Bobby stepped back from the last skeleton and took a deep breath as it clambered to its feet and stared at him emptily. He was almost out of magic, in fact he felt like he would have run out already if he hadn’t been in a graveyard brimming with the exact affinity of magic he seemed to be attuned with (he had made quite a few mistakes that had each cost him several points). As such he barely had five points left, although it was worth it because he now had five thralls and his perception and dexterity had jumped by three points each.

The effectiveness of gaining stats from making the skeletons seemed to be decreasing over time, which made sense as repeating actions often gave diminishing returns. Bobby knew that he needed to bring up regeneration and magic capacity to match his other stats as otherwise they might become bottlenecks, he’d played enough games to realise that tended to happen with unbalanced builds.

Michaela pushed one of the skeletons with her hand, causing it to stumble and right itself. “These things are pretty dumb, they don’t even react to my hand coming.”

Rho Dent jumped from her other hand onto the skeleton and squeezed herself up via the spinal column into its skull before poking her long nose through one of its eyes where the back of the eye socket had crumbled with age. She looked quite comfortable in the morbid position.

“Yeah, humans would not struggle with taking them down one at a time,” Bobby said, amused at the rats antics and glad Michaela was wearing clothes so he could differentiate her, “But imagine hundreds of these coming at you, none of them even flinching at the injuries you gave them.”

Gary shivered, “That would be terrifying, I’m glad I’m on your side, what do you plan to do with them?”

“I don’t know, without the van they are quite tricky to transport, so I’m inclined to leave all the skeletons here, if no one sees them moving then they would be a really effective trump card to pull out. Plus they are near enough to Lucinda’s place, so I might be able to figure out a way to make them come to us.”

Gary looked out over the rest of the graveyard, “If we’re going to make hundreds then we’ll have a lot of work on our hands.”

“Not necessarily, I’m promoting you to supervisor, and here are your workers.” Bobby passed a spade to one of the skeletons.

Then he addressed the five boney things, “You now will all obey Gary here and do anything he asks of you.”

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The skeletons didn’t respond.

“Salute when you understand orders,” Gary said, blinking in surprise as all the skeletons moved in unison. They brought their boney hands to their foreheads just slightly too fast, accidentally hitting them in the process and making a noise like bashing two clogs together. Rho Dent looked slightly uncomfortable at the noise and retreated back to Michaela.

A pensive expression filled the older man's face, “They are the perfect soldier, no minds of their own and they will follow my orders without delay.” He gave a chuckle, “Younger me would be so jealous, sometimes my men would take so long to do something simple.”

Gary directed the skeletons to open up a new mausoleum. They were interesting beings, each one was as dumb as a brick on its own, but you could give them simple instructions of how to interact with each other and interpret orders and like ants they would carry them out, with complex behaviour arising via emergence.

In fact Bobby was impressed at how fluidly the man directed them, he seemed to notice whenever they encountered something that they didn’t know how to deal with and always had the perfect instruction loaded up to resolve it. The clog noise of them bashing their hands against their skulls became remarkably frequent. I am very glad I met him, he’ll be indispensable when we have hundreds.

In about twenty minutes the skeletons had managed to get the door and slabs off the next mausoleum, leaving six skeletons visible, all lying in their shelf-like nooks.

“Wow that was surprisingly quick” said Bobby, surprised at how efficient workers the skeletons seemed to be under Gary’s charge. He inspected the skeletons next, finding their old bones remarkably intact despite the heavy rough stone they had been heaving about. “I don’t have the magic left in me to raise this lot," he said, pointing to the newly revealed corpses.” I think we should head back today and return here tomorrow.”

“Yeah that might be a fair cry,” Gary said, “Lucinda’s probably wondering what’s become of us by now.”

Gary got the skeletons to re block the entrances of the mausoleums, leaving them walled in to the last one so no one would discover them, then the group got back onto the scooters. Bobby got Mcgunkin to drive this time, but he looked slightly unsatisfied by the size of the vehicle and the whining of its pathetic motor.

Then they were on their way, back for dinner and more card games. For the next month they stayed at Lucinda’s at night, then they helped her with chores in the morning before making trips out the graveyard to raise more skeletons. It became quite a nice routine, and Bobby found himself enjoying life much more. He hadn’t really ever had this much chemistry with a group of people.

Bobby’s stats slowly rose over the month due to raising skeletons and expanding his core, gaining twenty more points to dexterity, perception and capacity, and half that to regeneration, this allowed him to raise more and more skeletons until finally they finished raising all the dead in the first graveyard.

But after that month just as they were beginning to forget about the gangs they were paid another visit by the Jameson Jockey Jedi.

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