Eventually everybody was shipped home, one person at a time by Mibbet on her broom. (They insisted on renaming it a holy sceptre for some reason, and no matter how many times Mibbet said it they seemed to ignore that it was called Puppy.)

Mibbet was rather exhausted by the whole ordeal of course, human interaction was completely exhausting. Sometimes she missed the days when all she had to do to avoid interaction was hide under a rock. Or more recently hit things with Choppy until they left her alone. Princessing was a completely exhausting activity in her opinion. With far too low a bath time to drama quota to be worth all the hard work it demanded.

Then shortly afterwards newcomers turned up, beautiful women, and handsome men with bark-like skin dressed in deep green, it didn’t take much imagination to see that these were dryads, though the mystery was why they were showing themselves here. They weren’t exactly known for their amicable relationships with humans, after all.

That mystery was solved a few moments later when a barky blur darted past Mibbet and pounced on the leader of the grove, squeezing them in a hug. The blur, it turned out, was the Spriggan queen, who was not happily receiving head-pats from the gathered Dryad’s. The Spriggan queen then showed them the impressive array of seeds they had gathered, and started to lay them around the edges of the newly opened chasm. Following along the river banks. Mibbet had no idea why they started there, but looking at the expressions on the faces of the gathered farmers, they at least understood.

Soon enough the Spriggans set the seedlings sprouting, after which the Dryads, with a knuckle crack that was truly horrifying to hear, started work, pouring their energy into the new saplings until they resembled two year old trees. Many of which were of course fruiting variants, The locals of course watched all this mouths agape. Then with some effort they teamed up to lay naturally fallen logs across the water, lashing them together after some creative shaping, to produce a series of bridges of a sort. It seemed all that water had churned up a fair amount of decent soil. That and the local caves had it would seem, a decent supply of Guano. (Of course the sudden ecological alteration of the local terrain had also helped, in a sense, by encouraging said bats to produce a very generous deposit to get everybody started. Suddenly having a wall of ones home collapse followed by an unscheduled explosion has that effect on anybody.)

So once the bats had settled down, a large group of farmers using ropes of vine. (The Spriggans were generous enough to provide these,) headed down into the caves, and hauled up a decent amount in baskets, to get the soil decently well supplied in nutrients. Since without that even the Dryads couldn’t achieve all that much. You can’t really grow all that well without food after all.

The Spriggans carefully anchored the improvised bridges in place with twisting tangles of ivy, expertly grown through all the cracks and crevices in the log, until it more closely resembled a work of art than a regular bridge. Then strengthened the underside with strong vines. With proper care that should hold for a few years. (A bit of a bodge job as far as the long lived Spriggans were concerned, but for humans it would last a generation or two. More than enough time for them to establish more long term solutions.)

That done it was time for Mibbet’s least favourite bit of all. Compulsory socialisation... I mean the celebration. To her relief though the entire event was limited to food, with no booze provided. (On the grounds that when you have suddenly gained crevices that can plunge a man to their doom, it is usually not a good idea to provide said men with consciousness altering substances. Particularly not ones that may be an encouragement to a “hold my beer” moment, that would likely involve said crevice.) So instead much food was prepared, the Dryads and Spriggans were more than happy to be provided with several cartloads of good soil to take home. It being difficult to decide what to feed sentient tree creatures and all. It would later be revealed that they really appreciated milk and honey, proving at least one of the myths spread about them correct.

The feast went on for hours however, and by the time it was done Mibbet was extremely relieved to get back to the farm, where at least the socialisation was limited to people she was already familiar with.

The bad news however, was yet to arrive. It turns out Spriggans on the whole pride themselves on their status as pranksters. This lead to a rather unfortunate situation, when one decided to try to play a little trick on Mary. Which, well , you can just imagine how that went, and before long a full on prank war was declared. Errol of course getting drafted by Mary, whether he liked it or not, to even out the teams. (This resulted in a completely fair fifteen against two battle.) Before eventually, after a few too many people were caught in the crossfire, leading to a rather abrupt end to the situation. (Poor Mr Azbin’s ear trumpet would never be the same again, and Mr Groat’s goats? Well they would forever eye any rustle in the bushes with suspicion.) This resulted in Mary finding out that every trick she could think of had in the past been pulled by her mother, and the offending Spriggans finding themselves dangling upside down in a tangle of vines until they cooled off a bit. Errol on the other hand? Well he found out that no matter how old you are, you are never old enough to avoid getting dragged home by your mum. Who will always be able to reach your ear, even if they have to jump up and grab you in a head lock to do it, not that Errol’s mum would ever need to do that unless the ear in question was attached to a cave troll.