"Maaan! Seriously! How do they expect a couple of three year olds to work like this!" Sam groused.

"You keep saying that, over and over. It's not helping, and it's actually getting annoying," I said.

"It's not about the mana! We had to work hard climbing down that cliff! It was physically and mentally exhausting! And that ass-hole wants us to go smoothing out this tough bastard of a stone wall!" She continued to rage.

"You said that too. You aren't going to change his mind complaining to me," I said.

"What, you want me to complain to that bastard? We both already know how that will go," Sam said, and then pulled off a piece of the stone wall in front of us and put it in her mouth. There was no biting or swallowing. Although our teeth probably are hard and strong enough to actually bite through solid rock, our preferred method is just to suck on it like candy.

It doesn't matter whether it's in our mouth or our stomach, a gnome is equally capable of breaking down and absorbing the earth mana in these stones. But, if we keep it in our mouth, it lets us taste the mana, and with extreme high-density earth mana like this it tastes just heavenly. We first suck all the infused mana out of it, and then we begin dissolving the stone itself and breaking that down into mana as well.

A rather nice side-effect of this that I've discovered is that since we are breaking everything down into mana, no solid food actually winds up in our digestive tract, and this means no waste. We don't have to poop. It's probably a good part of why that camp we were raised in managed to stay decently clean. Elves don't eat or excrete waste in the typical manner of Earth humans either.

"What?" She said, talking around the stone in her mouth. "We have to smooth this out anyway. Might as well do something with the pieces of it. This is really hard work!"

"I wasn't about to get on your case about eating," I said, popping a stone in my own mouth to make the point. "We need mana to work," I said. "Deseden there even said so. He's not gonna complain as long as we are smoothing this all out."

With those words, I placed a hand on the wall and started working with the next section of it. The earth mana was incredibly dense down here, and we could only work with sections of it about as wide as our arm-spans at a time to any degree that could be called reasonable in terms of the amount of exertion involved.

It was a little strange, thinking about how this all worked. It made some sense that the earth mana would become more dense the lower down we got, but the density of the earth mana was not uniform. I'd sensed that as we approached this 'pit' we'd been thrown into. To either side of 'the pit' horizontally, the mana density was much lower, but it spiked like crazy here.

And it wasn't just that. It also increased exponentially as we went further down below the ground level of 'the pit.' They called the rocks quarried from this pit 'earth nest stones.' The 'nest' part of that would imply something living here. Something powerful, and likely earth related.

This was all giving me a bad feeling just thinking about it. It was quite clear there were living creatures down here by the firs the people down here wore. If there was something bigger and nastier than whatever they hunted for clothing, then this place may be even more dangerous than even this whole war between the gnomes the keeper incites would suggest, and that's already pretty bad.

I would definitely have to find an opportunity to ask someone about this.

[Who goes there!]

Deseden shouted, and me and Sam turned to see what was happening.

[It is Abeshida, I have come to bring word of the decision of Enis Abdul,] a woman's voice said.

[What is it?] Deseden asks.

[The second gen children will be sent down here for safety, as well as some of the second gen women in order to care for them. Ekarem will be expected to assist you in guarding as the second gens take over the job of watching the children.]

[I see,] Deseden said. [That could be a problem. We have discovered the new children have memories of the Agarath, and likely very strong memories at that. They can speak Agatharan, I have heard them myself.]

[What!? Truly?] The woman exclaimed.

[Yes, and they are even powerful enough to use earth magic on the stones of the lower quarry. Inform the Enis that I have them working to carve stone from the lower mine to be used as walls to fortify the Enisib, and also that I do not think a second gen will be able to handle them. They have incredible power, and with the memories of the Agarath they are not to be treated as infants.]

[I would like to request at least one more of the first generation down here, I feel we should have at least one first gen for each of those two, and one more to guard. They must be observed closely until we know we can trust them, but the wall made from the lower quarry stone ought to give us some relief to be able to afford that extra attention. Please report all of this to the Enis.]

[Yes! At once!] The woman's voice said, still out of sight up the tunnel, and then I could hear the sound of footsteps as she retreated.

Sam and I glanced over to each other, both of us having heard everything that had just gone down in that exchange.

Sam sighed and sagged her shoulders. "Great, it's about to get real noisy down in here! And our personal babysitters ain't gonna let up on us."

"Well, as he said. It's just because we're new. I told you before that we want to put on some good behavior so the people with the real power don't toss that slave ritual thing at us, maybe it would be good to start practicing with these guys."

"Ick! I know you're right, but ick!" Sam scoffed.

I shrugged and got back to work with smoothing out the stone.

"You know? I've been thinking," Sam said. "I don't think we're going to be able to make a very good wall out of this. We can't make it any taller than this cave. This is, what? Maybe five feet high? And we're not going to be able to go completely floor to ceiling, so that means we could maybe get sections that are about four and a half feet high at most."

"And everyone down here's a gnome," I said. "The tallest gnomes are only just over four feet tall."

Which, in turn, means that these tunnels must be pretty claustrophobic for Ekarem and Deseden. They're alright for me and Sam since we're still so small, but they've only got about a foot of head clearance.

"What?" I asked, looking back at Sam who was looking at me like I was an idiot.

"Terlu, how high can you jump?" She asked.

It took me a minute to realize what she was getting at, but it connected in my brain rather quickly. For my gnome side in the Agarath, we always just passed right through solid stone, and everything was stone. This meant that gravity didn't matter and we could freely move in three dimensions.

The only prior experience either of us would have had is from our Earth sides, and on Earth it was not common to be able to jump higher than half your body height. However, during my practice with the guards back at the camp, I'd discovered the same wasn't exactly true here in this life, and the keeper along with Abu and Kain had demonstrated the jumping capabilities of people in this world quite well when they ascended the cliff.

I couldn't jump anywhere near as high as those two could, but I could quite easily jump right over an adult gnome's head, even at my age.

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah, a wall this high isn't going to be able to keep them out," Sam said.

I looked back up at the tunnel wall that we were flattening.

"No, we probably could get it high enough. We'd just have to cut out a whole heck of a lot of these," I said.

"What? You talking stacking them on top of each other? You actually think these guys are strong enough to do that? They use hammers instead of earthshaping to dig out this tunnel, and they were making a big deal over what we've been able to do so far!" Sam said.

"Yeah, I do think our mana is probably stronger than theirs by quite a bit, but that doesn't mean they're helpless. Those hammers they use were made with stoneshaping, and if they are able to break through the stuff down here then it must be made of this stone as well, since the stone becomes harder and more dense the more earth mana it contains. I think they'll be able to manage fusing together a couple of slabs after we cut them out."

I smooth out one more section of the wall. The last section down the line between the two hammers Deseden had marked it with. This means that we are finished with this.

"Alright, we should start cutting around the sides," I say. "Deseden will probably notice soon and give us the details for how thick he wants it."

"How do you think they're gonna carry it?" Sam asks. "Our bodies are strong, but you said it yourself just a minute ago. More earth mana means the stone is more dense, that means this will be way heavier than the same amount of stone on Earth would, and on Earth it would be almost impossible to lift a rock much bigger than your head! This is... like... gigantic!"

"I'm sure they've got something. If nothing else, we can cut it and it can be fused again once they get it up top. Stoneshaping really can change everything," I said.

"Yeah, you're probably right," Sam said.

Seriously, she just keeps having to question everything about what we're doing. I can't quite figure her out. Does she really not know? It feels like she's just avoiding thinking about this on purpose because she wants to find fault with these guys anywhere she can. Or maybe she's trying to find excuses to be lazy again.

No, I can't do that. She's my only real companion down here. I shouldn't start trying to find fault with her now.