The Horta had completed preparing the cavern for her much needed nursery… and just in time, as her progeny had already begun emerging from her opal obsidian exterior. Her eggs glow as their Piezo crystals multiply within their shells. The Horta is the last of her kind…the last one designated to produce the next generation… She knows that she will never see her children, as the last egg emerges she will die leaving only a mineral monument within the cavern. This scenario came from one of my favorite original Star Trek episodes where a USS Federation Di-Lithium crystal mining operation is violently interrupted by a rock-like creature with a caustic defense and means of boring through solid rock. It is only after being wounded by Kirk and crew phasers that Spock was able to do a Vulcan mind meld though which he learned that the Horta was, rather than being carbon based, she and her kind were hydro-Silicon geo-organisms. Dr. Mc Coy was called in to heal/repair the phaser damaged Horta, when he exclaimed: I'm a doctor...Not a bricklayer! I modeled the cave in Hexagon and the rest was done in Bryce 7.1