There is a lot to do down here. A lot that you didn't do last time. But the fact that you are always growing larger... It makes you happy of course, any progress towards the mighty Draak-Kin you know you can be is a delight. But nothing is only ever good. As your size increases, so does your hunger, and some paths that were once open to you will be closed. This is just the way things are.
So, heedless of the itch in your Mind that tells you to return to the surface quickly, you resolve to thoroughly investigate the depths once again. Starting with the Wormtails skulking about here and there.
It takes quite a bit of maneuvering to pin one enough that you can actually approach and talk to them.
I have not come to eat you. I hunt knowledge this day, knowledge of what you have seen and smelled.
...After you came and left, great scaled one, Tailless was more active. It did many things of careful arranging of wood stone. It made strange noises and movements. We did not understand or care. Food was easier to steal than ever before! We grew fat off the opportunity, and had many children. Then, it was sick. Then sicker. Then dead.
The Tailless was a being ancient in comparison to you, but not in comparison to what you will be. Draak are unique among all the animals of Earth in how they can survive forever, if not slain by hunger or claw or any of the other things that can kill. The Tailless must have known its life would end soon, even if it had enough to eat and was safe from danger. What thoughts might that bring to a mind? You shiver.
What will you do now? You ask the Wormtail.
The tailless-deep-nest food is now a no-food. Perhaps we will go to many-small-passages-above. Perhaps we will go to the pit of warmth.
Do you wish you could stay here?
The small creature seems confused by your question. Eventually it responds, Leaving is maybe-death. Staying here is certain-death-by-starvation. It is not a decision.
With that, you let the scared thing scurry off without you blocking its way any further. There's something resonant to that sentiment. 'It is not a decision'. Some choices are not really choices at all. A remarkable show of adaptability from the small creatures, and a lesson you would do well to adopt.
+1 Lesson in Water
What you are doing now is a choice, something you are doing out of... What, compassion? The Digger is dead. It can no longer feel. Compassion does not really apply anymore. Perhaps... Respect, then? Setting things right, according to a weird, twisty, Tailless version of 'right'. For some reason. You get the feeling other Draak would be seriously questioning your use of time, here, but you burn the bones clean of what little rot clings to them with gentle flames, then carefully arrange them in the room of the dead, as you have seen the others arranged.
You make a thorough study of all the markings and sigils you can find, committing them to your memory like tunnel-paths and maps. There are a great many markings. Carved into stone, into wood, painted in faded colors on things (somehow). Some of the markings and patterns repeat quite often, while others occur only once. It takes quite a while to commit everything to your mind, but you somehow know that your memories of the patterns will linger in perfect clarity for a very long time, perhaps forever. Some day, perhaps you can come to understand what they actually mean.
This one doesn't have a silver necklace to place with him, and if he had you might have wanted to keep it as a token of remembrance more than for its shininess-value. Though part of you itches to loot the metal things from the dead, you resist this urge. Furthermore, you don't know what sigils would have been carved into the wall above his bone-box. All the other bodies have patterns of markings, and the... Ritual of death... Is incomplete without them. But what should you mark? You don't know.
Instead of guessing at appropriate Tailless-markings, you end up carving the sigils for 'Draak-Kin' and 'Tailless' next to each other, together below the proud shape of Stone. Each of these things have intuitive and obvious shapes to you, frozen in clarity from being taught during the muddled and uncertain time-before-time that was your existence in the egg. Getting the thin stone covering the other bone-boxes have onto this one is troublesome. It's surprisingly light for a large mass of stone, but you are still small. With determined effort, you manage it, and then slink off to another room to sleep in a disused corner, somewhat exhausted.
You dream of a Tailless working at a wall of Stone, slowly carving markings into it. So slowly and patiently it would be easy to feel like no time is passing at all. Carvings spill out across the surface, visions of glory and strange devices and many No-Tails doing many different things. Making Treasure. Tending to each other. Fighting each other. Holding smaller Tailless... An orderly panoply of stone that seems almost alive.
And the stone-carver is not yet finished. But he grows slower and slower. He moves with pain and difficulty, though he is steady as he slowly claws at the stone. He is hunched over and grey and wracked with pain, a pitiful sight. He falls, the latest carving not fully complete. And you think it a pity that the work of art which an entire life was poured into exists without the artist being known. So with painstaking slowness, you carve an image of the stone-carver next to his life's work. You feel something... Shift, as though someone made a deeply satisfied grunt of approval.
...You are always on the lookout for strange dreams, ever since you were told that True Dreams with deep meaning about the world exist. You can't be sure if what you just experienced was a True Dream or your own mind's creation, but something about it makes you suspect the former.
Memorized Tailless Digger sigils. +2 Lessons in Earth
With that taken care of, you really must take the time to examine the devices left here. Perhaps some of them are even worth taking back to the surface. You are most curious about the shining lights... After carefully climbing up to one of the strings of lights that once sustained plants, you tear the whole strand loose so you can better examine it on the ground. The levers and buttons and switches are difficult to reach, but ultimately simple. They make metal touch or no longer touch, controlling what the electricity can flow to. The ones that twist you have to take apart to understand - there is a long strip of something that must be slightly conductive, and as the moving part twists, less and less of non-conductive material lies between the two copper contacts, easing the flow of lightning. Clever.
These strange lights are ever-so-slightly warmer than their surroundings, but not nearly so hot as you would expect if it was some kind of fire that produces that light. In fact, the cold light these strange devices emit is strange to you, almost uncanny. A work of the Diggers that you don't really understand. You carefully examine one after turning off the power so it doesn't blind you, staring at the tiny device. You... Still don't know how it works. There are two carefully shaped spars of metal inside a thin, clear glass case. Dozens or hundreds of these tiny devices make up the larger lights. You imagine one would have to be the size of an ant to make something so small and intricate! Except, obviously, the Tailless did it without such an advantage.
It takes a while, but you eventually manage to crack open a small at the base of one of the pipes (ignoring the small flood of water that this looses). It is initially just as mysterious as the lights, with a strange bladed rotor - to move water, as the other one moves air? It makes sense that this device is what drives water through the veins up ahead, like a pumping heart. Unfortunately, your examination involves quite a bit of tooth and claw, and when you try to re-assemble everything, you find that too much has been permanently cut and bent and smashed. Bent tiny metal pieces and flecks of strange material that's not stone nor wood nor plant nor metal litter the floor. Your claws aren't really nimble enough to put all this back together even if it were intact.
You do manage to identify which part of it is the electrically interesting bit - a cylinder hidden behind the rest of the item, which you crack open to reveal weird arrangements of wire - multiple bundles arranged around each other. You think... Yes, you think you recognize this. You know what it is at least - a device that takes the flow of lightning and uses it to create motion. You can imagine how the fields would interact, staring at it... Multiple loops of copper layered over each other, packed so closely and yet not touching. Such fine craftsmanship! You don't understand the whole device, there are a lot of bits that are probably important and do other things, to refine the basic action of 'turn electrical power into motion', but you can't figure out what the extra bits actually do.
There are a few other devices you can't make heads or tails of, frustratingly. They glow with light or make strange noises and sometimes move, to no purpose you can easily make sense of... You identify a few large boxes as nexuses of electrical power, where it flows in and out in a way that is... Regulated. Controlled. You practically salivate at this realization and peer into one, letting your mind identify how the forces play against each other to guide the wild energy of storms and lightning along careful, controlled paths. Fascinating. But where is the energy for all this coming from? You have a suspicion it is in the one place you haven't yet examined, the very bottom of this already-deep chamber... So you go there, following insulated wires as they converge and converge down to a single large channel.
It's a bit of a trick getting past the barriers the Tailless places in the path. You try to reason out how to make the weird device barring your way release itself from the door it holds closed so tightly, but eventually settle for dragging a box over to get you closer, then gnawing and clawing at it until you have destroyed enough to wrench the whole thing out of the door. And below that you find a large, round chamber that is very warm, in comparison to the rest of the cave. The centerpiece is a tall, multi-chambered device, and scattered around it are tools and parts of many kinds.
The machine seems like... The heart of everything the Diggers built here, somehow. The core of this great machine is a huge metal sphere, which positively radiates heat, being warmer than even a dark stone on a clear day. This heat suffuses the chamber and drives several devices that hs-hs softly through some mechanism you can't quite understand, hollow bulbs moving back and forth between the heat of the center and metal plates that bring the coolness of stone a bit closer. It is these devices, harnessing the sullen heat of the central core, that link to the great wires leading upward.
It should be comfortable, that heat, but something about it makes you uneasy... It is not some kind of spirit, for your Lifesense detects no life here. The core of this massive machine sings a quietly hostile music at the faintest edge of your perception, the wispy hint of a new kind of Destruction, contained and tamed... You have even less idea what sort of power is chained here, what weird malevolence the Diggers could have manifested to do this? You study the looming heart of heat for a while, trying to comprehend it. Ultimately your unease wins out, thinking of ways that mysterious energies could harm you, and you leave.
Power can end all contemplation and argument. Perhaps any power you can claim and tame and use for your own ends is a worthy power, whether or not you understand it. But power that is not understood seems likely to turn and Destroy the one who attempted to wield it...
+1 Lesson in Fire
The last segment of your stay down here is pretty good for keeping your mind off of things, thankfully. Treasure-Hunting. Your haul in physical goods, not even the secrets and lessons this place teaches you, ends up being a decent salve. You are growing hungry by now and don't have enough time to really thoroughly search and strip everything of value from this place, but you get a few things. Light making devices, long lines of copper, some magnets one intact heavy bundle of a working motor, one crescent-shaped False Claw made of shiny metal, more glass flasks of Acid, and a few odds and ends like flecks of ruined wire or those weird metal disks, all piled into a large Hollow Hill (so handy for carrying things around!), and hauled back to the surface.
You return to your Den with some trepidation, remembering what happened last time you plunged into the depths... You smell the aftermath of a great storm when you come up from the caves. Mud and broken tree limbs litter the ground, and the whole world seems to be recovering from suffering. You missed this great fury entirely, the structure of the deeps somehow keeping water from flowing down and in as you might have expected it to. Frustrated despair comes over you as you catch sight of your Den. The entrance is collapsed, turned to mud and falling to seal up the entrance! Your clever design for keeping water from flowing in was not sufficient to protect it from such fury, it seems.
You immediately set to work. It takes most of a day to clear a narrow path in. A thin layer of water coats the lower sections of your Den, and you find the small side-tunnel you created to allow for drainage clogged by fallen mud. After clearing it you search for your Treasures and find them... All intact, if damp, thankfully. It would have been frustrating to lose Treasure not to a worthy opponent but to the whims of Nature. After securing your new acquisitions, you turn your attention to immediate repair and re-consolidation of your Den. The stones and clay you laid down for a floor and the base of some walls is intact, if strewn with mud fallen from the roof. One section is sagging worryingly. You conclude that there must be a small hollow under it, opened by some quirk of Water's flow.
Apart from occasional hunts to regain your strength, you spend all your time for days upon days shoring things up as best you can, rebuilding the overhang-entrance a bit further back, a bit thicker, and replanting all the vegetation. You have observed that roots keep soil together even in heavy rain, a useful property. You shape up the walls where they are uneven or sagging and clear out all the mud and widen things just a little bit more. It's a lot of work to make sure everything is the way it was before, and not very interesting, though satisfying to have done.
Action: Repair Den automatically taken.
When your efforts are concluded, you are... Still unsatisfied. The sections of your Den that have dirt walls and roof are not truly secure. If a great storm overcame your Den once, it can happen again. You feel a strong urge to continue making improvements, to make this place a sanctum against such a storm. As you consider your next course of action, you also feel a sort of heaviness beginning to settle on you. It's barely even noticeable at this point, but it reminds you of the Great Sleep you know will overtake you eventually.
With a startling realization, you notice the colors of trees' leaves are slowly changing, fading. It's only a few of them now, but this is the sure sign of Autumn. The great cycle of the seasons marches onward... You are not out of time in your first year yet, but Time's inexorable march will bring it to you soon enough. A sense of quiet desperation rises in you. Most days have given you some new interesting thing to see or taste or do, and there are so many mysteries and stories you glimpsed but did not fully uncover... And you can't investigate them all. What will you have accomplished and seen and done in your first yet?
Autumn is coming! You will have to hibernate eventually, but not yet. What will you do next?
[] Improve your Den. The damage it suffered during the storm you weren't even there to see is simply unacceptable. More stones, more careful design. Make it as sturdy as the hill you are digging into.
[] Seek a Herald from among the Bluewings, to announce to challengers that this territory is claimed and you will return soon, whenever you leave it.
[] Venture South and try to find and meet the other hatchlings that are supposed to be there. You won't necessarily challenge them, you just want to meet them.
[] Try to find a path to the wise Draak called Leafback, whose territory is North and West across a band of steep mountains and rough terrain, and ask them to teach you.
[] Learn the Way of a tribe of beasts. You have spent time watching animals and plants, but your understanding of particular kinds can deepen and bring you insights.
[] Try to craft something useful or unique with the various electrical supplies you have in your Hoard. Maybe you can think of something useful. Maybe it would just be a neat Treasure.
[] As a Draak, you must become fierce and mighty. Hone your skills with tooth and claw by hunting something a bit more dangerous than common Treetail, Longears, Stripetail, or Darksweet.
