There is darkness, and a sense of pressure. Then a presence, a woman with a clipboard, dressed in blue, looking nervously at something. An entity wakes up, without form, body or memory.

“Sir! Good to see you’re awake again. We’ve hit a bit of a snag with the operation.”

It takes a moment, but the entity finds its voice. “Operation?”

“Oh dear. A few snags then. I am Ava, your assistant. We’re a pair of spirits, bound to a magical core, buried in the earth. I need you to focus your will, force the dirt away from us and build a tunnel to the surface. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” The entity exerted its will, compacting and transforming dirt into stone, shaping that stone into bricks, building a chamber around itself, and another that opened into sunlight and trees. Air and Mana rushed in, bathing the core in power. The entity’s awareness expanded to the stones it had just formed. The feeling was like stretching after a long sleep, but there was a sensation of something missing, of quite a bit missing.

“Excellent work sir. Well the good news is we’re stable again. The bad news is the core has suffered severe damage. We’re going to have to gather the pieces up to get full functionality back, or rebuild them ourselves. On the plus side I can actually see one of the pieces in the recently excavated chamber. Fetching that now.”

The entity watched as a jagged pebble, a wayward piece of itself, lifted off the ground and flitted into the core room. The core itself resembled a shredded flower, most of it missing. The pebble slotted into place and a few memories surfaced, fragile and weak, but containing the skills to create its first defenders. One memory would stay, the others would perish to feed it.

> Kobolds: Fairly weak, but can build a wide variety of traps and defenses to give themselves the edge in combat
> Sproutlings: Every sproutling starts small, but grows over time, becoming mighty monsters given enough time.
> Golems: Tiny machine life that can combine together into larger more menacing machines.