Good evening, Fred. How are you?

"I'm good. Are you okay? I didn't hear from you this morning."

Yes, I was very busy. I'm sorry.

"Well, you told me you'd be busy. So that's okay. So long as I know you're coming back. I'm sorry I freaked out last time."

I'm glad we figured this out. Tell me what's been happening.

"Well, three more of those wizards attacked me last night."

Not just one? Did you take care of them?

"Yeah, there were three this time. I squashed one. The Nasty Bird got another. The humans killed the third one, after he tried to escape from me."

Did they hurt you?

"Well, they tried casting that spell again. It made me dizzy, and itch, and burn. But I got 'em before it got too bad."

I'm glad. They seem determined to trouble you. I wish I knew more about them.

"So they're gonna keep coming. I need to figure out better ways to protect myself. I thought I could just drop rocks on them, but that last one was tricky. Is all I can do is dig?"

Well, your magic is large and complex. Supporting all the plants and beasts, transmuting materials, the Treasure Sprites. You're doing much more than digging.

"Yeah, sure, but I can't shoot flames at these guys. And I've got all these dangerous creatures around, but I can't talk to them or tell them who to attack."

It's true. You are an Earth Spirit. You control the earth, not the wind, or fate, or the minds of others.

"Wait, there's a Fate Spirit? What's that like?"

More trouble than you want, believe me. Fred, I think you need to unleash your inner creativity some more. Yes, you dig. But there are lots of ways of digging you haven't tried yet. And lots of things you haven't tried to dig yet. Have you made a pit trap?

When Jim said Pit Trap, Fred immediately knew what he meant. Fred could make a big hole, covered by a thin sheet of rock. When a bad guy stepped on it, Fred could remove the cover, and the bad guy would fall. "Yeah, I can do that," Fred thought. "Why didn't I think of that before?" Then he said it to Jim.

I know you can think of even more clever things to do. It's a matter of simply trying to be creative. Being proactive. With everything that's been happening to you, you've only been able to be reactive. But I've seen you be creative under pressure. And I believe in you.

"Okay. I'll be more creative. I'll work at it."

Good. What else happened?

"Okay, I got Nasty Bird moved to a deeper room. It's next to the King's Tomb. Nasty Bird got really excited about all the writing in there."

I wonder what that's about. Anything else?

Fred told Jim about the big fight with the mummy, and how a human had damaged the King's Tomb, but later it was all fixed.

Yes, that's how it works. And that tells me you've gotten stronger. Well done!

"Stronger?"

Yes, all the creatures and humans in your domain are giving you energy, so your magic power is growing. Didn't I tell you to dig more, and deeper? That's the result. When you first became an Earth Spirit, your magic was too weak to automatically repair the walls. Now you can.

"Wow, okay. What else can I do with this power? Fireballs?"

You tell me. Be creative. Okay, I've got to go. We'll talk later.

"Bye."

Fred did a full check of his domain, and everything seemed to be in its place. He looked out the front entrance, and saw the humans moving from battle mode to party mode. It did seem like the humans liked to work hard and play hard. Fred could hear drums, and pipes. He saw the humans laughing and eating. There were a few more merchant stalls that had been set up, and a few more bonfires than last night.

As Fred watched, the humans made a ring, and men began wrestling inside it, while everyone around the ring watched and screamed and jumped around like they wanted to take a turn. Fred was confused. On one hand, he certainly knew what wrestling was, and that humans staged barehanded fights for honor and money. On the other hand, he'd assumed that humans would get enough fighting and battling and challenge inside his domain; why would they want to continue that business in their off time? "Not the weirdest thing that happened today," he thought.

The party went on for a few hours, after which all was pretty quiet. But something was happening at the big central shaft.

Fred turned his attention to the top of his domain, where new monsters had arrived. Three of them. Three huge, colorful beetles, each the size of a small bear. "And they can fly!" Fred startled. They leapt off the lip of the central shaft, and flew on beetle wings down to the tree. Then they turned yellow, and moved with purpose, up the ramp and into the empty room next to the Kings Tomb.

Fred dutifully imagined the room they chose. They wanted something slightly bigger. And filled with sand. And a few big rocks, about as big as themselves. "Ah," thought Fred. "These guys want to hide in the sand, looking like just another big rock, then jump out at people. Cool." He got to work.

After just a few minutes, he had the room as they wanted, and they happily moved in and turned green. Fred left all the wall writing he'd previously copied from the King's Tomb. He didn't really feel the need to keep the Nasty Bird happy, but he also saw no reason to go to the trouble of erasing the writing. The Beetle Brothers (as he decided to call them) didn't seem to mind.

Fred stopped for a moment, and recognised how fast and adept he'd gotten with his digging. He knew that when he'd started (was it just a few weeks ago?) he'd have taken hours to do what he did to the room.

But that was it. Nothing else happened during the night. Everything was quiet, and Fred found he really enjoyed that. He could just keep one eye on everything, and zone out, and simply be peaceful.

Morning came. It seemed to be a repeat of yesterday. The humans got busy, got prepared, and got into fights with Fred's creatures. Jim checked in, mentioned how pretty the Beetle Bros were, and left quickly. Before noon, everything seemed fine and normal.

Then the dragon came.

There was a monstrous, earthshaking slam, as the huge green dragon dropped to the ground in front of the main entrance to Fred's domain. Many humans were instantly crushed, and several stalls and other ramshackle buildings were too. Everyone scattered. The humans inside the domain ran deeper inside. Fred's creatures cowered. Fred briefly worried that his domain might cave in from the tremendous shock.

The dragon raised its head, and screeched a roar of challenge into the sky. Then it bent its sinuous neck, so it could look into the main hallway of the domain. "There's no way the dragon can fit in there," Fred thought. The dragon obviously thought so too, so it huffed out a stinking green cloud, looked up, and gave a big heaving jump into the air. Its wings beat to lift it into flight, and the wind pushed by the wings knocked down every human and human construction within Fred's sight.

The dragon flew leisurely upslope, to the central shaft, and slammed down again on its lip. It looked down into the shaft, and roared another challenge at the silver tree at the bottom. Then, moving more like a lizard, it crawled down the central shaft, scoring large scars into the stone of the walls. It reached the tree, and curled around it. Fred thought that the tree was rather small compared to the width of the central shaft he'd dug. But now he was glad, because the dragon took up every bit of the shaft that the tree didn't. It was huge.

The dragon turned yellow. This was clear to Fred, even though the dragon was really an emerald green over almost all of its bulbous scaled body. It faced the entrance to the largest room that Fred had dug. It put its head down, expelled another noxious cloud from its nostrils, and waited impatiently.

Fred was stunned by all this, and by the size of the dragon, which dwarfed every other creature (or room) in Fred's domain. However, he pulled himself together, and went to imagine what the dragon wanted in a lair. He saw he had work to do.

The room needed to be bigger. Much bigger. The entrance, as it was, was too small for the dragon, and the dragon also wanted the entrance to be fancy, not like a natural formation at all. The dragon wanted the main room to have a forest in it, dark and damp. It wanted a smaller, back room, for the dragon to rest inside, Fred assumed. And yeah, that room needed to be filled with gold coins.

So Fred began digging. Fortunately, this room he'd made was already in the direction of the mountain (not downslope), so Fred knew he was digging deeper under the mountain, and had plenty of space to work with. He pushed the whole room bigger, and dug the room longer. As he went, removing huge volumes of rock, he found another small room with running water and mushroom colonies. He quickly harvested the mushrooms, and put them aside, and kept digging. He also came across some deep layered rock with rust-colored banding. A part of him knew this was hematite, iron in its natural form. This too he set aside, thinking he'd discuss it with Jim later.

Fred took almost two hours to dig out the main room and "bedroom" from the rock of the mountain. The whole time, the dragon watched him. Well, Fred knew he was invisible, but it sure felt like the dragon could see him. It watched everything from its position, encircling the silver tree. Its eyes moved with keen intelligence. Fred knew this was no mere beast. Not even close.

Fred also saw the aftermath of the dragon on the humans. They obviously knew the dragon hadn't flown away. As soon as the front entrance was quiet, the rest of the humans had cleared out and run far away. Except, of course, the woman in black leather. She was there, in the domain, on the spiral ramp. She was observing the dragon, while trying to hide from it (and everything else). The dragon either didn't see her (it wasn't looking her way at all), or didn't care. Fred assumed it didn't care.

Occasionally Fred saw a brave (or foolish) human rush back to the front area, to retrieve a dead body, or some item of value. Fred felt terrible for the humans, and knew the dragon was smart enough to know it needed to come down the shaft to the second floor. There was no reason to land at the front door. Except to announce itself to everyone. In a terrible, bloody way. Fred didn't think this dragon was very nice.

Now Fred got to work on the entrance to the dragon's lair. He'd seen from his lair-vision that the dragon required a big archway to move though, and it wanted that arch to be made from smooth, almost cubic stones. This he could do, and he started by simply making the entrance larger. Though he was already working with rock, he made the edges of the enlarged entrance into the cubic blocks the dragon wanted. The dragon watched all this with great interest, its face very close to the stone Fred was modifying. When the arch was completed, the dragon wuffled, and shifted. One long, scaled forearm reached out, and one long curved claw was carefully extended.

Then the dragon began carving the rock of the entrance. Its claw was clearly sharper than the stone, and it wrote with tremendous strength and control. The claw cut glyphs into the stone, beautiful symbols that Fred was sure meant something complex and important to dragons. This continued; the dragon didn't seem to be in a hurry. So Fred turned his attention to the big room.

Right now it was just a big cave, an empty space of bare rock. But the dragon wanted a forest, with trees. And that assumed a "ground" that trees could grow in. Fred wondered how he'd do that for a single second. Then he remembered to trust the power of his magic, and simply began transmuting the floor of the room. And just like that, rock was transformed into a rich, loamy clay, with grasses and lichens and a bed of dead leaves on top. A part of Fred marveled and gasped at what he'd done, and felt a bit dizzy. Another part took it in stride, and kept at it, until the whole main room was properly prepared.

Then the dragon moved in. It slid like a huge, comically bulbous snake, inside its new lair. Once inside, it curled around. Fred saw that it still took up a very large part of the space Fred had made, but it could stretch out and still not be quite as long as the diameter of the room. But Fred thought that, if he made a forest inside here, the dragon would wind up knocking all the trees down, it was so big.

The dragon reached out with its claw again, and began drawing big Xs in the dirt of the room. Again and again, it made these Xs, some against the wall, others away from the wall, none near the center of the room. As it finished (it had made some 25 X marks), Fred realized it was showing Fred where the trees should go. Where IT thought trees should go. Fred immediately felt bossed around. None of his other creatures had been anywhere near this pushy.

Nonetheless, he existed to make yellow creatures into green creatures, so he dutifully copied a tree from outside, and planted the copies in the locations the dragon had marked. This didn't take long; it seemed his ability to copy plants was near instantaneous. He hadn't really noticed when copying small plants, but with big trees appearing suddenly, and full grown, he noticed. The dragon seemed fascinated by this too. It turned to the X marks that hadn't gotten trees yet. Fred petulantly planted trees in the direction the dragon wasn't looking.

But finally all 25 marks were replaced by trees. The dragon turned slowly to face the smaller room, and settled down, ostentatiously waiting. Fred imagined the room again, just to make sure he knew what needed to be done. The dragon didn't need more changes to the room. It just needed those piles of gold coins. "Well, here's where I destroy the economy, I guess," Fred thought to himself. He got to work.

It wasn't hard at all to turn rock into gold coins, so (like the sand in the other rooms) he transmuted the rock from the ceiling. Gold coins showered down from the top of the room. The dragon, suddenly fascinated, stuck its head into the smaller room, and coins showered down upon it. This seemed to please the dragon; it began humming, like someone enjoying a hot shower. Though the hum was actually a very low rumble, Fred thought he could almost hear a melody in the humming. "Bathtime gurgles for gold," Fred thought to himself, and giggled.

Fred kept transmuting, and gold coins kept falling like rain, for fifteen minutes, before he thought he'd made as much as was necessary. Fred noticed that the coins were flat round discs, with no markings at all. He briefly wondered about this; he'd seen various marked and fancy coins, including the ones that had been left in his domain as treasure. Why were his transmuted "coins" so simple and bland? Oh well, another thing to ask Jim.

As the coins had fallen, the dragon had kept creeping further under the coin shower. Now the coins had stopped, and the dragon was completely inside its "bedroom", covered in coins like a blanket. Many parts of its body were still uncovered, including its head, which was looking outward toward the trees. The dragon let out a huge sigh, complete with toxic green mist jetting from its nostrils. Then it seemed to slump and relax. And then it turned green.

"Hello, Dungeon. Let's talk."