Just in time, too, as Martin saw even more pilgrims coming up the road. They were as pitiable as ever, and looked very cold, too. As some of the cold pilgrims started making it over the bridge, Fred imagined what that would be like if the bridge was iced over. He shivered in sympathy, but then he realized what a simple solution he had at hand.

　　He heated the bridge. Not much, but enough to keep any ice away from it. It was trivial. So he also heated the whole road, the same way. He didn`t intend to make the road warm enough to make the humans comfortable, but the road was warm enough to feel good on their tired feet. He didn`t want people laying down on a comfy warm road, anyway. They`d get run over. He`d just have to find a better way to keep the people warm.

　　Now he was on a roll, and fired up. The redirected stream had somehow filled him with creative energy, and he knew what he had to do next.

　　Looking down into the healing temple, he took stock of the rock and areas around it. The temple was close to (but much smaller than) the naga`s cavernous lair. On its other side lay the maze, but the maze wasn`t as close, and was set higher, closer to the surface. Farther away (and higher), towards the Front Entrance, was the escape room under the front steps, which had a passage connecting to the very top of the ramp. So all in all, he felt that he had plenty of space for his current plans.

　　First, he looked below the temple (which was currently all solid rock). Here he began carving out a space for worshiping. Mindful of Kumbanaka`s advice, he made a huge rectangle, 70 spans wide and 150 spans long. The ceiling was five spans high. Once the whole space was a perfect empty rectangle, Fred turned all of the stone to the same white rock that lined the Healing Temple itself.

　　But he knew that the whiteness of the temple was symbolically about cleanliness and health, and this new space was for group prayer and such. So he changed the floor to be the black marble he knew so well. To see how it looked, he put light panels all over the ceiling. The initial lights he created were far too cold and bright, so he added more of a sunlight-yellow color to them, and cut their brightness by half. Those lights looked great to him, so he copied them all across the ceiling.

　　But now he felt that the black floor was too stark. It wasn`t warm and comforting, Fred thought. So he changed the marble into something from his deep memory, a marble with pinks and blues and whites, in sweeping swirls, that made the floor seem a bit like the night sky, but more diffuse and colorful.

　　Finally, he wasn`t really happy with the structural soundness of such a large open room, so he put in pillars in two rows running down the entire room. This cut into the lines of sight in the room, Fred could see. So he removed half of them, made the rest thicker, and moved them towards the side walls. This worked.

　　Now he had to create that raised area (which Kumbanaka had called the sanctuary) at one end of the room. This took but a moment, and so did the large block of stone that was the altar. Looking about, Fred thought that all he needed to do now was make a set of stairs, connecting the temple and the worship room beneath it. But then he knew he had to do more, and he had a new inspiration.

　　He recognised that the access to the healing temple was a hassle, since people needed to travel through the domain entrance and down a dangerous ramp to access it. But nothing was stopping him from giving them another entrance, another outside door, like the door to the maze. He was so excited about the idea that he had to get it done right away. Along the east side of the worship room, he made a very wide, flat hallway that extended the length of that room. This hallway was below the temple, but above the worship room, so that two flights of stairs would be needed to connect the three.

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　　Going north past the worship room, away from the Tree Zone, the big tunnel changed to slope upward five degrees. Fred kept extending this tunnel until it broke out to the surface. He didn`t want the entrance to be unprotected, so he made a simple arched doorway, and added two stout stone doors to it. Behind the doorway he made a small building, just big enough to cover the hallway leading down.

　　He hadn`t forgotten that the priestess and her acolytes needed more living room. On the other (east) side of the hallway, he made a series of rooms and barracks of all sizes. For each room, he didn`t bother to change the stone into something pretty, he just carved out a rectangle and threw a soft light on the cieling. He didn`t really know how many rooms were needed, or for what, but it was trivial for him now to make these rooms, so before he knew it there were several dozen, of all shapes and sizes, all simply connected by doorways and ramps.

　　Finally, he made a flight of stairs from the new hallway down to the worship space. He made three connecting doors from the hallway to the new living spaces. And he made a flight of stairs to the temple. Actually, this flight of stairs connected to one of the small anterooms of the temple. Once the stairs were done, Fred realized that he needed the anteroom to become a bigger entrance, so he changed it. This was a great surprise to the person sleeping in the chamber at the time.

　　"Oh, I also wanted to make the temple bigger!" Fred thought to himself. The room was round, and bounded by the entrance tunnel and the ramp to the south and the water basin on the north wall. Fred decided to add more space on the other side of the water basin. He hollowed out another room to the north, a nearly identical space to the original healing temple, with its white walls, planters everywhere, and a spotlight in the center.

　　He connected the two temple rooms together by making new doorways on either side of the water basin. Now the two water basins formed an island between the old temple and the new temple extension, and the space of the whole temple was doubled.

　　The healing temple was full of people, so all this work Fred did was very surprising and disruptive to them. They shouted and scrambled to get out of the way of melting walls. But Fred could see Priestess Sharfroen herself walking through the congestion and calming everyone. "I`m glad she`s not afraid of me," Fred thought.

　　All this attention to the shape of the temple brought Fred back to the original latrine and cistern he`d made here. It was very clean, and had its own Brown Slime inside, Fred was happy to see. He didn`t think that the new temple extension needed its own bathroom, but he realized that the living quarters he`d just made didn`t have a latrine. So he zipped back there and made two.

　　Now Fred stepped back, admiring his work, and wondering what he`d forgotten or left out. He could see all the humans doing much the same. They went exploring, spreading out in every direction. It took only minutes for the humans to be in the living quarters, the worship space, and up and out the temple doors.

　　Fred`s manic need to build was satiated. He also wanted to make changes to the Forest Temple, but he decided that could wait a day. "They want to know who has my favor? I think I just made that clear." He smiled to himself.

　　For the rest of the day, Fred did nothing. He just watched the humans. The humans in the Healing Complex (he didn`t feel right calling it just a temple anymore) were a beehive of activity, adapting to Fred`s changes. This included the outside. Now that humans could avoid going down the ramp to get to the temple, they did so. The doors to the outside were instantly popular. The Temple doors opened onto a spot within the Town Wall, a bit upslope of the north gate. This wasn`t too far from the two fat towers that Fred had placed inside the north gate.

　　The area just outside the doors became the new triage area almost instantly. The doors themselves were swung wide, and people of every type and purpose hustled up and down the ramp. Fred saw that Priestess Sharfroen stayed inside the temple itself, moving patients around into the expanded area and into the little anterooms that surrounded the temple. People had more room to stretch out, but new sick pilgrims were brought in to use all the new space.

　　Fred noticed a tall thin man with short black hair. He seemed to be Priestess Sharfroen`s primary helper (Lieutenant? Sub-boss? Executive officer? Consigliere? Fred didn`t know where those words came from, but he felt like none of them fit). While she stayed to heal pilgrims, he went everywhere and bossed everyone. He and a small group got the new triage area set up outside the doors. He directed the acolytes to move out of their little anterooms and into the new living quarters. He even had some wagons moving up and down the big hallway to move furniture and chests and other large parcels.

　　Fred`s attention wasn`t only on the Temple Complex. The Hot Baths were getting some use, too. In fact, during the afternoon, the place was packed with humans of every kind. It seemed like all the class tension in the Healing Temple was somehow evaporating like the steam from the baths. Fred saw knights and maids next to old bent-backed pilgrims. Everyone was cordial and cheerful and talking. Fred even thought one of them was a king, but without pompous clothes and silly hats, it was hard to tell the humans apart. "Well, it is in range of the tree, and certainly in range of my magic. So mebbe this is something I`m doing?" Fred wondered.

　　Several times, throughout the day, Fred also noticed people harvesting the herbs he`d planted around the hot baths. This was cheering, too.