Vey tears the carriage door off, and tosses it to the side, pausing as it hears a feminine squeal from inside the carriage. Jumping into the carriage’s surprisingly spacious interior, large enough for two sets of seats facing each other, and evidently large enough for a brown-haired human girl in a light pink dress to cower from Vey in a corner without Vey being able to reach her. Vey eyes the girl, making note of the dress’s decorative frills, the gold jewelry on the girl’s wrists and ears, and the tears coming down her face.
“I-I-I-I can give you whatever you want, and my-my father will pay what-whatever you want for me if you let me live!” The girl shouts, while moving her arms up to cover her face as Vey takes a step forward.
“Why did both you and your driver say that… I don’t know why you’d think that mattered to me.” Vey responds sharply, while silently observing that it only has about two more steps it could take to get closer to the girl before it would be on top of her. “What’s in the wagon behind the carriage?”
“U-uh I think the travel supplies m-m-maybe…” The girl’s voice is muffled by her arms, but that also means she probably can’t see clearly what Vey is doing. Vey takes the opportunity to claw some of the gold inlay off of the wooden carriage wall, and plays with the soft foil in its hand as it thinks.
“How long would it be before someone came here to rescue you if I let you live?” Vey demands, turning its full attention back to the terrified noblewoman. Vey reaches its free hand to her arms, and pries her left arm away from her face forcefully, drawing blood from its claws sinking into her wrist. “I have no ‘feelings’ towards killing you to extend that amount of time if it’s too short.”
The girl presses her face into her remaining free arm, and annoyance builds within Vey at the sight of it. Dropping the bit of foil it was playing with, it drives its other hand towards the girl, pulling her remaining arm to the side, and planting its left leg on the seat between her legs. Vey presses its knee into her chest, and lets its full focus bore into her eyes as it continues speaking.
“I want everything you have, knowledge, supplies, your corpse, everything, and you don’t seem to be cooperating. What exactly will this ‘father’ of yours give you if I capture you instead of killing you?”
--
When Sera wakes up from her nap and walks out to the hallway, she sees that the skeleton spearmen are blocking her way up the stairs towards where Vey is presumably working, which worries her slightly. Before, it would only go up there when it thought Sera was sleeping, or more recently, when it was taking Sera with it. She knows that the corpses had been moved to a room up there, as had most of the stores of items that Sera doesn’t need or doesn’t need access to. She knows that Vey had been considering trying to use some of the other rooms for different things, namely a potential underground farming experiment at Sera’s suggestion, yet she doesn’t feel like Vey would exclude her from trying to work on that, even if it did have the spells to make an attempt already.
Sera tries to walk into the lab, and finds that the eight undead remaining in the lower level of the dungeon’s hallway and stairwell have no issue with this, so she decides to nose around for any clues as to what Vey is doing. It probably wouldn’t be the most ethical thing to do if she was back in the village, and it definitely isn’t the most ‘cooperative pet’ thing to do either, but Sera does feel like taking the initiative on something is good for her. She digs through the wooden chest with the copies of spells Vey has made, and starts sorting them on the table. Vey writes them in common, which is something Sera had always been confused about, but now realizes that it just doesn’t know any other languages. She sorts them into three piles: Ones she knew about, ones Vey would probably tell her about if she asked, and ones Vey probably wouldn’t tell her about if she asked.
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As Sera sorts, she begins to feel that most of Vey’s recent work has been on combat magic, and she realizes that Vey has likely been testing and designing some of these after Sera goes to sleep, intentionally so she wouldn’t know about them. Notably, what she can understand of [Telekinetic Tentacle] slightly terrifies her, because Vey’s notes and description of the spell seem to imply that it designed the spell for restraining, strangling, and executing enemies in combat, not that, which is what she initially assumed it was for based on the name.
A shiver goes down her spine at the thought of Vey, who she knew from watching it practice with the other undead is far more competent a warrior than even the knights and soldiers that sometimes did demonstration when staying in the village, had begun designing dedicated combat spells for brute forcing coups de grâce. Vey’s arsenal of ranged magic also troubles her, it has the [Scorching Ray] spell which she knew about for a burst of damage, but [Bonefiddle]’s conjured bow was probably capable of doing drastically more damage over time if set up correctly(archery being the one subject her elven mind would understand regardless of training).
Actually… A suspicion begins forming in her mind the moment she realizes the implications of the magic. Vey was asking me about how close the village was recently, and- She rushes over to Vey’s notebook(now separate from its spellbook) and starts flipping through the recent pages. The page on her body’s changes, a page on combat theory, and then the one she was fearing she’d find. A page on scouting potential ambush sites.
Sera felt afraid, first that she’d been unable to stop Vey from going to kill innocents, but she quickly realized she was just covering for the thing she was actually afraid of. Vey hadn’t told her that it was going to do something dangerous, which felt incredibly stupid to realize, but it mattered to her. Firstly, if Vey died outside the dungeons, the undead in here would still continue following their orders to keep Sera inside, which is potentially fatally bad. Second, if Vey survived, it might come back stronger or more intelligent, and decide it doesn’t want her anymore, which is somehow worse to her. Thirdly, the idea that the people Vey might be out there to kill could be her former peers and family from the village, or that Vey might’ve been hiding that from her for that very reason is what finally brings her to tears.
She almost wishes her monster didn’t have principles like that, so that she could settle for hating it instead of whatever she was becoming by its side. Almost, but almost isn’t enough. Sera tries to rationalize and justify Vey’s actions, or what she thinks Vey is doing, with various petty, narrow minded, and downright wrong assumptions on Vey’s possible motivations, victims, methods, or anything else that might be related to whatever Vey is doing right now, but none of it stops her tears, save for when they stop simply from lack of fluid. She leaves all of Vey’s papers on its stone table as she goes to the fountain, and finds herself looking away from her reflection in the water as she washes her face with her hands.
True anger starts welling in her heart for the first time in recent memory. Not marred by fear, disgust, violation, or embarrassment, true, unadulterated anger. Anger at Vey, anger at her selfish desires and needs distracting her from what it was preparing for, anger at her weakness and tears. But mostly just anger for anger’s sake.