Give piecewise a needle or something to stab throughout a fly or other bug's heart with his precision skills. Or use our own necroprecision to do so.
We don't have Piecewise with us, but it's a good idea.
Order ourselves to catch a fly and then drown it, to take advantage of our hyper-precision mode. That way the body should remain intact. Then we can add a small core, maybe a tiny splinter of wood or rock or even a particularly sturdy leaf and send it to act as a tracking beacon for the guard. If it's easy to do and inconspicuous we could even attach them to all of the guards of the night shift so that we can alert the rat if it's about to cross their path. There's always the chance the guards swat the annoying flies and we lose them but it shouldn't matter.
Are there dragonflies in this biome? Would probably be simpler to catch and still not very conspicuous. If it's the right season we could look for water and maybe find one.
Alternatively, this is a little base out in the boonies, so they probably have some crawling things that like to get inside. Could have a birdwise nab one intact and bring it to us.
That's also a good idea, send caterpillars or scarabs or ants or something.
Regardless of if the above works, I say we go ahead with the plan.
Bug spy attempts begin with trying to catch a flying insect. This proves remarkably difficult as even finding a fly or similar insect is hard and when you find one, attempts to capture it are foiled as it simply flies up and out of your reach before you can even get close. There are no bodies of water nearby to hunt for pond skimming insects and though you look for a dead animal to capture flies off of, you cannot find one. Even with your impossibly precise movement it seems there are limitations to your abilities. Next you focus on some more...accessible creatures. After turning over a few stones and checking under a fallen tree you finally find a nice beetle. You drown it in some of the water you took to camp with- a process which takes a lot longer than you expected- and reanimate it. Rather than using any foreign object as a core, you simply use the beetle's head as the core. The practice of "Organic Coring" was talked about in the necromancy text you read, but was written off as a "Inefficent" practice because organic cores are prone to degradation and easier to damage. For the sake of a disposable spy though, this will likely be fine. You use the remaining part of the day to send the spy beetle in and try to discover the location of the room in question with it. Or rather you send it in and...about 10 minutes later the connection is severed.
You ponder this turn of events while watching the base carefully. No alerts are sounded, the base doesn't go into lockdown...no sign they realized something was wrong. Chances are that someone just saw the beetle and swatted it like they would with any bug.
"That was a lot of effort for no profit eh?" Esme asks from where she's laying next to you.
You make a pained affirmative noise.
"Still going for it tonight?"
You sigh and shimmy back from the edge. You agree that its the best to try it now. Sending down more bugs might just cause people to notice an odd pattern to the insect invasion and get suspicious. Better to strike now while stealth and surprise are still both on your side.
You animate the hawk as a puppet and give it specific instructions to carry the rat down to the roof and then wait there until the rat returns before flying it back up here. The rat you give the more complex orders of finding the right documents and memorizing them. The rat seems to understand. You wait for the right time in the middle of the night and send your twin spies down. You lose track of them almost immediately in the darkness, only sighting them again briefly as they sail in over the fence and onto the roof. You quickly check the guards reactions but find them to be quietly continuing their normal behavior. At this point all you can do is sit and wait, watching the checkpoint with growing apprehension. You have no way of recalling them or asking how its going, you can only hope things are going well. You can kind of trace their location using the thread connecting them to you, the apparently slow progress of the rat as it scurries about translated into a movement of what looks like inches from this distance. It takes over two hours but finally, the rat's thread overlaps the hawks and together they ascend and move swiftly back toward you. Again you check the site for any signs of alarm and again nothing.
Once the rat returns you get out the paper and pencil and have it start transcribing everything it read. This turns out to be a great deal, as it apparently read through a lot of paperwork before finding exactly what it was after. The rat transcribes until 10:00 or so in the morning before you finally get the pages you were after. You set the extra stuff aside to look at more closely later and check through the prisoner transport logs, looking for the names of Kelley's co-workers. Jennifer Massey, Erin Massey, Thomas Hill, and Paul Van-Horn; you mutter their names to yourself while running your finger over the list. Its not in alphabetical order, its chronological. You flip through years and years of records until finally stopping. "MASSEY, JENNIFER", transferred to the prison and...not transferred out. You check the death logs and her name doesn't appear there either. You check the rest of the transfer logs and can't find anyone else, but Jennifer Massey is in that prison. You set the transfer logs aside and start checking the extra paperwork, looking for...you're not sure. Maybe a reason why she's there? She was a direct college of Kelley...If anyone was to know whats going on, it would be her. Sadly you cannot find anything more on her. At least nothing useful.
You sit back against a tree and consider what to do next. Break her out? Get in to speak with her? Just kill her somehow and eat the memories? She knows things you have to find out.
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Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 118964 times)