Today Askos brought three of his siblings, Junior and two of the saint variant Dragonewts. I didn’t catch their names. The Dragonewts aren’t nearly as talented as their Nothrune siblings, which makes sense as the entire Nothrune species is specialized in healing and has a much higher baseline than Dragonewts overall. They didn’t let that discourage them though.

Junior worked quietly and efficiently the entire time. She doesn’t really show much emotion at all really, and any emotion I pick up from her via telepathy is muted. Askos noticed too and is worried about her, apparently this isn’t normal. The poor kid is traumatized by watching her mother die, something I can relate to.

I want to help her, but I’m worried that if I try and fail that I will scare her away from the one thing she seems to enjoy recently, or that’s what her brother told me. And she does enjoy me training her in the art of healing. If her heart had been literally ripped out of her chest I would help her no problem, but her heart was metaphorically ripped out of her chest. And that is, at least here, a much more grievous injury.

The others are also traumatized, but I get the feeling that they will bounce back better. They didn’t actually see it happen. I can tell that learning how to heal is cathartic to them, but they have no real passion for it. No drive beyond the desire to feel close to their mother.

It’s amazing the kinds of things you pick up on when you have a constant mental link with someone all day.

I talked to their father towards the end of the day. He said he was initially reluctant but after thinking things through he thought that it would be a great idea for his kids to learn from me. He seemed defeated, depressed, which is reasonable considering what he went through. He walked off after saying his piece, I didn’t get a chance to say a word to him.

In less depressing news, one of my Paladins reached the point where I think it would be safe to integrate all of my plants into them. It was one of the ones who already had lots of skill with plants.

And so I triggered an evolution. I shaped their body to be more accepting of having plants integrated into it, better at using plants overall, and much better at manipulating the plants inside of their body. Of course, I also integrated each plant one by one into their body in a way that would make it easy to manipulate and modify as needed. I changed the way my hivemind interacted with them, giving them more control, a bigger slice of the pie if you will. Others with that same modification will also have a much stronger mental connection to each other, my hope is that it will make them work together better. And last but not least I added both Solar Energy pool and a much weaker version of my device that creates Solar Energy using mana. It would be easy for them to figure out how to improve it, but for now, it is better to restrict their access to the stuff until they figure out how not to blow themselves up with it.

I look forward to repeating the process thirty-nine more times.

Other than that I hung out with Tiddol. We talked about things, happy things, sad things, traumatic things, memories we could barely keep a hold of, memories we wished we could forget, memories we hoped never to forget. We talked about the recent invasion and the mark it left on the people and ourselves. We talked about the not as recent almost successful attempt on Tiddol’s life, a certain Imp looked away in shame during that part of the conversation. We talked about our first meeting nearly 2 years ago. We talked about Mest and Thes and guessed at what kind of creatures they had reincarnated into. Maybe they are together? Real full-blooded brothers this time, I think they would like that. And we talked about much more.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.