1 Week Later

Vey and Sera have finally managed to reach an equilibrium in terms of mutual understanding. Vey now understands significantly more about what mortals get annoyed, frustrated, hurt, motivated, saddened, surprised, and traumatized by, along with a myriad other emotions and mental factors Vey hadn’t even been capable of considering a short while ago. Vey was very happy with this new knowledge, and its rapidly expanding common sense has has a greatly positive effect on its wisdom score.

Sera is also coming to terms with her situation better, and has better control over her mental state now than when the memories(and bruises) were still fresh. She’s managed to get a better grasp of how Vey thinks and is likely to react to her actions. She knows that Vey is likely irredeemably evil, but also entirely reasonable. Sera now acts with the full understanding that Vey’s motivations are entirely selfish, and that it will justify almost anything to itself if given ample time to think. Sera has spoken with Vey enough to know that even when surprised by her actions, the skeleton’s curiosity will prevail over its shock.

These understandings took the entire week to forge, and some subjects are still tense or strained. Sera’s continued survival, for example, Vey has agreed to so long as Sera remains a useful source of information, but Vey has admitted that it has no plans nor means of acquiring more long-term food supplies for Sera when the preserved food runs out. The best Sera can figure her options will be ‘rats’ or ‘rotting corpses’ within another two weeks unless she wants to starve.

Vey has been much more productive since it acquired the Spellcraft skill, and managed to successfully craft two Transmutation(Enhancement) spells,

[Cutting Hand]

Tier 1

Transmutation(Enhancement)

V, S

Target: Self

Duration: 10 minutes per caster level

2 MP

Your hands and forearms gain the following properties for the spell’s duration:

Attack: Slash

Damage: 1d6+2+(Str Mod) Slashing Damage

Bonus to Hit:2+(Str Mod)

Ignores Damage Reduction from Source(s): Wood, Leather, Iron, Steel

and

[Fists of Stone]

Tier 1

Transmutation(Enhancement)

V, S

Target: Self

Duration: 10 minutes per caster level

2 MP

You gain a temporary +6 enhancement bonus to Str for the spell’s duration.

Your hands gain the following properties for the spell’s duration:

Attack: Slam

Damage: 1d10+(Str Mod) Bludgeoning Damage

Vey is very satisfied with these spells, as they greatly improve its self-defense capabilities. With both active, Vey would have the effective equivalent of 16 strength and a choice between a +2 magical shortsword equivalent weapon or a great club equivalent weapon.

Vey has continued its spellcrafting on evocation, and has managed to come up with a rudimentary [Magic Missile] spell. It still isn’t fully functional or combat ready, but Vey has managed to successfully expand its knowledge of Evocation(Luminous) into Evocation(Force). It has successfully produced a completed second spell Evocation(Luminous); [Permanent Light], the natural progression from [Light]. Immediately after testing its permanence in the ritual room, Sera practically begged Vey to add more lights to the ritual room and her chamber, to which Vey agreed to do in exchange for more knowledge on her anatomy, knowledge which was ultimately instrumental in advancing its knowledge of transmutation.

Sera similarly has not been idle, on the second day she managed to convince Vey that she needed something to do beyond sitting idle in the living chambers or performing the necessary menial chores. This resulted in Sera being granted permission to visit Vey in the hallway or the corpse-room(even though it took her until day six to build up the courage and tolerance to the smell to actually enter) whenever she pleases to talk with Vey. Adding ‘socialize with budding skeleton wizard’ to her morning routine has had a significant effect on her average mood. By Vey’s notes, the young elf now spends only 13% of her time in the state she described as ‘depression’ and only 25% in the state she described as ‘bored’, which is a marked improvement over the days before the change.

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The girl has also managed to wash some of the clothes from the corpse-room into a state of acceptable cleanliness, mostly out of want for something to occupy herself with, but it proved fruitful when she managed to cobble together what might be called a second outfit, even if it is ill-fitting and uncomfortable. Sera has consistently tried to convince Vey to consider wearing clothes, even if it has no biological need to do so. She is trying this for the simple reason that it would make it easier to spot Vey in the dark if it were wearing some of the brighter-colored clothes as opposed to its coloration. More than once she’s been scared enough to scream because the skeleton accidentally snuck up on her.

To Vey, none of these incidents were accidental, it simply had no other way of testing how stealthy it is, and Sera makes for a convenient… lab rat… for all sorts of things. Vey is beginning to understand through their repeated conversations on the topic of good, evil, and morality that its actions and thoughts probably make it thoroughly repulsive to her, but Vey notes that this hasn’t ever actually caused her to react negatively to Vey outside of the initial confusion regarding nudity.

Vey is currently testing its [Magic Missile] spell on one of the rats in the corpse-pile(Vey had actually started a rudimentary method of population control as opposed to simple extermination since they make for great test subjects) while Sera watches from a second chair brought in to the room for her by one of the zombies. The process fascinates Sera to no end, even if she has no desire to actually understand what is going on. Vey will attempt to cast a spell, come back over to the table, write another iteration or draft of the spell on a new piece of paper, spend ten minutes or so memorizing it, and then repeating. So far the results have been less than perfect, given Vey’s apparent frustration(which Sera notes the skeleton expresses by dragging the claw on its left middle finger across whichever stone surface is closest).

Vey has so far managed to create a puff of bluish-purple sparks in front of its hands, conjure a small ball of similarly colored energy which simply fell to the ground, launch a ball of said energy across the room before impacting the wall harmlessly, shape the ball into a more dart-like formation, and has most recently skewered the piece of rotting arm its target had been chewing on instead of the rat.

“Vey… Why are you so intent on learning magic? Couldn’t you just like… Have the undead in the hallway kill people for you?” Sera asks honestly, though she wonders if she actually should be giving ideas like that to the evil skeleton. Vey sits back down at the table, grabs a new piece of paper, and starts scratching the stonework more before responding.

“I don’t know. It’s one of the few things that has ‘driven’ me, to use your words.” Vey responds in a tone and volume that Sera feels is almost close to sounding human, which she considers confirmation that Vey is telling the truth. “In my mind, it is like everything before my ascension to intelligence is a black fog. My memory and consciousness begin at the point the necromancer gave me them, but the instincts of the mindless undead I was before remain. I want to learn more about magic, and I don’t think anything else would matter to me if my hand was forced.”

Sera shrinks back a little into her chair. That is the exact sort of monologue she grew up hearing her brothers and elders talk about when speaking of the villains in stories or why losing oneself in single-mindedness was a path to evil. Vey’s perspective seemed to her like an entirely dispassionate one, which she also knew not to be the case. The fact that it was still scratching the table in frustration, its ‘happy dance’ after killing him, and its insistence on learning from her about things that wouldn’t even be useful to it are all proof of that hypocrisy.

“Then why do you have the undead out there practicing as opposed to leaving them to die? Surely they don’t need to know how to be better with their weapons if they won’t ever be like you?” Sera felt her line of questioning might start pushing the boundaries on whatever passed for its tolerance of her, but call it whatever the gods might, she was beginning to grow somewhat attached to the skeleton out of sheer boredom and despair. It drove her hysterical when she first realized it, but being locked down here with the skeleton for just eight days since that had probably completely broken her sense of identity forever. Ultimately, Sera somewhat hoped that as long as she never had to think about it, it wouldn't matter.

“I don’t know. Would you at least try and value the lives of your fellow elves if you were in this seat and they were out there?”

*0*

Level and Hit Die:

1, 1

Current HP/MHP

8/8

Armor Class

11

MP

8

Class:

Wizard

Name:

Vey

Race:

Skeleton[Human, Male, Adult]

Subrace:

None/NA

Alignment:

Neutral Evil → Lawful Evil

Height

5’6 ft

Level and Hit Die:

0, 1

Current HP/MHP

4/4

Armor Class

8

MP

N/A(Non-caster)

Class:

None

Name:

Sera Eranda Eclir Luvil

Race:

Elf

Subrace:

High Elf

Age:

15

Alignment:

[System Determines No Alignment-RootCause; Acute Distress and Mental Trauma] → True Neutral(Undecided)

Height

4’9 ft

[System Help Menu-True Neutral Alignments; The True Neutral alignment is split into three types: (Undecided) for alignments resulting from moral confliction, (Balanced) for alignments resulting from a conscious equivalence between good, evil, law, and chaos, and (Primitive) for alignments resulting from being incapable of perceiving morality.]