Recall if it's possible to see through or use the senses of the puppet ourselves, if we can sense how many we have active/when one is destroyed, and if signal strength/latency becomes an issue when the puppet is far away.
Hmm. I wonder if the stuff we can absorb from books with Esme's help counts as "memories" that Anima Phantoms can eat. If so, that could be a source of food for them, as large as the library itself.
Do Anima Phantoms only eat specific kinds of memories, or do they just devour anything? Does it matter how emotional/interesting the memories are?
+1
As funny as this is, a mouse with a nail shoved down it's throat is not a good spy, because it is obviously undead.
Another thing to recall: Do undead naturaly decay?
You can't see through their eyes or really "Sense" anything directly. However, like with Piecewise in the closet, they can sort of broadcast their understanding of the world to you. If you try it with the mouse you get the impression the room you're in and that there is a person here. The mouse appears to have poor human differentiation because it can't tell you anything specific about yourself. To the mouse you're just "A human". Not even that really, just a big thing on two legs. You can sense how many are active and generally how strong the "Signal" is via the heartbeats in your head.
Anima phantoms seem to eat any memories but they like the memories of sentient beings best, judging by the book. Might be due to general "Interesting-ness" of the memories or something about sapience.
The undead do...not decay naturally but they also do not heal or bleed or anything like that. An undead that gets injured will always have that injury unless it is literally mechanically fixed by sewing it together or something similar.
I wonder if we can anchor to a claw or something that's naturally external. Probably risks damaging it, though.
Do different anchors have different properties? Is there a reason a necromancer might favor the heart over the liver or a length of rib, for instance?
Do we recall if anima phantoms eat memories OR mana or memories AND mana? More specifically, is there any way to keep an anima phantom servant without going insane or killing things for it?
Or just use the mouse's heart.
We'd have to physically wrap it, though, which would require some surgery.
You think about what you've learned...the book said nothing about the nature of the anchors, as in any differences between particular objects. There probably are some but it might be more in the theory or advanced practices.
You remember that a servant can be feed pure mana instead of memories. Mana, as the book says, is considered by necromancers to be somehow connected to the Anima.
You think back to when you killed the mouse. You remember...something coming out of it but you can't recall exactly what it was. Just some shimmering stuff that went up when the Anima connection failed. Maybe the mouse's memories? You're not sure you want to eat the memories of a mouse...but they might be good. Mice hear lots of things, see lots of things. Hmm.
In any case, you grab one of the nails and carefully jam it down the mouse's throat before reaching up and grabbing at the Anima. As you touch it, the red glow of your ring flows up your arm in little pulses and with a cold tingle you catch hold of the fabric of life. You pull it down; it resists more than you imagined it would but not hugely so and you carefully wrap it around the head of the nail, which is still sticking out from the mouse's mouth. The ring flashes once more as the connection is made and then the mouse's body shivers. With an odd muffled squeak it rises up onto its legs again and then stands perfectly still.
MOUSE.
HOVER MODE.
Also congratulations to us, if we weren't a necromancer before, we sure are now! Let's maybe bring our mouse friend along as we try to learn some of the other things on our list the natural way in the library.
You teach the mouse hover mode and it immediately begins bouncing up and down with odd, stiff motions and repeated squeaks.
Hmmm which subject to look into first?