Jake was tired of making lights. He had been making them for almost two days now. He figured, based on his plans, that he’d need forty-four more of them after his initial start of eight. That translated into over 4900 mana points. And coupled with everything else he’d had to make, well, no fun stuff for him. No digging, no monsters, no plants, although he did get a bunch of soul patterns for the different seeds when they were planted so that was good. That planting session had given him over thirty new soul patterns to play with.

Oh, and he also got pot from a fifteen-year-old who dropped the seeds when he lit up in the bathroom. His toilets ‘no odors’ ability made the stalls of the restrooms a perfect place for getting high clandestinely. He made himself a small garden bed in the second-floor room next to the rune room and planted the pot at the same time everyone was planting the other plants in the garden areas. Because why not? He figured that it might be a big feature eventually on his second floor. So some fun stuff.

He did make four owls to watch outside at night. Fortunately, the night watch had been inside so when he’d actually created the four owls on the porch, nobody saw. He made them dungeon scouts and instead of giant, he made them small, tiny little owls about 20 cm tall. He gave them shadow cloaks to make them better able to hide both at night and during the day. He started to give them steel feathers or talons but then decided that was pointless with a scout. After looking at the patterns, he decided to do something a little crazy.

He put hawk eyes in the owl's head. Not instead of, but also. Hawk eyes on top of the owl’s eyes. He shrank the large eyes that the owl normally possessed and gave it extended night vision to make up for the loss of vision. He decided that he didn’t need to give it dark vision because it would be outside and with the three moons there would always be some light. It could easily see two hundred meters at night. The hawk eyes were the same as the ones that his normal giant hawk possessed. Smaller of course, but with the same visual acuity. He could sense that attempting to use both sets of eyes at once would overload the visual processing ability of the poor owl’s brain so he gave it a reflex to only have one set of eyes open at a time.

When he finished, he thought the owl looked funny at first. The black eyes open with the hawk eyes shut on top of them all set in the heart-shaped white mask of the owl. Or the golden hawk eyes open with the black owl eyes shut below them. All the mechanisms of the eye, the lid, the tear ducts, all stood out from the white background.

It was too obvious that this owl was different. Just in case his little spy was discovered, he didn’t want his changes to be seen immediately. He finally darkened all the feathers on the face and the body of the owl, making the whole owl’s feathers match the tawny coloration which existed on its shoulders originally. Between the size of the owl and its new camouflage, not to mention it’s shadow ability, he was sure that the owl would be almost impossible to find. A perfect spy.

When he released them to watch the outside, he made sure to include ‘watch for humanoids and report back if you see them’ script. He also instructed each of them to split up and to watch a different area. And to stay at least 300 to 400 meters from Max’s. At 700 mana points his little owls were not cheap, but he felt better having them out there. An owl's hearing, coupled with its sight, now in the daylight as well, should provide a definite watch. He also made two of them female and two of them male. Two pairs. He wasn’t sure if dungeon monsters got busy, but he thought he’d give them a chance. Also, he wasn’t sure if the chicks of a dungeon monster born outside of his bounds would be a dungeon monster. He wondered if he’d just created his first invasive species?

While he was at it, he decided to start claiming territory outside. He wasn’t sure yet how to do it yet but figured that the easiest way was to sow seeds. Plant grass and let it grow. Bermuda grass, one of the seeds that Baxter had brought back as seeds in his coat, was a fairly invasive plant. If it got enough light, enough heat, enough water it would choke out the other plants around it and spread.

He wanted to keep that invasive quality, the ability to aggressively spread but thought he might do better on some of the other aspects. If he made it softer, people would like it more. If he made its height uniform and caused it to be a low ground cover, people would love it. And finally, if he gave it that dark green of fescue, everyone would love it. He figured he could tie it somehow to his mana and let it grow. He’d have it create seeds that in addition to the seed core would have a lemony taste and supply vitamin C and D as well as a higher sugar content, so native animals, maybe even monsters would like it, consume it and spread it. He hadn’t meant to do so but he’d created a grass that humans could live on. There was enough nutritional value in the grass that people could eat it and survive. Not that they’d enjoy it, it was grass after all, but they'd survive on a diet of his dungeon Bermuda.

The hardest part of the process was getting the plant sensitive to mana. Even with the ability to change patterns, it seemed like the pattern modification ability had a hard time understanding what Jake was looking for. Finally, after manipulating the mana around the pattern to both higher and lower levels, he was able to figure out how to change the plant to only grow around higher mana levels. In other words, around him.

It was odd having created a plant monster. Well, he wasn’t sure what to call it. It was still tied to him. A monster grass. It didn’t do anything. Well, I suppose if the person were allergic to grass it could inflict a nasty allergy on them, but it didn’t seem like it lived up to the monster part of the name.

‘I’ll just call it Dungeon Bermuda,’ Jake finally thought.

He thought about it some more. Wondering if there was something else that he wanted the grass to do. He could tell that he could sense it and use its senses, such as they were. A feeling of pressure, of water, of sunlight, of the cool earth, were about all that he could tell he’d get from the grass. He thought briefly of increasing the sense of pressure that the grass possessed. But eventually decided that that would be too cruel. Create a grass that’s perfect for walking on and then cause it to feel pain from the experience. Uncool.

But still, he wondered if there was something that he could change to make the grass more useful. He thought about having it create berries like a wild strawberry. Tiny little berries that he’d never tasted to see if they lived up to their name or were just decorative.

He thought some more and then realized that there was something he could change, that he’d have to change if he wanted the plant to be useful. Heat and light sensitivity. Bermuda started growing late in the season. It was late May before the grass started growing in Oklahoma. It required a lot of sun to grow and spread. Since it was now the equivalent of January, it wasn’t going to take off and spread like he wanted it to unless he changed it some more.

He quickly made the change then. It turned out to not be as big a deal as he thought it might be. His earlier change to make the grass more dependant on higher mana levels made it easy to switch the grass’s dependence on heat, on light to mana. If the mana were high enough the grass began growing. Period.

He started to wonder if he’d created a monster then. Some invasive ground cover that was going to strangle out the existing plant life but decided it was just evolution in action. Plants that evolved to use mana would have a competitive edge over plants that didn’t. Period. There was no helping that. Just like monsters. Monsters were, or at least could be, normal animals that had evolved to use mana. Greater size, a coat that turned attacks better, better eyesight, better camouflage, it all boiled down to greater survivability.

Although, he wasn’t sure about the aggressiveness. Every monster or monstrous animal had been uniformly crazy. Attacking anything that came inside of the territory that they claimed. He wondered based on the giant ground squirrels if that was merely a phase to the adaption. They hadn’t attacked. Baxter’s presence had brought out a trace of survival instinct in them.

He wondered if the monsters or monster animals were starting to go back to their standard levels of aggression? If their aggression levels had reset to just be a little more aggressive? It made sense he thought. What good does the desire to attack everything do for a deer or a squirrel? Unless they completely changed their diet, there would be no evolutionary benefit to the heightened aggression. Actually there would be a net decrease in survivability. The wounds they would get from the constant battles would weaken them to their natural enemies who would have also been mana changed.

But that still left real monsters. Stuff that he could create that somehow might have been created naturally. Things like dragons or hippogriffs or griffins or owlbears or some of the other monsters he’d been talking with Billy about. Billy had pulled out his monster manual and showed him several pages of it and that was a jolt to the system. He so wanted to create stuff like that, but what was the point? The only people he wanted to kill were Wade and his crew.

Anyway, he finally created the Dungeon Bermuda. The pattern modification was expensive. 175 mana points. But that was nothing compared to the cost of the grass itself. 200 mana points per seed. Holy crap! He created one.

He remembered going to Ace Hardware and Home Depot and buying bags of Bermuda seed, $33 bucks for a five-pound bag. There were literally thousands of seeds in each bag.

That seed was the equal of almost four gold pieces. That’s like 40,000 bucks. He had to check his math, but each copper was worth about an old American dollar. 100 coppers to a silver, a 100 silvers to a gold. 40,000 bucks. For a seed.

He started thinking about the stuff that he’d created then. Hall lights 112 mana, two gold, 20,000 bucks, Toilet 133 mana, about two and a half gold, 25,000 bucks.

‘Holy Crap,’ he thought, ‘I’ve already made my solid gold toilet. Take that Trump! And I made more than one.’

He quickly decided to stop thinking about things in those terms. He hadn’t really considered money and the cost of things. There was nothing he wanted to buy that he couldn’t make. Hell, making things was the point. It was fun. It was what he did.

But translating the mana cost of things into gold and silver and even copper made a difference. He started thinking about all the stuff that he could make so casually and the cost of having the items made by hand and started to think again about monsters and protecting himself. He suddenly felt very vulnerable.

“Hey,” Hildi said. It was after nine o’clock and she as well as most of the other folks was already in bed. She was evidently fighting off the effects of the runes. She sounded and looked tired.

“Hey,” he said back.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Making grass,” he answered. He felt like the conversation wasn’t going that well so far. She had been back a day and had sworn another two oaths to him, but basically they hadn’t really talked. He’d been aware of her the whole time and had talked when she needed him like when she needed him to describe what Max’s looked like, but other than that, they hadn’t talked. He’d talked with Billy far more than her. Really far more than anybody. She had been busy all last night and today answering people's questions, gardening, putting kids to bed, or just sleeping. She snored by the way. Cute little ones though, not huge mouth breather ones.

“Do I want to know?” she asked. She was in her bedroom. Billy had opted to sleep with the other kids. They had a room that was basically all his group.

“It’s Bermuda. I’m getting ready to seed it outside,” he answered.

“Why?” she asked.

“I specially created the grass,” he said. “It is mana dependent and very edible. It will grow and form a ground cover around me. And since it’s mine, it’ll claim the area that it grows on for me.”

“Are you trying to take over the world, dungeon boy?” she asked, half-jokingly.

“Just my little bit of it,” he said. In the meantime he had one of the new owls fly back to the porch and pick up the seed and drop it into a hole that it scratched in the ground and then cover it back up.

“Thanks by the way,” she said.

“For what?” he answered.

“For all this stuff you’ve created,” she said “This bed is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept on. The pool is great. The kids love it. The numbers at the bottom of the pool, the fog, even the stairs on the pillar that they can jump from. Plus the food. Just thanks. I’m not sure anyone has said thank you yet, but I wanted to.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And no, no one else has said thanks. I get it though. They are busy trying to deal with their new lives.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But they still should say thanks. I mean you didn’t have to do all this stuff. I was surprised when I got here. This place stunk like rat pee and there was that big nest right in the center of the place. To go from that to this in just a week is amazing. You are amazing.”

Jake felt both pleased and a little embarrassed. Not in a major way, but the muted way he experienced most emotions anymore. But if he could have, he would have been blushing. Maybe his gem glowed a little brighter.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s nice to be appreciated. I’ve been listening. Looks like my mom’s gone all uber on everything.”

“Yes,” she said. “She has. Thank god for her though. She’s shaking things up. Shaking people out of their ruts. It’s hard to understand these people. It’s like they got two tracks running at the same time. One is here and now and the other is still back in the Sapulpa that was. 9 to 5. Daycare and Starbucks.”

“Did Sapulpa even have a Starbucks?” he asked.

“Bite your tongue, blasphemer! The reach of Starbucks is long and eternal!” she said, laughing a little bit. “We had them. They were basically places that sold Starbucks coffee, but we had them.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s right. I haven’t lived here in about five, maybe six years. And overpriced coffee was never my thing. I had to work in high school and make car payments and insurance too.”

“Should have been a girl!” she said. “Daddy took care of that for me!”

“Must have been nice!” he said.

“It was,” she said. “Right up until two weeks ago.”

They both paused there. Stuck a little. She yawned a little, still fighting off the effects of the bed.

“I guess I’ve got two tracks too,” she said. “I’ll think I’ve adjusted and then boom, I realize that I’m still waiting on my mom and dad to show up. Still think I need to finish a college app or pick up some milk at QT.”

He paused, not knowing what to say.

“Sorry,” she said. “Look at me. Doing my poor little girl routine to a man that got changed into a rock. Lord, I’m dumb sometimes.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not. You got my family here, safely. You helped my mom rescue all those people. You’re not dumb! You are a survivor.”

“God, I miss that,” she murmured sleepily. “I miss that show!” she said and then drifted off to sleep, the runes finally taking hold.

Jake watched her sleep for a while. The other part of his mind that was busy siphoning, kept siphoning. But he was happy watching her, breathing in and breathing out. The room was dark, but to his senses, it might as well have been daylight. He looked at her, watched the mana in her chest move through her body, watch the bright spark of her soul burn at the edges of her skin.

He wasn’t sure what this feeling was. It didn’t feel like love, or lust or need. At least the way that he remembered those emotions feeling. Although it may have had elements of all those emotions in it. It felt cooler than that, strained through his body of stone. Although it felt warmer than most of his emotions got these days. Warm like the summer sun, warm like sheets fresh from the drier. It was contentment, he thought. Looking down at her sleeping, he felt content probably for the first time since, well, he didn’t know. He’d never felt this before.