SHIVERS-IN-SUNLIGHT

There was little time for setting up the barricades until the skitterbugs would swarm the village. Shivers-in-Sunlight, the youngest of the village adults, assisted as much as xe was able to. As xir name indicated, xe was disabled: Xe had a heightened sun sensitivity which came with unconscious movements to bury oneself in the sand of the Kha Zha plain.

That was why Shivers mostly worked on the farms. Most of the animal husbandry could be done at night. It actually was better to do so at night, as the snails were nocturnal. However, the village sometimes needed xir to do work in the day and setting up the barricades was one of the jobs that had just that requirement. Everyone from the smallest child to the oldest desertwalker worked together on it. Shivers worked on coating the beams with salt and a certain plant extract that the skitterbugs really didn’t like to keep the beams safe for the yearly migration, as well as in herbal extracts from snail feed. The herbal extracts were poison to skitterbugs, not bad enough that they would have to handle hundreds of skitterbug corpses, but enough so that skitterbugs were disinclined to make the fence their dinner and avoided the area. While the beams were drying, Shivers mixed sand and snail excrement in a bucket to pour outside of the village, near a drop to attract the skitterbugs there and hopefully make them fall there. Shivers' sister Rises-At-Dusk who could handle the sun better, especially after differentiating (turning from an undifferentiated form (like Shivers-In-Sunlight at this point was in) into a gendered form), deposited it. Rises' sun sensitivity was easily managed with sight slits, that means a piece of bone with a slit through it, making the sunlight more bearable, while Shivers' sun sensitivity was bad enough that sight slits only helped early at dawn or late at dusk.

After the beams were ready, Shivers and many others put them into the ground. As Shivers was using xir front claws to hold a beam and trying to keep xir shivering under control, Rises saw xir and asked it xe needed assistance. Shivers declined, the work was difficult, but xe managed. Xe slotted the beams into each other by feeling, not by sight. Eventually Hunts-With-Spears provided relief for xir and xe hid in xir hut until the sunlight went away. When xe woke up, xe saw notifications:

Skill gained: Barrier Building 4

The village had used chemical agents in the protection against skitterbugs for 3 consecutive years, making slight improvements each time.

Path gained: Barrier Builder

Due to your work protecting the village against skitterbugs, you have gained the secondary path Barrier Builder. For more information, please check your status.

Quest gained: Kha Zha needs barriers

Teach the Barrier skill to the settlements of the Kha Zha plain. You can either teach this in person or offer the skill to the village repositories and have someone use it.

Reward: Siraskeman perception

After a long time, Solidarity has been able to splice the very versatile perception of Siraskemans onto Scorpions-of-Tsanh who are suffering from perception disabilities. As this is still a very resource intensive process, it is currently only available as a quest reward. You can either use it yourself or on another Scorpion-of-Tsanh suffering from disordered perception.

Xe chittered happily. Xe had heard that heightened sunlight sensitivity could be cured by Solidarity. Now, xe knew why xe never had that option. Xe realised that this meant that xe needed different skills from the village repository as this was not a quest to be solved by heliciculture (snail farming), even at level 7. When xe was finished, xe checked xir status:

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Name:

Shivers-in-Sunlight

Home repository:

Village-of-the-Oasis-of-swimming-flowers-that-is-the-source-of-the-river-that-feeds-a-million-mouths (Level 7)

Species and state:

Undifferentiated (immature) post-integration Scorpion-of-Tsanh

Skills:

Longstrider (Level 3), Foraging (Level 3), Language agnostic communication (Level 5), Navigation (Level 4), Etiquette (Kha Zha plain) (Level 5), Barrier Building 4

Path:

Primary: Heliciculturist

Secondary: Barrier Builder

Xe walked to the hut of xir parents Strives-for-Water and Chirps-at-the-Moon, who were about to retire for the night. “Strives, Chirps!” xe chirped happily as xe hugged them. “Solidarity has given me a quest. Can you make sure someone takes my heliciculture skill and looks after the farm. I have returned it to the repo.”

Strives-For-Water responded happily: “Sure, your sibling Rises-At-Dusk had seen that you returned the skill and nabbed it. She’ll make sure the farm runs smooth and well. Rises certainly will do her best. And if there is an issue, I still have my Level 5 skills in Heliciculture. I normally don’t need them, but given that I got it up three levels, I only ever copied it the the repository, never transferred it.”

TEKI

Teki gurgled angrily in his tub. The amphibian worker stared at the dashboard as if staring at it would change anything. The target seemed far too far off. Generally, integrating 5 planets per quintal would be doable, but only if the sector that was assigned had an adequate amount of integratable planets.

Which obviously was not the case for Teki. The only planets that remained were lifeless or so close to lifeless that intelligent life was pretty much impossible. Tshardal 3 was a poisonous hellscape in which nothing but microorganisms thrive. Ikris 4 had flowing water only about 30 hours of the year. And then there was that weird one: A desert planet. Its inhabitants looked like nightmares from a punishment world. The only signs of civilisation were scattered villages, partly subterranean, and the technology level was that of the stone age. However, the information of the System always seemed far too unspecific than it should be, even after sending scouting drones. Teki couldn’t even get a consistent map of the place. For some odd reason, the system didn’t even name it according to common nomenclature. Instead, it was named Tsanh while the system was named after a former monarch: Rangi.

Thinking about Tshardal 3, Tsanh and wondering if getting into the headache that was either was better than getting fired and probably starving in the polluted channels of the town.

Teki eventually realised that there was nothing that could be done to delay the inevitable. He sent the System the message to start setting up the magic-shapers around the planet to prepare for integration. This time, the response was as unexpected as it was fast:

Remote integration impossible due to instability. Physical presence required. Please get authorisation from your manager.

For every other creature, this would be a common request, but Teki as an obligatorily aquatic creature needed expensive accommodation. This was a system message, he dreaded to send.