Hold on.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Well I don't breathe but I should calm down anyway. No need to fly off the handle. Anything that would be an immediate threat would be just as much of an issue now as apposed to earlier. Charging out and making a big fuss would just make me more visible to potential dangers making me far less safe than I want. I have time. Slow and steady wins the race. Ironic that, what with my monsters being hare.

With the addition of a second dire hare the effort to turn the approach to my Core into a treacherous array of pits, divots, and channels was improving apace. They seemed to divide up the labor with one stomping and gouging with the other moving the debris into semi random piles and ridges around the room adding more variance in the surface but keeping them just below the swirling cloud cover out of sight. They also tossed some of the newly created gravel out into the corridor to maybe alert me to the approach of an uninvited guest as they crunch under foot.

Seeing that they had that job well in hand and me nudging their elbow wouldn't help I turned to my new Leadership creator window thing. A number of the sliders and nobs seemed to govern purely aesthetic attributes slightly darker or lighter mist. Another nob thickened the trails of vapor into bubbly pillows or long wispy tendrils. There was even a button to turn off the mist entirely which didn't seem to work being locked in the on position. Similar lack of or at least reduced functionality seemed to apply to a number of other bits and bobs on the window which upon closer inspection all referred to the physical properties of the dire hare which was most likely governed by the Animal affinity that I did not have. Singling out all the widgets on the panel that were related to the Cloud affinity I had a lot more dramatic options.

After a bit of twisting, pulling, and poking I was able to work out that whatever mechanism let me borrow other mana affinities required me to have the majority of the mix be of one I controlled. While cross referencing my other informational screens I could find also suggested why I couldn't simply make more as my connection to anything outside my own affinities could only be accessed at the surge of mana I felt at the turn over of the day. Even with that it wasn't like it was an active process that I knew how to manipulate on my own.

I did come up with a few designs that looked workable but was uncertain about due to the limitations of having just a single affinity to reliably work with. Leaving the dire hare default looked like it would result in a slightly beefier variant that I could stylize as I saw fit to better pick it out of the crowd at a glance. For the other experiments I was able to tack their windows up on my wall and with only minor bugyness in their displays replacing the ones with random symbols. As long as I pinned the window and didn't dismiss it it would stay there.

First was the Mist-walker Dire Skvader which was basically just the dire hare with a pair of wings adorned with misty feathers. It was dubious how useful it would be inside but it undoubtedly looked cool. Thanks to the air flow in my Core room I did suspect that the outside wasn't too far away so the design wasn't deemed unusable.

Stolen story; please report.

Tier X Monster species Mist-walker Dire Skvader Level -+--= Mana Type Cloud, Animal Skills Stealth(mist), Dash

Second was the result of slamming Cloud affinity to one hundred percent with the Cloudborn Dire Hare. It was a fluffy cloud bunny. It was also not a wholly solid thing which might mean it didn't have a lot of options in regards to interacting with the physical world. I did wonder if tusks made of cloud would have any combat value.

Tier %NaN% Monster species Cloudborn Dire Hare Level 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999... Mana Type Cloud Skills Mist-step, Ethereal

Last was one that probably wouldn't provide Leadership to my hares proved that I could hijack the window for my own designs to a degree. The Mistwalker was created using only a smidge of Animal affinity and fiddling with a lot of the sliders to get it to drop the dire hare from memory. Leaving me with a slender humanoid whose body was almost imperceptible beneath the swirling mist that surrounded it. Its face was a blank swirl of white and a tendril of mist curled away from each of its joints and from its temples giving the appearance of being covered in thorns or horns.

Tier Ω Monster species Mistwalker Level 0.0.1 Mana Type Cloud, Animal Skills Mistwalk

Another thing of note was that finalizing the production had a cost of one Cloud Mana Pearl. Thankfully, I had one. Sadly I didn't know what else I could use them for or if I would need them for other things. Not to mention I didn't know if the one I had was a one time thing or how I could make more.

I looked up at my cloudy interior at the clock I had found in my investigations of my features. It popped up like a window but instead of a rectangle it was a disk that seemed to brighten as it approached the turnover point. The gleaming disk was doing its best impersonation of the mid day sun so I knew the turnover was near and I could test out some of my hypotheses.

A ripple of sensation rolled through my Domain but it wasn't the turn of day that I was expecting.

My monsters stopped digging and turned their ears toward the entrance before hunkering down into their misty suroundings.

Something was outside.

Something was approaching.