Coming out of evolution felt a little weird.  Time passed but it felt like it was only an hour or so each time.  It was similar to waking up and not even realizing you'd fallen asleep, except that you did know that you fell asleep.  The problem was that unless someone was there to tell you or something, that you had no way to know how much time had actually passed.  Even if someone did tell you, any changes in the environment would have seemed to appear overnight or faster.

That was part of why Jelin felt so weird looking at the tunnel and exploring the underground area during the morning.  Of course, he'd also been shooed away from the area before his evolution by the girls to go work on himself instead of trying to help dig.  It compounded into the amazing sight that he could barely believe in front of him.

The tunnel looked very different.  Whatever the inside had been coated with ended up changing the color and consistency to some yellowish purple color that felt and looked almost gooey while being solid.  Jelin likened it to snakes and how they appeared or even felt slimy at times but really weren't.  

The entire underground area's halls were coated much the same.  The rooms were still being worked on, though.  As he and Zaer had designed, the few personal rooms that were made to the left were all spherical in nature, but were bare and the walls had only been compacted and not coated.  The only other room aside from the three personal rooms was the bat room where their little bats were playing around in.

It was a large room, mostly rectangular, that led to the entrances at either side of the tunnel as well as into the central hallway.  Jelin wasn't sure if there should be some stuff in the room for the bats to play with or crawl on or whatever and considered trying to come up with such when he saw the bats just chasing each other around playfully.  That room had also not been coated yet, but he could see some bones and such planted into the packed dirt of the walls.

He decided to look around one more time to see if there had been anything he had missed.  The places for the rooms, including the workroom in the center and the storage rooms to the right of the tunnel, had been marked but not started.  There were also places for where the spiral ramps were supposed to end up in the hallway in order to go to both up and down in the future.

Jelin thought about it and finally decided that as long as they could somehow cover the tunnel ramp and get the spiral ramps made and covered, that he could consider the underground area done for a while.  It would already work as an emergency hideaway, with the hiding part only hindered by the giant obvious opening.  Satisfied enough with the progress he had seen, he went back up and let the girls know he was proud of them.

After telling them about the cover and ramps, he put their next major projects on hold start figuring out what they needed to do for the next big expedition.  He wanted to try and grab at least one of the beast skeletons, rescue as many baby bats as they could, and investigate the mysterious underground structure.  The list wasn't long but each was a task by itself.

Ell had ideas on how to deal with actually bringing back some skeletons as long as they could actually find some.  Jelin decided to leave that mostly to her since any ideas he had might involve adding to their technology in a way he didn't want to.  As for the baby bats, he planned to mostly leave that to Clare and the humans as well.  He did want to try and capture some more mother bats as well, though.

It was when it came to thinking about how to investigate the structure that he was a little lost.  Neither the rat nor the bee drones could provide scouting abilities that were quite good enough unless they planned to stay there for a long time.  Mel offered her new swarm as well, but they had mostly the same problems that the bee drones did, even if they were a little better at hiding.

The best idea Jelin could come up with was to try and find all of the holes they could during the day, wait for the bats to leave, then send in a group of fast minions through all of the holes to scout around.  While those minions scouted, they would send in the baby collectors to grab abandoned baby bats and bring them back out and to the humans some distance away.

With that plan they would need some way to close off the bat area for baby bats only, find some mother bats, and be prepared to lose a lot of minions.  Although they could probably have the minions leave through the holes every morning before the bats returned, unless they found a new opening they would eventually reach a point where they couldn't scout further without staying inside.  They might be able to find some door or something on the first day, of course, but Jelin wanted to be prepared for the worst he could be.

Lei brought to the discussion a suggestion to just make one of the workrooms and turn it into a baby bat nursing area.  That way it would also be small enough that the humans wouldn't have to chase any that escaped around as much.  They could use one of the small personal rooms that was already made to hold any captured milk makers, as well.  Jelin gave her a proud look with a wave of pride through the link before accepting the idea as vastly better than his.

Sai claimed that with Lei's and Kai's help she could probably manage to capture a few mother bats.  She did give  a warning that she might also end up catching some more baby bats that weren't technically abandoned by doing it her way, though.  Jelin admitted that it would actually be fairly cruel if looked at even objectively but there was so much long term potential that he was willing to do such things while what they were facing weren't sapient.

The only thing they could think of to improve the whole idea of potentially losing a lot of minions after that, though, was to train or mutate a new batch each meant just for the operation or hope that an appropriate opening was found quickly.  That though led to one last problem that he found, as well.  They needed some way to keep the newer babies from evolving too early.  The ideal he was thinking of was having most if not all of the bats under command of their familiars.

Emmy made the suggestion of having everyone who could to use the link on all of the baby bats.  Jelin gave her a glare for a while before pointing out the problems with that.  So far as they'd tested, nobody but him had the capacity for that and he didn't want a bunch of random beings in the link.  He wasn't planning on just offering every being he met a chance to be with them like that, even among non-sapient beings.  If anyone who could do it eventually found a bat or two they wanted in their own link then he had nothing to say about it but just linking them to keep them controlled was directly against his principles.

Sai actually offered the next idea of just helping the bats they had to evolve and then take command of the babies.  Jelin admitted that it was the solution he had been considering but since he wasn't sure about the timeline that would require, he had hoped for someone having a better plan.  He also wanted to look out for more strange evolutions that the bats might have.  Of course, mentioning that led to him explaining some of the bats he had seen on the night out as well as the 'Cutie' evolution he had seen with the humans' bat.

Slightly to his chagrin and much to his expectation, Emmy immediately decided that she should try and get it when he mentioned the possibility of it making one softer or fluffier.  Even Zaer seemed to be considering it.  Luckily the rest of the girls had no desire to be softer as it would make it difficult in a fight and they didn't want skin that tore so easily like the humans'.