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[3man75]

I'm busy right now, so I can't analyze this situation deeply-- but it would be prudent to consider that the creature might be neither physical nor undead. Perhaps ask if Detect Magic can also detect creatures that are derived from magic?

Or possibly ethereal?

[Andres]

Tell the guy to stop the wards and stuff. It'll be dangerous but we're in a situation where we can't do anything without accepting some risks.

Let's try to get some experiments out of the way.

- For Animate Object, see if you can make an object levitate, or move to your will.  Maybe this could develop into telekinesis..

More specifically, let's try to move the vitality within ourselves around and see how that affects our physical movements.

-Play with blood. Maybe that's what the golem needs. Blood. Mix some of your own blood into the clay.

Let's see what the relationship between blood and necromancy is.

I also have a new experiment we can do. First up, we rip off a leaf and watch its vitality drain away. Second, we rip off another leaf but use some mana to keep the vitality in, maybe making a new spell. Third, We rip off some more leaves and use Raise Zombie/Command Undead on them. The plants aren't entirely dead yet, after all, so it would be interesting to see the results.
Depending on the results of the experiments, we could play with putting our own vitality into a leaf after it's not entirely filled with its own to see how ours mixes with its and see if that virus experiment will work.

[RAM]

So the raise zombie spell must somehow either seal the vitality inside the zombie or magically repair some of the damage done to it or supplant the functions of the body. Maybe all three at once. And it uses the information stored in the body to do so. That's why the headless ant got a magical purple head after being raised.

So maybe there is a way to alter the form in which the energy is held? Perhaps alter the ant's vitality to form metre-long antennae to grant it heightened awareness? Perhaps we are dealing with something similar here, a relatively small undead with purely necromantic tendrils capable of draining vitality...


Wait just outside the wards until you or your companions believe that your concentration is waning. Everyone should be advised that should you indicate that there is something in the vicinity, that they should use whatever means of observation they have to discern the nature of anything that is there.

[Tomcost]

I can't believe I didn't PTW this before.

[Parisbre56]

I say we do some work laying a trap. We go deeper into the forest (towards the heart, towards where we saw the creature come from), we scout the area. I don't remember if it's possible (I remember it was asked about wards, I don't remember the answer), but if it is, we should cast an alarm spell that will activate once undead are near. If we find a good area, we should consider if it is possible to bait it with us. We make some physical traps while Eko lays down an alarm spell connected to a sanctuary that we can activate at will. We don't have to do all the work today, we can just do some preliminary work. If sanctuary can trap and weaken the creature, then our work will be much easier. We should at least discuss if it is possible. It's risky, but we need to take risks if we are to succeed. I am also worried that the creature might be repelled from active order magic, so we might be able to confuse it with an inactive one plus ourselves as a bait.

While we walk within the forest, we should also pay attention for any signs of the past like weapons or skeletons, either from the war or from more recent victims. It might give us a clue about what happened. We should also pay attention for anything out of the ordinary in general, like groups of dead trees or animals.

We should also ask if there are any known patterns about the curse. Is it more likely to occur at night? Does it prefer certain victims? Or certain locations?

I need to finish rereading this. I'm certain there's some information in the previous chapters that I need to make this plan work.

[RAM]

We probably have weeks if we want them. There is no need to take large risks on our first effort. We know nothing has happened so far, while we were warded, so now it is time to test if something happens while we are not warded, but within spitting distance of a ward. After that we go to roughly the distance from a ward that the children were when they were attacked.

[Parisbre56]

Yes, maybe we would have weeks, if the entire world consisted of this forest and if our only goal was to investigate it. But the problem is there are other factors.

First of all, there's the matter of supplies. We might be able to prolong our stay by hunting or gathering but eventually we're probably going to run out. Water seems like something that would be hard to come by. Sure, we could go back to the village but what if Eko decides to stay or what if the other officials force him to stay? What if the village gets attacked by zombies in the meantime? We know that at least some zombies received orders to march towards it.

Second, there's the matter that one of our objectives is to reach the capital to search for information. But every moment that passes the necromancer's army grows stronger, killing more people, cutting off more routes. Soon it could be strong enough to lay siege to the capital, if it isn't already. On the other hand, almost the entire forest is warded against undead. If we were to solve the curse, it would either free up a lot of wizards that could help the fight with the necromancers or it could be used as a shelter, a place where civilians can hide and launch guerrilla attacks from. Once they realize or are told the curse is gone, of course. Might be a bit hard to convince them.

Third, every moment we delay and do not learn more and do not expand our powers and understanding of necromancy we become weaker compared to the other necromancers, who have the knowledge of someone who claims to be in contact with a necromancy god to aid them. Sure they may not have time to practice and understand necromancy like we do due to being preoccupied with fighting, but they are certainly gaining more power and practical knowledge somehow. Not only that, we know that they have an interest in us and that interest isn't going to go away. Next time their attempts to convert us might be more forceful. They might even try to eliminate us if they think we're becoming dangerous. Who knows how this dream connection or the  necromantic god thing works? What if they could use either to track us? Or do worse things? They might want to turn us so they want us alive, but they'll probably won't have the same qualms about our friends. And we know they probably get at least some information about us through magical means, since they apparently knew when someone else knew we were a necromancer.

So we shouldn't consider ourselves perfectly safe. One way or another we are on a timer and our mere presence is putting everyone around us in danger.

[Descan]

You guys know we have a version of scrying, right? And it's cheaper than Order scrying. We can see through our minions eyes. So we just need to make a scout (a bird would be best, if we want to use animals) and send it around. If we can use our necro-vision through the bird, and look for purple-y stuff, we could scout the whole forest and look for anomalies in, like, an hour.

[Parisbre56]

You guys know we have a version of scrying, right? And it's cheaper than Order scrying. We can see through our minions eyes. So we just need to make a scout (a bird would be best, if we want to use animals) and send it around. If we can use our necro-vision through the bird, and look for purple-y stuff, we could scout the whole forest and look for anomalies in, like, an hour.

Good idea. It's what I was trying to do with the golem, but doing it with an actual bird would be quicker and easier. We should be on the lookout for dead birds lying on the forest floor. Or any large insects we could catch and kill. Or even living birds, if we happen to come upon one (unlikely with Eko with us though). Them whenever we've got some privacy, we can reanimate it and keep it relatively nearby but hidden. As long as Eko doesn't cast detect undead, we should be fine. Only problem is, I don't remember if necromantic sight works through command undead. And what happens to the command undead spell when they pass through a ward.

EDIT: Turns out we can't control things for a distance greater than we can see.

[Descan]

If/when we get Eko in our good books, it'd be interesting to investigate the interactions of necromancy magic with the other spell schools. Order seems like a good start.

[Parisbre56]

I've been rereading the thread and it turns out we can't do the bird scout thing, at least not without doing something like altering the bird to allow it to record images (spy plane bird?) or somehow boost our control range. Our control range appears to have the same range limit as our necromantic sight (or is tied to it in some way):

After dinner, you decide to do some testing of the range of Command Undead. As you walk away from your pack, your awareness of the minnow (both through Control Undead and Necromantic Sight) begins to drop off rapidly- once you get more than a couple yards away from your pack, the spell ends along with your Necromantic Sight's awareness of the minnow's existence. Returning to your pack, you sense the minnows again, but don't regain control of them.

We can certainly give it an instruction to do a flyby, but we won't be able to see what it sees and we won't be able to use our necromantic sight through it.

I've been keeping notes on things I find during my reread, you can see them here if you want:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sYTX9fyWuzwRnnVOFps6reyE2miT6JmgH9ousjSV3tM/edit?usp=sharing
It's a bit untidy, since I just note down anything I consider important so that I do not forget, I haven't taken any time to make it look pretty.

EDIT: We could still keep a bird or an insect around for mundane short range spying, I suppose.

[Parisbre56]

And idea surfaced while chatting with Deep Waters in the google doc chat (several actually, but that's the easiest one to check): We want to find out more about souls, correct? Think about it though... Think of Life and Death (not in the philosophical sense, the elemental one). What do we know about life? Life means enhancing vitality, essentially the creation and enhancement of vitality inside something. What do we know about necromancy? We also know it's about vitality, but it's more about moving it around, stealing it. As the historian put it:

Whereas the Mages of Life have the power to enhance the Vitality, the Life-Force of living things, the Necromancers had the power to take that Vitality and give it to the Dead.

But it's more than that. Necromancy is about control. Life magic goes through the natural ways, the natural order of things. Even when killing something, it uses nature to do so, it just exaggerates it. Life pushes things to happen. Necromancy on the other hand does not care about the natural state of things. Necromancy forces things to happen. Life magic can bend the rules. Necromancy can break them. Life magic is a gardener. Necromancy is an engineer.

Think of the raise zombie spell. See its description through the eyes of a zombie:

Tired, but content, you go to sleep, and begin to dream… It is dark, and cramped, and cold. So cold... you feel frozen. You can't move. You feel a terrible need to be warm, and no sooner do you have the thought than you feel heat growing within you. It is trapped, you can feel it, you are incomplete. You force your will on your body, and suddenly the heat leaps out, bridging the incompleteness, making you whole. The heat flows out, suffusing your limbs- too many limbs. Where it meets discontinuities, holes, fuzziness, it flows around, replacing what is missing. Your legs twitch- your claws clench. Purple phosphorescence erupts from your eyes, and you can see!

Vitality leaps into the being. And where there is damage, the damage is automatically repaired, using the vessel's body as a guide. Could that be what the difference between the leaf was? That the zombie is repaired while being raised, that the 'holes' the vitality could escape through are 'plugged'? Are the holes physical holes or are they there simply because the leaf has lost functionality and is dead? In that case, we can think of vitality in a new light. Vitality does not represent life force. It represents the potential for functionality (the capacity to perform a function, don't know if there's a better word for that).

Think about a biological organism. It is the perfect natural vessel for vitality. It has eyes and muscles, all ready to function, to be infused with vitality. But think of the rope doll. It had eyes, functional eyes. Its body could feel the dirt and the rock, even though it lacked skin. Its eyes were not on the rope itself, they were hovering in the air. So functionality is independent of the vessel. We know there exist things such as phantasms, they were mentioned by Eko. Some of them were said to have fought in the last great war. So living things do not necessarily need bodies, at least not physical ones.

Also think about life magic. It alters bodies. It alters bodies by giving them vitality. And harming bodies takes vitality from them. If vitality is an expression of the state of one's body and altering the body can alter vitality, then altering vitality could cause the opposite. They are connected. But the bodies need not be biological or even corporeal.

What I am trying to say is, what if vitality is both the machine and the powersource that drives it and bodies are just vessels, vessels built in the right way to hold vitality, vessels that can be supplanted by magic, by mana?

Another thing. The children lacked "souls". Yet when we looked at them we saw that their vitality was suffering. Like something was missing from it, something that prevented them from healing, they were hollow in a way.

Now think of something else: How does one control a zombie? You need empathy, true. But what happens to a zombie you control? Why can you control it? And why do you need empathy? Is it perhaps so that you can send the correct signals to it? Alter it in the right way? What if controlling zombies works by altering the vitality inside them? What if you can control them because they do not have a soul? What if what you do when you control them is take those inputs and outputs of your vitality network and put them in theirs? That would explain why you need empathy. You need to translate their bodies, their vitality networks into yours, somehow.

Now, think about the dream we had. We were contacted by other necromancers. So we can assume that necromancers can control dreams. That they have some form of limited telepathy. Which is not an absurd thing, considering they can mind control zombies. So if all they can do is mess with vitality, how do they do it? They mess with the vitality of the living. They mess with the vitality network connected to thoughts. Just like we do with zombies. Because the vitality network is just an expression of the mind (or the brain, depending on how you want to look at it) and vice versa. Because the body is vitality and vitality is the body.

Where does our consciousness go while we are dreaming? Is there a change in the vitality network of a sleeping person? And more importantly, can we use telepathy? If we can, then we can conclusively prove at least part of the above hypothesis.

Now of course, comes the problem of how we will use telepathy. We know it should be similar to command undead somehow. So we should probably try to empathize with the target. But we need more than that. Perhaps it would be easier if we had a willing volunteer, in case there is resistance possible. We should ask Omo (when Eko is sleeping or otherwise preoccupied) if he would be willing for us to try and use telepathy on him, trying to simply read his thoughts and the general state of his body like in a command undead spell. Or try forcing some thought or image to him, a joke or good memory from our shared childhood perhaps. The fact that he will have an open mind (pun intended) and the fact that we grew up together and thus know him well and can more easily empathize with him should help greatly. We could also try doing something similar while he sleeps, in case he is more receptive at the time. Perhaps use See Vitality on a sleeping person if we can.

The only thing that bugs me is where does the vitality from the raise zombie spell come from? Is some vitality left over inside the corpse or is it created via magic? Using see vitality while raising a zombie could help solve that conundrum of where does vitality come from and if it comes from mana, then we could use that knowledge to try and reverse the process, de-animating a zombie for MP.

There are other experiments we could try in that vein. One of the ideas that came up was making a blade out of vitality and trying to attach it to our hand.

(Sorry if I made this really wrong. Trying to express my thought process and half-formed ideas and concepts and I'm not sure if I'm expressing myself in a way others can understand. Maybe Deep Waters can help, since she came up with some of that. Just a hypothesis we could try, I'm not saying I've solved the problem of what necromancy is or anything.)

[~Neri]

There's a google doc?

[Baffler]

Messing with his brain like that is just as likely to kill Omo if we do it without knowing exactly what we're doing, or at least do him serious lasting damage. I agree with the second idea though, about seeing the vitality in a zombie, it could lead to a major insight.

I've been rereading the thread and it turns out we can't do the bird scout thing, at least not without doing something like altering the bird to allow it to record images (spy plane bird?) or somehow boost our control range. Our control range appears to have the same range limit as our necromantic sight (or is tied to it in some way):

After dinner, you decide to do some testing of the range of Command Undead. As you walk away from your pack, your awareness of the minnow (both through Control Undead and Necromantic Sight) begins to drop off rapidly- once you get more than a couple yards away from your pack, the spell ends along with your Necromantic Sight's awareness of the minnow's existence. Returning to your pack, you sense the minnows again, but don't regain control of them.

We can certainly give it an instruction to do a flyby, but we won't be able to see what it sees and we won't be able to use our necromantic sight through it.

I've been keeping notes on things I find during my reread, you can see them here if you want:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sYTX9fyWuzwRnnVOFps6reyE2miT6JmgH9ousjSV3tM/edit?usp=sharing
It's a bit untidy, since I just note down anything I consider important so that I do not forget, I haven't taken any time to make it look pretty.

EDIT: We could still keep a bird or an insect around for mundane short range spying, I suppose.

We were able to animate the rope doll and (I think) see through the eyes we gave it with Alter Golem, another thing we could do is use a few of them (or something simpler) as a sort of perimeter defense. Set them on strategic vantage points and check on what they're seeing every once in a while. We'd literally be able to watch five directions at once without even leaving the tent, since the only limitation we know of is distance. We couldn't get away with it now with Eko actively searching for such things, and the wards may well disrupt them anyway, but it's something to keep in mind for the future.

[syvarris]

Oh, yay, YaaN is back!  I had lost hope!

...I need to check my email more often.  I'm late.

I support the plan that has us walking just outside of a ward carried by Eko.  If we do that, and we're far enough away from Eko to talk, then I think we should discuss our powers of necromancy with Omo- both what we can do, and our planned experiments.  Ask him for input, even if we don't think he'd know anything useful.

Spoiler: Experiment ideas (click to show/hide)

So the leaf drained of vitality when we shoved some in, and wasn't an undead.  The vitality probably drained because it was severed from the body; a severed finger would die pretty quickly too.

First, I think we should test if our injected vitality is any different from natural vitality.  Tear a similar leaf from a tree, and watch it's vitality.  Does it leave in a similar way?  A similar time period?  Does it's structure look different?

If the leaf acts the same, then I think we should try to revive a complete corpse.  Probably something like an ant, killed using steal vitality.  Or perhaps something larger, like a mouse, so that we can more easily tell if it acts unnatural.

On a different note, I think we should test if we can control multiple balls of vitality at once.  Can we steal vitality from two different trees at the same time?  How long can we keep a ball of vitality around?  Can we steal some from a tree, then wander around with it all day?  Probably not useful, but I'm curious.  Although we can't test it, I wonder if other necromancers can manipulate vitality that we took out of something...

Lastly, I think we should discuss all experiments with Omo beforehand.  Partially, just to support the idea that he's watching us to make sure we don't become evil, but also to make sure we keep no secrets.  If he knows we're not keeping secrets, and he understands how necromancy works, he'll trust us more than if we just have unexplained powers of doom.  This extends to Eko, once he joins our party, if he ever does.

As far as the telepathy idea, I agree with Baffler- it's too dangerous to do to Omo.  Perhaps we could at least try it on an animal first?  We won't have the empathy and shared history, but we can test if the basic idea seems possible.