| Fausta had set up a small lab with the equipment stolen from Era Academy deep within the catacombs. She set it up within a small, isolated room at the bottom of the staircase where she hoped any intruder within the catacombs might fail to find. If that didn’t work, then at least the length of the stairs would alert her to that reality. She scoured through the catacombs and gathered the occasional wooden chair and table that hadn’t yet rotted away to properly furnish her new setup. She even managed to find an old bookcase covered in spiderwebs to place the tomes she had stolen from the academy’s library. By the time she finished setting it all up, she had produced a surprisingly homely workstation; that is, as long as you didn’t think about the skulls in the wall or cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. Finally, she also placed a candle on her desk and managed to light it with the aid of a pack of matches she found in the stolen bag she used to carry her loot. For many nights after her first, the lich dedicated herself to her studies, though, it proved amazingly easy with the stolen magical glasses which allowed her to read her new books in the matter of seconds. However, many of the books had little to offer Fausta who had already spent years prior studying necromancy. Instead, she refamiliarized herself with the material with the intent of preparing herself for the hands-on work ahead of her. She had already demonstrated the ability to make herself somewhat immortal by turning herself into an undead but now she wanted to see how far she could take it with others. She and her mentor managed to bring minor creatures back from the dead but had little success with humans. This barrier had to be crossed. As she spent her time getting ready for her experiments, Fausta made note of side tasks that needed attended unrelated to her studies. For one, she needed to find her phylactery, the object she placed her soul inside to preserve her life. She believed that lacking it made her somehow weaker than she should be, and it posed a serious risk since its destruction would mean her irreversible death. However, she had no leads toward it. She searched the catacombs, especially near her place of death, but came up completely empty. She suspected that either the warrior who slew her stole it or a graverobber took it. Either way, she had no means of finding it. She theorized that perhaps she could destroy her present body and perhaps regenerate at the location of her phylactery, but she hesitated to take this risk for fear of miscalculating. The second item of concern on her list had originally been her finger bone which popped off of her hand when she fell out of the academy window. She had hoped to test the finger and see if she could simply bind it back to her hand to get it working once more but instead, her finger slowly regenerated over the nights until completely fine. She enjoyed the fact that her body could regenerate at all, but the rate of regeneration annoyed her. If something happened to her body, it could be stuck in an unusable and unfortunate state for some time. Thankfully, however, this discovery would ensure that Fausta wouldn’t need to concern herself with caring for her body even if her flesh began to degrade at a rapid rate. She decided to keep a journal detailing any noticeable changed in her undead form. The third task needing addressing—and perhaps the strangest—was a Sorcerer’s Magazine subscription. She had stolen a magazine from the academy to learn more about the modern world and although she didn’t enjoy it at first, it began to draw her in like a piece of juicy fruit. She couldn’t discern the facts from the gossip all that well, but it intrigued her endlessly. She wanted to learn more, and some part of her wanted to be entertained as well. The back of the magazine detailed a subscription system in which she could get new additions of the magazine sent to her but it required both a monetary fee as well as an address for the publishers to send a copy. Fausta possessed neither; she couldn’t just ask them to send the magazine to the catacombs, and she left all her Jewels in her bank before her death but now possessed no means to access her account, though, she imagined the Magic Council might have confiscated the money in her account anyway. Lacking any means to commit to her other tasks, Fausta decided to focus on her experiments in necromancy which, for the time being, concerned with bringing a dead human back to life. Approximately two weeks after she herself resurrected the lich began searching the catacombs for suitable bodies. She took an assortment of both intact cadavers as well as skeletons from the numberless coffins littering the catacombs and placed them in her lab room. She had them respectfully wrapped up in white funeral cloth except for the first corpse she planned to work on. She worried little for their preservation as the catacomb had proven more than capable with its cool, dry atmosphere. Additionally, she brought in a stone slab to act as a makeshift bed for the body. Fausta carefully placed the corpse on the slab and examined its entire body to ensure it suffered no more than minor damage. She wrote down every description and measurement she could make with her limited tools and then, finally, began working on its body. With full focus, she spent close to several hours pumping the corpse with her twisted magic. She did not expect the process to take so long, suggesting she could have worked with more precision, but she would hopefully improve after the first time. Near the end of the process, the corpse oozed with necrotic energy. Cold, blue magic poured out of its mouth like a noxious gas. Although it felt natural, the magic that radiated off of the body would have felt unmistakably evil to others. Still, the lich felt certain she had done something wrong under the suspicion that it should have taken less time and far less magic power. Just as the lich nearly gave up out of exhaustion, the corpse started to twitch. With that, she felt a sudden spark of adrenaline from having reached a milestone that even her mentor failed to reach despite all her effort. Unbeknownst to Fausta, she would need that adrenaline very soon. She kneeled down to the corpse and place a hand somewhat affectionately next to its head before calling out to it. “You… can you hear me? Open yours eyes,” she suggested in a hushed tone, recalling the difficulty she had with opening her own eyes when she first came back to life. Unfortunately, the corpse did indeed open its eye and it appeared completely pissed at the sight before it. With surprising strength, the resurrected corpse pushed Fausta away before quickly rising up to its feet. All the while, it howled terribly with an angry, tormented tone and then lunged at the lich who was completely caught off guard. Both Fausta and the zombie fell back close to the lich’s desk and although she managed to hold the creature back, she knew she could not resist it for too long. The hours of using her magic had taken its toll on her, leaving her not only physically tired but mentally exhausted. The creature swung its hands around like claws, doing whatever it could to hurt Fausta in a blind and thoughtless rage. In doing so, however, the zombie knocked its head against the desk. It didn’t daze the corpse at all but instead knocked Fausta’s candle off the edge and right on the angry undead’s head. This instantly weakened the zombie enough for the lich to push off her assailant who merely flailed around and howled once more, this time in pain as the fire consumed its body extremely quickly. After the event, Fausta made sure to scribble in one of her notebooks, “Note to self: careful around fire.” Aside from that, the lich made sure to record what transpire while also noting precautions to take and suggested changes to her original method. Despite what occurred, however, she felt proud of her progress but nonetheless spent minimal time basking in the glory of her little success. She searched the catacombs for an efficient binding, eventually finding some old rope in one of the faraway rooms. She decided it best to bind anybody she planned to resurrect, at least until she grew more confident in her ability. It provided her with somewhat of a safety net while also giving her the opportunity to calm and maybe control whatever she brought to life. Just for good measure, though, Fausta decided to keep the candle at her desk. The next night, after having recovered her magic power, Fausta tightly bound her next would-be zombie to the slab via the old rope she found before beginning her spell once again. Having taken note of what seemed effective from the previous night, the lich managed to speed up the process of resurrecting the corpse by a couple hours. As expected, this corpse acted as aggressive as the subject before it. She thought the rope might snap from the tremendous force the undead creature presented but she would not let this feral-minded monster intimidate her. She took a seat on the zombie’s chest, helping the rope in holding it down before placing her hand on the corpse’s head to begin the next part of her spell; that is; binding this the undead to her will. She didn’t very much enjoy the thought of controlling another being’s mind, but it needed to be done to make progress. Fausta found herself delving into the zombie’s mind, but she couldn’t make much sense of it. She dug around in what felt like a complex maze with multiple layers and floors. The ordeal taught her personal and sentimental facts about the corpse’s previous life, but Fausta couldn’t make sense of the big picture. She instead determined to navigate the mind maze and once she felt she finished, she felt mentally drained. She stepped off of the zombie and latched one of her hands to her face, reeling from an intense headache. Her single exposed eye gazed over the bound zombie and noticed its dramatic calmness. It simply stared up at her as if expecting a command any moment. Despite the pain in her head, Fausta eagerly untied the rope holding down her subject and before she could even verbally order the creature to stand up, it was already getting on its feet. “Ah, so you can understand my will,” she commented aloud as she silently commanded the zombie to approach her. She inspected it and thought of writing down the results before wincing in a sudden uptick of pain to her head. The lich thought she might even pass out, but her feet wouldn’t buckle. As soon as she dropped her focus, however, the zombie’s demeanor changed completely. It produced a grumbling sound that grew louder and louder and it appeared agitated. Fausta recognized what was about to occur in an instant, giving enough heads up to keep the creature at bay with a steady arm as it lunged at her. It pushed her against the desk but failed to bring her down. The lich responded by reaching behind herself for the lit candle—though she had to make extra sure she didn’t touch the fire herself—and whacking the walking corpse in the head wit the lit end, setting the zombie ablaze in mere moments. Despite losing control of zombie, Fausta felt she made tremendous progress. She hoped, in theory she might reach a point in which she can raise a corpse more instantly and control with simplicity but felt such a goal sat far from her current position if it even existed at all. She had yet to learn the limits of necromancy after all, but now she had already gone through the two highest quality corpses she gathered up for this initial testing batch. Now, only the two skeletons remained. The lich made sure to write down the results of the second zombie, but she wondered if any of the data would translate over to the skeletons. She had yet to figure out if she could even resurrect an entire skeleton. Again, Fausta waited another night before tackling the creation of another undead. She tied the skeleton down which proved easier than tying down a complete corpse, but it nonetheless felt strange trying to revive the conglomerate of bones. She applied the more efficient techniques she picked up from the previous nights, though, she finally concluded that resurrecting a skeleton was just an all-around simpler task when it took only a few minutes to bring the being to life but displayed the same amount of aggression as the zombie. She placed her hand on the creature’s head, of course, and began traversing the skeleton’s mind which, evidently, was far more limited in its depth compared to the fleshy corpse from the previous night. She managed to force the skeleton to submit in just half the time as the zombie and she felt nowhere near as exhausted by the time she finished. As it took such little time to control the skeleton, Fausta had plenty of mental energy left to hold power over the creature for much longer than before, though, she suspected it took less effort in general when it came to raising and controlling skeletons. She released the raised undead from its bindings and gave it simple tasks to complete, such as moving around minor pieces of debris to test its strength and having it write something down on a piece of parchment. From this, she learned the undead suffered from their own degradation, which is to say their decayed flesh and mental capabilities indeed limited them worse than the living. Fausta imagined she would need to find a way to remedy such a glaring imperfection, not only to improve her undead creations but herself as well. After a few hours of braindead experiments, the lich felt some of her control wane but rather than destroy this test subject, she imprisoned the skeleton in one of the catacomb’s many coffins for later use. On the final night of her first set of experiments, Fausta went through the usual routine: binding the subject—another skeleton—and attempting to raise it from the dead. Now with more than plenty of notes, the lich raised the creature in a matter of minutes and bound it to her well even quicker. This time, however, she wanted to attempt to control multiple undead at once. She set the first skeleton free from its prison and after a mentally exhausting exercise, the lich had two skeletal servants at her disposal and dispose of them she would; Fausta had assembled simple sharp objects from around the catacombs and gave them to her two skeleton minions and ordered them to fight each other as a means of testing their combat capabilities. Although the lich would have enjoyed delving further into necromancy without worrying about might, she knew from experience that many would try to stop her and that she would need a means of defending herself. Only after obtaining sizeable power once more could she pursue less selfish ventures. The two skeletons managed to destroy each other and from their bout, Fausta determined the basic extent of their agency and their ways of fighting. In comparison to the zombies, the skeletons acted in a strange unison that suggested they lacked almost all of their personality, which would explain why the lich could control them so easily. It would also seem as though they were easily dealt with as it didn’t take long for them to completely dissemble one another. Even with a lack of vitals, they could still apparently die. Furthermore, it proved impossible to raise the creatures back from the dead a second time. Of course, this raised the question of Fausta’s own mortality. Age would never factor into her health and she assumed that if something managed to destroy her body, her phylactery would revive her but what might happen given that she lost that precious object? The lich sighed on the morning after her final experiment. It felt almost as if she had hit a wall. She had found more efficient and innovative ways of raising the dead and controlling them, but her raw power still proved quite lacking. Lich’s were supposed be more powerful than when they were alive, not weaker. Fausta believed the loss of phylactery capped her magical capabilities, leaving her a shell of her true potential. With no leads or reliable means of finding it, though, she could only continue her studies and accumulate resources until an opportunity presented itself. The remembered from her studies that a phylactery could resist a great deal of damage before its destruction, so she hoped the object would at least not suffer a fatal accident from accidental means. What were the odds that a random stranger would even figure out that the pendant was a phylactery anyway? Later, on the next night, Fausta had begun to prepare another set of bodies for a second round of experiments but something caught her eye. In an undiscovered section of the catacombs, Fausta happened upon the entrance of a magnificent tomb. The national crest of Fiore sat carved into the door, with faded gold trim around its outline. Fausta might have found treasure inside but she wasn’t a mere graverobber. Instead, she pondered just what kind of corpse she would find in such a tomb. To her weary soul, it seemed that perhaps good fortune had finally graced her; although, she was never the superstitious sort to believe in luck. Free-Form Job WC: 500/500 Free-Form Job WC: 500/500 Free-Form Job WC: 500/500 Free-Form Job WC: 500/500 Free-Form Job WC: 500/500 Free-Form Job WC: 507/500 Total WC: 3,007/3,000 |
If at First You Don't Succeed...
Fausta
Lineage : Master of the Other World
Position : None
Posts : 23
Guild : Elysium
Cosmic Coins : 0
Dungeon Tokens : 0
Experience : 900
Character Sheet
First Skill: Necromancy
Second Skill: N/A
Third Skill: N/A
