Cee of Bunside Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Hiiii folks! I've decided to split the fluffy parts of Cee's perspective off into it's own mini-story. Hope you enjoy!

Cee

Ryn wanted us to make a tavern. She said it needed to be, like dungeons and dragons turned up to 11. First hop, I needed to research what the second half meant, so that required a trip to the library.

Getting down on all fours, I rushed up the stairs of the tree-burrow. Around and around I went, because Ryn was not an architect and the easiest way up and down the tree was with a heckin’ spiral staircase. Bounding into the library, I ignored Catherine and Mer—who were busy talking with their heads really close—and stopped at the magical beasts section. They were, after all, magic, right?

Except there was nothing in the books about dragons! I mean, yes, the stories were very fun and all the heroes were great, even the ones that hurt the dragons. But none of it was about taverns, and that's what I needed to learn about.

It wasn't until I expressed my frustration with a good solid thump that I got answers.

"What are you looking for, Cee?" Catherine asked curiously.

Looking up at the mage girl, I began to explain when I noticed something strange about her. She was… different somehow. Her smell wasn’t the same, except it was also still her? Very strange.

“I uh—” I said, faltering. “I’m meant to learn about the dungeons and the dragons because Ryn wants the buns to make a tavern with them? I’m very dizzy about what this means.”

“Dizzy?” Mer asked, looking at Catherine.

The girl with the circles on her face smiled at Mer and shrugged. “Probably meant confused.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“Anyway,” Catherine said, standing up and walking towards a totally different shelf to the one I was at. “Dungeons and Dragons is actually a game, Cee. You know what imagination is, right?”

I nodded, and eagerly hopped over to the table they’d been sitting at and pulled up a chair. It was much too big for me, but the cushion on top was nice and soft.

“Okay, so Dungeons and Dragons, or as most shorten it to, DnD, is a game where you imagine a pretend world with a group of other people and then with imagined characters, explore it—”

Catherine went on to explain all about D and D. She told me of the dungeon masters, fickle gods who ruled by the law of dice and their own decree. I learned of the players, who sowed chaos, destruction, and kindness like they were all seeds of the same plant. The most important part to my quest, though, was the inns and taverns of these imaginary worlds. They were places for wondrous adventure to begin, for old friends to drink and enjoy each other’s company, and for shady men in dark hoods to stare broodingly out at everyone else.

Then there was this alcohol thing. That was going to require all sorts of new plants and buildings for us to make it. I was actually interested in this stuff, though. Like, mead and cider sounded amazing! We just needed to go and find honeybees and yeast… I think. Maybe a spell to speed up the yuckification of the mixture too. It was strange how something becoming rotten would create something that a bun could drink.

With Catherine’s careful explanation received, I went to find my fellow buns. We had work to do.

So far I’d made ten other buns into mages, but we were keeping it a loose secret. After what the ring people had done when I ate the mage fruit—purely by accident—I wasn’t gonna take any chances. Chances were scary. Sometimes they made you bonk, even if sometimes they also gave you something you wanted.

I found Dust—who was one of the other mage buns—helping to dig out a home-burrow in the new Bunniton village site. Now that we were forced to wear clothes and act a little more like humans, the bun-consensus had agreed that we needed our own town.

“Cee!” Dust exclaimed, standing up and wiping her pawns down on her coveralls. “What do you need?”

“I’ve been given a task by our Lady, and I was wondering if I could have your diganeer expertise planning it,” I explained, being careful not to get dirt on my nice green tunic. Clothes were very annoying, but I did like the colours and patterns they could give us. It was like dyeing my fur without the gross taste when you groomed yourself!

My friend carefully walked with me back out of the half-completed burrow and asked, “Oh! A quest from the Lady! What is it?”

“She wishes for us to build a tavern,” I said, whispering because it was fun to pretend we were conspiring to do great mischief. “It is a place where the tall-folk go to drink fermented plant or fruit juice. It makes them all wobbly but in a fun way, and they become happy. It is a sort of… large social fluffle place.”

Unlike me, Dust had short upright ears, and when I was done explaining, they were extra upwards with excitement. “That sounds fun! Do we need to make the fermented juice too?”

“We do,” I nodded. “The tavern must be down in the Order’s town. I will be going to find some charcoal and paper to make a drawing for it soon.”

“Oh, yes!” she said, grinding her teeth happily. “I will go and stake out a place to put the tavern.”

“Very good!” I grinned, shuffling slightly in a standing binky. “See you soon! Oh, and wrangle some of the fourleg buns to help with the digging and the building.”

“Yes, Miss Cee!” she winked, and flopped down onto all fours so she could run down into the wider grove.

I did not know why, but out of all the buns in the groves, I was the best at drawing. Most buns didn’t even draw, but ever since we had begun to think with longer thoughts, we’d needed a way to show ideas. Sometimes a simple touching of emotions and thoughts would work, but detail was difficult to send over mind-speak. So it fell to me to learn to draw, so that I could better direct the other buns.

The tavern I was creating was a strange looking building. The ground floor was big enough for a hundred humans to fit inside if they were fluffling like buns. Most of it was taken up by the big main floor, but there was a second lower wing of the floor that was where the tall-folk could do their music-binkies. Then there was the big table where the buns would work to serve fermented juice to the tall-folk. Finally, there was a back room where the food-burning would take place.

Two separate staircases climbed up to the second floor. One went from next to the bar, and that led up to many rooms for flopping. The second one went up from the burning room, where the buns would store all the things that a tavern needed. There was also lots of room for other things in the back section of the second floor, but I didn’t know what to put there yet. Oh, and I couldn’t forget the washrooms, because tall-folk liked to take care of their waste in a special place.

With my plans wrapped up nicely into a tube in my hands, I hurried back down out of the tree and into my own grove.

My spell plants were doing very well down here, and I saw a few of my four-leg bun friends carefully tending to the young trees I was working on. The other mage-buns and I had an idea, one that might give our Lady an edge when it was time to battle her enemies. We would be ready to help, ready to step in.

The trip through my grove was brief, and much shorter than going the long way down the mountain, and before long I popped out of a tunnel behind the Order’s main barracks. Glancing down at my paper plan, I checked to see if the shrub that hid the entrance had damaged it. Thankfully, it was fine.

I mean, I knew it would be fine, because I made sure to protect it, but you never knew with these things. The dark bratbun was always watching, waiting for his moment to step in and chew your luck right in two.

Anyway, now it was time for me to go and find where Dust was planning to build the tavern. Which reminded me, I needed to go and find one of my other magebun siblings, Titan, so he could begin to research how to make the fermented fruit juice. Goodness, this was becoming complicated. I might need a quick flop soon.