While he wasn’t nearing collapse anymore, Mr. Crow was definitely still weak from his sudden journey and needed to rest. Good thing too, I had an opportunity to take advantage of. I claimed every animal that chose to enter my tunnels. Two boarsaur, both male, a gaggle of snakes, all venomous, a pack of catyotes. Felines with the sorta-solitary but sorta-pack-like thing that coyotes have going on. There is also a dark scaled long neck and limbed lizard with downward-facing tusks. Looks kinda like a sabertooth tiger. A buncha deerish looking things.

The process is simple, basically I just hook some tentacles up to their heads until I can feel their souls, then I gave them some simple orders. None of them seem to have the self-awareness required to tell the difference between my thoughts and theirs. My orders were simple: don’t attack any of my other animals, you live in my cave now, protect it from humans (other than Mr. Crow because he can probably kick your ass). They all had to sniff each other and the boarsaurs didn’t get anything but the ‘you live here’ part.

Boarsaurs recognize only five things: food, mates, danger, baby boarsaurs, and things they don’t care about. I managed to convince them that glowing red orbs go in the baby boarsaur category. Now they’re determined to protect me, but they keep trying to feed me tubers. C’est la vie. I gave Borb a little mouth so they can feed him, it just converts whatever is put in there into mana in the same way I convert the stone. It’s lined with tastebuds I literally stole from the boarsaurs tongues. It’s fine. I replaced them.

Borb keeps telling me

Yeah.

This is my life now.

Dee and Dum seemed a bit despondent for a while till Mr. Crow told them that the tribe will still need scouts. Then they were confused until he said, “It’s not a problem. Everyone knows and you did your duty as husbands, somehow.”

“We had help.” Dum replied.

“What?” Mr. Crow was confused.

“My brother-”

“Thank you for sharing, Nelin.” Dum is named Nelin, apparently. I… Don’t care. I like nicknames. Not like I can talk to them anyways. Still, I should try and remember.

“You’re welcome?” Tweedledum is, in fact, tweedledumb.

“He means shut up because he doesn’t want to know.” Dee helpfully explained.

“Akasha witnesses my trials…” Mr. Crow muttered under his breath.

They made a camp between the two entrances. Dee and Dum have a huge amount of stuff in those backpacks on theirs, but Mr. Crow brought nothing. He told the boys that it’s harder to teleport the more items he brings and it was important that he arrive as soon as possible to set up wards. Dee and Dum privately agreed that he probably just forgot. After putting up tents and setting up campfires, they made some shrines, simple ones. Two altars, one with a palm-sized book that Mr. Crow took out of his pocket, another with a small bow and spear that Dum quickly whittled out of wood. He’s really good!

After that Mr. Crow had apparently rested enough so he began wandering around casting spells. There’s a bubble-shaped invisible net sorta inscribed with circuitry around the entire area now, just big enough to cover both my entrances. Not sure if that’s good or bad for me. He’s incentivized to protect me, but...

I did some more work myself. Dug some living spaces for all my minions, none of them big enough for humans to get into without crawling. Opened a bunch of side paths and loops among the tunnels and then hid myself in a deep pool at the end of one of them. The boarsaurs tracked me down with singleminded determination and attempted to feed Borb more tubers. Boarsaur do not float. I had to manually supply them with oxygen and build stairs for them to climb out of the water with. Both they and Borb got depressed until I removed his mouth and attached it to a false pearl I put in their den to act as a proxy for Borb. Part of his nervous system is now hundreds of feet long. It takes him about ten seconds to taste anything that they put in there, but he’s happy with it.

Then I did some inventive water piping to disguise the source of the water although it didn’t work out quite the way I had planned. Need a better source of pressure. Geothermal? Later. I seeded a few new cores in my shell with the souls of some snails, but the snails have tiny souls, so I padded them with moss souls. Yeah, moss has souls, tons of 'em for each patch, like little grains of sand. I figure with the snail and the moss souls combined, they should be content to just sit there and chill. I’ll be using them later, but even with me pumping essence into them, they take time to grow.

Dee and Mr. Crow noticed when I started expanding my tunnels and both swore. “Akasha witness!” For Mr. Crow.

“Miphas’ balls!” For Dee. Mr. Crow cackled at him and Dee blushed. How he blushes with scales I’m not quite sure yet. I’ll just have to figure that out next time he gets close to my pearl. Not that I’m planning on letting him near. I like these people, but I also like privacy.

I started improving the little birds Wash gave scales. They adapted tolerably well to the changes. While their flying brothers swoop around and nab insects midair, these little fuckers just charge at the nearest bug. It doesn’t have a high success rate. I copied some DNA from the tusked lizard to harden their bones and managed to give them long legs and a longer neck. They look sorta like six inch tall emus with scales now. I learned a lot in the process. Don’t worry, I put their souls in storage before mutating them. We’re ethical mad scientists round here. They worked well in testing, and by that I mean the mini scaled emus chasing crickets around, so I made some more. The whole thing was much easier than adding new organs or the ability to respirate underwater.

All this took time, of course, and while I can’t see the difference between day and night, the elfses slept three times before the rest of their tribe arrived. They’re uh, yeah, they’re people. Not sure what to say. Dee and Dum have wives. The wives are very close friends. Such close friends they share the same tent, just like Dee and Dum. Friendship is beautiful. They got a gaggle of kids too. None of them have Dee’s ears or fuzzy patches. There are a fair amount of uh, half elves? And non-elves too. One of them legit has an exoskeleton. A few very tanned lads and lasses with skin instead of scales. A desert elf who is a cyclops. About 50 people in total. They use big crabs as pack animals. I want some big crabs.

Mr. Crow also has a wife. She seems as old as him and similarly well-preserved. Other than the lines in her face and pure white hair she could pass for a human in her 40s. She also has a presence about her, a weight that seems almost ready to spill out her skin. If I were to guess she’s just at the edge of manifesting an aura and has held back for fear of Imperial hit squads. There are a few others with that sense of power, but she’s the strongest. In fact, she’s got a necklace on that’s holding it in, I think. Or it’s doing something else that forms a magical layer over her skin.

They have a son too. He’s comatose. His soul has a big hole in the side like something reached in and scooped out the middle. See, souls are sorta like… Jello salad. A semisolid protected by a membrane with various squishy bits inside like bits of fruit. I have no idea what all these bits of fruit are. When I merged with Wash his bits of fruit got added to my bits of fruit- I had way more fruit and more jello too- and jello doesn’t really work like that but whatever. I also have a rock in it. It’s not squishy. Presumably it’s why Wash choked on me.

I just realized a single-celled organism is a much much better metaphor.

Moving on-

As I watch Mr. and Mrs. Crow fuss over their son, I get an idea. This dude, he’s built like a hero. A Hero. Like Conan with scales for skin. What if this was meant to be my body? Was I supposed to possess this dude and then lead the tribe to greatness? Use all my knowledge of random crap to fight against the empire? I know enough to make smokeless gunpowder. I’d have the rock hard body of a hero and my own mind and the training of Mr. Crow in the magical arts. Then Wash intercepted me and choked on my soul, his body formed a cyst around me, and here we are.

Hmm... Or maybe a ghost mosquito gave his soul the succ.

The world probably does not revolve entirely around me and I have very little information about anything.

Still though, the possibility makes me feel vaguely guilty. I have no reason to feel guilty, didn’t do nuttin, but if I was part of the plot that harmed this family I’d like to help, if only for spite against whoever stole my soul from, uh, certain death, and gave me a chance to, um, reincarnate...

Mmm yeah, I don’t really have much of a reason to get mad on my own behalf unless they sent truck-kun after me. Doubtful, the evidence of divine intervention back on Earth is quite scanty and there are plenty of people looking very hard for it. On the other hand, even if they saved me, they did plan to use me. Nobody likes being used. Assuming ‘they’ exist at all and this isn’t just a big pile of baseless conjecture.

Maybe I should put some more moss souls into the blender and inject the slurry into him. That’s how my soul stomach works- I suck all the souls of the little critters down a tube and they go into a chamber where they get processed. The processed soulstuff goes down a tube into my brain and joins my own soul. Feels nice. That might fix him. He could also be missing an important piece of fruit.

Erhm... I'll have to think more on it.

In the meantime, I’ll make some dirt. All my tunnels except the original cave are bare sandstone and water and that’s not a super great aesthetic. Kinda bleak. I’ll do some gardening and fill my whole place with critters, yeah.

Then decide the fate of a person.

Yeah.

No big deal.