In the kitchen of the Artiste...
Niklas goes about the process of cooking this somewhat aged corpse, electing to create some nice brain soup.
[Culinary Dark Arts roll: 4+1]
First he seats the man carefully in an available chair, then equally carefully opens the skull, getting a pleasant scent of ripe brain from within. Removing the top of the skull, he takes a spoon and mashes up the brain rather nicely. He picks up some spices from a nearby spice rack and adds them in a rather liberal fashion. After all, if your meat's not necessarily top-quality, spices are your best friend! After the brain is nicely mashed up, he scoops it out of the skull, mashed brain stem and all, and places it all in a bowl. Now to let it sit for a while. But don't think that means the chef won't be doing anything! Oh no.
He opens up the man's chest cavity. It's a bit gas-filled already, but hey, some would call that a perk. Lets the organs stew in their own vapor and stuff. He slices all of the organs, making sure not to skip over the spleen, pancreas or even the thyroid by accident, and cubes them up into tiny bits, organizing bits of each in a pile. He then pan-fries each of them, adding crispy organ bits to the pureed brain in the bowl. Now, if he's got this right, he's got bits of everything in it. Good. Now for the final touches before heating.
The distressing chef adds a generous dollop of butter to the mixture. But wait, something's missing. Something important. He fishes in the pile of food, retrieving a handy bit of powder in a miraculously intact glass vial. Ah! Extract of moose! This changes everything! Niklas dabs a bit of it across the organ mixture, then carefully removes the eyes and lips of the man, arranging them on top of the whole thing in a jolly, happy fashion. Now to heat it all!
After about ten minutes, it's done! Brain Soup a la Niklas, ready to serve! He hands the bowl to the Artiste along with a clean spoon.
"Soup! Wonderful! Oh, and look, it even has a happy face on it. How nice."
He tastes the soup, which is a bit thicker than most roasts Niklas has made. He nods approvingly.
"You are quite good at this, I must say. Why, I might start habitually eating people now."
The master quickly wolfs down most of the soup, clearly enjoying himself.
"Okay, I really should stop now. I'm about as full as I can get, I think. Great stuff, minion, great stuff. You should really write these down somewhere, I think," he tells the chef, wiping his brain-stained mouth with a robe sleeve.
In a temple of Narcillicus...
Scott, silently fuming at the way he has been treated by the gods, goes to look for someplace he might be appreciated more.
Fortunately for him, there is a shrine to Pacitarius right here in the temple, slightly deeper within the building, along with the shrines of the other four gods, with Narcillicus' being the largest and most elaborate in this case. It's a pretty handy element in most temples - they mostly possess shrines to every god, even if they might not be obvious at first.
Deep inside a well...
Mark, momentarily held up by a lack of cracks in the walls, tries to do a back-supported wall-walk.
[Climbing roll: 1+1]
His legs are perfectly capable of running up the wall, he finds, but the main problem here is his back - with the whole tree head and such, it's a bit hard to maneuver upwards. So he just ends up in the water again.
In the entrance hall of the Artiste's home...
Sigmund, having found the facts within the book to his liking, looks at focus selection next, opening up Foci For Every Necromantic Need And Profane Purpose and taking a look at the options.
So, to make a long story short, there's spellbooks and then there's objects. Necromantic spellbooks are far, far easier to obtain than necromantic objects, though they are usually quite limited in what they can do, as each spell must take up at least a page, and spells have rather narrow uses and abilities, but necromancy has such a wide scope. That's why there are books of bindings, books of soulflaying and soulmending, books of spirit calling and eclectic mixtures of many necromantic techniques.
Objects are much greater in power and potential, though they have the unattractive disadvantages of being either prohibitively expensive or nigh-impossible to obtain. These are pretty much entirely dispensed by either demons or Velusius to mortals, and it is almost unheard of to obtain one any other way (though other gods should also be theoretically capable of providing such a focus). These extradimensional artifacts possess very considerable power, though you mostly have to obtain them from A) a demon or Velusius, who are likely to get your soul in the bargain or B) somebody who chose Option A and is now an extremely powerful necromancer with demonic connections.
It has been theorized by Joseph "Jolly Joe" Cunningham that perhaps an object that a demon is bound to (and there are indeed legends of such things) would make the perfect focus for necromancy, since demons (and gods) are the only beings in the universe known to possess a natural ability to manipulate souls, though the dangers of such an object (most notably that of an unpredictable nigh-omnipotent being connected to it) make such a focus of dubious use. Better just ask a demon to do something for you than look for crazy ones to enslave. Also, it is possible that some heretofore undiscovered element of the universe linked with soul transition (though such an element would be difficult to discover, as no information is available about the afterlife aside from minor observations about the soul exiting the material world) would also work for this purpose, though this is mere conjecture based on the, to be perfectly frank, rather absurd notion of harnessing the afterlife directly for a magical use.
By the time Sigmund is done with the book, dawn starts to break.
On the top floor of the Artiste's home...
Morton bows to Erin.
"Thank you, Erin, it was a grand pleasure meeting you. I'll get set on finding some parchment for Kevin, then working on that tea."
"Likewise, buddy, likewise. Good luck with that."
Morton politely moves away, searching for some paper around. Unfortunately, he can't even think of a place to look - there are alcoves where the mages sleep, there's the kitchen, there's Mark's parlor, now totally ruined by all the glass, and there is also some sort of storage space in the ground floor, though that's kind of empty.
In other news, the day seems to be starting. And there is a slight commotion from upstairs - sounds like the others are getting up.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 565369 times)