Vey taps his fingers against the table as he stares down at the stack of papers before him. Sera’s idea to take in the children and mothers from the village was a strange one, but she did argue successfully for doing so. Additionally, with the latest two batches of undead and the growth of Dragon squad, it hasn’t actually been that much of a challenge to house the mortals in the old chapel.
However, there have been some changes. Namely, Vey doesn’t really like them, mostly because they eat food, which is currently not a wholly renewable resource, but also because they take up a significant portion of Sera’s time. This would be fine, if that time was when Vey was also busy, but it seems to him like the times Sera is with the enclave are the same times they used to spend in the lab together.
The snow outside makes gathering resources from the forest quite annoying too, since Sheo squad, Zombie squad, and the new Smallfolk squad all have difficulty carrying stuff through the snow in the forest. Harvesting the remains of the village for literally everything that can be carried has been Vey’s primary agenda as of late, and he’s quite happy with just how much stuff there is to take.
He hadn’t really thought about just how many tools, books, pottery, cloth, and so on even a small village like this one would’ve had at its peak, but he had to double the size of the storage room with [Stone Shape] just to hold what he’s taken so far. Food is a problem, admittedly. He’s estimated they have enough for the enclave and Sera to last how long Sera said the winter will hold for, but after that he’s not sure.
Of course, this circles around to the enclave. He doesn’t want to ask Sera to put them to work somehow, and he’s not even sure what they could do for him. Actually, he’s not sure what he wants to do from here in general. With the village gone, and the risk of being attacked diminished as a result, Vey is wondering what exactly he should do with himself. Obviously, he should finally pick his evolution at some point, since he has the time to do so. He also thinks it would be best for him to study up on all of the books he’s collected.
Despite all of that, the spell he’s working on right now is more important. [Animate Dead]. Vey thinks it should come completely natural to him, being an undead himself, but he’s completely out of his depth, and that’s with his few necromancy spells as a basic foundation of knowledge. [Skullwatch] was simply enough, it was more like adapting an [Alarm] spell to necromantic concepts rather than designing a way to animate an undead from scratch.
Of course, he’s pretty close to completing it by now, but each successive failure makes him hate the process of trying again even more. If this iteration doesn’t successfully raise undead, he’s prepared to just give up. After all, one of the earliest lessons learned when practicing Spellcraft is that sometimes you can’t make something work yet.
Vey’s equally prepared to find out that raising undead with [Animate Dead] is somehow different than through Undead Leadership, and the raised ones won’t be independent. If so, this work will have all been for nothing, but Vey doesn’t want to think about that yet.
Truthfully, Vey has been procrastinating a bit on this particular subject. Every time he gets even slightly frustrated with it, he’ll make an entire other Evocation or Transmutation spell or patrol the dungeon or just find literally anything else to do until he feels like trying again. Some of his distractions were actually fairly fruitful, but he’d decided that enough is enough. Earlier, he’d told Sera that he was going to lock himself in the lab until he’d done it.
--
Sera closes the door to the enclave behind her, and lets out a heavy sigh. She adjusts her sword on her hip, and then looks up to Sheo squad. She’d had them wait outside for her, since the children don’t like the undead. Evidently they’re ok with Squish specifically, likely on account of how much effort Sera puts into making Squish look ‘cute’ as opposed to zombified. The caregivers are the source of Sera’s exasperation at present, though.
This whole thing had been her idea, because she didn’t want the children and their caregivers to just die for what Sera and Vey want, but perhaps she should’ve thought things through a little differently. The mothers seem to fail to see Sera as ‘the one in charge of keeping us alive’ and instead see her as some cross between a tyrant and a clueless child. Sera is fully aware that such a description is… entirely justified from their perspective, but it also is very unhelpful for the aforementioned trying to keep them alive. Ter and Kai in particular voiced the opinions that if the enclave won’t accept Sera’s ‘queenly’ authority, Ter and Kai don’t want them here.
Again, she doesn’t think this is helpful. Time has been the best asset to this whole ordeal, though. The two winter months that have by now passed by have caused a marked mellowing of the adults, who seem to be deciding just to accept things as they are. The two winter months Sera expects they have left to weather is the talk of the children, the youngest of them simply want to know when they can play outside again, which Sera finds adorable in their presence, but terribly sad outside of it. That’s actually part of why she wants to do what she’s going to do right now, though.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Sheo, take the rest of your squad down to the storage room and bring Zombie squad some lumber. I’m going to go fetch Smallfolk squad.” Sera issues her command and waits for Sheo to lightly nod and walk off. She looks down at the Soul Tendril connecting to each of Sheo squad’s members, and nods to herself in satisfaction. Sheo has not awoken, but it did nod, meaning it is at a baseline, smarter than Dragon squad was before awakening, and they haven’t existed for as long or been growing as fast. She smiles dryly, and adds something she knows they’ll probably forget. “Thank you, Sheo.”
Sera does a mental inventory of the dungeon as it is now, trying to think of where Vey’s elusive Smallfolk squad would be. They’d been made to be miners, since they are just four dwarf zombies and four gnome skeletons, but the dungeon doesn’t exactly have any mining to do, so Vey has been sending them around everywhere to train or move stuff.
She settles on checking with Dragon squad first. As she pokes her head into the entrance chamber, Woi turns to her, and simply shakes his head. If they aren’t training, they’re probably in one of the unused rooms doing weapon maintenance, their other intended purpose. Sure enough, the one remaining unused room at the top of the stairs has Smallfolk squad inside, surrounded by a pile of weapons and tools, with eight sharpening stones, a bucket of dirty water, and a few pieces of cloth.
“Est, En, Eil, Eo, Eve, Emi, Ed, Ewle, come with me for now. I want you to help Zombie squad build everything I’ll need to build a shed or a barn. I’ll teach you.”
--
Three Days Later
Vey sets down his quill, and looks at what he’s made. To be frank, he doesn’t think it is as elegant as his advanced Evocation spells, or as beautiful as his Transmutation spells. It looks quite ugly, actually, when written on a page like this. That doesn’t matter to him though, because he’s done it. It will work. Probably.
Quickly, he sets to preparing himself to cast it, and hastily copies it into his spellbook proper soon after. The part he was missing, and the thing he only learned today was borne of a misconception. His Undead Leadership lets him raise a number of undead, and he can do so once a month or so. There’s no limit to how many times he can raise the undead, either, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with a spell like [Animate Dead]. The moment he’s prepared it, he checks the spell description.
[Animate Dead]
Tier 4
Necromancy(Animacy)
V, S, F
Target: Corpses touched
Duration: N/A
12 MP + 1 MMP per undead HD
A corpse or corpses touched rise as either a zombie or a skeleton under your control. While under your control, your maximum MP is reduced by 1 per HD of undead controlled. If you control one medium zombie, for example, your maximum MP will be reduced by 1, but two large zombies would reduce it by 2 each. You also can’t control more undead than your casting modifier times your caster level, regardless of maximum MP.
Releasing undead from your control does not destroy them, but does free them from following any additional orders other than the ones they already had.
Vey allows himself a moment of pride at having truly and completely done it. Out of sheer joy, he immediately leaves the lab to search for Sera, so that she can share the experience. However, quite unexpectedly, she’s not in her room, or the workshop or storage room, nor the enclave. Instead, Sheo, Zombie and Smallfolk squads are all gone as well, which is quite odd.
He’s not worried by any stretch, but he feels kind of guilty for not knowing what she’s up to. Regardless, he decides to slow his pace, and surprise her right back. To do so, he needs to take inventory of what exactly he should first do with [Animate Dead]. Dragon squad is a dedicated guard, Sheo squad is more like a personal task force, Zombie squad are workers, the Skrats are scouts, Smallfolk squad are laborers, and the second Skrat squad is equally as much of a dedicated scouting group as the original. Hence, Vey has two or three things he thinks he wants. Given that it’s winter, a group for farm work probably isn’t very useful, so he think the next batch is between more warriors or more resource gatherers, and he thinks the latter is more useful in the immediate future.
Zombies, he decides, and the strongest ones he can find. He makes his way past Dragon squad to the barracks room, and starts picking through the corpses. Vey’s pretty sure there were at least eight or nine half-orc corpses left, and soon enough he’s found about… seven and a bit of them, which he thinks is good enough. Supplementing the rest of the group with human corpses, he drags them out into the entrance chamber, and sets to thinking about how exactly to do this.
Fifteen minutes later, Dragon squad’s training session has now stopped in favor of watching Vey struggle to make a decision on how to raise the ten zombies. And he does want to raise them as a group of ten, since that number splits into two different groups easily, but also works coherently together. Eventually, he decides, and starts what he assumes is going to be a very weird process. To begin, he sets his hand on each of the corpses(some of them are more like amalgamations of different corpses, but that shouldn’t matter), sets them as targets for [Animate Dead]. Next, he struggles for a few moments to properly control Soul Tendrils to also latch onto his inanimate targets, but eventually manages to get them to where he thinks they’ll need to be.
“[Animate Dead]!” Vey shouts, and feels the mana leave him almost immediately, and similarly notes the sensation of having his maximum mana reduced being very uncomfortable.
He takes a few step backs to watch the effects, and focuses on keeping the tendrils attached to the newly forming undead. One of the more cobbled together undead undergoes a fascinating process to Vey’s eyes, as flesh from different bodies seems to get less rotted and more healthy, before the different chunks knit themselves together to form a coherent body, before the various limbs twitch to life. The largest of the zombies, one Vey thinks might’ve just been a full-orc rather than a half-orc, rises to its feet first, and Vey begins thinking of a name while the rest slowly get up. By the time they have all stood, he begins.
“You are Brute. You are Falthis. You are Bray, Johe, and Calta. You are Sigrun, Lokra, Keld, and Soren. Lastly, you are Amalgam, you shall lead them, Drone squad.”