Today I finished my lessons, I now know everything that the greatest soul mage in the world knows on the subject. It will take decades, possibly even centuries, before I am his equal, but this was definitely a massive step in that direction.

With that no longer using up half of my day I am able to put a lot more time and effort into teaching the volunteers. After the first batch of people dropped out very few of them have decided to quit. It seems people decided pretty quickly whether or not they would be wasting their time here.

There is no one yet who I would consider skilled enough to join my Paladins, and no one is beyond my abilities to teach today.

We have received word from my dad today, apparently he managed to punch through the soldiers keeping him pinned and with his own soldiers has taken hold of a nearby city. He can’t return home quite yet as the people that were in charge destroyed the city teleporter on their way out and he can’t march through that much enemy territory without risking all of his soldiers. To top it off there is no one in the city willing to cooperate with him that can fix the city teleporter. So he is stuck there, in a highly defensible position in the middle of enemy territory until we are able to come rescue him. At least there is little risk of his hold of the city being destroyed, and it’s not like our enemy could do anything to my dad personally that would stick. He’s survived more knives in the dark than pretty much anyone, that tends to happen when you are as famous as he is.

We’ve also received word from the scholars about the issues with the angelic council killing scholars. They would prefer to avoid risking their own people and refuse to dedicate any of their more valuable resources, like nuclear fire wielders, to the task. They have, however, offered us people who can teach our soldiers various forms of magic. In addition to several craftsmen of all fields who can teach our own people. Their hope is that we can deal with this issue ourselves by providing us with resources to hopefully overwhelm the enemy.

It’s less than I hoped for, but it’s still quite substantial. I had wanted soldiers, but when asked the messenger said ‘we don’t have soldiers, we have tactical weapons’. Considering the way they train their mages I believe it.

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I ended up working with Azrezel and Tiddol again today to try and figure out why her body works and others don’t. It took quite a bit of work before we realized that it was all pointless and the answer was under our noses the entire time, in my case, literally. She is piloting her body the same way I am piloting mine.

The idea came to me while I was studying her soul, I noticed a distinct lack of anything that would help her pilot her body, the stuff that did exist only maps to her fleshy bits. There was a similar issue in every single creature, undead or otherwise, in the process of trying to figure out what works. And according to Tiddol, there is nothing in that metal skull of hers that would know how to pilot the body, which means that whatever is allowing her to move is not innate. The only thing that would work is if she had some magical control over clockwork, she is able to directly control her body through magic instead of through her brain or soul. Which means that any attempt to replicate her will end in failure, as we can’t teach a corpse until it is no longer a corpse, and then we won’t have enough time to teach them before they return to being a corpse. We also can’t take a living person and outfit them in a similar way as Tiddol as it would defeat the point, if they aren’t created that way or evolve into something greater then Tiddol can’t evolve. We might get lucky and somehow get a soul that already knows how to pilot a body like that, but Azrezel isn’t able to reliably make creatures with memories, and I don’t have the resources to pull it off. I could definitely do it with a bit of Fate and a lot of luck, but I don’t have enough Fate at the moment to be confident in my chances of success.

I could maybe create something that would work using the soul, but that would require a kind of delicate touch I simply don’t have yet. And I would need to learn a lot about clockwork, though that is the lesser issue.

Still, it’s good that we know that now. We can move onto other things that might actually bear fruit. But it’s disappointing, I was looking forward to seeing how flesh and clockwork would interact when communicating like that.

Tiddol is visibly better today. She’s been working on modifying and improving her body quite a bit, she still has a lot of issues but at the very least she is twitching less often and her stride is more even. That isn’t to say she isn’t twitching at all, it’s just much rarer and when it does happen it is much more pronounced. She says it’s under control and I believe her, but it’s still kind of creepy.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.