It took two months and a lot of hardships, but Jelin was proud of everyone for their accomplishments.  The bat mothers were mostly safely returned and they had managed to bring back some eggs of the large beasts.  There was a large area that included some of the clearing that they had webbed off and designated for the new livestock.  Luckily, it seemed that there were both males and females that had hatched.

The humans had been placed in charge of taking care of the beasts since their bat duties were mostly completed.  Two of the children had ended up having a bat bond to each of them, so they had to continue taking care of those and Fluffy.  Most of the rest of the baby bats were now child bats safely under the command of the familiar bats in the bat room.  A few, unfortunately, couldn't be saved from death and some few that evolve had gone too feral and had to be taken out.

Counting the familiars, but not the ones with the humans, there were now thirty seven bats being raised underground.  Luckily there weren't so many and they weren't so large yet that they were too difficult to keep well fed.  Jelin had evolved the familiars again, as he intended to keep those three as far ahead of the rest as possible, and had all three become [Child Shadow Bat]s.  He planned to use something closer to Sapphire's evolving method for the bats, where they evolved up once each time, instead of how he normally taught but made an exception for this one time since it seemed fitting.

For now the bat room had been curtained off as well.  Until Jelin could come up with a good training method for them, he didn't want them flying free every night and hunting things they shouldn't.  He had kind of set aside working on it over the last two months as he focused on returning the mothers and collecting their new livestock, which he had decided to call rhinosaurs until he heard a better name.

Even as babies, the rhinosaurs were very docile and much easier to take care of than the bats.  As they grew up they would likely be a little harder to handle both due to their size and food requirements.  Although he had left them mostly to the humans, he still tried to make visits with the others in his territory, even one of the bats on occasion, to try and get them used to having everyone around.  He also occasionally helped the children try and do some minor training with them but he wasn't sure how quickly they grew so it was all experimental.

Those two months also gave Sai the time she needed to fully heal as the only extreme work she was permitted to do was assisted hunting until she was healed up.  With everyone in good health, the territory being moderately well developed, and most of the immediate and important tasks completed, Jelin felt they were at something like a checkpoint.  That wasn't to say that there was nothing left to work on or anything, but enough had been done that he felt they could relax a little.

With that thought in mind, he decided it was time to change things up again for everyone.  The humans already had a task and were also still training and learning.  Sapphire was still counting her time here as a vacation and chance to raise her youngest sister.  He and his family, however, were now mostly freed of plans.

Jelin decided to give all of them a kind of pseudo freedom in tasks for the present.  He asked them all to come up with some of their own tasks and goals that would help both themselves and the territory or their family.  Zaer immediately decided to start working on a map and knowledge room or, as Jelin called it, a library.  He agreed that it was a great idea but added his own little bit to her tasks, and Mel's too.

He'd noticed the difficulty they'd had directing their swarms and the kind of unprotected focus it required.  He wanted both of them to find a way to protect themselves in such situations better, with his own suggestion being something like a guard squad of their most powerful minions.  He also wanted them to figure out some way to reduce the amount of concentration it took to direct their swarms.  He once again provided an example suggestion of choosing some of the oldest, smartest, and strongest ones to act as unit commanders or relays of a sort.

Mel, somewhat demurely, admitted that she needed to work on her swarm more and designated that as her task since she was planning on staying by his side and helping him in general otherwise.  Jelin accepted that but reminded her that they all should take this peaceful time to try and work on themselves while they could a well.  He made sure to give Ell a bit of a glare as he said so, hinting that she needed to remember to leave her workshop on occasion.

Emmy, riding the conversational wave, proclaimed that she would be staying mostly with Jelin as well but otherwise would be working solely on herself for a while as she still felt behind and wanted to be as equal to him as possible since they were supposed to be future mates.  Before anyone could comment on that, she pushed on and decided that Sai should also start working on self improvement to be Jelin's other mistress.  That left everyone gawking for a few moments.

Ell managed to end the awkward silence by saying that she wanted to work on a variety of inventions with Jelin's help.  He came out of his slight stupor and agreed on the condition that she also take some personal time.  She quickly agreed back and then went on some rant about how she wanted to have her own miniature swarm of helpers after all to get even more done.

Kai piped up after that with her own little rant about how she wanted her own swarm as well since one of her main goals was to be a faerie queen.  Jelin calmly waited for her to finish before telling her of an idea he had had some time ago but forgotten about shortly after due to it being irrelevant at the time.  He completely agreed with her becoming a faerie queen but maybe she didn't have to limit herself to just faeries.  He was willing to bet that there were other faerie-like creatures that she could likely become a queen over and maybe they could even find some of them and start up a small swarm for her.

As Kai took that information and sank deep into thought in amazement, Lei and Clare both tried to speak up at the same time.  Lei quickly backed off to let Clare go first, though.  Clare announced that she was feeling like she wouldn't be able to keep advancing her healing abilities much longer.  She wanted to get some training from Sapphire after evolving into some psychic abilities but after that she felt that it would be better to temporarily look in another direction and asked for everyone's help to prepare for that.  

She had two evolutions based on poisons and wanted to start pushing more in that direction soon.  She wanted to both try testing things on them and start hunting to work on her actual combat abilities and test her poison capabilities even more thoroughly.  Everyone was a little uneasy upon hearing that, especially Jelin and Lei from their past experiences with her concoctions, but Jelin said that they would all be supporting each other as best they could.

That left only Lei, assuming that Sai didn't try to go against Emmy's decision on her behalf, to announce her plans.  She took a moment and then said that she would keep training the humans and working on the underground but was thinking about trying to be a future mate of one of the human children.  Everyone looked at her in shock while she looked shyly away in embarrassment.  Jelin considered it for a few moments and realized that technically the children were older than her even if she was more grown at the moment.

In the end, he decided that it was mostly fine.  It was at least something worth working towards since even if things didn't go as she might wish, whatever she accomplished while working towards that would likely still help in the future.  In return, he wanted to check on a few things and told her they would have to have a special talk later.  He almost called the little meeting over with that but was stopped by the girls all asking about his own plans.

He started to list all of the things that he wanted to try and work on until the girls stopped him and made him promise to take every other day to work on himself.  Everyone believed that he should always remain the highest evolved, matched only by Emmy, in their family.  If he didn't work on bringing himself up then they wouldn't either.  That was the first time he could remember any of them, much less all, ever giving him something close to an ultimatum so he took it as it was and decided to even go a step further by saying he would try and push through for a bit to jump ahead more.