In the kitchen of Castle Fenton...Niklas tells the King to cool his britches for a moment - there's cooking to be done here first. Not the edible sort of cooking, though. More of a wedding cake project, with a dash of homuncular science and vegetable anatomy. Indeed, his project is to turn this perfectly dead human being and the perfectly alive fungus it hosts into something much nicer instead. It takes him but a moment to form a coherent shape in his mind - a humanfungus and liver replica potato is what he wants. Now, how shall he achieve this?
["Medicine" roll: 6+
1]
First, he rolls up the freshly dead chef into a careful fetal position, and holds him that way for a good minute or so before the knitting of the hyphae proves enough to hold it fast. This leaves the resulting potato approximation in the rough spatial neighborhood, though the little creases and lumps, like the armpits or the knees, are certainly no good whatsoever. So Niklas grabs some of the available goose livers and quickly fashions some putty out of them to fill in some of the more terrible unevenness, and ascribing the rest simply to non-traditional tuber shapes. The humanfungus is glad to oblige many of these structural requests, it seems, and though of questionable intelligence overall, seems to be cooperative and malleable enough.
Now then, with the potato shape being done, Niklas is struck by a terribly strange feeling, where for a moment he isn't entirely sure whether potatoes are supposed to have brains or not. This is cause for concern for but a moment, as the default answer is always the one Niklas has liked best - even if they are not, true Northern ones certainly are, and he will have it no other way. So he goes ahead and fashions what he believes to be an appropriate brain out of available supplies of untouched, perfectly good food and non-perishable materials. It looks like a brain, he thinks, which probably should be good enough for a potato anyway, since it's known to be a job that's less than taxing on the mental faculties. He sticks it into the potato, trusting that the thing will know best where its brain should be and how it needs to be wired up, similarly to the large degree of agency in their own neurosurgery that his countrymen generally espouse.
And so, in a process that's somehow both less and more involved than one would expect, the humanfungus and liver replica potato with authentic potato organs (potatoes that Niklas hypothesizes might be organs of some sort if properly applied) is complete, writhing in a lively fashion and seemingly burning with desire to be planted so that it may create more giant tubers soon. It seems to be growing little roots, even! How cute! Now, if only Niklas could teach the thing that uniform expansion of its mycelium in every direction is not the potato way as a general rule, he may in fact be golden.
In the unhallowed presence of Mr. T...Mark, not liking Mr. T's insistence on stressing the importance of
Morton like some form of posthuman exclamation mark, tries to express his confusion more clearly, which for the moment seems strangely paradoxical.
The awful amount of confusion that trying to understand the implications of intentionally clarifying one's confusion in no uncertain terms seems to resonate with Mr. T., who promptly dematerializes and rematerializes above Mark, his feet a scant few centimeters away from the top of his head. Glad at being the most important one once more, he motions for the rest of the crew to get him some writing implements before taking note of the fact that he's the only one who carries writing implements around in the first place and that he seems to have plenty already on his person. Nevertheless, feels good to ask imperiously about these things, you know.
Morton, meanwhile, tries a different tack, suspecting telepathy to be at work.
~Salutations, good sir! Can you hear me?~ he mentally wonders, but Mr. T appears to be fascinated with Mark too much for the moment. Feeling a little left out, Morton forms two arms out of his surface and performs a little ritual, pointing his palms and the ground and slowly pushing them down. It seems to work reasonably well, at least in the symbolic way. The calm collectedness of Morton's mind seems to seep into Mr. T as well, as he appears to be almost still now, or at least vibrating too quickly to be seen by the naked eye.
Feeling grand about this fascinating discovery, Morton is about to politely share his insights, but the universe feels compelled to intervene. This manifests as a slight movement on Morton's port, a little reflexive fidget just as insight hits him, where one part of his body - one of the corners of his desk surface, in fact - goes one way, embedding itself into the wall of a stone manor across the street, while his desk leg, theoretically corresponding to that same corner, disappears into the sky. Both, peculiarly enough, remain attached to his body and don't seem to hurt at all.
[Morton's will roll: 3]
It still fails to hurt when he experimentally moves but a smidgen, which causes a long black triangle of Morton's stretched demonflesh to form a neat perspective effect in the distance as seemingly more parts are pulled in the same unusual directions.
"I... think it might be best to consider quickly leaving," Wilma says, having had quite enough of the strangeness. Mr. T starts to vibrate more noticeably.
"Never looking back, that also seems like a wise plan."In the local inn of Rugish...Kevin, intrigued by bridgebreakers and lynch mobs, tries to figure out where this discussion in the inn is going - his first impression is "nowhere", as there's too much speculation about beavers for the immediate course of the group mind to produce much of use. It does, however, quickly progress into a much more practical plan of action proposed by the man on the counter, apparently a priest of Narcillicus by the name of Dan. This plan entails looking for suspicious new people or nervous familiar people in town (on the basis that the townsfolk already know the witch on the hill is evil, and that the Black Circle is even more evil, and the latter will no doubt exterminate the village if it tries anything against the former, and also that the witch on the hill probably has few reasons to mess with these villagers aside from the abductions here and there), grilling them for what they know and then probably figuring out they're behind all this once enough grilling has been done.
Sleuthing isn't difficult if the whole village is in on it, the priest states. The goal is to find the odd ones out, then figure out their angle, then think of a suitably painful punishment for them, clearly. Now, who could possibly be a good candidate for this sort of investigation, the crowd wonders? As they do so, Kevin is relieved that this doesn't seem to have been a rhetorical question and nobody seems to be giving him any sinister looks just yet.
In the wilderness outside Eckledun...Sigmund, unsure of how his pebble of magic might actually work, considers its structure carefully. After all, if he doesn't remember anything, who's to say he hasn't made it into something completely ridiculous again? It's hard being his own quality control, he grumblingly decides. Giving the thing a cursory inspection, he realizes that it should probably work perfectly well, and that it's a bit silly to assume he'll have some special insight about its structural flaws the very minute after he made it (which he did in under two minutes).
Having regained confidence, he strives to prepare a sphere of stone for his flesh to inhabit.
[Sigmund's magic roll: 4]
It is almost immediately that he realizes that his stone shaping abilities don't appear to extend very far or very wide. Namely, not enough to reach much of actual stone, though the nearby pillar of stone he managed to form seems to work well enough as a source of material.
Secondly, the control is definitely not the finest that Sigmund's experienced, and the closest he can manage to a stone sphere is best described as a jar, if jars had no hollow space inside them. Hm.
Across a magical sheet deep beneath the earth...Scott, having run out of options of his own, tries to invoke the gub to help him out in this dire time of need.
"Oh, almighty gub! Hear this sinner's prayer! I believe I am about to die and require your aid, for the sake of my master and the Divine PlanTM please save me!" he says, specifically enunciating the TM for unknown reasons. This appears to not matter, as the gub do not seem to hear him at all, or at least make no indication of having done so at all. Hm. Time for drastic measures, he thinks as he tries to phase through the magical wall - this, just as predictably, shows no signs of success, either, considering that enchanted objects react with ectoplasm as if it were tangible, if Scott remembers his undead trivia right.
Hm. That's two perfectly good plans proven untenable in three minutes. Scott has stepped up his methodology's efficiency in terms of plan output, it seems.
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Topic: Life Begins At Death - Epilogue: We Live And Live Again (Read 542672 times)