“I started my next project with the undead today.” The pep in Sera’s voice and the frankness with which she ended her sentence signals to Vey that she wants him to ask what exactly that project is. Before he can ask, though, she shifts in his arms to face him, stopping his thoughts in their tracks long enough for her to continue on her own. “I’m building a town hall~”
“A town hall? Are we making a town for the mortals?” Vey’s question accompanies a light brush of his hand through his companion’s hair. Thankfully Sera waits until his hand is free before she shakes her head.
“Nope. It’s for the undead and the mortals. I was thinking, if we’re going to keep having more undead, we should prepare for when they’re all intelligent, so it’d be nice to have something approaching the town meetings my village had.” Vey gets lost in Sera’s eyes and smile for a moment before truly pondering the idea.
Sera doesn’t think it’s all that great an idea herself, but she does think it will be necessary in the future, and it will give the undead more construction experience in the short term. Plus, and while it might be a bit careless of her to think in such a way, she liked it better when she and Vey had the dungeon all to themselves for the most part.
“I think it’s worth doing. Still, are we planning on taking in more mortals? Or just more intelligent undead?” Vey hugs Sera in closer to let her know he doesn’t intend for the question to be answered just yet. The fact that she can squeeze back significantly harder than he can has not surprised him since she started gaining so many levels, but being compressed will likely always be an odd feeling for the skeleton. “Do you-”
“Have you- ah. You first, my love.” One of Sera’s hands somehow finds its way to the side of Vey’s skull, and she presses her lips to Vey’s collarbone while she waits.
“Do you think we should try to get more information about the world outside of our little border? It’s been worrying me lately that all my magical knowledge would be useless if an army showed up at our door…” Vey pats Sera on her bare back as he finishes his piece. He nuzzles her off of his collar with his chin, before ‘kissing’ her forehead.
“Probably… But I’m not sure how much more you could do. You’re out of corpses to raise right now, right?” Sera waits for Vey’s nod before continuing. “So short of sending Dragon or Sheo squad out or inventing a new spell for it, what more could we do?”
Vey contemplates that for a moment. Clairvoyance is great for surveying a wide area from a hilltop or the like, but requires him to be there and doesn’t give great detail. Plus, it’s perspective dependent, it doesn’t matter if he can see for miles if the view is blocked by trees. A spell for collecting a lot of information in a large area would probably be monstrously difficult to create and incredibly expensive to cast. Not to mention that his current maximum of 4th tier magic probably isn’t lenient enough for it.
“If I leveled up a little more… Maybe I could make a spell for it. I could also try making some more of the undead sentient with [Undead Lieutenant]-”
“No. As much as I cherish and trust Dragon squad and Sheo, they developed intelligence naturally. How exactly did our arrangement come to be in the first place?”
“Understood. I’ll see if we have enough collective cartography knowledge between the books and my magic to create a ‘mapping squad’ out of existing resources. The Skrats would be a massive help for that.”
“I’ll see if Sheo is willing to lead that effort.” In the silence that follows their conclusions, Sera peppers Vey’s skull with a few kisses before closing her eyes in thought, her lips still on Vey’s teeth. “My question from earlier: Have you decided on your evolution yet? What’s worrying me is that you’re not thinking about it at all.”
“I just… The previous time, it felt incredibly ‘right’ and natural. I wanted what the white path was trying to offer me. I wanted to understand you and us better. The only option this time that I think has anything I actually want is the [Greater Necropolitan], but it also doesn’t offer anything for my combat ability.” Vey’s words come perhaps more honestly than he’d been being with himself for the last month or so, which makes him decide to keep going. “[White Lich] sounds great, it sounds like even if I died protecting you, I wouldn’t really die if we kept, say, my spellbook safe. But it also sounds like a massive point of failure. What if a random rat or thief destroys my phylactery while I’m away? [Skeletal Vampire] sounds very promising, but all of the knowledge I have on vampires is mostly of horrible downsid-”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Vey, I love you. I’m not saying you need to choose. It makes me feel better just to know that you’re thinking about it. Why not try writing down all the options? Go over the information like you were making a spell, or something like that. I know what I want you to pick, but what if you just need to see it in a different way to decide for yourself.” Sera kisses him again, before pushing herself deeping into his arms. It’s still jarring feeling to not be able to physically stop her from doing that. “I love you, let’s talk more in the morning.”
“I love you too.”
--
After finishing her last round of the night, Ter sits down on a rock by the dungeon entrance, setting her spear beside her. She bids the trio good hunting as they make off towards the hill up the cave, and she hands her duties off to Jyu and Woi while she grabs the sharpening stone she’d left here the night before.
She doesn’t need ‘sleep’ or rest. Technically speaking, none of them do. But time to be alone with her thoughts and sharpen her spear once every day is much appreciated. Ter often wonders how Glorious Leader Vey manages so much information and so many more complex emotions and thoughts without spending half of every day sitting on rocks and doing monotonous tasks like the one Ter is doing now.
That isn’t the only reason Ter’s been coming to this specific rock for her nightly alone time. Or, perhaps it would be better to say this rock is for not alone time, as soon after she begins her work, another intelligent undead joins her. Sheo, a skeleton she’d not had much thoughts of on account of not working together much, has shown just as much intelligence as any member of Dragon squad. For some reason, he’s also been de-facto chosen by Queen Sera, a fact that Ter would be upset with. She wants to be the most useful to the Queen, after all.
However, there’s something about Sheo’s usually silent company and the way he occasionally does odd things around her that lead Ter to not dislike him. Far from it, in fact. His presence sitting beside her on this rock is quite indescribable to her, but she knows she’d prefer to spend her ‘alone time’ like this with Sheo as opposed to being actually alone.
The way he occasionally reaches a hand out towards her before acting confused, or the way he gets clearly worse at sword fighting with Jyu when he sees Ter is watching, there’s something to that, she thinks. She’s just not sure what.
--
Watching the skeletons has become Milo’s favorite hobby. At first, he watched the skeletons and zombies at every opportunity, because Nana had told him that they might try to hurt him, so he should keep an eye out for them. When Miss Sera had explained that the colored ones were just as smart as he is, he began to see them in a different light. Nana and the other adults had started acting more afraid of the skeletons, but Milo and some of his friends started watching them more closely.
Little things like the green ones poking each other in their rib bones sometimes, or the red and blue one arguing over the ‘correct’ way to do something, or the purple one bossing the others around became like looking in a mirror. Andrew’s demands that Reina do her chores the ‘right way’ began to take on new meaning in Milo’s mind. Nate’s attempts at stealing scraps of dried meat from his younger brothers made watching the green ones steal arrows from each other something understandable, rather than something eldritch to be feared.
Plus, the white one. Milo remembers being told by Miss Sera that the white skeleton is the most important skeleton. She hadn’t explained why, at least not in a way Nana or the others could help him understand, but the white one feels different to Milo. He doesn’t act like Nate or Andrew or Reina or even himself. The white one acts more like Nana or Dad do. He never does anything ‘fun’, but Miss Sera always seems happy to see and talk about the white skeleton.
Milo even once saw the white skeleton do magic. Real magic! Like the bards that sometimes entertained the village children used to do. He made a ball of light in his bony hand once. Milo even swore that he saw the stone in the walls move when the white skeleton wave his hand once. Real magic, not just tales to scare him into sleeping at night, something he never thought he’d see if he wasn’t secretly a sorcerer or something.
Milo started keeping a pile of all the drawings he made of the white skeleton doing magic, and he started trying to tell the others about the skeleton’s magic. For the most part they believe him, but Nana and the others always hush him to stop talking about it. He’s pretty sure that they think the white skeleton is like those stories meant to scare him, but if Miss Sera likes him so much, and the other colored skeletons seem ok, why not the white one?