In the streets of Eckledun...
Scott not entirely unfoundedly believes that he could probably use a drink, and that such a small niggle as him being entirely unable to drink is not about to stop him. Surely enough threats and fire shall fix this much as they shall solve all other problems in his unlife in time. Happy thoughts of flaming destruction keeping him company, he looks around for the nearest fine place of extreme inebriation.
Fortunately for him, he needs not look far, for a place called Bill's Hideaway seems all too inviting from across the street - it has all he could possibly want aside from an actual wooden construction - instead it seems to be all worked stone and metal. There's plenty of drunks out front who look pickled enough that he could set them on fire with a mere glance, however, so he's holding out hope. Floating in through the front door like it wasn't even there, he finds himself in a fairly low-class joint, the kind of place he feels only a few regulars might miss if it were to suddenly explode, complete with a stone and metal bar seemingly made specifically to deflect any falling drunkards without a single scratch remaining on it. There's a rather fine-looking older woman with a glass eye standing behind the bar, looking less than thrilled that the patron ugliness record was just soundly broken beyond all belief with Scott's arrival. She rather politely says nothing as Scott moves toward the bar, only venturing to guess his purpose midway through his opening threat, which need not be repeated, but can be freely assumed to be rather ugly. Since she gets the point rather easily, Scott does not mind.
"You want a stiff drink, I'll freely assume."
She produces a carafe from one of the cupboards behind her. The liquid within glows a bright green.
"Here's what I got, then. You'll want the whole bottle, I'm guessing?"
When Scott bobs affirmatively, she places it in front of him. Scott, like the polite drunk he is, bobs forward into the bottle, phasing through the glass, whereupon the liquid within quickly gets absorbed into his ectoplasmic form.
[Scott's endurance roll: 5]
That did the trick, he thinks. So well and truly knackered he's never been in his life, let alone in the days of enforced sobriety death had brought him. He's even got the old quintuple-vision thing going. What a charming throwback to a more innocent time. So stone drunk is he, he wonders if he might have sustained a bit of brain damage from all that. After all, he's starting to worry about brain damage, which is already a marked departure from the list of psychoses and neuroses that compose his very being.
At the Mystery Forge...
Niklas needs victims, this much is clear. Not having a victim is worse than not having an audience, this much he knows.
"Are there any nearby? Aside from maid person there," he says, pointing at the vacant spot where the maid was a moment ago. She seems to have gotten the right idea at last. A shame. "Oh, and do you have a mirror so I can behold myself?"
"No on both counts, dear creature! But I am sure if you can move quietly enough, both will be within reach soon enough!" he explains, then runs over to the Mystery Forge, which he begins to climb.
At the Purging Crab...
Morton, having let good tailor Craig alone with good mage Lawrence for far too long already, focuses all of his narrowed will and strengthened resolve, to say nothing of superior knowledge, straight into the tea he has prepared, willing it to be the perfect temperature, intimately known to him like it is to no other, now and forever.
Interestingly, as he makes the effort of will needed to accomplish this, he finds it surprisingly easy to make reality do what he wants, and in his mind there can be only one explanation - clearly nature itself wants people to enjoy wonderful tea just as much as he does. The warm feeling this fact brings him is truly irreplaceable, he finds. This is good, since when he's done (and taken the necessary fifteen minute break afterward to get his faculties in order, naturally) there is absolutely nothing to indicate that he has done anything to the tea at all apart from its rather uniquely pleasing temperature.
In the wilderness of the deadliest of coasts...
Sigmund, ever the crafty sort, immediately starts working dark designs on the new arrival. First he checks the serial number of his soul, because how can one work dark designs without messing around with souls? They wouldn't be very dark in that event, would they? So, he quickly looks through his soul number, and finds it boring as usual, although he comes across a very interesting fact - something's changed there, a detail he hadn't noticed before while trying to look through the veritable hundreds of soul vessels his body is composed of. That detail happens to be a certain privilege, which is something Sigmund finds intriguing.
That privilege, or at least that's what it's termed, seems to be called the privilege of inseparability, with a timestamp saying that it's begun on 22114333.12899.557, whatever that might possibly mean.
Meanwhile, the body in the distance seems to be meandering around, not changing its location much, though its meandering is admittedly slowly taking it closer to Sigmund's pile of organs.
In the dining room of Ms. Klemm...
Kevin decides to eat up without protest, and do his very best to appear that he's enjoying the food. Fortunately, that's not a problem, since the food genuinely is rather delicious, or at least it tastes very nutritious. Has a bit of a dusty taste, but otherwise a very solid way to absorb all that vitally important goodness. Very filling, too, though Kevin's hungry enough to make very good progress on the food anyway, and soon manages to finish both pods at a markedly faster rate than Ms. Klemm.
"Hm, this is pretty good!" he comments.
"I know, right?" she replies with her mouth half-full. A moment passes as Kevin elects to wait until she swallows before asking the next question.
"Uh... so how do you tell these... uh... cuties... to do these things?"
"Oh, I cheat," she says, blushing a little and laughing to herself. "I used to try working with actual insects, because they're so very cute! But then I realized that they're a bit too... alien to train. No brain, just ganglia scattered across the body. Not much learning capacity in them, either. So I did the next best thing and made them very cute-looking, but on the inside they're pretty much above-average dog parts. Same for the spiders. I mean, there's only so much hard work you can put in just for squeeing value, am I right?"
She beckons a nearby ant thing, which does start to look distressingly like a six-legged, chitin-covered dog in its mannerisms as Kevin observes it more closely, to come closer, and it does, at which point she pets it. The ant thing appears to appreciate it.
"Anyway, want seconds?"
In the gutter of the dead...
["Medicine" roll: 6+1]
"I dunno, it doesn't seem like it'd be in the community's best interest to..."
Mark puts two fingers to the lady necromancer's mouth. She pauses a moment, taken aback by the effective certainty of the gesture. With his other hand, he lets the wonder of his creation speak for itself. It is a glorious invention, a thing of hollowed and hewn bone, precariously placed fingers, sinew strings and membranous drums, with small and stubby walking legs, about six of them, all six skinless and without a wasted bit of flesh on them. No torso to speak of - all has been filled with points of articulation most delicate, each part set up with exceptional timing, frequency and intensity in mind. It took three dead refugees (not murdered, mind you - Mark, reasonable chap that he is, realizes that it'd probably complicate the pitch overmuch if he'd killed them himself, and the note he presented to the lady had been complicated enough to explain already).
The smell of Mark's fingers hits the lady necromancers brain and she retches, drawing back. Mark tilts his head.
"Ugh, don't you ever wash those? Gods, man."
Mark takes a look at the nearby stream, a mere trickle now due to the several refugees falling into (or being thrown into, he supposes - a few of them didn't look drowned) a closed off part of the sewer the water was coming from. He'd tried washing with that, but it had an overly gunk-like consistency.
"Anyway, I don't see anything to transfer a soul from into that thing anyway. Do you even know how this works?" she asks. Mark rolls his eyes and points at the nearby refugee pile. Should be three good people in that.
"Wait, they're not dead?"
Mark passes her another note. This one details the system - the pile of three is the "barely breathing" pile, while the ravaged pile of what was formerly five others is the viable materials one. The seeping pile of three to six is the non-viable materials pile, probably extreme life magic failures (and not just minor ones like the others), and a little bit too spicy for this project. Took only a little bit of systematization, too!
"Okay..." she nods as she reads it. "I dunno. This seems a bit disrespectful."
Mark is prepared, and provides her with his last note, the note of justifications. It provides a multitude of reasons why this is totally a thing the lady necromancer should do, including the fact that these people are probably dead anyway, this is like a new lease on life, they are going to be providing the community a valuable service, and that she's a goddamn necromancer and he thinks these kinds of reservations are really something necromancer school ought to have stripped from her long ago. And really, it could turn out funny! There's no way this thing could be a threat, either, since this is one of the rare things he hasn't made with the express purpose of either enabling or facilitating criminal activity (he assumes fixing up his former companions all counts toward one of those two categories, and other things he hardly remembers).
Side note - the stationery he bought for all those tips he got from playing the flute before seems to have made his thoughts more presentable than ever, even with the unsavory smell of the rest of his being! Way more fun than speaking, and more menacing to boot!
"... uh, well... eh, fuck it. Let's give it a shot," the lady necromancer says, giving Mark back the note and turning to the barely breathing pile, keeping both it and Mark's creation in her view.
[Wilma's magic roll: 1]
She looks at the pile, concentrating upon its contents, and it stirs! Oh, how it stirs! Mostly it's one body that stirs - a young lady in the middle, pale and in very poor health, her body twitching, looking suddenly revitalized for some reason.
"Oh. Uh, whoops!" says the lady necromancer as the young woman starts to scream wildly and flail, as if in extreme agony. Quite a bit of life in her now, Mark notices. And such violence, too! With barely any effort she manages to shake off the fat old fellow atop her (placed deliberately on top, mind you - Mark understands the concept of the corpse paperweight very well) and immediately tries to get up, though this appears very difficult, as the several parts of her body appear to not be moving quite as concertedly as they should be. The fat fellow, to further the disappointment, looks to have died entirely, judging from the lack of breathing. The skinny middle-aged woman at the bottom, though, emits a low pained gasp as she can finally breathe at full efficiency once more.
"Dammit, I told you I'm an exorcist, not one of the undead types! Why'd I let you talk me into this?" the lady necromancer looks accusatorily at Mark, who seems to be wondering about three things. Firstly, whether there's anything he can do with the fascinatingly lively near-corpse flailing around in the near vicinity. Secondly, whether he could improve his current design, the One-Beast-Band, with materials from the dead fat fellow who just freed up his vast bulk. Thirdly, whether he should have planned a bit further ahead with his notes.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 563829 times)