Gina watched Shale slip their way around the rocks, disappearing into the tall grasses around the river. She returned to her study, considering the lives she had inadvertently created. She had never wanted to be a mother, but this wasn't too bad right? She suddenly wondered if she needed to feed them.

"I didn't send them off with any water, or food, or shelter, or any fire starters, or any supplies!" Realization of the massive responsibility she now held gripped her tightly.

"HEY, SHALE! YOU NEED SUPPLIES! COME BACK!" The words hit the invisible wall that was the outside and dissipated.

"Great. My first children and I already doomed them to a slow and painful death" Lamenting over her bad parenting she drifted back to the workbench.

"Well, they were born knowing how to talk, how to get dressed and how to scuffle. Maybe they will be alright. When they get back, I will have to find out how much they know, and what they eat, if they know how to use the bathroom and where they want to sleep... I AM A BAD MOTHER!"

It took a while for Gina to come out of her slump, she decided to start finding out more about things so she could be prepared to help shale with their needs.

Gina was familiar with crafting, and knew that you only got out what you put in. This was magic, she was magic, what was it that she put in? She opened Status. She saw her energy was at 73. It had been 75 yesterday, then she summoned shale, but blacked out from exhaustion.

The only conclusion was summoning shale took all her energy. She opened Creature Summons. There, right below Wee folk was a new paragraph.

"Summon cost: 25 for level 1"

"Well, that confirms it then" She proudly said to her self.

Gina tried to break the system, tried to convince herself the summon cost less, tried to convince herself it cost more. She summoned a fish, then a bat, then tried to re-eat them. She couldn't re-eat them. Realization dawned that the life they had was magical in nature, so the summons didn't have whatever essence it was she devoured.

The summon costs appeared in the book without her prompting, she was getting used to associating numbers to how she felt. She also realized summoning a fish cost five times as much as she got from eating one. She was also aware of a small trickle of energy from the animal simply living in her soul space. That must be why she always had more energy in the mornings!

She wondered why some items were stored, and why some added energy. She tried devouring the stone in her storage, it worked, the number went down, but the amount of energy she received was next to nothing.

"So, I am a dungeon, I eat life and turn it into magic. How that magic comes out... no... the form of the magic is something I can shape, based on the blueprints I have. Oh! I wonder if I can create more copper!"

Gina tried to create more copper, her energy quickly draining to 50, and only a small patch of copper appeared.

"So, I can create anything! It just takes a stupid amount of energy to bring it into being" Gina thought for a determined couple of minutes.

" Well, if destroying is easier than creating, destroy I shall!"

Gina headed down the long tunnel from her room, the tunnel was about 200 meters long. She stopped outside the entry to the room and started consuming.

She worked her way along the wall in both directions, making a large room with a high ceiling right outside her door. The room was about ten square meters, as big as both her other rooms put together, she left a fairly thick wall between her new room and her old rooms.

Gina checked Status. The amount of copper she had on hand had gone up. There must have been a small vein running through her cave.

With the extra room she felt the trickle of energy go up a small amount, like her cave was her lungs and breathing became a little easier. She must be able to collect a small amount of energy from the world itself, the more room in her dungeon the more she could collect. She checked Status again and noticed the energy cap went up to 425.

"Now, time to get to crafting!" This was the part she lived for! More than that, this was the part she had once died for.

First thing she did was to make the small bathroom that came off her old bedroom. She wasn't about to have shale leaving their messes everywhere.

She focused on the small cramped room and started to work. The stone water basin with it's simple square stand beside the door on the right, the simple stone seat with a hole in it across from the basin. The wash tub took up most of the left wall. All the fixtures in the room were carved out of the natural stone, just like how the dwarves did it when they created their underground cities. A little planning, some careful stonework, and you never needed to build furniture.

The tank below the toilet didn't lead anywhere, she had no idea where plumbing was supposed to go, but things in her dungeon had a fun habit of disappearing by themselves. She tried very hard to convince herself it was completely different than devouring things.

She formed a small copper washbowl on top of the washstand, filling it with some water from her inventory.

The final touch was a woven reed curtain over the doorway, hanging from stone hooks she formed. "No need to waste energy on wood! She said proudly. Proud at finding an efficient solution, not proud of the curtain itself, which looked like something had coughed it up then laid on it until it dried it flat.

"That will do for now. When Shale comes back I can tailor it to their needs. Now, about that drink"

Gina had no tools, but she also had no hands. She was very familiar with the travel brewery she needed to make. Her mind focused and her concentration absolute. The pieces started to come together.

First there was the heat chamber. With no iron stone would work, it would just be thicker. Next came the heat distribution coils folded back and forth through the heat chamber. Next came the tumbler directly over the heat chamber, the tumbler should have been made out of iron too, but again, stone would work.

The tumbler turned in a way that as the grains roasted, they would become lighter and be pushed out the top into the boiler. The boiler was just a giant copper kettle. Water flowed in the bottom of the kettle, as it heated it boiled over a lip on the side and ran over a strainer into the glasswork. The strainer had to be perfectly crafted to push off the old grains that floated in from the top of the boiler into the fire below, while the flavor filled liquid pushed off into the glasswork.

The glasswork was the true secret. The heating coils from the heat chamber embraced each glass vessel in a precise way that slowly pushed the liquid through the system. As the liquid fermented, its density changed, and the lighter ale would separate from the denser boiled barley water (wort). As it aged and brewed it would move through the glass chambers and tubes until it spilled out the end as a perfect mug of ale.

The name "travel brewery" was a little bit of a misnomer, it ended being the size of a large cart, but that was what it what it was made for anyway.

Gina was exhausted by the time she got to the glass work. With no energy left she consumed some minor plants, fungi and a few fish, ending up with 8 energy. It wasn't as much as she hoped to have at this point, but it would have to do.

She spent the rest of the day off, playing with the bugs and beetles next to the waterfall, then went to sleep. Shale had not returned yet.