Community Planning

Chapter 120

The valley, which I needed to name, looked like it was holding an undead festival. Mira, Hetcha, and Mina were all topside exploring the small main street I'd set up during the week since I'd revealed the skeletons to them. There were ten buildings in total, and I had a sketch of what the space would look like as I filled it in going forward.

One I was presently in the process of editing the shit out of. My little Halloween Town was a project I'd been working on without much input, which showed.

It also turned out I'd phrased my former requests for input too confusingly or ambiguous, depending on who you asked. Now the bone brigade properly understood it would be topside, and they could apply to live in it and eventually interact with mortals. That resulted in a flood of requests and ideas.

Certainly, some of them were misguided suggestions for discreet murder, oddly not from Chris, but the enthusiasm was appreciated regardless.

It had taken a couple of days for the girls to get comfortable with the skeletons. I'd told the bone brigade to carry on like usual with their illusions. While the girls were important to my plans, such as they were, that was no reason to force my residents to do anything uncomfortable. They took a couple of days to loosen up around the girls too, but now mingled relatively freely.

Thanks to the change, I was overwhelmed with artistic work, which was glorious. The would-be shopkeepers and merely curious mingled to exchange notes and ideas. I was flooded with design modification requests, placement change suggestions--everything under the sun.

I was having fun watching the proceedings from my palace of shadows. While the girls were exploring, I had a scheduled meeting with the halflings who wanted to move into the town. They'd been the most vocal group by far, so once the example main street was done, I'd decided to prioritize them.

I had a representative party of halflings on their way to meet me. Honestly, being out and in the daylight made me deeply uncomfortable. Still, irrationally anxious or not, I needed to be outside to do the implementation phase correctly.

"Mistress!" Icarus called. He was leading the pack of halflings coming into the palace of shadows. I waved and waited for them to form up on me before teleporting us all to the area that had been selected.

Of course, I could have done it individually, regardless of where they were. Only it felt like that was a little weird—meeting up and going felt more natural than just snatching them from wherever they happened to be.

"This… it's lovely," someone said as the group started murmuring. About a quarter of them had illusions of life, so they spoke aloud instead of the usual silent telepathy. Strolling along the path, they started checking out the interiors of the test houses.

Despite it being a bit cowardly, I was hanging back in a stand of trees that cast deep shadows. It wasn't perfect, but it helped ease my nerves just a bit.. I watched the halflings explore the test units from the shade of the trees. They looked pleased enough, but I felt like something was off.

The halfling warren in the dungeon had a low entrance, so I'd initially designed their homes with their heights in mind. The shops were taller to accommodate other races, with doors that split in the middle. It looked funky to me and not in a charming way now that I was watching them use the spaces.

"Hey, Mirabella… Is this similar to the place you lived before?" I asked. Mirabella Fairburn Humorous, bard librarian, was the nearest halfling to me and studied the buildings curiously.

"Well, sort of. Plenty of us had shops along roads and the like, but our homes were usually cut into embankments of rivers, not-" Mirabella gestured. I'd essentially made mounds and set the housing into them. That clearly didn't match how they'd done things, and it wasn't aesthetically pleasing to my orbs now that I was looking at it.

"Anyone object to me changing things up?" I called out. A chorus of "no" came back after only a slight pause. Laughing, I cracked my knuckles and opened my interface to try something a bit more extreme in terms of renovations.

Multi-selecting tiles, I included the river and twenty feet on either side to act as a flood plain. Thankfully, the lake was already lower, so I didn't need to mess with that. Next, I depressed the tile group by eight feet, which created a new set of cliffs.

"Fuuuuck," Icarus said appreciatively. The other halflings let out similar exclamations or whistled. I made a little bow, the butterflies in my stomach abating just a bit at the praise.

I wasn't done yet, though. I pushed the cliffs out and infilled to create a gentle slope adorned with thick grass to keep the dirt in place. I felt it looked nice and wouldn't trap anyone who might accidentally slide down.

Coming four feet up from the river plane I cut a wide, for halflings, path into the slope. I covered it with bricks of the valley's natural stone. Next, I adjusted the slope above to make it even gentler than the lower one. With the basic preparations complete, I moved the houses I'd made originally into this new section.

I kept the entrances on the interior, so they faced the river. The doors were in little cutouts with roofs above them, so they were easy to find and didn't stick out into the path. The idea of having to step directly into foot traffic from your front door was gross to me.

"That's much nicer," Reolus Oldbuck Humorous said, then laughed. He and the rest of the halflings walked into the new arrangement while I contemplated an issue. The houses were now sticking up about two feet above the slope. I considered covering it up with more dirt and grass but hesitated.

I could have waited but decided to test an idea. I copied a home to experiment with. I added enough earth to make a new mound on top of it, but this one was only three feet high. Playing around with some internal structure changes, I got it to a point where I felt comfortable placing one of the shop designs on top.

Rather than leaving it tall folk friendly, I cut it down to halfling preference in height but added a large window so goods could be displayed. Next to it, I added a smaller to-go-style window. Since it was on a raised mound, the store was at a comfortable height for taller folk to look into but not comically oversized for their intended owners.

"Mistress 42?" Hetcha inquired. I nearly jumped out of my pseudo-flesh. I was halfway over the roof of the shop I was working on before I even consciously processed who’d spoken. I hadn’t heard her approaching and she’d come from behind me, where no one was supposed to be.

"Yes?" I asked. I knew I probably looked as much like an idiot as I felt as I peered over the store's roof at her. With my dignity in absolute tatters, I couldn't do much but proceed and hope Hetcha indulged me by just going with it. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to react much to my little stunt.

"Uhm… can you make burrows like you made whatever these homes are? My people prefer living underground when we have a choice," Hetcha asked.

"We call them warrens," Mirabella chimed in from my left. She was sitting with a grin on the roof next to me. If I had the required anatomy, I'd have pissed myself because I hadn't heard her climb up. I felt I might need to make bells into a fashion trend if I wanted whatever my heart equivalent was to hold out long term.

"I think my people call them that when they reach a certain size, though I'm not sure," Hetcha supplied. From what little she'd said about herself, she hadn't grown up in a Lepusan community. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to find much in the way of cultural or historical information on them either.

Lepusan history was only covered in broad strokes by the encyclopedia. Moreover, they had been in a diaspora situation for quite a while. So cultural erosion wasn't strange given those circumstances.

"I have no problem making something like that. If what I come up with doesn't work, I can always alter them later," I offered. Of course, it might get tricky to do anything significant once mortals officially lived in the valley, but I'd think of something.

"Though… Would you prefer this environment, or would a forest be better?" I asked out of curiosity. I associate rabbits with open grassy meadows, but Lepusan weren't rabbits. So I didn't honestly know what they might like.

"You'd change the valley into a forest?" Hetcha asked, looking stunned.

"I could, but I was asking because I have some land in a natural forest on the other side of the mountain," I explained. I wasn't that into the idea of outright changing the local environment. Despite how much I tinkered with it, I'd never outright used foreign plants or altered the biome type.

"Want to take a look?" I asked. I'd been buying tiles on that side occasionally, which was why I'd held off on adding elves to the dungeon. They weren't represented in the typical local species, so I didn't see a reason to rush. They'd probably be happier if they had access to a lovely outdoor area right off rather than having to wait.

"You can just cross the mountain range here?" Hetcha asked, sounding worried.

"Problem?" I inquired. I didn't have much information on the other side of the range, but it didn't seem strange or dangerous. Hetcha started to say something, then paused, looking up at the mountains.

"Uhm… I suppose that depends on how well you get along with demons," Hetcha said finally.

"Get along with what now?" I asked, taken aback. Then what she meant sunk in. "Ah fuck."

"If you want to be knee-deep in blood, guts, and glory, we do have a few lesser opportunities. Demon Lord is particularly popular," Steve had said during my interview. Somehow I'd forgotten about that. If Demon Lords were a thing, it stood to reason that demons would be. I might have fucked up with the second entrance.