Two men, rough, with axes and beards and leather clothing. They looked like they'd been chopping trees and just stumbled into Fred's domain. They stepped carefully into the main hall, and checked the empty room on the right. Then they peeked into the wolf's lair on the left. The wolf was up, ready and growling, looking like a hound of hell all by itself. The two men ran in terror immediately, and Fred didn't blame them. The wolf strolled out to the entrance of its lair, and watched the men run. Fred thought it looked incredibly smug. It didn't follow any farther, and went back to lay down after a minute.

So it begins. They'll go back to town, and tell everyone what they've seen. And then more humans will come. And they'll come prepared. I expect them in a week.

"What else do I have to do to prepare?"

Just what you've been doing. When creatures show up, make a place for them.

The next creature was different. Fred noticed it as soon as it arrived, but it still surprised him, because it didn't come in the front door. It crawled out of a hole in the new hallway he'd made. A huge segmented worm, three spans long, with a round mouth full of sharp teeth, writhed out of the hole it had dug. Fred was utterly disgusted.

"Is that a worm?!?"

A wurm?

"No, a worm. But big! And gross! Don't tell me it wants to live here."

Well, it's not red, so maybe not.

"What do I do?"

If it's not here to seek a lair, it's here to eat something. These things happen. Not all creatures come to a lair because they're called.

"What would it eat? Oh no, Shelley! That thing can't eat Shelley. What do I do?" This is your domain. You have power. Think. What can you do?

Fred immediately thought of transmuting it into gold. That was stupid. Then he thought of walling it up. But it's a worm. It would dig through, right? Then Fred thought of dropping a big rock on it. It was wiggling slowly along the hallway, clearly headed for Shelley's nest, and there was lots of dirt above it. He got to work, carving out a large chunk of dirt above the worm, and soon dirt rained down on the worm. Which didn't stop it. He tried again, but this time he first

transmuted the dirt ceiling into rock. Then he carefully carved out around his righteous rock, til it was held by only a small tongue of stone. He waited until the worm was in the right spot, then he removed the tongue, and the big stone fell.

The splat was disgusting, and also very satisfying.

The worm was clearly dead. The bat-thing came out of its lair, sniffed all around the dead worm, looked up at the hole in the ceiling, and then went back inside. Fred sat for several minutes looking at the mess, and watched the little sparkles gather around the body, then erase it from the floor. The big stone was still there, which looked like it would get in the way, so Fred removed it, and filled in the ceiling spot it came from with more rock.

Well done. Well done.

"How did it get in here?"

Well, most of your walls are still dirt. Easy for a worm to dig through.

"Okay, I can fix that." Fred got started armoring all the walls with rock. He started with Shelley's den, of course. It took him most of two days to make every wall, ceiling, and floor into stone.

The men came back the morning after that. Fred could see them at the entrance, huddling together. He noticed that it wasn't just men. Women too, and children, and a couple of old grandmother types, too. In fact, it looked like the whole village had come to visit. And nobody wanted to go inside first. He could see one of the grandmothers shouting and hectoring everyone else, and he noticed that he couldn't understand any of them.

"Why can't I understand them? Jim?"

You're not human. They have their own ways, and languages. You don't share them. "Why not? I'm so full of magic. Isn't there a translating spell you can give me?" That's not how this works.

"It just seems to me, if I'm supposed to be helping these people by giving them a training ground, it would help to know what they're saying."

Or you could listen, and learn their language that way.

"Way too hard."

The humans started moving inside. Well, a group of the men did. They moved slowly to surround the entrance to the wolf's lair, who started to growl and stalk the men. It slowly moved

closer to the men, who were all standing fast, though they were clearly terrified. Behind them, a grandmother screeched, and all the women and children charged into the hallway. "What are they doing?", Fred thought. Then he saw that they were raiding, grabbing and ripping out every blade of the herbs he'd planted along the hallway. There were a lot of plants, but in no time they were gone, as a horde of children rushed back out of Fred's domain, each with a handful of herbs. Meanwhile, the wolf had been rushing and slashing at the men blocking its lair, but they were all armed with something pointy, and it couldn't get close enough to kill anyone. Several men got slashes on their arms, but they refused to move back.

The grandmother yelled again; the harvesting was complete, the women and children were outside again. Then the bear poked its head out of its lair, and the men broke and ran too. In just another moment, all was quiet. The creatures had gone back to sleep, and the humans were gone. Every single plant in the tunnel was also gone, and every berry was gone from the bush outside. Some little shit had even left a turd in his tunnel. "That little kid musta pooped very fast", Fred couldn't help giggling. "I'm glad I don't have to clean it up." Fred watched as the little sparkles started to erase the little pile of human poo, but then noticed sparkles of an entirely different color. It was at the entrance to the wolf's lair. Someone had dropped their knife, and it was being cleaned up, but it didn't look right. As Fred watched, the sparkles accelerated, and the knife was consumed. But then, in its place, a small glowing sphere formed, floating serelenly just above the floor. Fred could see a small image of the knife inside the sphere. "This is new."

Let me explain.

"Okay."

You just got your first real treasure.

Fred didn't know what to say to that, so he waited for Jim to continue.

When humans leave items inside your domain, they get converted to Treasure Sprites, like the one you see now. These Treasure Sprites exist to make multiple copies of things the humans want, and also to reward them for killing, I mean, achieving victory over your creatures. Treasure Sprites float around your domain, and if they are in the same room when a creature dies, they create a new copy of their item. Humans can pick the copy up and use it.

"Why make it random? Why not leave the items inside the lairs, so the humans know what they're fighting for?"

Human psychology. Do you know that word?

"Yes."

Okay, good. Well, humans will fight harder for a random reward than for a fixed and known reward. As humans keep leaving stuff inside your domain, some of it will be nicer than others, and the random way treasure is dispensed will keep them coming back to try for the nice stuff, even if it's very uncommon. It's just how they are.

"So these sprites just float around? Do I need to do anything with them?"

They're part of your domain, so you have control over them. You can copy and move and destroy them as you choose. But they're designed so you don't have to bother with them. The system just works, so you don't have to care. But we do have to talk about the plants.

"What plants? The humans stole every single one."

Like your creatures, those plants will regenerate very quickly. You haven't lost anything. But you can see that the humans wanted them. You put them out, made them a visible treasure, and the humans responded.

"Treasure? My new plant powers told me they were barely useful herbs."

To you. If you'd looked closer, you'd have seen how poor and starved those humans were. They were desperate enough to risk their own children to get those herbs. I bet they plan to use some for healing, and sell the rest, just to buy food.

"Well, I'm supposed to help them, right? Should I make more, and make them easier to get?"

I'd advise it, for now. Like I said before, you are a tremendous resource for the humans. You know they can get combat training, copied weapons, and medicinal plants from your domain, and they are well on their way to knowing it too. As your domain grows, their domain will also grow, borne by the resources you provide. Right now, the humans are probably huddled in their homes, talking about their bright future, because of you.

"Just so long as they all don't leave turds for me."

Like Jim said, all the herbs had regrown within the next hour. This was amazing. Fred knew most of them had been pulled out by the roots, so how could they regrow at all? Magic, of course, he thought. Even the berries were already coming back on the berry bush. Because it was incredibly easy, Fred copied the berry bush three times, and moved them all a little further from the entrance. Then Fred inspected the ground again, looking for more plants that could be helpful to humans. In doing so, he realised that he still couldn't see much of the surface.

"How do I get more plants? I want to search for more, but there's only so much I can see."

Expand under the ground, and you'll see more above ground, too. Make more tunnels. Make more lairs. Big ones and small ones. This is how you grow.

"All right. Hey, can I tunnel down to the human's town? Could I spy on them that way?" Yes.

Hmmm. Fred wondered if he wanted to do that, but he also reasoned that the good plants would be farther from the human settlement, so he started digging another main hallway back into the mountain, up the slope. It was monotonous work, but he found another skeleton. A bear, he thought. He also found a curious stone, cut smooth, and with weathered markings on it. As he dug around, he kept finding identical stones, until he had dug out a round room, forty spans wide and tall, and had collected 108 of the stones. Aside from the markings on them, and the number and uniformity of them, they all seemed to be made from a stone that wasn't normally found in this part of the world. He knew this, but didn't know how he knew, and shrugged to himself about it. He stacked the 108 stones in the center of the big room, and got back to searching for helpful plants. He didn't find much, other than some small potatoes.

Don't discount those potatoes. Root crop. Extremely valuable to the poor humans you're helping. Plant a thousand of them in an empty lair room, and the humans will come harvest them constantly.

"Don't I want to plant them outside, so the humans aren't threatened?"

That's what the berries are for. We want to help the humans get stronger, not make them fat and lazy.

"Will humans really fight and die for potatoes?"

Yes. I guarantee it.

Shrugging mentally, Fred planted and copied til the first room on the right (the empty one across from the wolf's lair) was filled with little potatoes. It was crazy easy, done with almost no thought or effort. "I guess I'm good at something", Fred thought.

Then the boar showed up. The big boar. Big as a bear. It wandered in, and poked its head into the bear's room. They looked at each other, seemingly in friendly recognition. "Hey, dude. Good to see you again", Fred imagined them saying to each other. Then the boar wandered over to the empty room across from the bear's lair. And lay down with a big, breathy groan. It turned green. "I guess it didn't need much at all", Fred thought. Looking closer, Fred could see streaks of grey in its fur. It was missing a tusk, and it had a big weeping puss-y sore along its back. "Thanks for joining us, old fellow", Fred thought. "Take a rest. You'll feel better in the

morning. Wow. I really am turning into a zoo keeper. Huh." Nothing else happened in the night, and Fred enjoyed just laying out with his groundhog troup.

In the morning, the humans were back. "So this is gonna be a morning thing, then", Fred shrugged. As before, they moved to fence in the wolf while the women and children rushed in to denude the herbs. Things went differently, though. The men and the wolf both seemed more aggressive, and in a few seconds one man lay dead with his side slashed open, and the wolf had a spear in his side. The men seemed enraged, and as the wolf staggered back, they rushed into its lair to finish it. The wolf feinted and clamped onto another man's leg, as the rest fell upon it and stabbed until it was dead. By that time the poor man's leg was detached, and two of his buddies were dragging him out, leaving the leg locked in the jaws of the dead wolf.

As the men came out of the wolf's lair, the boar stepped out of its lair, and one of the lizards got curious too. Children screamed and ran like little blurs. As the men streamed and staggered out of the tunnel, the boar burst into a sudden rush, and slammed into the last man running out. The man flew outside the tunnel like a kicked football, and Fred lost sight of him before he hit the ground. The children were literally underfoot of the boar, but none of them seemed to be hurt, and they disappeared quickly too. Then it was quiet. The boar snuffled, and shrieked, as if to say, "And stay out, little jerks." It turned around to go back to its lair, and Fred noticed that the sore on its back was gone. It also looked a little less gray.

"Did I heal the boar?"

Yes. Your magic takes good care of all the creatures within your domain. "Does it look younger?"

Yes, old age is a condition to be healed, like any other.

The dead man, and the wolf, started sparkling. In different colors.

"You said the wolf wouldn't die."

Watch. Be patient.

The man, the wolf, the spear, and the human leg in the wolf's mouth all disappeared in sparkles. But another blue globe appeared where the wolf had been. Fred could see a small wolf inside the blue globe. There was also a new Treasure Sprite for the spear, floating slowly away from the wolf globe. Now that he was reminded, Fred looked around and spotted the Sprite with the knife in it, floating around in the bear's lair now.

"How long do we wait befo… Mutherfucker!" Fred shouted as another little turd on the floor of the tunnel slowly dissolved into sparkles.