It was about 10:30 now. In another hour and a half, his mana would reset and he’d be able to make the showers as well as the other items he’d queued up. He thought about sinks then. He thought about his plans and the rooms and the various people that would be staying in the rooms.

He finally decided that every adult room would get a sink. So would the kid’s rooms and the ‘not mobile’ rooms. He decided to keep it simple though, Hot, Cold, On, Off, and a volume control. No special pulses or whatever. Simple.

Of course, then he decided that the sink needed a stopper, and a sump, so rudimentary plumbing, really only a single pipe.

He had three different sink templates. One was a template for the big stainless steel sinks that you find in a restaurant's kitchen. A sink you can use to either wash dishes or wash produce or even thaw meat.

Another was a simpler sink, a bathroom hand washing station, probably from the trucker’s bathrooms he remembered being in Max's.

The third looked like it started out as a utility sink, someplace to dump the water you’d just used to wash your floor. Of course, the Bobs war on plastics continued so the sink was now made of some weird resin. It looked like when he really focused on it that the resin was coughed up by a type of giant frog. Well, it would have been if it weren’t being created by mana.

He thought about it some more. He guessed he didn’t need the utility sink since he could clean the floors whenever he wanted. The kitchen sink would come in handy, although he’d have to create it out of something else since he couldn’t make stainless steel yet. He was going to have to create a kitchen sink and a really changed version of the bathroom sink.

He opened his pattern space and added the bathroom sink pattern to it. He kept the faucet and removed the plumbing except for the drain pipe which he straightened and pointed straight down about 10 cm beyond where he expected the ground level to be. Then he changed the materials from porcelain to white sandstone and the metal to bronze. He also kept the sink stopper so the user could fill the sink with water.

Then on the right side of the sink, he created a bronze disk and added his standard H and C characters. He also added the M circle in the center of the two parallel horizontal bars. The only character he added to the face of the bronze disk was one that looked like a bar of soap.

The sink would work in the same way that the shower and the pool control did. Touch closer to the H, the water gets hotter. Touch closer to the C, the water gets colder. Touch the bar of soap, everything in the sink gets a thin layer of soap.

Touch the M and the water turns off and the objects in the sink or near the sink get cleaned and dried, including the sump under the sink. Walk away from the sink and the water turns off. Fill the sink to capacity and the water turns off.

He created the pattern and once again, almost screamed. Despite his best efforts, the pattern cost him a 100 mana. That meant that creating them was going to be expensive also.

He had about 30 minutes left to create a kitchen sink and then his mana would reset and he could actually create some of these things. He thought about the tables and realized that he wasn’t going to be able to make them out of red oak. He needed to level his skill more, but black ash would work as well. He loved the fact that the wood he created came out with smooth grain patterns, no knots, no burls, no fungus, nothing except straight easy to use wood grain. Everything was FAS, heck better than that.

He started on the kitchen sink pattern. The first thing he had to do was come up with the material he was going to make it with. He finally decided on white sandstone again after looking over everything that he had in his creation kit.

None of the metals he could create were rust-free at this point. So he created the sink out of a giant stone rectangular pillar. Then he hollowed out the base below the sink into four compartments, each with five-centimeter walls. He was trying to reduce the amount of material he needed to create. The less material, the less mana spent he figured. Then he put in a small slant into the base of the sink to get the water to drain.

The original kitchen sink pattern had two basins in it which he copied. Then it had two platforms set on the outside of the sink with a lip around them to hold the water in. The platforms were at the same level as the top of the sinks. He left that also. Why mess with good design? It had a single faucet and two knobs for cold and hot water. But it had a large pole that stuck up about 60 centimeters into the air from which dangled a sprayer nozzle. They could use the nozzle to spray wash meat, dishes or vegetables, or even dirty dishes he guessed.

He thought about it for a bit and then removed the faucet and the two knobs. Instead, he replaced them with two of the spray features. One for each sink. He also changed the metal to bronze. He figured the price was right and he could replace it if it corroded. Then above the nozzle and the spray handle, he added one of his round circular disks.

Actually, he realized, that since there was no water moving through a hose or a pipe since the water was all generated right in the nozzle, the odds were good that the sprayer would never go bad. It should never corrode.

Anyway, he did his customary H and C only this time without the mom button in the center. He also added a picture of a bunch of lines meeting in a point, a picture of a bunch of lines spreading out in a cone, and a bar of soap. Then he added one of those little icons that looked like they were designed to slide along a track. When you reached the ON side, in the real world that was, it changed color to green, the OFF side was a faded grey. That was enough functionality, he decided. Then set the temperatures to range from forty degrees to five degrees. Really hot and really cold.

The jet icon sent the water out in a steady stream. He thought about that. How far did he want the sprayer to reach? He thought it might be fun if someone in the kitchen could spray off a hot head arguing in the dining room but finally decided three meters was enough. He didn’t want to create a fire hose in the kitchen.

The cone generated a concentrated outpouring of water, and the bar of soap lathered up whatever was in the sink.

The ON/OFF toggle switch allowed the water to continue flowing even without somebody holding the nozzle. Of course, he added an automatic shutoff when the sink was full.

The mom button on the control disk, he replaced using the squeeze handle on the nozzle. If you release the squeeze handle, the water will quit. Unless you had toggled the ON/OFF switch to ON, in which case it keeps running until the sink is full.

He made the dry function happen when you started draining the sink. If you drained over half the water in the sink, the water in the sink, the food bits cleaned off, the dirt, blood or trash off of the food, and the water in the sump, all disappeared leaving your sink and whatever was in it, clean and dry. Living things excepted. The plan cost him 108 mana which almost exactly used up all the mana he’d either been able to create or siphon for the day.

The clock struck twelve and his mana reset.

He wished that besides siphoning there was some way of regenerating mana like he suspected humans could do with meditation. He still wasn’t sure why he couldn’t receive the skill, but he was starting to think that only humans could. Well, maybe the ‘non-crystalline blessed’ he amended since he wasn’t sure what other kinds of sapient beings were in the world now besides humans.

‘Hell,’ he thought, ‘I bet Baxter can do it. He’s a Temple Dog after all. I’ll have to see if I can train him. Hmm! I wonder if I should even think about training him. Is that Dogist?’ He laughed then. But he still wondered if the dog could learn it. He added it to his ‘things to talk to Baxter about’ list.

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Next, he created a pattern for black ash bar tables and benches and accepted it. 25 mana apiece. He was a little bit down that he couldn’t use the red oak pattern, but his skill wasn’t high enough and he didn’t think it was going to make it.

He felt the siphoning ability start and thought ‘at least I won’t lose 600 mana this time.’ It was about a minute after 12 so the loss was extremely small. ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!’ Saying that old saying made him miss his mom. She kind of lived her life that way. She seemed easygoing, trusting and happy-go-lucky to most folks, except those that got on her bad side. Getting off her shit list took some serious effort. He knew about that. There were some serious patches in his life where he and his mom had been on the outs. Looking back, it was mostly in high school and mostly his fault. He had been too full of himself back then.

Then he created the benches and the tables for the dining area. The tables were about five meters long and two meters wide. It sat on a simple pedestal created from two simple flat wooden legs joined by another vertical board that ran between them. He guessed it might be called a shaker table or something similar. The boards were once again glued and pegged together. He liked both the simple lines of the table, the beautiful wood and the sheer thickness of the tabletop and the table legs.

Everything on the table was about 10 cm thick. He made them that thick because he expected them to get a lot of use. He wanted them to be sturdy. He also wanted them to be heavy enough to not be easily movable. He didn’t want people bashing each other with the furniture! Breaking his tables and benches. Anyway, the tables took slightly over 1000 mana, while the benches, designed in a similar style and thickness, took slightly less. There were more of them to create, but they needed fewer materials.

He set up the dining room then with his newly created tables and benches. Then he created the comfortable chairs. They were expensive. He had no idea that they were going to take that much mana. Unlike the sinks, it came as a big nasty surprise. When he thought about it though, he guessed he wasn’t too surprised. They were made from multiple materials, they were big so they took a lot of materials to create and there were a lot of them. Each adult bedroom got one, plus there were the ones scattered around to allow people to lounge on them. Anyway, 4800 mana points later, he had his comfy chairs.

And, he was getting low on mana. It had been less than 30 minutes and he’d already almost blown through his daily mana supply. ‘Shit!’ he thought. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

He sorted out the chairs, arranging them around Max’s, putting them in their rooms but then he thought he probably needed to sit and prioritize better. Priorities are important. Especially when building something.

The second thing he decided was he was going to have to always have a mana cushion. Something in the tank that he could use if he needed an emergency monster. He’d spent 150 mana points to get his snakes. Of course, he probably couldn’t afford his current snakes, now that they’d leveled up and gotten so much tougher. But still, he needed to always leave something in the tank. He was sitting here without his boss monster and little mana. Since he had 500 mana left, he made it his new rule, to always have at least 500 mana points left.

Of course, once he leveled up some more and some of the creatures in the world or even men started leveling up, he’d need to up that cushion. As he’d been telling himself over the past couple of days, ‘there isn’t a pill for regret!’. And he could see himself really regretting letting that Matchstick guy yank him out of his home.

He started to turn back to his old familiar standby, or what was becoming his old familiar standby, studying runes. He had about 23 hours to kill and nothing to do except wait on his mana to replenish.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem to get bored anymore. He could practically stare at a wall and find it interesting. Of course, his ability to see mana, to see heat, to see Qi, to see basically microscopically as well as to see telescopically helped. He had to check that last one out by moving his perception down to the second floor and forcing it to stay at the entrance, yet look at the far wall. It was a bit of a challenge. His, what he called,‘point of perception’ kept wanting to move close to the other wall. Since it was all internal, why not look from up close? But he eventually succeeded and was able to examine the wall from a distance, even able to zoom up close and study the wall from about a half a kilometer away.

‘What a totally useless ability,’ he thought. And then spent about an hour trying to come up with some way that the ability could be useful. Unsuccessfully. He remembered repeating some of Michael Faraday’s candle flame experiments in high school chemistry. He remembered thinking at the time that it was interesting, but not really helpful on the SATs. He felt a little like he was repeating those experiments when he looked at the wall. Interesting, but not really useful in creating monsters. Or furniture. Or plants.

But one thing that looking around and experimenting with his perception was useful for, was killing time. After he’d given up on finding a use for telescoping vision, especially since he couldn’t use it outside his dungeon. Damn, it would be nice if he could peer out from his walls, he thought. He’d actually stared at the wall and ran through all his methods of perceiving the wall. It did give him a better feel for his dungeon senses. And he had all five of the human senses plus some. He could sense mass, he guessed. Not just weight, but also density. He could also sense temperatures, feel coldness, feel heat. Not in a pain or pleasure sense that humans did it, but as quantifiable pieces of information. And different objects had a different well, flavor to them. For instance, the big chunk of sandstone and the sandstone he’d carved the dungeon out of had a different, not taste, but kind of taste to them.

The one that he’d made tasted uniform, a little boring. The ‘wild’ sandstone tasted similar, but then had these exotic spice-like bits of flavor as he could taste various other things. Things like copper, iron, a whole range of little bits of trace elements from its stay on the bottom of the ocean were available to his 'not-tongue' tongue. Well, assuming the sandstone wasn’t about 15 days old now and it had subsumed.

It was hard even articulating it to himself. English just didn’t have words for the senses that he was discovering. Hot doesn’t really mean anything to a being that can sense heat beyond the level of a lava flow or cold past the freezing point of water.

He wondered if dungeons had their own language and how he could learn it. He wondered what it would sound like if it would even be a spoken language. How conversations would be held. He’d once read Samuel Delany’s Babel 17 and it had really opened the idea of language to him. One word containing a description of a power plant. How long would it take to learn a language like that?

Fortunately, he could quit thinking the deep thoughts. He’d killed enough time and it was about 30 minutes until the clock turned and his mana reset.

He had about 5400 mana points to spend and not a lot of time to do it in. The first thing he did was buy the sinks. He bought them one at a time so he didn’t run out of mana. He started with the kitchen sink. It cost him 1071 mana points. He hoped this wasn’t a taste of things to come, but figured it probably was.

Next, he used ‘Create Loot’ to buy a bathroom/bedroom sink. A single sink cost him 402 mana points. More than the small fireplace, less than the big. Probably more than the beds should have cost, but didn’t.

But he was grateful. He wasn’t sure he’d been granted a discount on the beds, but he looked at things like the toilets which were of similar complexity and cost way more and couldn’t understand why they had cost so much more than the beds did. But ‘All praise Bob!’ he thought.

He created ten sinks and ran out of mana again. At least he didn’t have enough to make more. He really thought about it. Did people need a sink in their bedrooms or want one? Did he need to create a sink or want to be a good host and create one for them? Was he a schmuck or a mensch? ‘Ok,’ he thought. ‘New plan. Tomorrow, I finish up creating the sinks for the restrooms and I create a couple, maybe three more. One for Hildi, one for Rex, one for my mother. . . and Rex’s only gets cold water! Maybe I’ll create sinks for people that do things for me.’ Then he thought about how much mana the sinks cost and added, ‘really nice things.’

He still had some mana left but not enough for creating another sink. He thought about it and decided that he could dig the sink sumps in the bathrooms and the bedrooms that were going to get sinks.

Each one wound up costing him essentially nothing. A big hole with a bathroom sink drain-sized hole in the top of it. All fifteen sump pits cost him a total of 30 mana points.

He still had time left and some mana to spend before his clock reset. He hadn’t been sure if he should separate the kitchen from the dining room. Kitchens were usually pretty loud. But did he want to separate the two groups of people, making a de facto ‘worker class’ and a ‘non-worker class'?

'That was the problem with old America,’ he thought. ‘Too many people thought they were above getting their hands dirty. Too many people doing anything to keep from getting their hands dirty. Although, it’s a kitchen. It’s loud.’ He decided to compromise and create small walls around it. Little half walls about 1.5 meters in height that had a black ash faceplate around the top. A lintel?

He still had about 20 minutes left and over 250 mana points left. Then he remembered the bathroom stall door hinges and latches. He’d never created those and the doors were still stacked in the bathroom waiting to be attached. 85 mana points spent.

And finally, he remembered the chests that he’d planned on making. A basic box with a lid and bronze covered sides. Again, he thought that he could do better for people that did nice things for him. And he created one. That was all that his leftover mana would allow.

He wondered about where that thought about 'doing nice things' was coming from? But then he remembered his earlier thought about the worker class and the entitled class. And then he thought about him, the ultimate worker and decided right then and there that he and his mom, his family and Hildi and Baxter had to have a talk!