Everything went better than expected

 [Originally written October 3 2020]

The Meso is a very comfortable area, so creatures seem to not really want to leave it. I expect this is exacerbated by the fact that the only ways out are via portals and the door to the hub; the hub doesn’t have much interesting-smelling in it to draw them through the door, and I don’t believe portals carry smells at all so the only reason Norns push them is boredom or crowdedness. As such, most everybody except Ash, Lilac, and the Grendels were in the Meso (the rest were in the Woodland). Birch at least decided to be adventurous and wander into the Hub, but not for long – he just entertained himself going back and forth through the door.

With everything calm and a large number of young male Norns, I decided it was the ideal time to bring in a new breed, and hatched Daisy, a Fallow Norn. She got on quite nicely with Spruce, and the two were pretty well inseperable.

Rose has seemed pretty content to remain on the top level of the Meso by herself. She sometimes sits by the warp portal but doesn’t go through, although sometimes she gets visitors through it.

Acacia outgrew his younger playmates and became a bit aloof, while still sticking around the area. Perhaps he wants to be seen as the cool older kid? Pine certainly seems to be in awe – either that or he’d just been smacked around a bit by Birch! I noticed he often had a frightened look about him and I wasn’t sure whether it was caused by other Norns treating him as a punching bag or something else, so I gave him a new Cuddly Tree to play with.

Meanwhile, in the Woodland, the stress of dealing with Ash’s incessant attempts to play catch with him turned old Willow gray! Oak was perfectly well adjusted, if obsessed with his gadgets, but I occasionally had to encourage Willow to take his anger out on the objects left laying about for this express purpose. Still, the fact that Oak at least turned out well tells me I did something right with that one. I’m getting my Grendel-taming mojo back!

Lilac wasn’t content to stick around in one place – leave it to the Chichi to teleport all over the place! She decided a trip to the Desert was in order, where she attempted to play with the rocks – classified as toys, yet not something creatures can play with. I can understand why object categories behave so inconsistently in Creatures 1 and even 2 to an extent, but you’d think by Creatures 3 they would have figured it out… Thankfully I found a fix for this on the internet so I’ll inject that for the next session.

Spruce took after his mother, braving the trip through the warp portal to the Woodland. Evidently the climate wasn’t to his liking, or maybe he just liked the feeling of teleportation, since he just went back and forth for a while. 

Meanwhile, Lilac continued her adventure by teleporting to the Workshop, but from there she decided to walk to the Hub and eventually join the gaggle of Norns already in the Meso. This left Ash and the Grendels as the only inhabitants of the Woodland. 

To even things out a little bit, I grabbed a few creatures and moved them to the Woodland. Acacia looked like he wasn’t having any of it, since he immediately headed back for the warp portal, but changed his mind on the top level.

Spruce headed for the drumset, while Daisy went straight down the elevator and in the opposite direction. Just a tip, Spruce: if you’re going to try to serenade a female, drums are not the most romantic instrument to use. 

In the Meso, excessively tall bramboo was getting to be a problem, and somehow they’d started sprouting in the middle level, so I stripped the tallest stalks bare and used the berries to make cookies, which I scattered around at random.

Oak, ever the well-behaved Grendel, made friends with Acacia and enjoyed playing with the rocket toy with him. Now if I can just get all future Grendels to be like this one! Ash, meanwhile, enjoyed the cool breeze from the weather generator.

Spruce had figured out that the drums weren’t doing the trick and went to be a little more direct with Daisy. This time she returned the interest, and soon there was an egg on the way!

Almost simultaneously with little Foxglove’s birth I got a death notification, which momentarily scared the bajeezus out of me, but it was just an Ettin. The little Norn was quite healthy! She has three minor pigment bleed mutations and one change to a receptor. I don’t believe it’ll have any significant effect, but she’ll need slightly more prostaglandin than usual to heal her immune system.

There was a period of not much interesting going on. Spruce, Ash, and Acacia harrassed the Grendels while they tried to sleep. Lilac wandered through the warp portal to the Terrarium. 

As Daisy recovered from her first pregnancy, she gained an entourage of hopeful male Norns, and it didn’t take long for one to catch a lucky break and father her second – this time, it was Acacia, though Spruce was eager to take credit! 

I don’t have the heart to break it to him, but thankfully Norns aren’t smart enough to put together Amaranth’s parentage from her appearance. She has three mutations – two to chemical reactions and one to a pigment bleed. Incidentally she gets two autocorrections when I open her genome. The pigment bleed just has a life stage change, and one of the reactions has a mutability degree change. The third flagged gene has no changes so it must be one of the automatic corrections.