Blinking, I sat back up, massaging my temples in an attempt to get rid of the budding headache. Having one of my scrying constructs shattered was a recipe for one, though the effect could be mitigated somewhat if I controlled the construct with a conjured focus. Using one came with its own drawbacks, which is why I hadn’t done so tonight, leaving me with an aching head in addition to the mystery of what had happened.
Closing my eyes, I brought those last few moments back before my mind’s eye, putting together the images blurry from rapid motion in an attempt to turn the glimpse I had been able to see into a coherent picture. The claw was simple, I could easily estimate its size by comparing it to the known dimension of my scrying construct and conclude that it was on the same scale as my own hands would be, maybe a little larger, meaning it was far from the massive appendage my initial impression suggested. That had simply been a case of perspective, with my viewpoint and mind constrained to the much smaller scale of my scrying construct, the human-sized hand looked massive.
Looking back at the image, I could also tell that the appendage the claw was attached to seemed to be covered in some mottled grey hide, or it might have been some strange form of leather, it certainly didn’t look like normal skin, far too coarse. It might even be scales, the strange colour made it difficult to tell, but whatever it was, it looked far too inhuman to belong on the vaguely human appendage, giving me yet another clue as to what we were likely dealing with, especially with the last obvious piece of the puzzle, namely the blue flames.
How could I ever forget that particular hue of blue, I had seen it far too often for comfort, to the point that I even had the occasional dream, or rather nightmare, about flames of that colour. Ever since those flames had covered the sky and burned our old world to ashes, ever since the eyes of so many people had been burned away and replaced with these smouldering fires, I knew that particular hue.
Shattered, or possibly some advanced variants of them. By now, I could only guess what the basic, bestial Shattered we had faced at the start of this entire mess might have evolved into, there might be a nearly infinite variety of them. What could be true for one Shattered might be entirely false for another and that was without getting into the possibility of fundamentally different variants, like the Scorched. My current understanding was that those had come to be when somebody was in the process of being burned alive while the Change had hit, or maybe right after, creating something fantastically dangerous, but what if there were other variants, depending on the circumstances during the change?
Drowned, maybe, or some sort of electric variants if the change had hit while they were being electrocuted, either by faulty wiring, power surges or something as unlikely as a lightning bolt? Just because the change had hit my hometown during a fairly clear and pleasant night didn’t mean that it had been the case everywhere, I couldn’t be confident about anything. There were enough people out there to make even the unlikeliest of scenarios plausible, with the only question being whether I’d run into them. Or if the unlikely circumstances of their creation caused them to be equally unlikely outliers in terms of power, eventually forcing me to take care of them?
But before any of the potential dangers lurking far away mattered, we would have to deal with the danger right before us, unless we decided to turn around and leave the place behind. Not that I was planning to leave. While I didn’t think that there were people around, Shattered could be useful in their own right, allowing us to test Soul Magic in a different way, hopefully shedding some additional light onto the complicated subject.
Moreover, the fact that the small town looked incredibly tidy was curious, indicating that the Shattered were more than their usual bestial and mindless selves. Well, unless the residents had placed a few destroyed cars at the side of the road, stacked rubble in neat piles, shed large puddles of blood in the streets and generally turned their town into a confusing mess. No, I was fairly certain that the town had been cleaned up after the change, which, in turn, led to the question of who had done the cleaning and so far, the only reasonable answer was that the Shattered had cleaned up. For some reason.
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Sure, it was plausible that the Shattered had feasted on a few bodies, but that left the question where the remains of those bodies were, as I didn’t believe Shattered would be this tidy. An even bigger question would be why they would have moved the destroyed cars into parking spots or tidied up some of the rubble, actions I didn’t think Shattered would be motivated to do. Unless there was somebody with powerful Mind Magic around, in that case, they might have decided to make use of the Shattered as useful and powerful organic robots, similar to the way I had used the Undead near that apartment complex.
Whatever the case was, I needed more information so we could make an informed decision. For one, I needed to know how many Shattered there were in this town, how intelligent they were, whether there were any special variants around, if there were humans around as implied by the idea about a Mind Magic user controlling them and a hundred other things.
Letting out a sigh, I opened my eyes and begun explaining my discovery to the others. Amusingly, the news that the town was at least partially filled with monsters was welcomed by Lia and Luna, while Alex and Silva looked only mildly interested. To my two daughters, monsters in general and Shattered in particular meant there were interesting experiments to be had, especially for Lia.
Given that she had been created from a Shattered, though one that hadn’t been feral but contained and caged, she had a slightly strange attachment to them. It didn’t stop her from slaughtering them by the dozen if there was a need but she had admitted that a part of her wanted to see if we could turn more Shattered into Vampires and give them a part of their sapience back. It was a bit of a long-shot, especially as a good part of Lia’s creation had been happenstance and luck, but it was an interesting experiment to perform.
Similarly, Luna saw Shattered as another fairly intelligent base-creature that could be used in our experiments, trying to understand magic and the different affinities. We hadn’t been able to look into their existence too deeply yet, so having a town filled with nothing but Shattered gave us a good opportunity to investigate and learn more.
Finally, Silva indicated in her usual, slightly growly, fashion that we should ascertain whether the strange scent that had brought us here was coming from the town or if there was something beyond it that we might want to investigate. It was a reasonable point and it didn’t take long for Luna and Silva to decide that they would head out during the day, keep a lot of distance from the town and make their way to its other side, testing where the scent was coming from.
In the meantime, I was tasked with turning our usual, fairly small, shelter into a base that we could use for a couple of days. Additionally, Lia and Luna felt that a few cells would be a useful addition, something I readily agreed with. It was one thing to perform simple experiments on people coming to us for powers, it was another thing to use a few of the local Shattered in our experiments. Hopefully, there were a lot more Shattered than there had been volunteers, allowing us to repeat the same experiments multiple times, allowing us to gather more foundational information.
It was one thing to know how channelling power into a soul would alter it but it was an entirely different thing to understand why the channelling of power altered it in that way and how another soul, with different attributes, would be altered if the same thing happened to it. For that, we needed repeated tests and experiments with as little variation in the test subjects as possible, which made Shattered a fairly useful specimen. At least if their souls either remained human or were altered in a consistent fashion, otherwise, we might only learn more about Shattered.
But even that could give us some information on the foundations of Life, Magic and the Universe. However, at the end of the day, the Answer to all of that would likely turn out to be forty-two.