Twenty three days after they first brought the baby bats home, the fourth baby bat was born.  That morning everyone decided to have the original three baby bats evolve from [Baby Bat] to a 'Lesser Child'.  Jelin took control of the evolutions through the link since he didn't trust how the normal choosing would work with non-sapient creatures.

[Lesser Child Climber Bat]

The first one he chose for didn't have many options and none of them were past 'Lesser Child', which made sense since they were all young and hadn't even been allowed to have any cores.  They all had 'Familiar' as a post modifier evolution so he intended to give that to all three next.  He did see that the first one had 'Supporter' as an option and decided to finally ask Mel, whom he knew had it, what exactly it did.

<Hey, Mel, what does 'Supporter' actually do?  I never asked before.>

<Oh, that.  It basically gives me a very degraded copy of a lot of your innate natural abilities and authority.  It only works for someone who has someone they believe to be an absolute superior they're dedicating themselves to, though.  As far as I know anyways.  Maybe someone else knows a different way or use.>

<<Wait, seriously?!>>

It seemed that Emmy was as surprised as he was about it.  After a little bit of discussion they decided to test if it allowed Mel to make a link with the last test bat.  She claimed that she could use a similar link to the real one because she had already done it with the blood broodlings.  Supposedly, he should be able to control any of the degraded abilities of his she used through her, as well.  He had apparently done it once without realizing already.

The test worked on the bat as Mel tried to make her own link.  Unfortunately it struggled against the link and the control of it so hard that it killed itself.  Jelin was able to feel it now that he was trying to, though.  The interesting thing was that the limit he felt with his own link hadn't registered with Mel doing it.  He mentally moved the evolution up in his list of good ones for anyone who wanted permanent subordinates.

[Lesser Child Supporter Bat]

Luckily, the second bat had the evolution choice.  This would be the little familiar that he intended to now try and raise as a kind of bat swarm leader.  With his new knowledge of how the 'Supporter' evolution worked, for them at least, he wanted to try and get any leader or swarm style evolution he could. 

On that same note, Emmy declared that she needed the 'Supporter' evolution as well since she would be his mate and to not have it would be a lacking point as such.  He didn't try to argue against it and Mel strongly supported the idea.  He also announced it through the link so anyone else who was thinking about having their own swarms or minions would be able to try for it as well.  Zaer seemed quite happy about the news.

[Lesser Child Blood Bat]

The last baby bat seemed to be a wild child.  His only options were 'Wild', 'Vampiric', and 'Blood', so he chose the one that would lead to the least problems as far as he could remember.  The other two might have made the little thing a little too rowdy to handle at such a young age.  Then again, the first one liked to try and crawl around everywhere, so the third one had a little competition for being the most difficult.

All three of them managed to finish their evolutions by evening that day.  Jelin still wasn't quite comfortable letting them roam completely free yet, though.  They were still very weak individually and he didn't want them deciding to check around outside the territory and getting hurt.  They'd already had to finally put up a kind of curtain door for the main room to keep the three from escaping in their childlike explorations.

Unfortunately, their evolutions made them just big enough to be able to actually swallow cores and the 'Climber' one had found the stash while everyone was watching the second one come out of evolution.  Jelin managed to catch it before it ate more than one, but it tried to slip into evolution again immediately.  There wasn't a way to stop it so he had to take over once more and the first one started its 'Familiar' evolution as the last one came out of their evolution.

A quick chat with the girls after that little incident and they all decided to go ahead and feed the other two one core each and make them full familiars in the hopes that it would allow him to give them simple orders and prevent such a thing in the future.  Just in case, they also redid the web covering on the buried cores so it was harder to get the cores as well.  The cores collected from the dead bats were being kept in the workshop already since one of the experiments had shown that it was a bad idea for monsters to eat a core of the same species.

For the fourth bat, Jelin decided to let the human children take care of it.  The girls were against it at first but eventually gave in.  Jelin intended to have the children help when they started with the baby bat rescues and learning to take care of one earlier than that would mean more saved later.  It was also not a bad idea to teach them a bit of how to take care of a weaker creature and just maybe it would make a good pet for them.  They kept the mother in the workshop and only gave the children the milk sacks, though.

Another three days after all of that business, Jelin finally managed to evolve his class again and had the same options as before.  One difference between classes and evolutions showed up after he chose {Mana Thief}.  His class didn't change to [Mana Thief], but to [Masked Mana Thief] instead.  He remembered hearing something about everyone's class ending up different eventually.  From what he could tell, it would just add all of his choices together or something.

When he made the announcement about his class, the girls also all admitted that with the extra time they'd had recently and helping either take care of the bats or try and figure out the rat's shadow abilities had resulted in them being either ready or almost ready for evolution.  They'd all held back because they wanted him to evolve first for some reason and they had been enjoying being motherly to the bats.

Hearing that made him want to sigh but he could also kind of see where they were coming from.  If they had evolved while bat care was ongoing then they would have missed up to a whole week of helping raise them.  Also, he had gone through some of the least amount of evolutions compared to the others which was a little awkward in some ways.  So he made a deal with all of them.

If they all went through evolutions one after the other and also got enough of the work on things done that he wanted done, he would spend the time working on himself and evolve at the end of the line as well.  The humans needed to be ready to leave the territory, the bat area underground needed to be completed, a few items like ropes and bandoliers needed to be made, baby rescue milk formula needed to be made, and a few of them needed to learn certain skills or abilities were designated as the minimum tasks that needed to be completed, though.

They all listened intently, and after confirming the details, agreed.  After that they spent some time figuring out the order they would go in with Jelin intervening for the rat.  They spent one more day together after they had decided the order since they wouldn't all be together again for over a month as they chained their evolutions.  The last two evenings they spent together were more about them just being close to one another and they snuggled extra close for those nights.  The morning after those last days, they began their evolution plan and Jelin began focusing on trying to get his own evolution ready.