Immediately inform Esme. Immediately.
+1 After she wakes up, whisper to her what happened
+1
Would Esme's ability to copy and move knowledge around enable us to communicate with her covertly if she knew we needed to get something across? With our permission could she look at what's in the front of our mind, allowing us to silently tell her stuff and her to transfer her responses in reverse?
You consider shaking Esme awake and then consider against it. Though your knowledge of normal human anatomy and needs is not exactly perfect, you understand the necessity of sleep. You cross your arms and consider this new discovery. You wonder if it just requires a corpse, not a corpse you've previously controlled. You think about corpses you know the location and existence of that you haven't animated. There are preserved specimens at the library you haven't touched...those might work. You attempt to jump into a large eel you remember in a glass jar near where you left the skeletons. No luck. You try a few others and come to the conclusion that just knowing about the corpse isn't good enough.
At least not for now. In the back of your mind you have been considering whether or not this power of yours is something that has always been intrinsic to you or something you unlocked recently. You're not really sure. It could theoretically be either. But you're really not sure what the trigger for "unlocking" it could have been, if there was one at all. Hmm.
You sit and consider this for several more hours, until Esme begins to stir sometime after sunrise. As soon as she's awake enough to comprehend what you want to say, you whisper it to her. She asks you to repeat yourself once, but after that she simply nods and says "We'll talk about this later". However, after she says this, she makes a special production of picking up your bag, checking that the hawk's body is still in it, and then sitting down with it on her lap. She tells you that when the two of you get back, that she's going to go to the office. She pulls a book out of her bag and hands it to you.
"Take that, and that other paper work, and go deliver it to the address I've written there. The client is waiting for it. After that, give me a call." She taps her fingers on the bag meaningfully as she says all this. You nod, folding the collection of papers and stuffing them into the book before putting it back in your jacket. Neither of you speak about anything really meaningful for the few remaining hours of the trip, and once you exit the train you both go in opposite ways after a hug and various banal farewells. You follow the directions on the inner cover of the book to a very mundane looking 3 story brick building somewhere among a sea of similar homes. An old woman answers the door and asks who you're looking for. You give the name -Mr. Pachui -that is written in the book and then wait, shuffling your feet in the snow. A man you've never seen comes to the door a minute later, takes the book, and thanks you. You try to ask him something, maybe just get a better idea what this is all about, but he closes the door and you're left standing on the stoop, staring at the brass knocker in the gray light of morning.
You walk a while after this, until you get somewhere more deserted. You find an area that looks like it was hard hit by bombing and crawl into the ruins of one of the buildings. You carefully hide yourself away where you're fairly sure no one will find you and then transfer yourself to the hawk once more. Esme is there, standing over you. You take a moment to get your bearings. You think you're in those same underground rooms that you slept in after your lab heist. You don't recognize the room itself...just concrete and hard lights with a metal door and table. Interrogation room maybe?
"Is that you?" Esme says, bringing her face down to your level and squinting at you. You nod.
"Well...thats new." She says, apparently as shocked about all this as you are. "Can you speak?"
You give it a shot. You can make noises, but no lips or teeth, a different shaped tongue and an inhuman voice box limit you greatly when it comes to speaking intelligibility. About the very best you can do is make some noises that vaguely sound like words. Hello becomes "---EEEEOOOOooo".
"Thats not gonna work for anything but signaling. How about writing?"
This turns out to be hard mostly because of balance. Standing on one foot and writing with the other is a very coordinated sort of action, one you don't really have practice with. After you fall down a few times Esme just picks you up and holds you above the sheet of paper, slowly moving you to the side and then down as you write. Your handwriting is...well its hawkscratch but its legible enough.
"We can do a lot with this" Esme mutters to herself as she looks over the page you wrote together. "We can get you into that prison for one. Though...conducting an interview with that woman might be difficult as a rat or whatever....Can you animate bodies while in another body?"
You shrug. She brings a preserved animal...that eel you were thinking of before...back after a few minutes and tells you to try. Plucking the anima is hard -you have to use your feet and end up laying on your back to do so- but manage to reanimate the eel. Linking it to yourself with blood is a different story: you don't have any in this body. Hmm. As a test you jump into the eel and indeed, that does work, but only after you deanimated it first.
"So you can create bodies and then hop to them. Maybe what we can do is get you in there as some small animal carrying poison, kill a guard, reanimate him before people notice, and then have you use that body to talk to prisoner?" Esme says, half thinking out loud.
Author
Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 116750 times)