[centre][h1]The Great Till, Part One[/h1][/centre]
In characteristic fashion, the bull had maintained his tantrum at a surprisingly stable level. His path of destruction had not ended underground, nor on the surface. Even before the Big Bang, he had been on the surface of the planet that was to become Galbar, performing a new pastime. With his horns, he had dug up channels in the dead soil. When he had reached a sufficient distance and taken a small breather, he would turn and do the same thing in the opposite direction. All the while, he muttered a promise under his breath.

“Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill…”

But as time went on, his mouth got tired and the consonants changed. 

“... Gill, gill, gill, gill, gill, gill…”

Eventually, the vowels slipped, too.

“... Gull, gull, gull, guw… Guww…”

By now, he had plowed several kilometres of field. He let out a long, exhausted groan and turned to look at his work. The gray soil had become a little grayer, mostly resulting from shadows cast from the many new dirt heeps all around. He nodded in satisfaction and sat down to rest.

Then, an overwhelming, chaotic flash drowned the entire planet in colour and light. In seconds, his work was eradicated and then overgrown with grasses, ferns and forests. Animals began to awake and divine power flickered and crackled all over the horizon - a giant tree popped out of the ground, crystals rained from the sky, and cackling laughter came from the woods from tiny green menaces. The bull blinked and looked out over his field; in a second, it had become completely overgrown. It saw there agape for gods know how long; long enough to see an eternal sunbeam form over the massive tree on the horizon. The bull seethed and once again dug its horns into the regrown soil. As he snarled his way forward, pushing over stock and stone, tree and trunk, goblin and fowl, it spat out a new word, his anger twisting his tongue until consonants no longer fit the intent:

“TILL, TILL, TILL, TILL, TILL!”

And till, he did. He tilled so efficiently that by the end of the day, he had prepared hundreds of acres of soil for this new, untested phenomenon that he had yet to understand that he was supposed to teach people. Taking a small break, he pondered how he best could get revenge on the universe for never respecting him. It was then that a small, blackish red hexaped strolled past him with a bit of grey fuzz in its mouth. The bull eyed the creature curiously, for it had never seen its like. The creature, on the other hand, paid him no mind.

“You. What are you?” the bull demanded.

“Am ant,” replied the ant.

“Ant? What is ‘ant’?”

“Ant am ant,” answered the ant.

The bull furrowed his bushy brows, dry dirt breaking off his muddy forehead. “Are you like that smug-faced asshole who sucker-punched me in the jaw and deserves a shallow grave covered in cow dung?”

The ant stopped to ponder this. “No.” It moves on. The bull eyed it intently. The ant still paid him no mind.

“What’re you doing?” asked the bull.

“Collect and bring food for Queen,” replied the ant. 

“What’s a Queen?”

“Queen am Queen.” The ant had the patience of a saint. “Am mom, too.”

“You are?”

“No, Queen am.” 

The bull was now genuinely interested. The ant, meanwhile, was soon joined by other ants strolling by with fuzz in their mouth. The bull blinked. “There are more of you now!”

“Yes,” replied the ant. The others ignored him. Soon, the ants had formed a trail going back, presumably to their hive. The bull inspected the fuzz in their mandibles a bit closer. It looked fungal. He scratched his beard.

"What you've got there?"

"Mushroom," replied the ant. The bull raised a brow.

"So you eat mushrooms?"

"Yes. They grow all over forest. Lots, lots, lots." It had stopped to converse with the bull, stalling the whole trail behind it. The bull hummed in amusement.

"So you prey upon it?"

"Yes. It grows everywhere, so can prey. Not like insect; insect die if preyed; mushroom endless."

The bull nodded. "Thank you for telling me. Say, where can I find these mushrooms? It sounds like you have a lot to spare, and I am quite hungry." 

The ant pointed an antenna back the way it had come, which by now was pretty much a mapped out route thanks to all the ants waiting to move on. The bull nodded its thanks and followed the ant trail into the forest. After a walk that took hours for an ant, but about five minutes for the bull, he had arrived at a small hole under a tree. Ants walked into the hole emptimouthed and came out with bits and pieces of mycelium in their mandibles. The bull pursed his lips and stuck his hand into the hole. Feeling around gently, he eventually struck a vein of mycelium. Whispering, he asked, "Anyone there?"

The response came like morse code. A series of electrical signals skipped through the mycelium and into the bull's finger, then divine power deciphered them as easily as speech. "Who's there?" a million voices asked inquisitively.

"A friend," replied the bull. "I am here about the ant situation. Heard they were enjoying a bountiful harvest of mushrooms, so I came to see what the fuzz was about."

The mycelium's voices hummed. "Ant situation? Oh! You mean my porters."

The bull raised an eyebrow. "Your porters?"

"Oh yes. They bring food in heaps. All I have to do is sit here and snatch it up from the ground. Sure, every now and then they get a bit rowdy and bite a part or two of me, but honestly, I'm getting the better deal."

"You don't say…" mumbled the bull. "What do you think of the ants?"

"Bunch'a chumps if you ask me. It all started when a few just came in here and died. They were delicious! Then some came in and dumped a bunch of detritus. That was delicious too! I don't get it, how can they waste so much good food? Oh, oh, and get this: they've even gotten rid of all my parasites! I've actually never been better! I wish I could pinch myself, for I've been living a dream."

The bull hummed and looked over at one of the ants coming out of the cave with fungus in its mouth. "You there, ant. What do you think of the mushroom?"

"Big chump. Just sit there, get eat. Grow out of junk, become food. Even has other food grow on top. Is genius for us. Stupid mushroom." It clicked its mandibles in a tiny laugh. The bulk smirked.
"Yeah. Funny how that works, isn't it?" He stood up and walked back to his field. Finally, after his tormenting, yet short existence in the Galbarverse, he understood his purpose. He would teach everyone the dance he had danced with the nebula in his previous world: the dance of domestication.

Behind him, plants were beginning to settle in his tilled fields. To keep them clean until he knew how to make proper use of them, he took a few of the ants and gave them shovel-like mandibles. He then grew them to the size of wolves and set them to till his field, as well as to graze on unwanted vegetation. Any and all waste was to be mulched and placed back on the fields to be broken down by detritus feeders, the funny mushroom among them.

Then, the bull sat down to admire his field and its toiling workers. At one point, the sky cracked open with blood and his fields filled with insects and parasites that immediately swarmed to suck it up. The aftermath of the rain proved fantastic for the fertility of the soil. There also showed up some emissary talking about dreams and whatnot. The bull waved him away and told him to come back later. This… Tilling thing - and the domestication - was the start of something big, he knew it, so now all he needed were students to learn the dance.

[hider=Summary]
Hummus spent the rest of pre-Bang time tilling an enormous area of land using his horns in pure rage. Then the Bang happened and the entire mass he had tilled is immediately swallowed by thick overgrowth. Now quadruple angry, he tills it all away again.

When he's done tilling, he meets an ant who had some fungus in its mouth. It explains that it got it from the forest, so the bull goes to check it out. When it asks the mushroom how it feels about the ants, the mushroom is surprisingly completely convinced that the ants are slaving away on its behalf, bringing it food and warding off parasites. When Hummus asks the ants, they're convinced that they completely own the fungus and that they get free food from leaving garbage around that the mushroom for some reason seems to eat. This gives Hummus the idea of domestication and sets him off on the path to teach people the dance of mutually assured destruction through interreliance.

Oh, and he also makes wolf-sized ants that till the earth and eat weeds.
[/hider]

[hider=EmPee]
Hummus - 8MP
1MP: Create giants, huge ants with shovel-like mandibles that live off of weeds that grow near and on farm fields. They till the soil in search of parasitic growths and to mix the top soil. They also add detritus and waste as mulch to the farm soil to keep it from drying out. They are very territorial, though, so they make for poor farm animals. They are more of a wild animal that does the farmer a favour by eating weeds, but will run him down and beat him to death if he sees him. These also farm mushrooms on a large scale and build huge hives commonly confused for being hilltopd near farmland.
1MP: Made the Striped Lands, a huge flat area of land that is immensely fertile for agriculture, where the earth has already been preworked and prepared for the settlement of agriculteurs and their plants. Its fertility draws life of all kinds, so it's a competitive place to live.
6MP
[/hider]