After the first Shattered exploded on us, procurement of additional Shattered started to become a priority. Luckily, my first venture into their town to capture one had given me enough information to let me go back there without too much trouble. Flying prevented them from detecting my presence on the ground, while my magic was enough to conceal me, even while I was using my cloak to fly. Additionally, I noticed that I could carry the weight of a Shattered if I put enough power into the levitation effect of my cloak, though it took a lot out of me.
Those factors combined meant that I could capture Shattered by using Mind Magic to stun them, quickly rope them up and disappear into the sky before the other Shattered could come out from underground, the aerial extraction taking away the tracks they’d normally follow. While I still exercised due diligence and made sure to fly over rough and difficult terrain to make the possibility of pursuit even less of an issue, I hadn’t noticed any trouble while capturing five Shattered, taking one each night.
Experimenting on these five was what kept us busy during our days. There were a lot of fascinating similarities between the different Shattered, especially when it came to their, well, shattered Souls but there were just as many differences. My continued attempts to improve my Mind Magic had cost us one of our test subjects when I decided to try and see if more power would allow me to get a better idea of what was going on within their brain. The results had been a very mixed bag, on one hand, I had managed to read a slew of strange, fairly unconnected images from their Mind, images I was still trying to figure out and understand, but on the other hand, I had received a blue box, notifying me that I had killed a Shattered.
Not just put it into a coma, the usual result of pure Mind Magic attacks, but actually killed it. Out of curiosity, I had decided to dissect the thing and had been quite surprised when its brain wasn’t just damaged but it looked almost as if it had been boiled in the blood flowing through it. A small part of me wondered why the overpowered Mind Magic had seemingly manifested as heat while another part was curious if there was a way to overpower Mind Magic to such a degree that a head would literally explode but disregarding those questions, there was little the Shattered’s body could tell me. Just that Mind Magic could cause physical damage if overpowered far enough, something I hadn’t known before. The more you know, the more you can learn.
Another Shattered had been fed a concoction from Alex before Lia attempted to turn the Shattered into a Vampire without my assistance. The concoction was something the pair had worked on together, hoping that it would allow them to make more Vampires without my aid, and the Shattered was simply a useful first test. Only, the result was about as problematic as it could get. The Shattered expired from the concoction while Lia was still draining its blood, forcing us to question whether it had expired because of the drain or because of the concoction.
Our follow-up experiment came when Alex joined me in town the next night, hitching a ride on my shoulder. There, we brought down another Shattered and instead of roping this one, Alex fed it the concoction they had used on the one at our base, just without Lia draining its blood at the same time. This time, the Shattered didn’t die from the concoction, but that might have been because it was ripped apart as soon as its fellow Shattered came across it.
Now, we only needed to decide if these results should be considered a positive thing and if Alex could manage to aerosolise their concoction. If they could, it might be a quite potent weapon against the Shattered, if we ever needed one. However, more testing was required to see if the results were consistent.
The third of our Shattered was used as a control. Did they always explode when their Souls were forcibly repaired or was it a coincidence? As it turned out, yet another cell was painted red and we learned that, at least with a sample size of two, Shattered explode when their Souls are repaired with brute force.
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That, in turn, led us to wonder what would happen if we didn’t use brute force to repair the Soul which gave Luna and me our next project. Slowly and gently repair a Shattered’s Soul without having their Bodies explode on us. Especially as the smell of exploded Shattered was quite nauseating, part rotten corpse, part fresh blood and a hundred per cent nasty.
The slow approach was somewhat similar to my initial attempts at repairing a Shattered’s Soul, only that instead of trying to work alone, I had Luna add her own Life Magic into the Shattered’s Soul, infusing it with enough vitality to withstand nearly everything and, maybe more importantly, to reduce the problem I had with different pieces repelling each other. The idea was that by overpowering their natural affinities and biases with Life Magic, we’d be able to complete the puzzle slowly and piece by piece.
It took quite a lot of time and even more focus, but after a few hours of slow and methodical puzzling, we managed to get the Shattered’s Soul put back together. Well, we managed to put the biggest pieces back together and get something roughly spherical before pushing the remaining pieces into the gaps and sprinkled the smallest pieces across the result. Sadly, that was about as far as we could go, as the effort of keeping the Soul attuned to Life Magic was enough to drain Luna of Astral Power.
Curious about the result of our experiment, I woke the Shattered back up, after I had put it out earlier. Its constant movement, the attempts to break through the wall land its general agitation had been quite annoying and made an already difficult piece of magic even harder, so putting it to sleep had been a good solution. And now, I was curious what a healed Shattered would look and act like.
“Good Afternoon,” I spoke, as the Shattered was slowly blinking its eyes, trying to gather its scrambled bearings.
“Where am I?” it asked, its voice rough from disuse to the point that it barely sounded human, “What was this nightmare?”
“How curious,” I muttered, wondering how much it remembered, “Could you please ask for your status?” I prodded, watching as the Shattered in the cell started to look around frantically, almost as if it hadn’t been able to hear me. Or maybe it had heard but was ignoring me, the stupid thing. I only wanted to know if it still had access to the system.
Still, I could see its mouth work for a moment, mouthing the word, even as its agitation was rapidly rising, especially when it was taking stock of its body and saw the thick, leathery skin on its arms, the claw-like hands and its general, naked appearance.
Sadly, I couldn’t tell if the Shattered was seeing anything, there were no useful pupils or anything the like to go by, only two pits filled with fire. However, where before the fire had been a cold, blue colour, now it was cyan, giving it a slightly warmer appearance. Still ominous, but the change was interesting. Out of curiosity, I decided to use Observe, getting a strange notification that flickered between Shattered with its original high level and a bunch of question marks, leaving me with a few more questions and little new information.
Sadly, it ignored everything I tried telling it, instead mumbling to itself while its hands were clawing at every piece of exposed skin, which was all skin, leaving deep gouges, only for those wounds to heal thanks to the Life Magic still filling its Soul.
Out of curiosity, I glanced at the Soul and noticed that now that Luna wasn’t constantly filling it with more Life Magic, the power drained rapidly and even faster as the thing was clawing at itself.
Within less than a minute of that, even after I decided to knock it out again, the Life Magic faded completely and I could watch as the Soul Shattered once more, only now, there was a strange surge of Astral Power at the same time, leaving the Shattered burned to a crip from azure flames that spontaneously erupted all over its body.
These were interesting results which ultimately led us to the fifth Shattered and yet another experiment, this one a collaboration between Lia and myself. An attempt to repeat the original creation of Lia, to turn a Shattered into a Vampire. We had a few ideas, as demonstrated by the experiments Lia and Alex had performed together, but as of yet, we didn’t have a whole lot of success. Not that the lack of success was stopping us, even a failed experiment could teach us a lot. We only needed to try again, with a slightly different method.