There were a lot more bugs around Amy's dungeon than she’d first realized. The scout flies and jawtooth flies were able to move faster and capture other bugs more effectively. Soon, she had what appeared to be ladybugs, grasshoppers, and even a young mantis. The fact that she was gathering during the day might be part of the change, too, she realized.

Amy wondered if she’d be able to find actual dragonflies - she seemed to remember they were predators, so would probably be far superior to the regular flies. Though… if she did find them, they’d probably eat her minions. So that might be challenging.

And if she extended the scout’s hunting range into the forest…? Spiders would be a fantastic addition to her arsenal. They should add poison and silk to her list of things she could create. Though, they posed the same acquisition problem as dragonflies.

If she weren’t saving up mana for the human village, she’d have them go for it immediately.

As it was, though, she set them to gathering material and mana for her. She had the three baby rabbits head out to gather, too, while the speedily grown rabbit slept right next to her core. She set both the jawtooth flies and the gatherer flies on the babies for protection, in case there were cats or something around. The bunnies were far better than flies at getting plant matter. The scout flies were out catching as many insects as they could find.

At around noon, she discovered the obvious fact that flies - even enhanced flies - were not up to protecting baby rabbits. A hawk flew off with its snack, and she sullenly took her two baby rabbits back into the warren.

The speedily grown one slept soundly as Amy contemplated it. The rabbits were so much more valuable than insects. They produced more mana, both in life and in death. They were stronger, faster, with better senses. But they were also prey animals. The insects were probably only alive since she’d been using only the flies, and only right next to her dungeon. She should expect more casualties as she expanded her hunting range… and honestly, probably even next to her dungeon, too, as predators discovered the amount of food here.

She needed her rabbit to survive the scouting mission. And more missions after that. But what was she supposed to do about hawks? She sighed, and decided to add a magical enhancement for speed. That’d help with both scouting and escaping, she figured.

It was driving Amy crazy to wait till sundown. She fidgeted with everything in her dungeon that didn’t require mana, since she was still saving up for the trip.

The dungeon vine was working almost perfectly. A few tiny tweaks didn’t drain her mana that much. Energy was absorbed by the leaves and flowed in the form of sugar down the length of the stem, into the pods, which dripped onto the piles of maggots. Many maggots ate each other in their desperate bid to “eat faster.”

The second generation flies had already laid eggs that morning. It seemed to have stabilized at a reproductive cycle of about twenty four hours. Sheer madness, to have a new generation every day.

What would her rabbits become?

Amy glared at the sunlight outside the entrance. Every second made her even tighter with nerves. She wanted to see the village!

Finally, the ground in front of her dungeon was shaded. She whispered good luck to her rabbit, who oddly twitched her ears as though she could hear Amy. Then she sent the rabbit off running.

South, south, to the strange shapes she’d seen before.

Amy kept her attention on the rabbit’s wide area of vision, watching for predators. Especially in the sky. A few times, she diverted course when she got suspicious of something, but for the most part, the rabbit ran like it was possessed.

Which, she supposed, it actually was.

In any case, it only took about an hour’s solid trek to get to the village. During her trek, she noticed that the babies’ mother returned to nurse them again. Good, so her interference had no long term consequences.

Her attention returned to the trek. The sun was still high enough for Amy to see clearly, and she eagerly took in the sights and sounds.

Homes were built out of wood and straw, mostly. The roads were dirt, and well used. She’d not paid attention to the clothing that the girls had worn, but now that she saw lots of people, it stuck out to her. The fabric reminded her of the burlap sacks that she’d done three-legged races with, as a kid.

Window panes of something opaque - wood, or animal parts? - were wide open, allowing delicious smells to fill the air. The people seemed friendly and in good spirits. As she listened, she realized that she could both tell they weren’t speaking English, and also understand them. Even gestures made intuitive sense to her.

It was like being in a renaissance fair. These guys were definitely pre-industrial revolution. Amy frowned to herself. At least, her mental image of herself frowned. The rabbit’s face just wasn’t up to the task. In any case, she was having a hard time judging what she was dealing with, here.

She continued to have the rabbit slip around the village as she pondered.

On Earth, there were places in the world that were more technologically developed than others. Surely, that’d be true here, too. If she were here randomly, then the odds would be in favor of this being more middle-of-the-road. But, she was placed here on purpose. So, was this their version of highly advanced society? Or some tribal village in the middle of nowhere? Or something else?

Prosopon of personas had said that there’d be no priests on her continent for a year. So maybe this was a new continent they were settling? They could be new settlers. That would mean that they’d probably have skilled crafters, but limited materials. Glass, for instance - they might know how to craft glass, but might not have brought much overseas, and might not have found any good sources of high quality sand.

Lots of people noticed her rabbit darting around, but as expected, no one seemed upset by it. A few kids chased her, but she could easily outrun them. The handful of dogs were harder to outrun, and a few cats almost successfully ambushed her, but the magic enhancement of speed made her escape handily.

Wood was everywhere, but there was some metal, too. She wasn’t a history buff, but none of the technology and architecture seemed to be a perfect match for anything she’d seen in school or on TV. Some things looked a little more advanced than she’d expect, and other things looked less so. It made it hard for her to get a good sense of what she should expect.

With magic dungeons in this world, and priests who got power from the gods, there should be magic things somewhere. Shouldn’t there? But maybe it was like Earth, and only rich people got good stuff. Maybe this was just some random town, with noone special. Her rabbit nodded thoughtfully, matching Amy’s self image, and she had to laugh at herself.

Still, there might be a rich person here. That’d probably give her the best indication of their capabilities. She started looking for a nicer home, moving hastily due to the setting sun.

As she poked her head up to look inside a window, she felt a sudden pain in her side. It was enough to knock her mind out of the rabbit, making her less acutely aware of the rabbit’s suffering. The connection was still strong, though, so she forced herself back in, to figure out what happened.

An arrow shaft was sticking out of her hide. Mana was pouring out with the blood, and she realized that her presence was keeping the rabbit alive. She could save it. Even from this range, the connection was strong enough, she could pour her entire remaining reserve of mana and close the wound. It wasn’t worth it, though.

A man holding a bow reached down, and picked her rabbit up by the ears. He looked surprised, and pulled out a knife. It moved towards the rabbit’s throat, and…

The connection was gone.

Amy sighed. She’d gotten careless, and now she was down two of four rabbits. She’d have to be seriously careful not to lose the others.

In any case, expensive as it was, she had some excellent information. The biggest, in her books, was that she was leagues beyond them, technologically. Sure, she didn’t exactly know how to build… well, almost anything, really. Not from the raw starting material, anyway. But she was pretty sure that just knowing what was possible would make a massive difference. That, combined with her ability to put stuff together exactly the way she wanted? And, of course, immortality.

She could cause an industrial revolution. And whatever the next technological leap was after that. And maybe even get computers going. She’d kind of learned a little about how circuits worked from some video games. Batteries were all chemistry - she could make those out of some fruit and strips of metal back from high school.

Of course, that begged the question of what she ought to do. Even the gods didn’t know about the advanced technology of her world - at least, she was pretty sure they didn’t, based on their conversation. And they couldn’t take it from her mind.

That made for one hell of a trump card.

She fell back into her turquoise gem to think, drawing mana to herself in her excitement. There were too many things she didn’t know about this world, and wouldn’t be able to find out from simple scouting trips into the local village. But all signs pointed to her having incredible potential here.

All she had to do was not screw up, for a few phases of her life.

Technology knowledge wouldn’t protect her from some enterprising young soul from stealing or destroying her core. Between her instincts, and her conversation with the demigods, that seemed like a thing that would normally happen. She needed to be protected on a lot of fronts, and more advanced technology would only be a part of that.

Besides, practically everything she knew about was a tool for humans. It wasn’t like she’d be able to build an automated turret system within the next few decades, if not the next century.

After a year, the gods would start messing with things. She wanted to be ready for them. For now, her goal was clear. She was going to befriend the village; get them interested in working with her and protecting her; get a series of protections on her core, in case any of her new human friends were the greedy poacher types; and start doing some serious experimentation with her capabilities.

Pleased, she pulled away from her core and looked at her dungeon. She noticed something different instantly.

Her core was larger.

And now that she thought about it, she had less mana than she’d expected.

Huh. So, drawing mana to myself when I’m in the core makes it larger? Are there any other changes?

The obvious guess was that it’d make her magic stronger. What was a good test…?

She reached out to her vine creation, and decided to push the outside growth. Her hypothesis was confirmed, as it took notably less effort to make the plant grow. It took the same amount of mana - just less time and focus.

Her attention snapped to the rabbits. That was the reason she’d failed to capture the babies in the first place - she couldn’t push them hard enough. There were about ten other babies, all a few weeks old, scattered around the warren. She hadn’t noticed a big difference in mana between “her” rabbits and the others. There was some, but it wasn’t enough to be worth gambling on being able to pull it off.

She was tired. The scouting mission had been expensive, mana-wise. She begrudgingly decided to rest overnight, while her bugs gathered for her.

It was hard, but she did really need the rest. Falling back into the crystal, she let her mind wander with all sorts of fun daydreams about what she might accomplish.

Just before dawn, when the mother rabbits were about to return to nurse their young, Amy decided to capture all but two of them. She took her last remaining female baby rabbit, and used the last of her rabbit-type material to advance her growth. It made her nervous, to use up her reserves like this. Still, it’d pay off.

A whispered enhancement drew on her mana, and made the newly adult rabbit the best surrogate mother ever. She’d produce milk like a miniature dairy cow. She chowed down on some of the grass piles the insects had gathered, and with her tummy full, she hopped over to the litters.

Amy was originally going to leave one nest alone, but she changed her mind at the last minute. She could always find out if her enlarged core would enable her to take over things easier with the eggs of visiting flies - she didn’t have to delay getting the high quality rabbits for that test.

Next thing was to decide what to do with the humans. She didn’t want to go to their village again - losing two rabbits in one day had hurt. If she could get the humans to come to her dungeon, though, that’d be a good start.

Two aspects of that to consider. One, she did not want them to find her core. It was one of the few areas in which Amy fully agreed with her dungeon instincts - most people wouldn’t steal, as a rule, but they’d fall to temptation with a really good opportunity.

Instead of making an obvious entrance that was well protected, as her instincts suggested, she decided to go with a hidden entrance that was extremely unpleasant. First, though, she’d make the “human friendly area.”

The one room of her dungeon was expanded a little to the back, and broadened. All of her production components - fly breeding and vine nectar pods - were moved to the back area. The front was made nice and clean. She split the sections away with a complex dirt, stone, and glass wall. On the off chance anyone decided to break through the wall, they’d be sliced to ribbons with the embedded glass shards.

There were several openings in the wall, to allow for easy mana flow. Most were small, and wouldn’t allow more than an arm to get through. The largest one, big enough for a human to easily get through, was covered with a big portion of the vine, making it look like a solid part of the wall was simply overgrown.

The vine stem also had slivers of glass in it, looking like thorns, but way worse. Even better, if a human gently brushed aside the leaves, out of curiosity, they would be faced with piles of rabbit poop that were infested with maggots. How many humans would brave sharp thorns for maggoty rabbit poop? Surely not many.

On the off chance some human did decide that they wanted to investigate the maggot-hole, they would find themselves attacked by jawtooth flies. None of those options were very lethal, since Amy would rather humans give up than get hurt.

However, if anyone braved the jawtooth fly swarm, there were no options left. The entrance to her well was covered in a solid layer of dirt and vine roots. It’d handle rabbits with ease, but a full grown human would trigger a collapse. They’d be sliced with glass thorns and would slide down an oily passage, lined with thin, hooked spikes, to the bottom of her well. It was deep enough to drown anyone who fell in.

In the interest of being humane, she wanted them to die quickly, if it came to that. As a chemist, that part was easy to figure out. She got some bacteria producing some ethane gas down in her well. She’d turn it into an organic garbage dump - any organic material she didn’t have direct use for would go down there. It’d make for a fetid cesspool of slime and rot.

Better still, ethane was really close to ethanol, chemically, and was flammable, to boot. She’d be able to harvest the ethane, if she wanted. She could turn it into alcohol, which would surely be a good item for trade. If the human were starting to emerge, she could set the ethane on fire. And, almost for sure, the human would suffocate to death in the absence of oxygen.

Oh, that did remind her. She needed something to set things on fire. She thought about it for a bit, trying to remember all the different ways she knew how to create fire. Chemists were known for loving fire and explosions. In her experience, that stereotype was spot on.

One idea came to her, and she looked at her glass suspiciously. Quartz. She remembered learning about something called the piezoelectric effect, and how quartz was really useful for that. Certain materials, if compressed, would create electricity, and quartz was one of those things. Wasn’t quartz just silicon dioxide?

She frowned at her glass shards, examining them closely. There were a few different types, she realized - there were a half dozen different arrangements of silicon and oxygen in there. Though, it looked like that was due to imperfections in the structure. There were two types, ultimately. One was a crystalline pattern, and one was a sort of random, but stable, blob. The blob looked more like glass, to her. Maybe it was?

She separated them into two groups. Each one was carefully adjusted to be exactly its own pattern of silicon and oxygen, with no impurities. She let the first group form into a shape that matched its own crystalline structure. The glass-like one, she made into a cube. Next, she needed to hit it with something, hard.

Amy grumbled to herself. She didn’t have a hammer, and couldn’t use one if she did. Maybe she could use her magic to compress the crystals?

She gave it a shot. It didn’t work well, but she was able to see itty bitty sparks of electricity from the one of the two - the crystalline sample. The idea of setting up a system to create fire on command might be nice, but it’d be unreliable. Instead, she’d set something on fire as soon as she felt like a human might be getting ready to go too far.

At last, she felt reasonably confident in her setup. With that, she opened up her entrance. It was about six feet high, and perhaps ten feet wide. It looked like an overhang more than a cave, which was exactly what she wanted. A cave might seem threatening.

The vines were grown out even more, and with the rabbits’ help, she had them grow all over the entrance. Now, the shaded area had what seemed like leafy curtains. Drawing on more water from her well, she created a little reservoir above and behind the trap wall. A trickle of water began to pour down, looking like it was the reason for all this greenery. It collected in a stone basin before overflowing and seeping into a series of cracks in the ground.

Next, she made a few little boulders of stone. They “coincidentally” had sections that were perfectly shaped for humans to sit on, right next to the water basin.

All in all, rather natural looking, but quite convenient. Any human visitors would have clean water for drinking, and a comfortable place in the shade to sit. She might make it more obviously manufactured, if the villagers proved non hostile.

Pleased with her creation, Amy moved on to her next step - luring in a human.

Based on the interaction of little Maya and Sarah, she knew just what to do. Humans were creatures of habit. Most likely, she’d find Maya and Sarah in the woods again, and probably shortly before sunset. Sarah would be easy to lure with a rabbit.

Amy grinned to herself in excitement. Her upgrades hadn’t been all that expensive, and she had mana enough for the task. It was even a good time to start, with sunset only a few hours away. She gathered a bunch of baby rabbits. She didn’t have enough material to make them larger, but honestly, baby bunnies would be better at this than adults.

Time to go find the sisters!