“You’re sure this has some sort of intelligence?” Reeve said, bouncing the still unfamiliar weight of her modified naginata in her hand. “Aside from being a little heavier, and shorter, it doesn’t seem special in any way.”

The dwarf, who was already flushed nearly blood red from straining against a crate, scowled at her as he gave one great final push and then let out an explosive breath. “Everything I create,” he said, the words spat out between breaths, “is special, Lassie. But that staff, well, you go on and get yourself in a fight, and then tell me what you think about my work and the enchantments Helia herself lay upon it.” He swept his huge hand through the air several times, as though he might fan Walter and the elves through the door. ”On through with the lot of ye dunderheads.”

“Just walk right in?” Reeve said. “We shouldn’t scout the room first?” She tried to peer through the shimmering door of water.

“Ach. There’s hardly ever any in it,” Thomanji'yheri said.

“Why not?” Walter said.

“We only have a few in the camp of any alignment with bee mana, and no’un else wants to spend any more time than they need to in a subterranean room chockfull of millions o’ bees.”

“Wait,” Walter said and took a step back, where he bumped into Starling’s stomach.

“Uh-uh.” Reeve took a step toward her father, grasped his arm, and led him through. When her ears broke the water-door, Reeve felt a low vibration that reached into her lungs and made them itch while also making every object she was carrying hum against her. “Wow.” She looked over what she thought was probably close to a hundred hives, each formed from a small, banzai-style tree that had been cultivated and shaped to serve as a box of limbs on the pedestal provided by the tree’s trunk, the limbs enclosing a space in which a bee colony had established its hive. Each tree was potted in a low, stone-rimmed bed.

Walter’s arm broke from her hand and she wheeled to grab him, but he wasn’t fleeing. Instead, he was reaching frantically into his hammerspace, and it took half a dozen tries before he produced his bee veil, which he donned before retrieving the bee smoker as well. Holding the smoker in one hand and the spatula in the other, he looked at Reeve.

Reeve ignored the elves that were appearing through the door behind her father at a rate that brought to mind orange-clad clowns in a strange fantasy circus. “You look ready for action there, Dad.”

“I’ve been preparing for this my whole life,” he said. He swallowed dryly a few times, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “In this game. My whole life in this game.”

“Yeah, which is like a whole hour of your life so far, IRL, so, way to stick with it, Dad. You always tell me education is an investment. Let’s see what your investment is going to pay out.” She turned and looked at the rows and rows of hives. “My money’s on it being bees.”

“B-bees,” Walter said.

“Hopefully not angry bees,” Reeve said.

“A-angry b-bees,” Walter said quietly.

Thomanji'yheri followed Leaf through the door and surveyed the cluster of elves, Reeve, Walter, and the fallen elf. “Where’s your ugly fighter?”

“Ohmagod,” Reeve spun around, trying to see between and past the sea of milling elves. “She was just here! Like, just here! What the heck! You have to watch them all the time!” Remembering clearly their first day in the game, Reeve pushed through the elves and then the door into the storage room, which was empty save for crates. She ran through the door into the armory, the racks of weapons forming a shimmering blur as she raced past them. Her footfalls echoed loudly as she slowed herself at the other end of the aisle, the last few steps carrying her into the space adjacent to Thomanji'yheri’s workbench.

“Why. Would. You. Just. Wander. Off!?” Her scream echoed as she spun on her heels, one way then the other, arms extended, wishing someone, anyone, anything, would explain her parents to her. The echo faded and left her alone, without an answer. She opened her UI and scanned the Party and Combat logs. “Well,” she said to the empty room, “she still must be pretty close by because… Ohmagod. What? Why?”

Fighter (human) impales a Level 7 Elf Carpenter with Unerring Devotion (estoc) for 21 points of damage.

Fighter (human) has killed a Level 7 Elf Carpenter.

“Fudge.” Focusing on her Stealth skill, Reeve followed the short passage from the armory back toward the main hall they’d taken from their cell. She stopped in the relative darkness a few yards short of the hall and stood listening. Elves occasionally passed in the hall beyond, but none looked her way and she heard no sounds of struggle or alarm.

Reeve turned and moved silently back into the armory before running down the aisle, through the storage room, and through the door into the apiary, where she tripped over something that, with a loud clang and puff of smoke, announced itself as a bee smoker while she stumbled forward and fell into the knot of orange-clad elves, which scattered before her whitewater rob, clearing the path that carried her face-first into the dirt of an otherwise empty stone-rimmed bed where she would have expected a hive-tree to stand. She staggered to her feet, wiping dirt from her face and then shaking it from her cowl and the shoulders of her robe. Walter was walking toward her, his face pale. He held in one hand the spatula. The other held one of the hive-trees, dirt still clinging to its roots, bees swarming around the hive.

“A-angry b-bees,” he said as he stopped a few feet from Reeve.

“Where are all of the other hives!” She looked around at the empty beds that filled the room, the hive-tree Walter was holding apparently the only one that remained. “I was gone for, like, three minutes! Maybe! What happened?!”

“The halfling has a way with bees, no doubt,” Thomanji'yheri said as he approached them down the adjacent row. “I’ve had a look into the orchard. Not much work happenin’ at the moment, but they’ll likely notice the missing bees soon enough. Best we be goin’.”

“But the hives…” Reeve looked around them. “Oh no, and my mom. Yeah, let’s go. Shouldn’t you put that down, Dad?”

Thomanji'yheri herded Reeve, Walter, Leaf, and Walter’s hangers-on toward the storage-room door.

“I don’t think I can,” Walter said.

“Why not?” Reeve said as she stooped to pick up the bee smoker and then queued behind the elves at the door.

“I think I set off some sort of spell when I picked it up.”

“You can’t cast, you’re not the right Class.”

“Well, I don’t know, Evie. But when I picked it up, I just had this feeling that the bees had been, you know, turned on—“

“You turned on the bees?”

“I mean, activated, switched on, and I either needed to tell them what to do or they’d go off.”

Reeve passed through the door and waited for her father to emerge. “Go off?”

“Pick their own option of what to do.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure, I couldn’t really understand how to control the different options, but I’m pretty sure if I just drop the tree now they might choose Swarm or Deadly Throng.”

“What are you—“

“I sensed those as some of the options.”

“Ohmagod. You’ve pulled the pin on a hive of bees and now you can’t put it down. At least until you figure out how to control it.”

“I wish I could just put it in my Inventory.”

“I don’t think you could stick a whole hive of bees in your Inventory.”

Walter did not respond as they shuffled slowly with the crowd through the storage room door into the armory.

“Dad, you can’t put a hive of bees in your Inventory, right?”

“I definitely can,” Walter swallowed hard. “I just can’t put more than ninety-nine hives of bees into my Inventory.”

Reeve looked straight ahead as they walked down the aisle. “That’s what happened to all the other hives?”

“I tried picking one up,” Walter said, and then swallowed audibly again, “to see if I’d be able to, I don’t know, charm the bees, and when I did, I had the activated-bees feeling. I…I…”

“Panicked?”

“I think that’s not inaccurate. I didn’t know what to do, and the bees were getting their little, well, themselves in a bonnet, and I wanted to get the hive out of my hands, so I just stuffed it the only place I could think of.”

“And it went into your Inventory?”

“Yes,” Walter said, “the hive of angry bees went into my Inventory.”

“And then,” Reeve forced herself to look at her father, “you did that again ninety-eight times.”

“I thought one of the hives might be different, and I’d just be able to hold it without getting them riled up.”

Reeve looked away.

“But the whole room just seemed to be getting more and more riled up as hives disappeared, so I hurried more and more, and pretty soon I was holding this and—“

“Stack limit. You got the message you get when you try to store more than ninety-nine of the same item in your Inventory.”

“I was not happy to see that message.” Walter looked over his shoulder. “It’s bad enough knowing there are ninety-nine hives of angry bees in my hammeryspace. I don’t also need to be stuck holding one.”

“Could this help?” Reeve held up the bee smoker.

“Maybe,” Walter said. He started to hand the spatula to Reeve to hold for him but, seeing her hands full with her naginata and bee smoker, he turned and looked around them. They were leaving the aisle and joining the congregating elves, who were back in the space adjacent to Thomanji'yheri’s workbench. “Where’s your mother?”

“Killing carpenter elves using a weapon I’ve never heard of,” Reeve said, her voice tired. “Put it in your Inventory.”

“I can’t—“

“The spatula.”

“Right.” Walter swung the spatula back into his Inventory and took the smoker from Reeve. Holding both the hive-tree and smoker as far from his body as his short halfling arms permitted, Walter tentatively puffed smoke against the hive.

“We should be going,” Thomanji'yheri said, pushing roughly back through the elves. “Doorun’s Granite Garden. What’re’ye doin’?”

“Smoking bees,” Walter whispered.

“Well, you should be doin’ that on your own time.”

“Just a second,” Reeve said. “We’ll be able to move faster if he can put down the hive.”

Walter puffed again several times, and smoke rose up and around the hive. “It’s…not working,” he said. “I think I have to use my Apiculturist skills to defuse it.”

“We don’t have time for you to learn to defuse anything,” Reeve said. She looked at Thomanji'yheri. “I think my mom—the, uh, fighter—may have attacked a carpenter somewhere nearby.”

“That would likely be in the cooperage,” Starling said from behind Thomanji'yheri. “Many of the carpenters have been drafted into service as coopers, in light of the minimal woodworking needed in our current subterranean abode.”

Reeve’s mouth twisted and her brow wrinkled. “Chickens?”

“Barrel making—coopers—for wine or mead,” Walter said. He swung the bee smoker back into his Inventory. “I really want to put this down before we go anywhere, Reeve.”

“Since when do you know about barrel making and coopers? Do you have a new subclass you haven’t told me about?”

“Your mother and I like watching that food show.”

“The cooperage is on the way to your residence,” Starling said, “to which we should be returning you posthaste.”

“Yes, good, let’s go,” Reeve said.

“Reeve…” Walter said.

Reeve squatted to be able to see him under the brim of the bee veil. His eyes were wide.

“You want to put that down,” she said.

“Please,” he whispered, “I don’t want to be carrying around thirty-thousand bees.”

“Thirty-thousand…are you serious?”

“Yes, I can just tell.”

She took a breath and nodded slowly, choosing not to point out to her father that, if the hive he held contained thirty-thousand bees, then his Inventory currently held almost three million, a fact she felt unlikely to improve his frame of mind or ability to function. “OK. Yeah, we can figure this out.” She looked at the hive-tree. “It’s probably controlled by a skill related to your Class, like you said. Those usually require you to think about what you want to happen. Oh!” Reeve’s eyes widened. “Like when you accidentally started forming the companion’s bond with Bunce.”

“My Hive Master Skill,” Walter said.

“Yes! Do you remember what it felt like when you connected with Bunce?”

Walter frowned. “It’s a little overshadowed by what happened next, when, well, she connected with me.”

Reeve absentmindedly raised her hand to sweep away hair that was tickling her temple, but stopped, remembering all of her hair had recently been cut short. “Uh, Dad, what’s right here?” She tilted her face toward Walter and pointed to her temple.

“That would be a bee,” Walter said quietly but confidently.

Reeve closed her eyes and took a few breaths. Reopening them, she looked at Walter. “We need to make this happen. Just imagine what you’d like the bees to do, and try to push that feeling, that command, to them.”

“Like when I imagine something happening in my UI?”

“Yes! Like that.”

Walter stared at the hive, and over the next minute, Reeve watched his eyes gradually narrow until she wasn’t sure whether they were still open. Other parts of his face began to tense and crease, and after a few more minutes Reeve had to stand and turn her attention away because she didn’t want to witness the moment when a blood vessel somewhere in his head popped.

She joined Thomanji'yheri and Leaf, their conversation too quiet for Reeve to have heard from where she’d been huddling with her father.

“What’s up?” Reeve said.

“Routes out of the camp,” Leaf said. “We’ve been discussing the options.”

“And?”

“Realistically, there is but one.”

Reeve’s mood sank further. “I don’t think its ‘options’ then, is it?”

“Woo-hoo!” Walter’s cry caused Reeve to turn just in time to see a dense swarm of bees pull away from the hive and fly down one of the armory’s aisles and out of sight. The tickling at Reeve’s temple ended, and the lone bee flew away after its colony.

Reeve gave her father a thumbs up. “Nice, Dad. How’d you do it?”

Walter walked toward them, still holding the hive-tree. He smiled. “I just kept thinking of things I wanted them to do more than I wanted them to be buzzing around my hand.”

“What worked?”

Walter nodded, his expression a serious one Reeve associated with moments in which he shared with her what he considered parental wisdom and what she, more often than not, considered useless and embarrassing ancient trivia.

“I couldn’t figure out how to just send them away—the closest I could feel had something to do with Deadly Throng, but they seemed to need a specific location, and I couldn’t figure out how to specify it—but eventually I could feel the options related to commanding them to Swam, so I sent them that way.” He pointed with the tree down the aisle toward the far side of the armory.

Reeve lay a large, half-orc hand on her father’s shoulder. “When they get to the end of the aisle and don’t find anyone to swarm, what will they do?”

Walter looked confused and thought for a minute. He glanced back down the aisle. “I think they’ll keep looking.”

“Where?”

Walter bent slightly and delicately balanced the hive-tree on its exposed roots. “They may just kind of bounce around?”

“Starling?” Reeve raised her voice and turned, looking for the elf, who was right next to her. “Time to go back to our room, by way of the cooperage. Right now.”