The Bee Dungeon

Belissar still had two thousand DP left, enough for room feature choices if he wanted, but he decided to wait for now. With any luck, they might complete some of the gods’ missions before he had enough to afford the other choices, which could inform what they decided to purchase next. The council thus adjourned, as it was almost time for the daily purification. Since Frelis and the First of the Fifth’s Sixth Daughter had only just begun planning for flower defenses, the bee army and karnuq would handle this one as normal.
It was a turtle shade and it got caught in a Dirt Tunnels pit trap yet again.
A new day started. Fourth Queen Pezuya had once again returned with sigmaka warriors to challenge the Tower. Belissar, however, wasn’t paying much attention to them.
The Second of the Sixth had finished evolving! Belissar smiled as he sent his Tower sight over to her hive just in time to see her finish crawling out of a cell. He tilted his head. Curiously, her colors had completely changed from the bluish-green and black stripes of the medicinal bees to white and light red, almost pink, stripes. Her body was smooth and sleek with no visibly sharp edges at all, her stinger had grown even thinner than before, and she glowed with a soft white light.
Belissar was about to head over and congratulate her when a second message appeared before him…and with it a third.
Belissar blinked and stared at the message, stunned for a moment. They had…already completed the God of Bees’ mission? All because a drone evolved? When did
happen?
Belissar zipped about through the hives with his Tower sight until he came upon the hive of the fallen. There, he saw Beero zipping about at max speed with a kind of bee he had never seen before.
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He was about halfway between the size of a worker bee and soldier bee. He retained the big eyes and stout abdomen of the usual drones but now had the extra fuzzy antennae characteristic of communers. His eyes appeared to sparkle as individual receptors lit up here and there. The glow of mana illuminated his abdomen and then passed across the rest of his body in a gentle wave, causing his eyes and antennae to light up when it arrived there.
Belissar was still somewhat dazed as he focused on the new drone, trying to determine what had happened.
Belissar slowly began to smile as he watched Beero and the new dronecaster dance in celebration. There was a lot to take in…but one point in particular stood out to Belissar.
Drones didn’t have to die anymore. Drones were the one kind of bee that even Belissar couldn’t keep alive. Their entire purpose was to mate at the cost of their lives and they could not perform that function and survive…until now. Now…it was possible that every bee born in his Tower could survive without compromising the function of the hives.
That thought brought tears of joy to his eyes.
Belissar personally congratulated the Second of the Sixth and the dronecaster on their evolutions, much to their delight. He found communers from several different hives all buzzing around the dronecaster in particular. It seemed the entire hive of hives was captivated by that news.
Belissar had to pull himself away from the happy dancing and buzzing to get to work. And, as much as he’d have loved to resume his interrupted magic practice from the day before, he had a job to do as Tower Keeper first. With new bees constantly evolving and the gardeners exploring Tarwantrad’s dungeon every day, it was up to him to make sure the new rooms kept pace.
First of all, he checked in on the butcher room and the Dirt Tunnels with the water stones. The butcher hives were growing well, four hives had now established themselves. Squads of butcher soldiers flew back carrying rabbit corpses, dumping them in the corpse zone for the workers to disassemble. The butchers were apparently quite efficient and consuming practically every corpse left there, nothing was accumulating save for bones.
Belissar rubbed his chin and turned his Tower sight to focus on mana. He could see hints of the same kind of colors that surrounded the Memorial, but only small little flashes that had him wondering if he had imagined them. At this rate, he might need to increase the number of rabbits after all…especially if the butcher hives continued to grow. Still, Tarwantrad’s warnings hung in his mind, so he decided to give it a little more time.
Next, he looked over the Dirt Tunnels with the water stones, which had not yet converted into a new room type. He quickly understood why, the flooding of the room was proceeding at a much slower rate than it had in a Flower Meadow. The water from the stones was soaking into the dirt rather than pooling in the tunnels, only when a tunnel had turned into fully saturated mud did the water gather. Even then, it had a tendency to pass through the dirt and drip into tunnels below. Belissar would apparently need to wait for the water to gather at the very bottom of the room and then work its way up.
He shrugged, though. He wasn’t really sure what he could do about that except wait. There wasn’t a problem doing so given that he still had room slots to spare, so he moved on.
Now it was time to begin another experiment: whether or not he could change a room through the use of universal floriculture pots. The First of the Fifth had mentioned that they had cold mana flowers, but no cold room to grow them in, so Belissar decided to try that first. To start with, he needed to decide which kind of room he would try to make colder.
“Hey Niobee…does anyone remember what flowers the cold mana flowers came from?”
“Will ask!”
The ever-reliable Niobee’s antennae glowed as she danced on his head. He barely had to wait a minute before she danced happily about.
“First of the Fifth does! Came from cloudberry!”
Belissar smiled.
“Thanks Niobee, that really helps.”
Niobee continued her happy dance as Belissar began placing a room. He had initially ruled out a Flower Meadow for this experiment as he didn’t think the flowers would appreciate a cold room…but if the cold mana flowers came from cloudberries growing in the meadow then that changed things. He figured his best bet was to go with the room type they preferred.
So, Belissar went ahead and placed a new Flower Meadow next to the slowly flooding Dirt Tunnels just to keep the experiments in one place. He enabled cloudberries…and sweetvetch too, after a moment’s thought. If he recalled correctly, the karnuq had told him both of those came from colder climates. He also placed a mana flower node for easy cross-pollination with the cloudberries and a shortcut to the Orchard’s shortcut wall. Finally, he placed ten universal floriculture pots for the actual experiment. He could afford more, but since that alone took up a hundred mana he wanted to see if ten would be enough.
“Ok, let’s see if that works. Niobee, could you tell everyone about the new room? And could you ask the gardeners to plant some cold mana flowers in the pots?”
“Ok!”
Belissar nodded, satisfied. Now all there was left to do was to wait and see if anything came from these experiments…