Return to Albia

[Originally written August 17 2020]

It’s been a while since I booted Creatures 1 up, so I was a little disoriented on arrival. I checked the observation kit to get back up to speed on the state of the world.

Ah. Carlos needed encouragement to eat; everyone else was doing pretty okay. I’d recently lost a couple Norns, and hatched Edmund by accident.

It occurred to me that these Norns hadn’t really gone through any sort of genetic analysis, and I’d just made a spreadsheet for tracking lineage and moniker, so I added a tab for Creatures 1 and went through everybody’s records to add them to the list. 

While doing so, I encountered something amusing! Remember how I mentioned that Aaron was the provided male PMN from the Life Kit? I hadn’t really thought about the implications of him being an import rather than hatched in my world, so it was kind of trippy to see his birth certificate!

But I didn’t feel like doing the genetic analysis at the time so I just went to work trying to convince Carlos to eat. Derek, bless his heart, even demonstrated how to Push Food for him, to no avail. I like Derek; he’s a good Norn. He’s obedient, good-looking, and a pretty decent eater. In short, he’s everything Carlos isn’t. Ah, well.

In between trying to coax some cooperation out of the troublesome Banana Norn, I made the rounds to check on everyone else. Aaron was off on another adventure, this time to the Grendel Tree. Erika was pregnant again. Most of the other Norns were either hanging out with Greg in the garden or ended up there by following the Hand as I tried to guide Carlos into a food-rich environment. That’s the one problem with having trained my Norns to follow me so well – any attempt to lead one Norn inevitably turns into a mass migration as a whole flock of the little critters pour out of the woodworks to follow me like the Pied Piper of Albia.

Erika stealthily hid her egg behind the Feverfew, where I nearly missed it in all the commotion, but I did manage to grab it before it could hatch! No more Edmunds, thank you! Beth decided to make me keep working to keep on top of the egg situation, and when I left off, she had another egg on the way.

Carlos had still not eaten.