She awoke to the growling of her stomach again. This was the morning after she had spent an entire day looking for nuts in vain. There weren’t any nuts or berries left in the trees within reach of this one’s branches.

The stream had also almost stopped flowing. She had been forced to climb through an entire embankment’s worth of mud before she reached the shallow trickle of the stream that was left at the bottom. It had left her very unhappy when she had to climb back up through the mud and then clean it out of her fur.

She was going to have to move again. The noises had been getting increasingly harder to ignore and they had sounded ever more like voices of some strange kind to her. When she first realized that the noises were sometimes repeating and responding to one another, she just about climbed down the tree and ran back the way she had come.

She didn’t know why the idea of that frightened her or why everything else frightened her but it did.

She steeled her resolve and decided that now was the time to step out and try something she was afraid of. She descended the tree and began walking in the direction of the voices. She wasn’t sure what to expect but she wanted to see something and cowering in a tree and running away from everything and everyone wasn’t going to keep her stomach full.

Meanwhile in Kaori’s apartment

“I’m afraid I still don’t get it. Why did she sacrifice her brother?”

“If she didn’t, she was afraid the great evil would take over his body and he would become the next demonlord.”

“But the duke’s son was the one that was going to become the demonlord. It still doesn’t make any sense for her to sacrifice her brother if he wasn’t even the one that was going to become the demonlord.”

“Ahh, but she didn’t know the duke’s son was the one. From the main character’s perspective, her brother was the one who showed the most signs of being the chosen of the dark gods. That’s called dramatic irony and it means that the audience knows things that the character of the story doesn’t. It’s a very commonly used writing tool.”

“Kaori-sam… san, can you show me how to complete the red forest side quest? I keep getting caught by the blood-golems. I just don’t see how you’re supposed to get by without losing a single hit point! It’s not fair. They put these really hard enemies in the way and you can’t lose any health or the blood-golems show up and take you back to the start.”

Kaori had introduced the lot of them to some of her favorite anime and games that featured a system and they all began to see where she was going with her ideas. She had gotten across the idea about creating a system interface for all of the inhabitants rather easily but it had taken a bit of discussing to decide how much info the system would display and who would be able to see it.

By now, everybody was on the same page about how to design the stat system. Now they were just so absorbed into the media that they had started on when trying to understand Kaori’s explanations that they couldn’t stop in the middle. Even the stoic Foglat was sitting in a beanbag chair in the corner of the library, reading a manga about some random girl that reincarnated as a magical girl in another world with an OP magic system.

At first, the group seemed a bit bemused by the idea that the entertainment from Kaori’s world would be her inspiration in creating a world. They had all changed their minds as the various media had begun to captivate their minds and imaginations. Kaori now found herself in a seven-way discussion about everything otaku. It would have been a twelve-way conversation but three were too engrossed in their games or anime to ask any questions and then there were the two reading in the library.

Suddenly, Kaori felt a tug at her consciousness and focused all her attention on what was happening to the squiringen girl on the planet below.

In the forest below

What were these things she was looking at? Each one was thrice her height and had huge proportions. Their faces were slightly elongated with bulbous brown noses and small snouts with whiskers and huge front teeth. They all had small beady brown eyes and were covered in brown fur with most of them growing a long beard. A few had braided their beards as well.

Each of them was also very broad and muscular. Even the ones that were plainly female, made obvious by the four teats, seemed to have beards though. They all had stubby claws and webs on their hands and feet which they were making good use of in holding and dragging the many pieces of logs around. They all also seemed to have broad flat tails that were only about three times as long as they were wide and were hairless.

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These things were the source of the noises that she had heard before. Several of them were chittering and clicking at one another. Others were grunting, grumbling, or whining but there was a clear meaning being conveyed between them. No matter which noises they were making in which order, the other or others they were looking at all seemed to understand.

The lot of them also seemed to be very crafty and industrious. They were all moving about the periphery of a small lake that seemed to have an island on it. There seemed to be a lot more of them on the island and when she looked, she could tell that they were moving in and out of holes on the sides of the island, just under the water.

The ones on the shore were all grabbing logs and branches and then swimming out to the island where they seemed to be building a big mound. Then she noticed that the stream had been blocked by logs. The logs seemed to be precisely placed too. She realized very quickly that these creatures were the ones that had made it so hard to get water earlier. The water was being stopped by the logs before it could go downstream and it was building up in this lake.

Suddenly, she was shrouded in shadow and quickly looked up from the stump of a tree that she had been peeking from behind. Standing over her was one of the creatures and he, because no teats, started grunting and chittering at her. She had no idea what to do and stood frozen for a few moments before trying to run past him. He made to block her on the left but she started right and just as he went to turn that direction, she actually did dart left and past him.

She could tell that she was faster than the creatures even if they were taller than her. The one that she had slipped past began slapping its tail on the ground and the others all turned to it. As she made it to the safety of the nearest tree she furiously climbed up as fast as she could.

The creatures all began running over to where the first one was and he began pointing to the tree she was in. Meanwhile, she was searching furiously for a way to get to the next tree over but the creatures had somehow chopped down several of the trees nearby. She had gone up a tree that she had no way to get out of. She wanted to climb back down and run to a tree further into the forest but they had surrounded the base of the tree.

Suddenly, she felt a weird vibration in the tree and looked around the edge of the trunk where a similarly strange sound was coming from. The creature there was chewing on the tree and as she watched, others began to join it. She went into a full panic and began chittering at the creatures to stop but they ignored her so she ran back up into the tree.

After many tense minutes, there was a sudden change in the way the tree was standing. With a snapping and a long groan, the tree began to tilt to the side. She could do nothing but hang on for her life as the tree she was in began to fall over sideways. She screwed her eyes shut and screamed while she clung desperately to the tree.

Before she was fully sideways, the tree stopped moving with a bone-jarring thump. She hadn’t been thrown from the tree however and this puzzled her a bit. She cautiously opened her eyes and looked around before she spotted the reason why she was still safely in the tree. The tree she was in had lodged itself into the branches of the trees further into the forest that she hadn’t been able to reach earlier.

Without pause, she rushed from her spot and darted into the next tree. Her exodus didn’t go unnoticed, however. The whole group of creatures began chasing after her on the ground as she picked her way through the trees above their heads. Unfortunately, she could only go a few trees in any direction because there was a small ridge of rock cutting across the ground between the trees she was in and the ones further along.

She circled around a few times but there were only about a dozen large trees in this copse that she could reach. The creatures had gathered at the bases of almost every tree in the copse too. When she got back to the first tree that they had felled into the copse, they had already dragged it away.

She then made her way back to the tree closest to the rest of the forest. She figured that they would get bored of waiting for her to come down. There weren’t enough of them to wait at the base of every tree but they had all of the ones on the edge so she couldn’t escape at all. With nothing else she could do, she found a nut and began gnawing and eating nervously.

The creatures didn’t seem to appreciate her settling down because the one below her began gnawing on the tree she was in. She got up and was about to run when she felt a presence and suddenly, she felt very calm. She began thinking again and a plan formed. She would wait for them to knock this tree into the next one over and run further into the forest. She went to the highest branches to wait.

Things didn’t go quite as planned. When the tree began to fall, it wasn’t towards the trees across the ridge of rock. Instead, it was falling out over the stream. She ran back up to the trunk and clung for her life as the tree arched ever farther to the side.

The tree was almost completely sideways when the top collided with the branches of the trees on the far bank. These trees were lower because the embankment was lower on that side. She was sent flying from the top of the felled tree into a tangle of bushes below. The trees and her fur received an impromptu shower as she landed in them.

Winded, panicked, and drenched in her own pee, she climbed out of the bushes. For several seconds, all she could do was stand there and gulp down air. Finally, a series of splashes brought her to her senses and she looked over to see the creatures coming across the stream.

It didn’t look like they had spotted her yet so she took the opportunity to run for her life. These things, whatever they were, seemed to want her dead. She wasn’t fond of the idea and made all appropriate haste to ensure she wasn’t caught by them again. She ran ever farther into the woods.