Aby gave one final review of the fifteenth floor, satisfied that the flagship and the wyvern knew not to kill one another. The gelatinous air pocket didn’t return to the center of the floor despite this, though, instead opting to give the wyvern his due space. Its ‘fleet’ seemed to be attempting to rejoin their surprisingly agile leader, with varying levels of success. For instance, the sole fish in its group had little issue moving freely, though it followed behind the flagship almost mechanically. Most of its jellies were at least basically mobile, but the other man-o-war were having a hard time reuniting, the currents of hot air redirecting them all over the place. As it stood, only a select few of that group were actually reunited, and the remainder stayed adrift.

Unfortunately, the core was unable to learn anything more about the fleeting bond from earlier. Since it knew of no way to find that presence, nor to coax it into finding it, it simply removed its attention from the floor, making sure to remain more alert to anything unusual which may happen. The bulk of its mind went into reviewing the events of the day, idly watching Sela go about tending to their core room and playing with the three spirits as it tried to puzzle together what it should do with the remainder of its free time.

The core could tell that night was just beginning, as the warmth and color leaking into its entrance was all but gone; only the barest hints of orange could be made out at the edge of its awareness. In its place, the dim white glow of what it now knew to be the moons Nai and Eln tried in vain to match the light of Sol. It was a fruitless endeavor, so soft was their light that Aby was almost fooled into thinking the night to be completely dark thanks to the din of its own colors and glows, and it was only recently that they started increasing in intensity enough for the core to treat the glow as a reliable way to gauge time.

Normally, nights were the only time Aby was able to run any actual maintenance, even before the sapients had evidently monopolized invading it the core could make out a definite trend, and there was almost always a lull in the amount of creatures invading when the night came. Because of this, not only were its nights generally the least busy for it, they were for its denizens, too, and they had settled into their own rhythms. With most of its aggressive creatures starting to slow down for the night, the core watched as the meeker creatures tentatively began their own routines.

Many of Aby’s floors began to bustle with activity once more after just a brief moment of motionlessness, especially the floors modeled after the reef above. Rather than simply wandering shoals of fish or various large predators, the nights instead belonged to the creatures which weren’t capable of making a real difference in any invasion. While some predators were still on the prowl, like the ennedi shark which hadn’t stopped terrorizing the eighth floor since her creation, the majority shifted towards those hoping to simply eke out a living within these hostile halls. Seahorses bobbed along, smaller reef fish went about eating their own foods, and even the spirits seemed to be more spirited in their activities despite being ignored by almost everything Aby had.

That did, however, bring Aby’s attention back to the twelfth floor, to the ruined section which saw the conflict between the core’s wyvern and drake. More specifically, Aby was watching as the Undines on that floor and the eleventh seemed to come to some unspoken agreement, and without any interference, began to congregate around the shaft between the two floors. What they were doing remained a mystery, but whatever it did led to the diminutive elementals acting in as a group instead of moving about individually.

Dozens came together, flickering brightly towards one another before they began to gather at the edge of the devastation; it took a mere quarter hour for that entire portion of the floor to go from one of sandy dunes and tidal pools to almost completely liquid, and from above it appeared to be an actual beach, now. The large pond of water at the entrance took up nearly a fifth of the kilometer wide floor, and the Undines had begun to gleefully swim around the deeper waters, even when nothing else had dared to approach the crater formed by the two draconic combatants.

Almost nothing, anyways. The drake was watching the living lights with apparent interest, and he was sitting on his haunches as his head followed the leading spirit. Aby could tell with just a cursory examination of their bond that the drake was immensely satisfied with his own handiwork, even if his pride was a little hurt from the loss. Still, having experienced a skirmish on that sort of scale was more than enough to leave him both pleased while still desperately wanting for more.

After joining the drake and watching for any changes in the spirits’ behavior and seeing none, Aby left them to their own devices, adding yet another item to its mental list of unexpected or unusual creature behaviors. It once more checked on the progress of the kobold eggs, unsurprised to find that they weren’t quite ready to hatch, nor that the drake kin clutch was even further from doing so. It did learn something interesting from the kobolds though; despite their unborn nature, the core had apparently already formed a mental link with them. It wasn’t certain when, as it was still developing in much the same way as they were, but it had a few ideas and could get confirmation when the developing drake kin unlocked a template, whenever that came to pass.

On the subject of monitoring, it decided to check on a few creatures which it had made note of earlier, ones it thought were possibly evolving ‘naturally’, rather than through its own selection. While it had no way of knowing for certain, if it stumbled across a creature abnormally unlike the majority of their species, it was likely to note them down through their bond with the core, something which allowed it to find them in an instant. It couldn’t do this for everything, since it would just as much defeat the entire purpose of doing so as overload its mind with multiple the tens of thousands of creatures within its halls, and that was discounting the many, many more which had some form of rudimentary presence that Aby neglected.

Still, having merely a few dozen creatures to be slightly more aware of at any given time was hardly straining to the core, and it was more than capable of splitting its awareness enough to give a quick glance at many of them, and a more detailed examination to a small number. It didn’t see too many changes to those creatures which it marked that it deemed exciting, but there were a few with definite morphological differences to what it had remembered them as last.

One of the biggest changes it saw was that of a ninth floor seagull. The bird had caught its eye a few weeks prior for merely being a tad smaller than the rest, but by now it was almost half the size as its counterparts, with a wingspan of around two-thirds theirs. It was still a common coastal seagull like the rest, but one would be hard-pressed to connect the solidly grey bird with a wickedly hooked beak to its less aggressive counterparts.

The only other difference that came close to that was that of the rifle shrimp it had made note of much more recently. The dull grey carapace had grown slightly larger, while its claw, slightly smaller. It wasn’t so comically proportioned now, and the slight differences in color were another indication of something occurring. What was once matte grey was now lighter, nearly a lustrous silver; what was once a dark red was now a vibrant orange. And most striking were its antennae, which had gotten both shorter and thicker, approaching the point they’d be considered less a sensory organ and more an ornamental decoration.

A few other creatures were also actively different than when the core had last paid them any attention, and some were showing no changes despite having been monitored for extensive lengths of time, specimens Aby no longer thought were naturally evolving and instead merely showing some form of variation, like the bull shark with a pair of tiny horns above his eyes which turned out to be nothing overly interesting.

There was another brief lapse in Aby’s thoughts as it began to contemplate what next to do, or if it’s nightly activities had already been completed and it should begin silently monitoring its halls once again. Eventually, its attention flitted off elsewhere, taking care of yet another task it had thought up in the interim.