With the dining rooms mildly decorated, Eric felt mildly more festive and relaxed. He had taken some of the bio-luminescent plates from his now-butchered adult centipede pair, who could not be safely kept now that he was growing weaker and weaker in the realm of his magical prowess and could rarely expend so much energy just to tell them not to do this or that, and hung them in the dining hall, reanimating them as a sort of undead lights. It was at least cheaper to do this.
Now, the dining room was decorated not only with vines and quartzite, but lovely lighted bits of exoskeleton which would flash a different color every other second or so. It was slow, in no particular pattern, and proved entirely safe. Or at least as safe as light strings ever were. They were provided energy and nutrients through small amounts of blood he'd trapped in their veins under scar tissue which simply formed as he'd kept them alive, and would strobe continually until he chose not to feed them anymore. Or rotted for his failure to properly upkeep them, whichever came first. Biology wasn't his major, and preventing infections of tissues no longer connected to a body wasn't that high a priority.
Researching his dream of preventing death in the first place by saving the soul the complications of the afterlife and regenerating their bodies had never really died, and he had spent a little bit of his free time working on the problems. He'd never had access to Thari's notes, and presumed Weird or Hugo had confiscated them, probably just because they felt he was prone to some similarly extreme sadism as she had been. However, the small bits of notes in her "diary" or auto-biographic portion of text at the end of My Friend, Kodkod had at least provided bridges across gaps in his creativity. She mentioned that "...I had found that it is possible to actually keep disembodied tissues alive after excising them from a body, even without use of magic, and only providing a small dose of a healing potion. I detailed it in my research notes in section..." and that had triggered memories of his regarding something similar in a biology class he'd taken; body tissues separated from an animal yet provided an environment mimicking the creature's body and introducing proper nutrients could be kept alive and possibly grown in a petri dish. He had assumed that Thari probably used this find in combination with her magics and whatever else in some sick and twisted experiments, probably related to welding tissues onto the elves... Eric, though, had simply tried providing the lighted exoskeleton bits with some magic-transferred energy and nutrients, and succeeded in keeping them alive for many hours after the death of the centipedes themselves, and now could mimic the proper conditions to keep them going maybe for a couple days, enough time for this holiday period Hugo had wanted to come up with.
Today would be a good day, though, as he'd convinced the others NOT to play with the captured monster until they were better prepared, and as far as they knew it was still properly contained in it's entirety. On top of that, he'd had time to partially excavate Wierd's new lab in the deep quartzite deposit, and it proved to have zero detectable fractures in the small portion he'd prepared already. The material was also nice for carving furniture, and he'd processed a large chunk of it into the rough likeness of a table he could haul out and refine tomorrow. Rocks everywhere, for sure, but the quartzite was a rather lovely stark-white in comparison to the complex granite, gabbro, and diorite available lower down, and the relatively ugly sedimentary deposits above.
But that was all work, and Eric realized he had nearly no social life. Athel and his girlfriend were his primary companions now, and he rarely spoke to anyone else for anything other than work or business of some manner. This new holiday would be a remarkable chance to slack off and chat with the few dwarves remaining in the fortress, if they were willing to talk to "that damned fool who always wants to work instead of party."
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 266979 times)