them on, and it works. I considered killing a bunch more of the ferns to spread them, but decided to just fill the space every couple feet with a green sea plant, and then let them grow naturally. I also tossed some baitplant ‘berries’ on the ground around me, hoping that they will sprout into some more of the stuff for Cytra.

My orb is completely hidden from view by the green sea now, and it looks very natural. If I couldn’t ‘feel’ where I am, I wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at it from the outside. It's also got a lot more blood and plant magic in it than it had before, So my best guess is that if anyone out there has magicvision like I do, I'm not actually hidden at all.

I also think my initial plan to create life without mutilating stuff was a bit flawed. I’d been trying to make an adult spider, from scratch, using magic. I don’t think I should have tried to. After all, the plants I designed on a very small, minimalistic scale, and then just sort of let them develop according to what I wanted them to be. So, I should try making a baby creature.

Stolen story; please report.

Actually, that might still be too complicated. Time for Egg.

That’s right, Egg.

I think an egg is pretty much just a sack of water and nutrients that a potential creature goes into, so that’s what I’ve made, a ball of blood magic filled with water magic and a tiny amount of more blood magic. It obviously wouldn’t hatch into anything if I created it, and it is very small, but I can create it, which means it’s what I’ll call a ‘stable’ design. I need more water magic, though, so a couple more ferns die for the paltry amount of water magic I get from them, at least when compared to the plant magic.

Just like my baitplant and green sea plant.

Right, so how to make sure it actually hatches into something… hmm…

Eventually I settle on just copying the magical schematic for a mosquito-beetle and just shoving it inside of the egg, and that seems stable enough to me, so I guess the idea is to make an egg design, then make a design for a creature, then put the creature design in the egg design, and then make the egg. And then, presumably, my creature design will grow from the egg.

That’s a lot of steps and ways things can go wrong, but I guess creatures are just built differently than plants. It also leaves me with the rather disturbing idea of having something like my baitplant grow eggs instead of berries, but I squash that one before I consider actually doing it.

Instead, I think I’ll take some time and decide what I want to try and grow for my first experiment.

Oh! I have a guest… Hmm… That’s an elf, pointy ears are a dead giveaway, even if I’ve only played D&D once. Looks like a male, but I’m not entirely sure. I don’t really know why he’s here, to be honest, but he does take a minute to look at my patch of plants, which gives me more time to examine him.

Cloth pants and shirt, different types of cloth, though, a basket with some plants in it… Ah. He’s out gathering herbs? That sounds about right, to me, which, on second thought.

Shit, he’ll want to collect some of mine, maybe? Is that why he’s looking this way?

I poke Cytra with my magic hands with the intention to get her to hide, which seems to work, since she immediately retreats from her webs to being underneath the green sea just before the elf gets close enough to smell the baitplant.

Ah...

I mean, I get it too bud, they do smell foul, but there’s no reason to cover your mouth and run off like that, though. Unless they really do smell that bad…

Ahh well. I guess I should tell Cytra it’s safe to come back out now. No, wait, she’s already come back on her own, excellent. I guess I did tell her to ‘hide’ just then… Hmm. So maybe I can do more than gather information and physically move things, aside from the obvious magic stuff. I poke Cytra again, with the intention for her to spin in a circle, and she does.

Huh. Neat. I guess I know how I’m wasting time until I get tired again.

Sure enough, by the time I’m starting to feel like I could use a reboot, I’ve successfully managed to get Cytra to make a couple little decorative webs, which also double as functional webs. What was I doing before that? Oh well.