Nicole and Kazic were in one of the open plains near Heart Forge, beside the trade road that connected the east and west sides of the continent. Their backs were to the road and just behind them was the hive building they’d been using as a portable base, with the doors wide open. Beside the parked shuttle were two gray, wheeled plastic storage tubs that had ‘wall’ and ‘street’ written on their sides with a black marker. Just past those was a red, rolling cart with sub-divided drawers that had been labeled with the same marker as ‘buildings’. Several of the drawers had been completely pulled out and laid on the floor of the entryway, allowing one to see that each little tray in the drawer bore its own label, with some examples being ‘admin’, ‘art’, ‘storage’ and ‘utility’. One whole drawer was labeled ‘housing’, though the only things within any of the storage containers were identical-looking folded-up pieces of Kurg.

  Just after they’d gotten back to Heart Forge, Kazic had resigned as fire chief and began joining Nicole every day, to work on Kurg as paid staff, while Nicole had taken to living in it, since she’d grown attached to her roomy bedroom in the upstairs area of the hive.

  The work had started with an inventory of the pieces they had on hand, opening each, in turn. After that, having seen that most of the pieces were in strange, nonsensical arrangements, like a city wall surrounding the greenhouse, they started further breaking them down, to organize the pieces into more useful categories. With the inventory work complete, they had roughly one-third wall segments, one-third street and one-third buildings.

  As they entered the hive, having finally finished their inventory, Nicole looked over a tablet computer that held a complete list of the parts available to them, along with a few crude drawings they’d put together for possible layouts of the city.

  Seeing the enormity of the task, she grumbled, “It’s too much! How am I supposed to make a city of all these pieces? I’m no architect!”

  “Aye, me isn’t one, either,” Kazic nodded, “but we could always wait for the Ulkun to arrive, couldn’t we?”

  “That won’t work.” Nicole laughed in a hollow fashion, “They literally stood around doing nothing for decades, just because they couldn’t figure out what to do next. They aren’t fast thinkers and I’d rather get this done in my own lifetime. I think we’d be better off using the Ulkun for heavy-lifting, rather than thinking.”

  “Well, me has a cousin that’s an architect. Maybe she’d help?”

  “Do you trust her?” Nicole asked.

  “Aye,” Kazic nodded, “though she can be a little weird.”

  “Define ‘weird’.”

  The dwarf chuckled, “Ye’ll see when ye meets her.” Seeing the sun was going down, he added, “Me’ll bring her tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Have a good night.”

  Nicole shut the doors and locked them from the inside, then headed for one of the couches, where Ustrina had been sleeping for several days. In the past month, she’d been growing steadily and had become too large to perch on Nicole’s shoulder, being about the size of the average dog, though when she was awake she still behaved more like a cat.

  Kazic headed for one of the side chambers, where Nicole had recently installed a teleporter pad, because walking to and from the city had become burdensome. It was weird, but when she started looking around for a way to string power cables through the walls, she’d discovered a set of holes that were perfect for the task, even though she could have sworn they hadn’t been there the day before, allowing her to hide a small reactor under the stairs, then run cables to the room next to them, all without a trip hazard.

  Pop! – The teleporter activated, leaving her alone for the evening.

  After a little while, Nicole felt mildly bored and brought up a satellite image on her tablet. The Ulkun were halfway to Heart Forge and walking across the grassy plain of the continent, in sixty columns of marching figures, arranged by body type and size. Behind them, the ground was firmly packed, almost like a dirt road. Noting the tail end of their procession had left the trees of the forest, she took a quick snapshot and ran it through a program that was good at counting objects in photos, highlighting each type of Ulkun as an example of what it was supposed to count. The program quickly spat out an approximation of ten-thousand!

  Nicole switched back to her inventory list and checked the number of housing units available. Even with conservative estimates and putting a minimum of three Ulkun in each room, there was nowhere near enough housing, which made no sense.

  Hadn’t the city been built to house the Ulkun? Since it troubled her, she started estimating how much of the city the Architect had stolen when he teleported away, guessing at their size based on the average size of the pieces she had access to, but the numbers came up far too short.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The only conclusion she could come to was there were more pieces out there. Perhaps Ogomid had hidden some of them away?

  Feeling frustrated and knowing she wouldn’t get answers any time soon, she put everything away and climbed the stairs to her room.

  The upper rooms of the hive were the best, complete with wide windows to let in light, which was rather odd, because from the outside, the structure was completely opaque. With a little concentration, she’d quickly found the walls responded to desire, but always with smooth gradients from opaque to transparent, instead of sharply-defined edges. From the outside, even when she’d setup a camera, the walls were always the same: smoothly-polished orichalcum.

  Feeling tired, Nicole changed into a comfortable set of loose-fitting clothes and climbed into bed.

  Nicole woke to the sound of loud arguing in dwarvish, followed by angry, draconic growling!

  Quickly rushing down the stairs, Nicole found Kazic and a rather strange-looking dwarf backing away from Ustrina, who seemed to have grown slightly larger in the night, having reached the size of a large dog, instead of an average one!

  The new dwarf was definitely female, with a bust-line even a human woman would have been jealous of, but without the long beard of the standard-model dwarf, or even stubble. Even more odd was the color of her long, curly hair: it was a stark, blue shade! She wore a pair of glasses with thick, black frames. Overall, she looked more like a short human college student, rather than a dwarf. She even wore a backpack, which had something heavy in it, based on how the straps lay.

  Smoke curled from the edges of Ustrina’s mouth, as Kazic desperately called out, “Ye know me, don’t ye? Me’s never mistreated ye! Please don’t burn us!”

  The new dwarf stood behind him and was clearly using him for cover.

  Seeing their predicament and certain Ustrina was about to release flame, Nicole shouted, “Ustrina, no!”

  The dragon looked straight at Nicole and grumbled, “Why always ‘no’?”

  Nicole was shocked, since Ustrina had never spoken before, though she’d repeatedly demonstrated understanding of spoken words. The dwarves also stared in shock.

  Taking a moment to think as she finished climbing down the stairs, Nicole answered, “There will be no burning of my friends!”

  The dwarves stared at Nicole.

  “Why not?” The dragon gave her a defiant look and the dwarves once again stared at the dragon.

  “Because they’re my friends and I don’t want them hurt!” Again, Nicole was the center of attention.

  Ustrina grumbled, “They’re not my friends.”

  The eyes of the dwarves bobbed back to her.

  “You’ll do as I say or I’ll never feed you again!” Nicole countered.

  “Hate dwarves.” Ustrina turned away and climbed on one of the couches, where she closed her eyes to slits and gave the dwarves an acidic glare of hatred.

  “What happened down here?” Nicole asked.

  “We started to argue a little,” Kazic admitted, “but then yer dragon turned on us and looked like she was going to kill us.” He gestured to the new dwarf, “This is the cousin me was telling ye about.”

  The cousin introduced herself with a bow of her head, “Me name is Vanubo, but everyone calls me Vanu.”

  “What were the two of you arguing about?”

  “That was me own fault.” Vanu quickly bowed her head, in apology, “Me don’t like dragons-” Ustrina growled in response, reminding everyone the feeling was mutual, “-and me shouldn’t have been so loud about it.”

  “Fair enough. As you’ve noticed, Ustrina doesn’t like dwarves very much.” Nicole gestured for them to follow her to the dining table, where they all sat, on the opposite side of the room from the cantankerous dragon, “Kazic tells me you’re an architect. Do you think you could help us lay out the outer walls, streets and buildings of a city?”

  “Me’s actually a student of architecture, even though me already finished me apprenticeship, but me won’t accept the title of ‘Architect’ until me’s finished me college degrees. In the old days, learning from a master as a teen would have been enough, but in these modern days, there’s so much more to learn than just the ancient crafting secrets handed down from master to apprentice!” The dwarf woman’s eyes seemed to take on a light of their own as they filled with a passion for the subject, “Me was up all night studying city plans from all over the galaxy, after me spoke with Kazic about yer project. Me hasn’t seen anything else based on hexagons, but me took the liberty of studying bee hives for inspiration…” Vanu went on and on about the subject, repeatedly comparing the city of Kurg to a bee hive and the Ulkun to worker bees, while the eyes of Nicole and Kazic glazed over, unable to get a word in, due to how quickly Vanu spoke.

  The dwarf soon had three books spread open on the table and a large sheet of custom, hexagonal graph paper was unrolled, on which she began drawing a rough sketch for the layout of the city, while she continued to talk.

  After a while, Kazic stepped away from the table and Nicole followed suit. Vanu seemed not to notice their absence as she worked, mumbled and sketched.

  “Okay, so we’ve definitely got an architect, now.” Nicole whispered, “Who else are we going to need?”

  “Smiths and craftsmen? Every city needs those. Watchmen, doctors, nurses, farmers for the greenhouses, miners for gathering resources and people to cook meals. Oh, and that reminds me: me bumped into Peares last night and he’s planning to move into the city just as soon as the Ulkun arrive.” Seeing Nicole’s look of distaste, Kazic chuckled and continued, “We might need a few soldiers to defend the city or at least teach the Ulkun to defend it.”

  Soldiers and weapons to arm them with. That was something Nicole hadn’t thought about, but it was true: they would likely have to defend the city at some point, especially considering how mobile and powerful it was. Surely, someone would want to steal it. She made a mental note to stock her new home with weaponry.

  Thinking of the trouble he’d already been, Nicole sighed, “Do you think the Architect will come back to cause more trouble?”

  “Probably not. He did run away just as soon as he saw how upset ye were, after all. He’s probably too cowardly to come back.”