SHIVERS-IN-SUNLIGHT
Shivers woke up and emerged from the sand. As light hit xir eyes, Shivers tensed in order to suppress xir twitching. Except, it didn’t start. Xe saw the light and slowly unclenched xir muscles and there still was no twitching. Xe slowly moved xir legs and the control was amazing. Xe felt like xe could manipulate grains of sand with xir legs. Xe crawled out of the sand and looked at Skips sitting in the tent. Seeing her for the first time in actual light confused xir, she looked much browner than xe imagined in the low light. Instead of being colourful like the spiders, she had the colour of the sand. Both her skin as well as the fabric that she covered herself with seemed to blend in with the sand of the Kha Zha plain. If her hair didn’t tend towards the yellow, she would be almost invisible. Xe had assumed that the difference in brightness came with a difference in hue. "Skips, I can see you now!" xe said.
Skips opened her eyes. They actually had a blue hue with a black centre. "I am glad to hear that!" Skips moved towards the opening of the tent and opened it with a flourish. Rises rushed in and hugged xir. So did xir parents until xe was in the middle of a cuddle pile.
Examining literally everything in the light of the day was amazing. Everything was so vibrant. All colours screamed out to xir to be beheld, to be embraced, to be nibbled on. The colours were quite amazing: The beige of the sand, the green sheen of the snails, the blue of the sky, the green, yellow, red and purple of the vegetation, tents were not just made out of a dark cloth to keep the night’s cold out, but they also had countless embellishments by the people that lived in them. The Scorpions-of-Tsanh had a dark blue tint on their carapaces. Shivers looked at xirself in still water and noticed that xir eyes looked different than those of other Scorpions-of-Tsanh: They looked as if a soap bubble was constantly part of them, shining in all colours xe could imagine instead of being the deep, dark, profound pools of black that others had. Xe was mesmerised by the change. And by soap bubbles, which Skips likened to them. Shivers spent the entire day just admiring things and asking xir family as well as Skips if they saw things in the same way.
TEKI
Checking a map of the planet, Teki sighed. Most of the planet's population lived on the Kha Zha plain with only isolated groups in the highlands. Most protocols for integration didn't consider this. They assumed a planet's population that settled the planet. They assumed a planetary population of at least one million sentients. They assumed oceans existing, which on Tsanh wasn't the case. Here on Tsanh, he had to make the decisions himself and while good decisions would be ignored, bad decisions would lead to getting chided. This had, over time, led to a growing unease around making decisions. As the automatic assignment of dungeons failed however, Teki had to make many decisions quickly. And he hated every second of it. He knew that the Kha Zha plane would be where most of the dungeons would be located, but as many of the inhabitants remained near their settlements and trade was existent but sparse, the dungeons needed to be closer to the settlements than normally. They also needed to be close to places that the inhabitants visit, like waterholes, fields and farms, with the harder dungeons further away from settlements to not just wipe the inhabitants out.
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He thought of Sarah and bile rose in him. Not because he hated her per se, she did get him the watersuit after all. He hated however what she made him go through at work and he fully understood that there was a difference between difficult people at work and generally harmless people who with a seemingly innocent flick of the tongue can cause more chaos than any particularly dedicated unpleasable grump. He then placed the one grade 9 dungeon that he could assign to the planet near Sarah’s most common whereabouts before she got rid of her tracker. Most likely the place where she lived now. Just incidentally near the largest settlement. “Great potential! I can see it now. Sarah, you either stop being my problem because you die or you stop being my problem because you will succeed and be the problem of someone else, probably of your family, maybe even of the Administration!”
The anger of that particular cluster made him break through his indecision and he placed the other dungeons as well as spawn points. Associating creatures was rather difficult though. The creatures were supposed to be killed by adventurers, not the environment minutes after spawn. The repositories had some creatures that would thrive in the Kha Zha plains but some were just very high level, others were low in level but expensive to spawn and thus off limits, again others would require other species to thrive, which in this environment just couldn’t. Teki could either make the most boring, generic spawns or he needed some guidance and inspiration. Eventually, in a flash of inspiration, he sent a message to a coworker: “Hey Kata, do you have a link to the betabox? I might need some of the critters in it!”
The betabox was a set of creature designs that were never officially seedable, but could be seeded with some finagling of the System. Some were too dangerous, some were too frustrating, some were too easy to defeat and some just too bizarre. Some of the bizarre creatures were extremophiles and had a chance of falling to stingers of scorpions, not thirst, heat or exposure at night. He still decided to add some water sources in order to give these creatures at least a bit of a fighting chance. These would only last a short while, but would condense magic into drinkable water. Just tiny trickles of it, but it would hopefully help with the initial spawning condition. Especially as he put them in paths from spawn points to scorpion infrastructure and settlements. He smiled a genuine smile as he remembered how much integration helped his own species, the Keani. It would be a tragic time for many, but becoming part of the global system would be so worth it. It gave the Keani permanent settlements, access to many powers and skills and access to the entire integrated universe. Teki sung as he accessed the betabox and tried to persuade the system to spawn its contents.