One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is that I feel sorta owned and I don’t like that at all. The Sahii seem to be nice people and they’re playing nice with the other tribes and all, but I don’t belong to them. They don’t choose who accesses me and who gets my water! Fuck that. Now that I’ve revealed myself to be personish maybe they’ll be more polite about it. Maybe not. Either way I don’t want to be dependent on the charity and morality of others. Even if the Sahii will respect me, somebody else might take over and lock me down. It’d be especially bad if they had aura users- just one near my core would prevent me from moving myself or doing anything at all, really.

So, for defense I have several options. Rely on humans. Good, not great. Recruit more creatures- they’re blocking my two entrances. Don’t think I can get anything else good. Breed more creatures. I have two male boarsaur and one female feliz, then a buncha creatures that couldn’t stand up in a fight. A few snakes maybe. Besides, breeding takes time. Unless I can accelerate it… Almost certainly.

So what can I do? Best options are traps and confusion. I have a number of classic pit traps concealed by moss around but I really can’t see them being all too effective against competent enemies. I have a hall of doom style rolling boulder trap- the best part is that the hall they run down is a dead end! I have to trigger that one manually tho. A problem. Some thin steel wires, both tripwires and ones positioned to take the neck. Underwater nets. Not much else. I’ve been slacking. Traps don’t excite me.

So finally: Confusion. I have thus far made a determined effort to avoid a straightforward floorplan. The entire thing is a maze and half of it’s flooded. Despite my efforts though the essenceflow is rather straightforward. Anyone who can detect it can just follow their nose and find the right path- or at least a path that will EVENTUALLY work. Hopefully I can scramble my core around in that event but I move quite slow. I have to keep moving as far as my roots will allow and then grow new roots to connect to the warp pipe. I do this at supernatural speed, but it’s still a crawl to humans.

So here’s my secret plan: Snorbs. The dozen snail orbs I’ve been growing are finally ready. They took a lot of work! See, half my biology is based on those magic organs. Essence seems to naturally produce what is necessary for whatever creature receives it, but it doesn’t get rid of waste. My mana organs do that, turning CO2 back into O2 and ammonia back into water.

I cannot replicate these organs.

I tried real hard. They’re mind-numbingly complex and I can’t make them all ethereal like they are in me, I have to etch them on something. Plus there’s an automatic factor that the organs have which I can’t figure out how to reproduce either, so far I’ve only figured out always-on and on-when-focused upon.

When I remove the snorbs they quickly become nasty and I have to manually act as their kidney and lungs. That ain’t practical. I can only reach so far and these things are going to be scattered all over. Plus it’s a pain in the ass.

My solution was low tech, sorta nasty, gettin down and dirty with duck tape. I, uh, killed a bunch of rodents and integrated their organs with the ethereal guts of the snorb cores. Kidneys, liver, bladder, heart, lungs. Finicky work. Now they breath like a natural creature and occasionally leak pee out of their pores. Gross...

Borb was jealous of all the attention so I made him a drum set. Lil dude’s happy as a clam now. I’ve been feeding him souls of other species of songbirds and he’s been getting much better at improv. Plus a bit of music theory class. Not that I know more than the bare bones myself.

While everyone was sleeping, I went around planting them. Each of them gets a little maze below the level of the tunnel- they’ll fill up the maze, then the essence water will spill out into the river tunnel. The mazes are also connected at the bottom to give me a little worker’s tunnel to move around in. They can’t grow roots themselves, so I had to connect them to my spare roots and the warp tunnels manually, but once set up they started happily spewing out essence water at a respectable rate. All twelve of them together almost equaled my own output!

...Yeah, I need more for this plan to work.

I’ve carved a big channel through about half the circumference of the crater walls- still working on the other half- and just before the Sahii wake I start making a bunch of exits into the crater. Now instead of one entrance which can be monopolized I have a dozen, each with their own little stream! Block that, fuckos! Soon as each entrance opens it attracts more animals- some of them come inside and get claimed, but most just enjoy the water. It’s okay. I can be patient. You’ll all be mine when I make a tunnel system under the entire crater floor. Or maybe I’ll make a lake. Gonna take a while till I get to that point.

Whatevs.

Next comes another project near and dear to my heart. Geothermal! The problem here is I can’t dig that deep. My tentacles only go down so far and if I’m going to move my core down I’ll have to dig tunnels big enough for essence venting and then I have a gigantic bottomless hole constantly venting steam which is a fucking awesome idea, but not what I’m really going for right now. I just want the steam so I can use that for mechanical power, putting water on higher levels, and just for blasting at people in traps. So many options!

The solution I have come to is to use the runescript that makes my tentacles dissolve stuff into mana. I just etched it on a rock. That didn’t work out- the rock dissolved itself, disrupting the runescript. I had to investigate some more- turns out when I activate the bit in my core, another bit of runescript shows up on my tentacles that gives them a protective barrier. It still took several attempts to find a way to combine them so that the rock is protected and has a field of melty on top.

Then I turned the rock upside down.

Bye bye!

Just look at it go, like it’s sinking into mud.

This will take a while. But hey, it's set and forget! Can't get more convenient than that.

Anyways the rock will probably melt when it gets hot enough, disrupting the runescript and stopping the process. Otherwise it’ll burrow into the very center of the world and turn the molten core of the world into pure mana. Depends on how the barrier works. I think it’s just a ‘this doesn’t melt from that particular effect’ barrier but it could also be a barrier that blocks heat.

Hmm...

I’ve decided to ignore this possibility.

Why don’t I think of these things before I do them?

Well, I’d have tried it out either way. The Gods can clean it up.