Sign: Snake
Buffs: Serpent’s Kiss (Romance twice as easy)
Debuffs: Curse of the Unspecified (Start the game with no gender, no name, and no other identifying feature)
EXP: 1,338
Alchemy
Coagula (LVL 1, 44 SKP)
Solvé (LVL 1, 19 SKP) Ready to level up!
Theoria (LVL 1, 48 SKP)
Botany
Sowing (LVL 0, 5 SKP)
Tending (LVL 0, 80 SKP) Ready to level up!
?
Cooking
Fire (LVL 1, 28 SKP)
Water (LVL 0, 39 SKP) Ready to level up!
?
Homesteading
Fire Tending (LVL 0, 7 SKP)
Tidying (LVL 1, 124 SKP) Ready to level up!
Mending (LVL 0, 15 SKP)
Speech
Logic (LVL 1, 23 SKP)
Linguistics (LVL 0, 41 SKP) Ready to level up!
Cajoling (LVL 0, 10 SKP)
Total SKP: 441
Inventory:
Auros: 2.65
Cards of Destiny: 5 of ?? Discovered
Names: 4
Evengeline, The Pure Snow (Holly)
Vitas, The Wind Thief (Sparrow)
Gillygad, The Stitched-Up Wonder (Pitchfork)
Zinia, The Serpent’s Caress (Snake)
Anjelica, The Keeper (Ladle)
Passive Skills:
(Theoria LVL 1) Pure Substances: Some metals are especially luminous. Some hands are more precise than others. These hands shall become sharpened scalpels, made of the most luminous Silver. Higher maximum Quality points are possible for all potions.
(Coagula LVL 1) Coalescing Membranes: The membranes of the parts which make up the whole shall be in accordance. Ingredients combine more smoothly, producing higher quality potions.
(Fire LVL 1) Ignited: The Elemental branch of magic lends this Sorcerer the ability to cook faster using fire. Prepare fried or baked meals twice as quickly. Get burnt less.
(Tidying LVL 1) Dirt Buster: The magical branch of Purification lends this Sorcerer the ability to ‘Bust Dirt.’ Dust and grime accumulate at an infinitesimally slow rate on objects you have cleaned.
(Logic LVL 1) Rhetoric: The magical branch of Entreatment lends this Sorcerer the ability of heightened ‘Rhetoric.’ The structure of your arguments is smooth, regular, and orthogonal. Spirits and people are more likely to agree with you.
Active Skills:
(Solvé LVL 1) Dissolving Lines: The understanding of how a menagerie of elements comes together to make common items; skin, bark, atlases, all are building blocks, of building blocks of building blocks. The understanding of how to dissolve the whole into parts, to learn of its nature. Boil or burn an unknown ingredient to discover its essence.
Spells:
Wild and Overwhelming Growth (LVL 1) Accelerate the growth of plants and fungi. Enchanted plants grow ten times faster (Overwhelming Influence), BUT enchanted plants sometimes disregard their original form.
Mated With A Strong Bond, Lesser Baptism (LVL 1) Skill actions performed by the enchanted object grant the Sorcerer one-fifth of their SKP and EXP (Strong Influence) but the objects must be enchanted in identical pairs.
She was growing more secretive by the day. I would catch her clutching something in her small hands, and before I could get a glimpse of the thing, she would scurry away and hide.
She took to hiding her trinkets, the meaningless talismans she constructed from scraps and refuse. They were nothing to me, but I felt the flames of jealousy stir my heart.
My poppet had grown an inner world. A secret garden where a lock of horse hair twined around a bent fork, and tied with rough woolen twine meant something. It must have been important to her. I found it carefully stashed in a hidey-hole behind her sleeping place.
But I could not penetrate the object’s symbolism. This bothered me. It grated on me immensely. I had made this creature, and she was mine. I could not abide the secrets. I could not abide not knowing what it meant.
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She kicked and screamed at me as I burned her little talismans, her fetishes. What were they? She never did confess. (Oh, young Sorcerer, my little dear had finally learned speech, after months of her insect-like faux-language, she had acquired my tongue).
Did I feel ashamed burning my little dear’s tokens? Did I feel like a villain as the flames turned them to ash, and I held her back, as she wailed? Yes. Let no man say I have no heart. I did feel the shame, and the regret, but I also felt righteous.
As Ma Chère was only beginning to speak in my own language, her words were primitive and childlike.
“Mean!” She would cry, “You mean!” she wailed as I hauled her upstairs to her "bedroom."
I pondered her words. Of course I knew that she was simply stating my act of destroying her little creations had been, in her eyes, cruel. But I had gotten caught by the word. Mean. What did I mean when I created her? What had I meant for her to do? What was she meant to be?
I knew that there was a clear purpose in the beginning, but it began to fade from me. Ma petite Chère was now so life-like, so human, that it was becoming cumbersome to reduce her existence to a single meaning. You could just as easily ask your own humble author, Gigert Giger, what his life’s meaning is?
How humorous I find it now, that when I think of my life’s meaning, I know that unlike my poppet, it is reducible, and dissolvable, down to a single sentence. My one purpose in life, as I sit in this dungeon and reminisce on the past, was to create Ma Chère, and then to end her. And so I have fulfilled it, and can face the end with just a crumble of tranquility.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let me tell you about how she grew every day.
Not her size, I’m sure you understand. My little dear remained the same four feet as when she climbed from the shadows of the baptismal dirt. No.
She grew in intelligence, as I have already suggested. She learned to speak, haltingly at first, like a toddler, but more and more The year was not out, and she could converse freely. At first, she picked up my cadences, my figures of speech. How this pleased me! To have my little dear be a small and imperfect facsimile of myself.
Then, as though picking up used and dirty laundry, sneering at the filth and throwing them back into the bin, she cast my lexial fragments aside, and found new ones. Created, heard on the radio, read in a book, who knows where she found these turns of phrase, but they stunned me when I encountered them. “I’ll fetch the water, quick as a tick,” she said and I scowled. What foolishness! Where had she found such a droll phrase?
And these, her new words, I could not burn so easily.
But I remember when she was born, she was just like my shadow. She followed me, shyly peaking around corners, her eyes tracing my movements. I thought that it had been love, or admiration that I saw in those delicate features- oh fool! How deluded I was to think I knew her mind. Perhaps she never loved me at all.
She did not grow in size, but her body did change. After experimenting with countless poppets, I knew all the tricks and the techniques (And no, I shall not share them) to have created a poppet that looked very human-like. She crawled out of her dirt bed on that first day, and by the weak light of the candles, she could have been mistaken for a real girl. But by the light of the morning, you would see the differences. You could tell that Ma Chère was no human, but a very careful approximation.
At first.
In order to strengthen the enchantment, and keep it lasting, I continuously gave her infusions of pneuma, of my own blood and spit (And no, I shall not share how to proceed in this either).
I believe now, as I have my recollections in this dim cell, that these infusions might have been the cause of our trouble. It is possible that, besides the jolt of life which every dramful provided, something more carried over with my blood, and made its way into my darling. Something much more vile.
Have you guessed what it is?
Here we must turn the lens like a mirror upon the author. Because you see, I also had, and have still, a predisposition for lying, and deception. I have always wanted and needed absolute independence, and despised any hierarchy where I was not at the very top. I, too, have a secret garden that lives entirely in my head, which no man or woman has ever scaled the high walls to enter. I cannot say much more, but I will drop you this one hint: my secret garden is not a place of sunshine and flowers, and I believe, if another human found themselves there, they would be most uncomfortable. And so, you now see the cause of my initial trouble; my lonesome existence, my difficulty with keeping company. It originates solely from my own heart, which tends towards jealousy and bitterness, and other sins to grave to put in these pages.
I have spent these late years blaming Ma Chère for what she became, but perhaps the blame was entirely mine. She was, in some ways, truly like my child, with all the old faults and evils that have plagued me for years.
So we digress again, and I must make an effort to return this story back to the main thread which binds it. Ma Chère, and the infusions of pneuma, which I administered to her every full moon.
Her cheeks became more flushed, like there was truly blood there, under the soft flesh made of dough. I was sure that it was just an impression, a visual trick, but I was wrong. Cleaning my dishes one morning, after a fine country breakfast that she had prepared for me, the little dear nicked her palm on the kitchen knife, as she scrubbed the dishes.
She ran over to me, as this was during the short and happy period in our lives when she still brought her troubles to my lap, and cried. She showed me her palm, and I was astonished. Blood! She had cut her skin, and beneath it, the blood which lay in waiting had surged out in little droplets.
My fingers were numb and fumbling as I dressed her wound, and told her to be more careful. How could it be? But it was. Somehow this creature of dough had gained one more aspect of humanity, which I never intended for her to have-
I stopped reading the book, and closed it with shaking hands.
I did not like where this story was going.
I did not like the way that Gigert Giger was treating Ma Chère. I did not like the reminder that enchantments are temporary. But what I really didn’t like was reading that his poppet could bleed.
I looked down at my own palms.
A part of me knew it was stupid, that I was worried about something like this, but I just couldn’t help it.
I had thought it was impossible that I was a poppet, because I bled, and surely, a poppet made of flour and clay could not. But Ma Chère did. So what did that mean?
Why else had I woken up, with no memories, no past, not even a name? Could it be that the Snake’s curse, Sorcery, the initiation, were all nothing but a red curtain which hides the real truth?
Perhaps I don’t remember anything because there is nothing to remember. Perhaps I was made, molded from dough, and buried in dirt. Perhaps I am nothing but an enchanted dough-shape, made to clean and keep the parcel service running, bringing in money.
And haven’t I been told to do exactly that? I wondered if I had been a satisfactory experiment for Mistress. Had I done an adequate job?
I remembered vividly, the day Mistress came back to the house, and how cross she had been to find the place in disarray. I suppose it would be disappointing if one were to enchant a magical helper, and find that they had done diddly squat in your absence.
Debuff: Tired
EXP gains are decreased.
Sleep is essential. Missing sleep is a hazard to mind and body.
(Warning: Tiredness may cause Visions!)
I rubbed at my eyes, and put the pink-covered book, with the picture of the broken and bleeding heart, aside. I had stayed up late hoping that somewhere in the pages, Gigert Giger would give me a clue as to how I might extend the life of Hansel and Gretel if their enchantments failed. Although he had given me a clue, as apparently he had been extending Ma Chère's enchantment with blood and spit, I was not keen to follow it through. I had no idea how. Besides, I now felt that same surge of disgust at the book, as when I first attempted to pick it up. But this time, the revulsion was earned, and it made me apprehensive about walking any further in Gigert's footsteps.
I waved away the Tired message, and then realized what I had done.
I got messages. I had an overlay.
I brought up my character sheet, and re-read the words which I had all but memorized.
Sign: Snake
Buffs: Serpent’s Kiss (Romance twice as easy)
Debuffs: Curse of the Unspecified (Start the game with no gender, no name, and no other identifying feature)
I felt some of the tension unwind from my shoulders. Poppets didn’t do Sorcery. They didn’t have Signs. They didn’t have access to Old Toad’s Grimoire. I was inexplicably sure of these things.
I had no memories because of the Curse of the Unspecified, not because I was an enchanted poppet. These were facts.
Feeling calmer, I laid myself down and tried to sleep, but I kept thinking of the poppet, Ma Chère, and how things might have ended for her.