"What are you all... doing?"
"Yuuji, look, it's like a fantasy elf."
"Yeah, yeah, look, long ears and handsome."
"Although judging by the tired eyes, he looks kind of lazy too hehe, handsome and lazy."
"Eh? You think so? To me he looks..."
At Yuuji's question, Risa and Mío pointed at the group of aliens in front of them they had been interacting with the whole time, who reminded them of mythical fantasy elves.
However...
"They're mind trappers, that's not their real appearance, so don't get too close." Mikado looked up from her own work without much interest and gave them a short but effective warning.
The two girls immediately stepped away.
As soon as they did, the aliens' appearance changed into something similar to a giant purple carnivorous plant fused with a person.
"Eh? No way! The elves!" Mío complained immediately.
"How dare they deceive us with elves?! They played with our feelings!" Risa added.
"They actually copied the image from your minds" Lala said, making both girls widen their eyes in surprise and back away even further, afraid their minds would be read.
"Don't worry, they can only read things superficially."
Even after hearing that, Risa and Mío did not dare approach again, obediently following Yuuji and Lala instead.
As for Run, she needed no supervision, she was simply talking with a gray alien with a huge head, large red eyes, and a language that sounded like mysterious whispers while Rito and Haruna watched with interest.
Yuuji went to look for Yui instead, surprised that she was alone since that did not fit her image of "responsible girl just keeping an eye on everyone."
"...Really? Amazing."
Yuuji heard noise in a corner and walked over there, finding Yui talking with what looked like tiny flower fairies.
"How cute!" Before Yuuji could say anything, Mío and Risa approached them with interest after seeing the fairies.
At the sudden movement, the fairies hid timidly behind Yui.
"Wait, you're scaring them" Yui corrected them with a serious look.
But all she got in return was a look from both girls before they took the chance to tease her.
"W-what?" she said after noticing their attitude.
"Hehe, looks like strict Yui has a soft spot for alien fairies."
"Yeah, yeah, weren't you supposed to be here watching us? What are you doing here alone?"
"It's not that. I was just... curious" she said, lowering her voice at the end.
"Yui, are you interested in other species? I can teach you about them." Having heard her perfectly, Lala walked toward her and grabbed her hands excitedly as she asked.
"N-no. That's not necessary, I was just curious, I'm not really that interested" Yui said while avoiding her gaze in embarrassment.
"Alright, not curious at all Yui, we have to go, or are you staying here with your new friends?"
Seeing Lala give her a confused look, Yuuji took the opportunity to interrupt.
"Of course not. I have to make sure you don't do anything irresponsible" Yui declared immediately, saying goodbye to the little fairies before following them.
...
"What are we doing here?" Rito asked as he looked at the surroundings.
They were on a normal street in front of a park.
"We came to make an alien hotel!" Lala declared while raising a hand excitedly.
"Y-yeah, but... here?" he asked while looking at the perfectly ordinary place again.
"To be exact..." Lala smiled mysteriously while pulling out a device shaped like a Polaroid camera and taking a picture of the place in front of them. "...here."
As soon as the flash burst in the area, the surrounding terrain changed, turning into a semi ruined environment with numerous cracks and holes in the ground.
"Ah! It's Picun!" Run exclaimed when she saw the camera.
"Picun?" Rito asked.
"It's a camera that can transform the area inside its focus, it creates an artificial space layered over reality based on a picture previously taken of the same place with the same camera."
"That sounds..." Yui started.
"Exactly" Run interrupted her. "It's what Lala uses to fix her disasters without other people noticing."
"Hehe." Lala laughed awkwardly.
"So what happened here? Did another one of your inventions explode?" Run asked disdainfully.
"No, this time I had nothing to do with it. While I was with Yuuji yesterday at the park, the ground opened up and little people came out saying they conquered the surface or something like that." Lala explained while denying responsibility. "Actually, I thought about fixing it, but Yuuji told me not to yet."
Everyone's gaze shifted toward Yuuji, wondering why he would do that.
"You'll understand soon enough, Lala, do you have those?"
"I do!"
Lala pulled out a pack of gum from her D-Dial and handed one to each of them.
"What is this? How do you use it?"
Yuuji answered while approaching the largest crack in the ground. Lala walked over and hugged him.
"It's simple. You put it in your mouth, chew it, blow a bubble and..."
Before everyone's eyes, the pink bubble inflated until it wrapped Yuuji and Lala inside a pink sphere.
"You jump" Yuuji finished while jumping into the crack.
"..."
"I don't know if I should be surprised by the shameless flirting right in front of us or by what they just did" Risa said after a few seconds of silence.
"...How nice" Run murmured weakly.
"What?" Rito asked since he had not heard her properly.
"It's nothing. Since we didn't hear screams of pain, it looks like everything went fine. Come on, Rito!"
Run was the next to jump, quickly repeating the process while approaching the hole in the ground before following Yuuji and Lala.
...
"What is this place?" Yui asked while opening her eyes with difficulty in the underground area, slightly dizzy from the fall.
"Welcome... to the seven colored hot springs" Yuuji introduced while opening his arms like a salesman.
"Why not rainbow hot springs?"
"That's what you focused on?" Yuuji raised an eyebrow before answering "Seven colored sounds better."
"You're probably wondering how we discovered this place..."
"Wasn't it yesterday when the underground beings tried to invade the surface?" Risa interrupted.
"After that they probably got curious and came to investigate" Yui said.
"And knowing Yuuji's family, you probably told Lala not to close it because you thought of some business plan, right?" Rito finished.
"..." Yuuji stared at them silently and blinked a couple of times before speaking. "Alright, looks like you're not wondering that.
Then, since you're all so smart, you also know what we're doing here, right?"
"Hehe, Yuuji, you're being pretty childish right now" Risa teased.
"So you're making the hotel here? Is it going to be an onsen?" Yui asked.
"It will" Yuuji nodded. "As for actually making the hotel, that's Lala's job."
"Wait, Yuuji, you're going to let your girlfriend do everything? That's not gentlemanly at all."
"Do you know how to build a hotel from scratch? Or have the resources to do it in minutes while also purifying the air, sealing nearby magma veins, and fixing the terrain?" Yuuji asked while looking at Risa.
"And what about us? What are we supposed to do?"
"I don't know, go enjoy the hot springs?" Yuuji shrugged.
"That's it? Then why did we come?" Risa complained dramatically.
"Don't ask me. You all followed me on your own."
"...Alright, change of plans, hot spring day!" Risa blanked out for a second at the answer before reacting excitedly and running toward the nearest hot spring.
"That really doesn't bother her at all" Run said, impressed. "But do we even have swimsuits?"
"You can ask Lala if you want bathrobes, swimsuits, towels, or anything else" Yuuji said before walking away.
Even though he said Lala would do everything, he still intended to help with something, especially the terrain and magma veins, which he actually could help with thanks to Earthbending and other similar abilities.
While Lala pulled out more and more strange devices whose purposes he did not recognize, Yuuji crouched down and touched the ground with his hands.
Using Earthbending, he could extend his senses like sonar, locating several dangerous spots.
Dangerous in the sense that they could erupt with lava at any moment and kill all future guests.
Of course, sealing lava veins completely was out of the question, nobody with basic knowledge of physics would do something that stupid.
Instead, Yuuji made sure to redirect the veins farther away, divert the dangerous ones, and connect the smaller veins into larger ones while minimizing their number.
In the end, he managed to create an area several kilometers wide where there was no lava beneath the ground, which was quite difficult since, without exaggeration, they were closer to the center of the Earth than to the surface.
By the time he finished, he stood up and opened his eyes again. There were several drones around him moving around with wooden boards and constructing the hotel at incredible speed.
The drones were divided into multiple types, those transporting wood, those building, also split into categories such as placing, hammering, and planning, those supervising, and more. Everything formed a perfectly automated chain of command.
Something curious about all these drones was that, at least the ones that did not fly, they did not have humanoid appearances, instead they looked like robotic spiders whose legs clung tightly to the ground at all times despite not needing to.
"She knows me well" Yuuji murmured in surprise after realizing the reason.
The next second, Yuuji crouched down again, this time being more precise and extending his senses as far as possible in order to minimize any kind of accident.
Even so, once he started, the entire area began to shake, surprising most of the people present.
Before everyone's shocked eyes, the ground began tilting in some places and rising in others, the uneven terrain became regular while visible rocks and minerals started being swallowed by the earth until disappearing completely, ultimately transforming into a perfectly smooth and uniform landscape made from the same material.
But it did not end there. Once that was done, Yuuji did everything possible to compress the terrain as much as he could, extracting earth from places where he knew it would not be needed.
In a short time he finished his work. Although the ground looked identical, it was now so hard that not even thousands of heavy vehicles would be able to leave marks on it.
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+15 chapters in advance on Patreon.
p-atreon.com/IAMME26
(just delete the hyphen)
80 power stones = 1 extra chapter (cumulative)