Mori perused the coffins, barely noticing the Keeper leaving as she did so. She was excited, more so than she could have ever thought. Though she was excited, it was not the type of excitement that came from traveling, anxiety tingeing the elation. It was instead the pure joy of a child finding themselves in a candy store, with limitless options expanding in front of them and being able to have it all.
She decided that she would try to raise a revenant first. That progression, from zombie, to greater zombie, to revenant, and to greater revenant, was something that always eluded her, but, with such an abundance of materials, she could experiment to her heart’s content.
She selected the coffin of a raving mad man, if the engravings written in some ancient language were to be believed, and opened the container. A hiss of air rushed into the coffin, barely disturbing the body, and a rush of mana emerged. Mori could almost feel the meanings of them, but she would have to do something more to parse their meanings, something that was just beyond her mind. She rolled her eye-flames as the spontaneous influx of information, and instead pulled the dwarven body up by his robe and placed him upon the ground.
“So, what’re you planning?” Fara asked from the side, eyeing the body with some degree of curiosity, “You looked like you were about to explode with excitement.”
Mori tilted her head, “I didn’t think I gave such an expressive… um… expression,” she replied.
“Your armor gave it away,” VII chuckled, pointing to her writing mass of rainbow-green metal that she called her armor as it curled around itself in her confusion, “You take wearing your emotions on your sleeve very literally, it seems.”
The metal deflated a bit at the statement, following her mood, “Daww… I wanted to be able to do some sort of deception… Do you think I would be somewhat good at it, Fara?” Mori knew that subtlety was not one of her strong suits, but she had done it before. She thought that she had a good chance of being able to do it in the future.
Fara’s pitying smile was all that Mori needed to see, “Mori, I’m your friend, and as such I try to support you. But you aren’t good at it. At all. But! You’re good at being bubbly! And that’s just as good! You don’t need to be subtle,” she comforted, rubbing Mori’s back. With a start, Mori realized that she could actually feel the hand rubbing her spine. She could feel its warmth, its softness, and its care. She smiled and let out a little sigh, “Mori, what was that?” Fara asked, eying Mori quite fiercely.
“Ah… I think I can feel your hand… It’s nice,” she remarked, “But now I need to focus! I’m going to try to figure out this whole revenant thing! Now, let’s see…” Mori said, holding out her left hand. Mana, black and heavy, gathered on her palm, forming itself into a sigil with so much ease that it startled Mori herself. She shook herself a bit to refocus and added the Earthshaker mana to her sigil. It had been a long while since she had used the mana type, so it took a moment to properly recall, but it was within her grasp soon enough.
She resisted the urge to add another few mana types, and prepared to give it to the corpse when VII placed her hand on Mori’s shoulder. Mori turned and gave VII a confused look, “Mori, what happens when something can’t contain the power you give it?”
Mori thought back to the wyrm she failed to unknowingly turn into a revenant, “They uh… they explode. Alright, I get your point. I’ll take him outside before I do this, alright?” She picked the dwarf up and carried him up the stairs and out of the watchtower, placing him down in the cavern beyond, “Alright, here we go…” She remade her spell and cast it on the dwarven corpse. The body instantly shuddered, shook, and seized. Mori was almost certain that the corpse could not survive the attempt but, to her shock and delight, the newly-made revenant rose and bowed his head to her, his eyes containing a small spark of intellect.
“So… what is he? Revenant? Greater revenant?” Fara asked, looking at the dwarven zombie up and down.
Mori shrugged, whispering her final command into the undead’s ear, “I don’t know, really. It-” She paused. Something was tugging on her senses and it was bothering her. She switched her vision to soulsight and saw it. Her undead’s soul, thrashing and struggling and fighting back the unending tide of blue. Almost on instinct, she snatched the soul with her own and cradled it in her grasp.
Fara did not seem to see it, but VII most certainly did, “Mori… is that how you’ve been raising and reusing undead? Did… did you not know what happens every time you kill an undead?”
Mori shook her head lightly, “I never knew… I… Did I kill them?” she asked.
VII shook her head, “No, you didn’t. You’re lucky. The system saves them from that fate. Since that’s the first one you made outside of the system, it didn’t get the same benefits as the undead from the system. Which includes being lost to mana,” she explained. Mori nodded and continued to cradle her undead’s soul.
Fara stepped beside Mori and patted her back, “Alright, does anyone want to explain what happened? I’m a bit lost here.” VII nodded, pulling Fara aside and whispering in her ear. Mori was far more focused on her undead’s soul than the conversation and focused on such. She was left with a dilemma. She could either let the soul go, leaving it to suffer the fate she herself barely escaped, or she could put it back into a body. The problem, however, was that she did not want it to simply live as a normal zombie or revenant or whatever. That would have doomed it to an unlife of obscurity. She wished she had a way to affect the soul of her undead, or even to create a new body for it completely out of mana, so that it could gain some sort of unique ability.
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She waited for some sort of revelation to come from the stash of knowledge that Kel’rk’ath gave her, but nothing came. She turned inwards and poked at the little nugget of foreign S. energy. She knew that mana could take a physical form, but there were also metaphysical states mana could take, like existing within heat, light, fire, or any other number of concepts. She shook her head. What came did not help her.
“Hey, Mori, are you alright?” Fara asked, giving her a side-hug.
Mori herself jumped at the contact, but found it soothing nonetheless, “I… I am. I’ll be fine. I’m just trying to figure out what to do with my undead’s soul now. I don’t want to damn it to a painful death, but I also don’t want it to just live as a weak revenant… If I could affect its soul, then I could do something, but… Maybe… I could do that, yeah…”
She turned inward once more and fixed her awareness, a vague thing that came with being a soul-like being according to the little knowledge fountain, onto the undead soul. She made a tiny sigil to affect it, with her death mana type, her S. energy, and her Earthshaker mana all together. She channeled them and sent it into the soul. In an instant, the soul shook and shuddered, and a black case of mana encapsulated it. An instant later, the mana bubble burst and the soul emerged, stronger, heartier, and generally bigger. Not only that, but death mana was seeping through the cracks between the threads of its soul.
It slithered from beyond her immediate grasp in a moment, surprising Mori and sending her into a panic. She tried to grab it once more, but noticed that the normal mana around the soul was devoured by the death mana. It escaped a few feet from her and then began to spew out mana at an obscene rate, draining the surroundings quickly. Just as Mori was about to become worried, the cloud of mana stopped growing and began to shrink. It shrank and shrank until it became a ball as big as Mori’s head and simply floated there, hovering without doing anything else.
“Mori, what is that?” Fara asked, “I guess it solves your problem, but… I don’t get it.”
Mori shook her head, “I dunno what it is. All I know is that I added some strength, some sentient energy, and my death mana. I… really don’t know what this is.”
VII nodded, “Frankly, neither do I. My guess is that it is either a storage balloon, or it’s an egg. I would put rather good odds on the latter, though. If you added your mana in equal quantities, then… I think my best guess is that you just let it develop however it sees fit? I am quite confused myself.”
“Great… I give it the gift of life and just tell it to go back to sleep… At least it's not dead?” she remarked, smiling.
“I suppose so,” VII replied, “So, if I might ask, what is the end goal here? We were told to destroy the Hive, but how are you going to do it? You have a good template with the armored undead, so are you aiming to improve them? Focusing on something different? Something else entirely?”
Mori was about to respond when she suddenly thought the question through on a deeper level. The last twenty minutes of necromancy was her fanciful experimenting, but what VII said was correct. She needed to figure out what she wanted to do so that they could improve the warcasket ripoffs.
She thought for a while longer, then nodded to herself, “Fara, I think we should improve the basics. What do you think?”
Fara nodded, “Okay, I’m interested. What are you thinking about?”
Mori sat on the ground, patting the spot in front of her so that Fara and VII would follow, “The whole point of the project was to make undead soldiers that could merge with armor and regenerate it. We’ve been using a pretty jury-rigged system for this, so why not improve it a bit? The first idea was fire, but why not take a page from VII’s book?”
VII raised an eyebrow, “That would be plagiarism,” she said.
“They become powered by movement, like the Clockworks,” Mori said, ignoring VII, “But instead of normal movement, it’s from the idea of movement. It could interact with the death mana I have very well. The whole point of living is to move, to change, and to incorporate that into the power source of the mechs, the two could resonate nicely. They could compliment each other and give us better results than if we did the same to a wrath-zombie. What do you say?” she asked.
Fara rubbed her chin, a smile growing on her face, “That… That could work. I’ll just have to incorporate it into the suit design. If we replace the boiler with a… wound spring or something like that, we can keep movement going. And we can route some of the movement into the spring to keep it wound. The only problem would come from keeping them active. At worst, we can add a crank for emergencies.”
Mori nodded emphatically, “That could work! Alright, I’ll start testing something, maybe even make some personal mana types.” She stood, stepping towards the corpse and raising a hand. She channeled her mana into a sigil, the original warcasket spell with a bit more power behind it. Contrary to her expectations, the corpse did not rise, but instead burst, shooting jets of blood feet. Through some lucky coincidence, Mori stood in the path of the stream of blood and Fara and VII, “Huh… what did I do wrong?” she asked.
VII shook her head, “Raising souls from matter takes its toll, Mori. You can use bodies multiple times, but if you take too much, then… you know.” Unio emerged from within Mori’s roiling armor, almost as if sniffing the air, before he slid down her front, devouring the blood she splattered over herself, “Cute,” VII commented.
“He is,” Mori answered, “Can you clean this up for me, Unio?” she asked, gesturing to the bloodstains. The little slime bobbled up and down for a moment before he slid off to his task. “Fara, I don’t want to ruin your fun, but why don’t you go find that guy the Keeper was talking about? He said that Jran could help you with your side of this.”
Fara thought about the proposal for all of a second before nodding, “Oh, yeah! I’ll see you later, Mori,” she said, dashing into the tower. Mori chuckled and led VII back into the catacombs. She still had her own job to do, and she was not short on experimentation supply.