Chapter 4

Digging

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Mason

Mason was going over his vague plans for next section of his home. He had an entryway, sure, and it was grand, but what did it enter into? Nothing, yet. This had to be fixed.

It cost a little mana, but expanding his little realm of influence had turned out to be a fairly simple process. It wasn't long until Mason had claimed an area to work in and started eating up dirt. A large, open space made for an excellent first room. Smoothing out the walls and making them the same marbled stone as the entryway, he stopped. Looking at it now, it seemed so... flat. Too one dimensional. The swirls in the stone were pretty, but repetitive and kind of boring. Considering what other materials he could afford to line the walls with, he tried different colors and types of stone, but it ended with the same result. Long, flat walls. He had to break it up somehow.

He tried making the walls different form each other, which was worse, and then tried dividing up the walls to make each out of multiple materials. Still no good, but he was getting somewhere now. Mason began to talk to himself.

"The patterns are nice. Spectacular, actually. I just want more variance in the depth of things. Maybe if I make the pattern deeper than the rest?"

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He returned the walls to his original marbled stone, but he made the colors in a more natural feeling shape, instead of the ordered diamonds of the entry walls. Then he shaped it so that the black cracks and swirls were receding into the wall. This gave it a kind of worn, weathered texture that he rather liked!

"Okay, this is good. I can still do better though."

Dividing the stone into two, un upper half and a lower half, he pushed the top half backwards about an inch. Then, over the ridge that formed between the two sections, he formed a long band of stone sticking out, half an inch form the bottom half, an inch and a half from the top. Instead of marble, this band was formed like a polished granite, with many colors mirroring the gemstones in the entry, and by extension, the colors in his own crystal self. Taking a good look, he admired his work and decided that it looked pretty good. He might come back and tweak it later, but this was fine.

"Now I have a room... but what to fill it with? There's no point to an empty space. There needs to be a use for this."

Mason didn't want to build purposeless things. Even if the purpose was just to look upon it and feel awe, there needed to be something.

He had some choices. This room could be for entertaining guests. A reception room of sorts. But then, he didn't know what kind of guests he would have, if he would ever have any. He hadn't seen anyone else yet, though he got the feeling that people eventually would be coming. He tried to imagine the memories of "people" that he had, and predict what he could expect in his first encounters with them. Would they be friendly? Did he need to make this room into a gatehouse? Would they be humans? Humans were prevalent in his memories, but far from the only creatures he could picture. Dragons, trolls, and other large things wouldn't fit into his front doorway... er, hole way. Maybe he needed to fix that, too. Merfolk would need water to get around, and couldn't just walk down his halls. If he eventually got a visitor and it wasn't even an intelligent creature that know how to open doors, he was going to be very disappointed.