Vera was absorbed in her work. The materials that Max brought her were quite useful. Max had taken to wearing the new backpack easily. The time she spent modifying it to his small frame she considered well spent. She tried to design additional clothes for him. Considering all she had to work with was light brown leather she felt that her options were pretty limited. Without summoning an item she made plans for a leather vest, cowboy boots and a matching hat. She wasn’t satisfied with the leather but, something inside her had awakened and needed to be fulfilled. She probably wouldn’t be able to make miniature guns for him, but she would start to dress her cat like a cowboy. Max never expounded on his statement of how she could make her creatures move.

“Max, do you want me to make you a weapon?” she asked.

He didn’t reply, he was currently busy doing cat things. He sat with his back to the core. It looked a little awkward to Vera’s eyes. He looked like a gargoyle on an old church, ready to jump onto something below. She couldn’t tell if his arched back was something his body was designed to do. Vera should make a furniture for Max. Did Max still go crazy for cardboard boxes? What did cats use before cardboard boxes? Should she make a room for Max? The questions poured through her mind. When Max spoke it caught her off guard.

“Make the dagger!”

If Vera had a mouth, it would have broken into a grin. He played right into her trap. Vera would start slow, getting him used to the clothes. She started with a belt modeled from straps from the satchel. She measured it to wrap around his waist and bored a few holes at the end. She used some metal from the rusted sword working it into the crude shape of a cat head. She found manipulating the metal was harder than she anticipated. The metal itself was malleable, but any attempt to remove the rust was met with resistance. She eventually gave up, keeping the metal’s quality as is. The buckle itself still shined but was spotted with the brown rust. She fastened the belt buckle to the opposite end of the small belt. It was large compared to the belt, but she felt it was the right size. She looked at the pointed ears. She wasn’t satisfied with them. If Max were to bend awkwardly there would be a chance of hurting himself. She rethought the belt buckle. She loved the design and would use it elsewhere, but for something that was as flexible as a cat it was impractical. She changed it to one of the buckles that had been on the satchel. As the buckles had originally been made for the straps on the satchel Vera had very little to change. She decided to give Max two daggers with scabbards, and use the scabbards much like a holster. For the scabbard she used a modified strap and looped it back onto itself, fixing it so a dagger could be freely placed. She had to get a little creative where the scabbards would be fixed to the belt. She wanted to make sure they could be removed as needed, but while being worn they wouldn’t freely slip along the belt. She developed a three loop system that seemed to do the trick. She still wanted to use the cat head design. She fixed a small version at the mouthpiece of each scabbard.

“Here you go Max!”

The belt with daggers popped into existence near him.

>

Max picked up the belt. He examined it briefly before unbuckling it and putting it on. He yelped slightly when the buckle caught onto the fur on his stomach, but a quick readjustment seemed to fix it.

“I’m sorry Max I’ll have to rework the buckle.”

“It’s fine, tall friend.” He said, “I’ll get used to it.”

She wanted to make more. The thought of chaps came to mind but quickly set aside. They might interfere with She needed to make some boots, a vest and a hat. She had also thought about a handkerchief, but needed to put a pin in that too. She hadn’t had any cloth to work with. The boots would be a problem, his feet were clawed and most definitely feline shaped. Beyond that, he might need to use his claws for something. She might make something that had claws on the outside. She wasn’t comfortable with designing the boots yet. This was another thing she would have to put a pin in. The vest would work. She used more of the leather from her satchel pattern. It hadn’t been much work to cut it into shape for Max’s body. She reused the cat head design and placed it on the breast as a badge. The light colored leather looked good when paired with the belt. Next to be worked on was the hat, but Vera quickly found that the leather didn’t want to stay in shape.

“Here’s another piece, Max.”

The vest, with the fixed badge, fell to the floor. The sound of clinking metal was muffled under the vest.

>

Max picked up the vest and slowly put it on. He moved his arms, testing the vest’s impact on his range of motion. With a twitch of his tail, he signaled that he was content.

“Max, could you get some cloth, and some stiffer leather?”

Max didn’t reply. He sat with his strange gargoyle posture for a moment, followed by flopping onto his side. Vera tried to start talking to him, but Max simply closed his eyes. She knew that she could yell at him, but he would just simply open his eyes for a few minutes before closing them again. With a sigh, Vera looked at the vest. It looked a little scruffy, and the badge she made looked awful. It would have been better if she had used silver or gold. The coins! She went through her lists and found the coins. They were listed as miscellaneous items. She found working with the silver and gold to be easier. It must have been because of how pure the items were. The silver wasn’t tarnished and the gold was non-reactive. She admired her work. The new cat head badges were something she was proud of. Now all she needed to do was to replace the old ones on the clothing she had given to Max.

>

She would have wrinkled her nose. With Max not paying attention to her, she found herself at a loss of what to do. The dungeon centipedes she created continued to not move. They were living, but they hadn’t managed to move. She needed something to make them move. Maybe something to give them a will of their own. She looked at her core. Max seemed to continue to feed off the mana that she was emitting. She couldn’t think of something to name the entity that was Max. Was it a soul? A spirit? Essence? Could it be like some kind of AI? Vera decided to call it a core. There were some similarities. Instead of drawing from wherever Vera’s core, Max’s drew from hers. She might try creating something similar for her myriapods. She didn’t want to make them as sophisticated as Max, nor did she want them to feed from her directly.She wanted them able to function on their own. She only channeled a small amount of mana into a spiral. It was enough to get the mass of mana to spin and pull from their surroundings, but Vera was careful not to allow it to reach the insane storm she had made within her own core. When the spinning seemed to stabilize, she decided to push it into the world.

>

With a distinct ping it hit the floor of the cavern. It bounced and rolled a little until it rested near the wall. Vera sighed with relief. Creating the core seemed to shrink her influence and with the core rolling around as it had, it came close to the new border. It would have been a shame to lose her new item. It seemed to be stable as she observed it. She started the process of absorbing it back into herself. The spinning core had been far more resilient than the small shards of mana that had collected from her experiments with the smaller creatures. While absorbing the core, She looked back into her designs of the dungeon centipede. She placed a minor core into the head, bundled within the nerves. If this worked, she might try playing around with placing cores in creatures, although she would have to increase their size before doing so. The minor cores were larger than many of the creatures that Max had massacred when he had his killing spree. Before she would summon the new centipede, she set about absorbing the old motionless ones. When the last of them vanished into nothing she started the work of summoning the new creature.

Vera was quite pleased with herself. The placement was perfect. It hadn’t appeared mid air to fall on the ground. Each of its multiple legs rested on the rocky floor as the mana weaved itself into a physical existence. Once completed the centipede’s antennae twitched in the cool cavern air. Vera watched the centipede. The twitching antennae was a good sign. The legs started to move slowly. The centipede then burst into movement. It charged the sleeping form of Max. Before Vera thought to cry out the centipede had wrapped around the small faerie. It didn’t bite him. The myriapod seemed to snuggle into Max’s fur. Max wrapped his arms around the centipede and pushed his face into its segments. Vera was both relieved and horrified at the same time. On one hand, she was glad that the centipede hadn’t attacked Max. On the other, well, it was pretty gross. She couldn’t in her wildest dreams imagine snuggling up to a segmented creature. The glossy black carapace along with the pointy legs was just too much for her. She would create seperate rooms for her creatures, or at least keep the mammals from the arthropods.

Where did centipedes live? Simple. They lived in damp locations, under rocks. If there was one thing that Vera had it was rocks. If there was another thing she had, it was damp. No, it was water, damp water. Water was damp. Whatever, the point was, she had the perfect habitat for these nasty centipedes. She carved a few crevices into the walls, floor and ceiling of her cavern. Centipedes could climb walls right? They were like ants or spiders. Something like that. Their pointy feet probably had something to do with it. Did centipedes carry diseases? Vera hadn’t heard of any centipede carrying a disease. Regardless, they were still gross. There hadn’t been any soil she could absorb and copy. She hoped that wouldn’t be an issue for her centipede. Satisfied with her work she waited for the centipede to rush into one of the many crevices she carved. It still laid on the ground, snuggling with Max.

“Centipede! Go into a crevice!” Vera shouted at the comfortable myriapod.

The creature didn’t budge. If anything it seemed to wrap itself tighter around Max. She grew a little flustered as it didn’t respond to her command. She tried to move it like she had for the previous versions of centipedes that she had created. It didn’t move. She couldn’t seem to connect to it the same way. With a bit of a struggle, she somehow managed to select it. Once selected she found she could issue it commands from a small menu that appeared. She commanded it to move and the centipede untangled itself from Max to the location she specified. She played around with moving it around the cavern. She was pleasantly surprised to find that it could climb walls. Furthermore, it did seem that the pointy feet were the sole reason that it was able to climb. She did find, though, that it could only climb rough surfaces. If she directed it to move along some of the smoother walls it simply slid to the floor. She found a suitable crevice for the centipede and set a home. The centipede squeezed in. She looked back at Max. He hadn’t seemed to respond to the centipede leaving. Vera selected him and found a room that she had specifically carved for him. There had yet to be any furniture in the room, it was just a door leading to a dark empty room. Vera selected the option to set a home. Max responded to this by standing and stretching each of his limbs.

“It’s about time,” he yawned.