The elf-girl simply stared at Vey instead of answering, Vey’s cruel and grating voice shocking her into silence. After a minute of not receiving a response, Vey mentally sighs and begins tapping its boney fingers against its chin before standing up and grabbing the heavy mace in both hands.
“It wasn’t really a question, girl.”
That statement kicked the girl into gear in record time, and she scrambled to desperately cover her exposed body with some of the bloodied furs as Vey steps menacingly towards her. Unbeknownst to Vey, its lack of expression, its appearance, and unnatural voice, combined with the girl’s mental state, amount to the feeling of an avatar of death itself closing in on her in her most vulnerable state. Vey stops in place as the girl’s mouth parts slightly, and she visibly winces from her split lip before talking.
“I- don’t know m-much. Um- I can- If we were in town- Library…” The girl’s fear and scattered thoughts produce a result that Vey is not entirely capable of understanding, but the gist of it seems to Vey to be that the girl doesn’t know anything helpful directly, but does know where the knowledge is. Vey appraises the girl, from her feet up to her head, and then makes the silent judgment that while worthless to its progression as a wizard, Vey can probably get a decent amount of information on the village nearby and on the outside world in general from her.
Vey lets go of the mace with its left hand, and simply holds it casually at its side with its right, before turning around and grabbing the notebook off of the wooden table. Vey turns around to find that the girl has shuffled herself further against the stone wall, and has managed to completely cover herself from the neck down in the spare furs of the bed. Vey wonders momentarily if it really is that cold in the dungeon, as being an undead and thus immune to cold it wouldn’t know, but Vey suspects there might be some other reason it is not privy to at this time.
That sort of gap in its knowledge is the primary reason Vey has to keep her alive, it supposes, and so it sits down on a chair at the table, looking across it at the girl, snatches up an inkwell and pen, and sets the mace on the table besides its hand.
“Girl. Can you read common?” Vey asks, knowing full well it’s likely a stupid question. Vey hasn’t had much opportunity to speak with anything, it literally hadn’t been able to until just a little while ago today, and trying to get the girl talking ought to be an easy way to practice.
“Y-Yes…” The girl responds shyly, and Vey shifts its weight in its seat. It’s beginning to think that the girl may need more time to simply recover from its experience than Vey ever initially intended on letting her live, which is somewhat disappointing. Vey knows its master had some amount of food supplies, and the water from the fountain is drinkable, so Vey feels like the girl might have enough supplies for… a week or two? Three at most?
That’s far longer than Vey should actually need to extract all of her knowledge from her, but if she takes that long to just reach a point of stability in her responses it would be all for nothing.
Vey begins contemplating once more the merits between her life and her death, and gives up almost immediately. Vey feels like every time it tries to work its way around the issue, it only ends up more complicated in ways Vey isn’t equipped to deal with yet, so its choice is simple and pragmatic. Vey ignores her, and goes back to its independent research on trying to make a [Light] spell.
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This leaves the girl thoroughly confused. From her perspective, the animate skeleton seemed very interested in her, and even began asking the terrified girl questions, before sitting down at the table and abandoning her entirely. She doesn’t think she could run. Even assuming that the skeleton doesn’t chase her, those undead throughout the dungeon certainly would, which leads to her curling up in a ball on the bed again.
The sinking feeling of despair starts seeping in again. She silently curses herself, because by the gods, what could she possibly do? The feeling of revulsion and pain in her entire body, the bruises and cuts, and the complete lack of any method to escape, has she been abandoned by her village too? Would they even know where to look for her, if they even cared to try? None of it feels real, except for the pain and disgust. But when she checks her status, she finds it, the ultimate proof that all of this is very, very real.
Blightmark(Curse) Duration: 70 hrs remain
Victims of the Vow of Defilement are left with a Blightmark for 72 hours, marking them as curse-bearers by proxy for the duration and imposing a permanent -4 Lck penalty.
Vey looks up to see the girl rubbing her eyes, trying to cry again, but not finding any tears to do so. It decides, for reasons it doesn’t wholly understand yet, to utter two words in her general direction before it continues its work.
“Thank you.”
Vey looks down at the sheets of paper and its notebook, and dips the quill in ink once more, before writing what it knows of the method to produce continual light with magic. Vey believes it has stumbled upon a method of writing down magical information in a way that the system might recognize as a spell, even if it doesn’t know how to make one that actually works yet. It is also beginning to worry that it won’t be able to test whether or not it works, since it doesn’t have any MP to attempt to cast a spell.
Meanwhile, the girl stares puzzlingly at the skeleton. Did it just thank her? For what? What kind of trick is it? What complex method of torturing her further must it be? And other such thoughts blaze through her mind, her trauma briefly forgotten in her sheer confusion. As she watches the skeleton doing… research? She’s not quite sure, but it looks like the skeleton is writing down the same sort of structure as the spell scrolls from Mr. Eltyr’s hidden shelf. She chides herself slightly for peeking at those when she was told not to, but recovers/sinks further when she realizes that none of that matters anymore.
Can skeletons even think properly? The girl doesn’t know, but remembers reading that undead created by necromancers continue to follow their orders even after the necromancer dies, so maybe the skeleton was simply ordered to do whatever it is doing? The thought of the necromancer and captor returning sends a shiver down her spine, and she balls up further. Then she begins to think a little bit more calmly about the situation, about the cold and drying blood on her face and on the furs, and on the stone floor leading out of the chamber, and begins correlating that information with the dried blood on the skeleton’s hand.
“Where… i-is that- um… him?” The girl asks, her voice shaking and confused, and with visible pain in her eyes as she recalls the memory of the day’s events. Vey, for its part, merely tilts its head upwards slightly, meeting the girl’s gaze.
“Dead. Why do you think I thanked you?” Vey returns immediately to its work after the curt remark, leaving the girl speechless for a moment, before she panics and throws the bloody furs off of her as she realizes fully. She frantically tries to wipe the blood off of her face, but all this succeeds in doing is spreading it more and more on her arms and chest.
Vey spots this from the corner of its vision, and responds by simply tossing some of the rags it had previously used to hide the dagger over to the girl in a bundle.
“There’s water in the fountain. I was the only one guarding that room, so… Don’t get blood on everything.”
[System Help-On the LCK stat; LCK is a stat that loosely represents a creature's "luck", or that odds that probabilistic phenomena occur in their favor in positive values, or against their favor in negative values. Most typically increased or lowered by blessings and curses respectively. Help Code 32-L]