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[Dustan Hache]

try to raise some of the fresher corpses from their graves, and summon one or two of the older ones back as ghosts to talk to me.

[Xvareon]

Turn 2

Search for and pick up a small, sealable container, preferably a transparent jar. Give myself a minor injury (a scratch or something) and catch the glowing ball that will come down from the ceiling to heal me. Analyze it and try to learn how to create it.

{_} You search, but don't manage to find any containers, transparent jars or otherwise. The graveyard is little but grass, dirt, and dull gray headstones. (I was tempted to make this an autofail because you never saw your companion get healed, but I did it anyway.) You test the edge of the stone chunk in your grasp, carefully making a small -- but still painful, ouch -- cut on yourself. Yep, broken rock is still dangerous. Before you can bleed more than a handful of drops, however, your body suddenly flashes with green light! You flinch back, glancing side to side, but see no likely source. But the pain in your tentacle is gone, as is the wound, as though it never happened; though a fleck of your blood is still visible on the rock.

Enter the mausoleum and walk next to the lizardman "If you weren't a fellow reptile I would kill you and eat your soul for power" Animate the pile of corpses into a single being with care to not crush Zal-Hasar in the process.

{_} You assume a rigid pose; head forward, legs poised, and eyes staring hungrily into the dead eyes of so many viable corpses just lying before you. Unable to hide your grin, you begin channeling energy through yourself with ease, shaping and codexing it into the pattern of reanimation and control that your art demands. Then you unleash the spell, and your eyes flash with the sheer amount of power you're attempting to control. It isn't long before you feel the first twitches coming from the deceased bodies heaped so carelessly on the floor. {_}{_} You don't lose your focus. Not even for a moment. Every touch of your magic is carefully guided, and every movement of the bodies is exponential, with more and more of them shifting and moving to your call. But you aren't content. Oh, no. You have something much bigger in mind for these.

Now that your magic has thoroughly permeated a good half-dozen of the bodies atop your reptilian companion, you flex your ephemeral puppet strings all at once, and twist. {_} It takes considerable effort to maintain enough control to avoid catching the lizardman's body in what is now happening. Six newly-risen corpses smash into each other as though pulled by gravity, and become stuck, their preserved flesh and bones fusing with each other amidst a grotesque smacking and crunching noise. {_} But now, things begin getting... strange. Having spent so much of your energy on animating and fusing the corpses, you weren't able to actually dictate so much about what shape your new undead servant would take. As a result, to the side of the now almost-freed lizardman, there now sits an orb. A giant, supercondensed orb of dead flesh and skeleton, which promptly rolls down the pile and impacts with a dry smack on the left mausoleum wall.

{_} Your job done for now, you relax, cutting off your spell with a thought. The first pangs of exhaustion are curiously absent, reduced to little more than a dull ache thrumming through your body at the use of so much power. {Learned: Dark Adept!}

try to raise some of the fresher corpses from their graves, and summon one or two of the older ones back as ghosts to talk to me.

{_} You walk about the field of graves, looking for those that were dug the most recently. It doesn't take you long to find a promising candidate. {_} You gesture, moving your hands in wide, sweeping patterns over your chosen grave. The real work comes first from moving the earth away from the body, of course, so you're only able to focus on one body at a time, even with the minor cantrip you use to dig up the corpse. Once you sense that you're close enough, though, your necromancy, and your new servant, does the rest.

The dirt beneath your hands shuffles. Two half-decayed arms burst forth, and you grip them firmly, yanking the zombie out of the shallow hole. It is -- or was -- a male, likely human by the looks of him. He's whole, aside from a partially caved-in skull and some cracked ribs. Your spell takes care of that easily enough, giving him the motive force he needs to move around on his own power once again. He's little more than a puppet now, but that might change with proper care and attention.

Your efforts to raise even this one zombie took quite a bit longer than you expected, and you weren't able to attempt to contact any spirits this turn.

Take the candle, attempt to light it using any sort of rocks, wood, anything that can spark. Or magic, if at all possible.

{_} You attempt to remove the candle from the stake, but find that it's affixed tightly to the rod. Attempts to strike a flame are also unsuccessful. Finally, in frustration, you attempt a fire spell; but in your haste, you botch a critical component of the casting, and BOOM, your hand is now on !!fire!! Pain rips through your body! {_} Quickly, you dive onto the ground and smother the flame beneath your chest. {_} Wincing, you slowly roll over to inspect your wounded limb; but the next instant after you lay eyes on the red, blister-covered mess, a jolt of refreshing energy washes through you from head to toe! Your hand flashes green, and seconds later, the burns have vanished!

Zakir does just that. He Looks at it and attempts to identify if the stakeskull is arcane, and if so what does it do?

{_} You stare at the skull. But something feels off, so you flip the 'lid' closed again, so now you can have a proper staring match. Then it hits you:  something's weird about the eyes. It's close to the 'uncanny valley' effect, in fact, as though the skull could come to life any second. You grasp the iron rod with both hands and lift, pulling it out of the ground easily enough--

INTRUDER   MASTER   WHERE IS MASTER   BLOCKED   HELPLESS   NO NO NO

Your mind reels from the sudden assault of foreign thoughts! Panicking, you backpedal, one hand clutching your head, whlie the fingers of your other just barely clutch the skull-topped rod. An angry humming like a hive full of bees surges up your arm. (You are dazed!)

Look for items or something more useful than this exit.

{_} You are unable to find anything nearby. The solid carved stone plaza is bare, save for the dais. The only new thing you really notice is the immense black aura of Necromancy oozing out of the nearby mausoleum. Your companions seem to be busy.

Animate the corpses that are touching me and get them to raise me out of the pile. If necessary, contest the dragon's magic to avoid being crushed.

{_} Feeling the corpses actually shift on top of you, without your direction, briefly makes you panic, enough to sink your own magical strings into each body and give them a firm tug. The two remaining bodies slide off of you in response. Grinning, you rise to a crouch... just in time to see the huge ball of fused corpses you inadvertently sent rolling towards you!

{_} You kick off the floor, twist, and hurl yourself into a dead sprint for the exit! The rolling death ball smacks into the wall, bounces, and drifts to a halt in the middle of the hallway.

Walks into the mausoleum, hands extended, fingers gesturing Detect Magic in the air, aware of his surroundings. He takes note of the lizardman under a pile of corpses and the dragon standing by him, but pays no regard to either, instead very carefully walking forward. The tendrils of his facial sensors extend from behind his metal mask, stretching out, as he clicks his fingers every so often to learn every nook and cranny of the environment, searching for traps and anything of value to his search. He tries to trace the destination of the green wisp.

{_} You calmly brush past the baby dragon and lizardman on your way into the mausoleum, and sidestep the orb of dead bodies. Checking the area for magic initially seems to be fruitless (especially since the narrow hall is so saturated with it at the moment it's like you're staring into a floodlight), but once you're clambering over the bodies around the center of the mausoleum, you begin to notice details. A strong planar connection is localized somewhere underneath the pile of bodies, though currently it feels... hollow, to your senses; it's likely where all these corpses came from.

The next thing you sense is a moderate magical aura stemming from somewhere in the back wall. Carefully, you pick your way in that direction, and, after checking your normal spectrum of vision, notice a round carving sitting at chest level on the stone, with a carved-out handle pointing horizontally towards you. You can't make out what might be behind the wall from here.
Background: {_} A faint telepathic signal echoes through the minds of several of the Necromancers on this plane. No words or coherent message can be deciphered, but the presence of another mind is still there. It's the same kind of wavelength your master Lakhmet sometimes used to communicate over long distances.

Name: Zakir Varuk
Race: Kitsune-Tsuki
Gender: Unknown. Check, or don't. Very ambiguous.
Location: Around the periphery of the demiplane.
Status: Dazed.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Zal-hasar
Race: Lizardman
Gender: Ambiguous (uses male pronouns)
Location: Standing just inside the mausoleum.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Froza
Race: Baby blue dragon
Gender: Female
Location: Standing just inside the mausoleum.
Items: Cute little black sash and bow (neck).
Abilities: Dark Adept

Name: Urist McNecromancer
Race: Dwarf
Gender: Male
Location: In the graveyard, around the periphery of the demiplane.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Victor Superbia
Race: Humanoid black dragon
Gender: Ambiguous
Location: In the center of the plaza.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Nix
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Location: With Kevak, around the periphery of the demiplane.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Kithrax
Race: Incutilis
Gender: Male
Location: At the very edge of the demiplane, right next to the fog barrier.
Items: Black sash (wrapped around his shell).

Name: Naoztxr'itra
Race: Ethergaunt
Gender: Male
Location: Inside the mausoleum, behind the pile of bodies, inspecting the back wall.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

1x Zombie (Dustan Hache)|Location: In the graveyard, next to Urist McNecromancer (Dustan Hache)|Items: Old rags|State: Fresh
1x Fused Zombie Orb (ziizo)|Location: Inside the mausoleum.|State: Fresh

[ziizo]

Froza climbs the orb and tries to summon spirits to bound at it turning it into a floating meat orb

"Spirits from beyond that are here now, obey my commands or I will beat you all and force you to obey me anyway"

(what does Dark Adept does?)

[Xvareon]

(what does Dark Adept does?)

Gives you +1 to all corpse reanimation, control, & fusion when using necromancy. You got that for scoring so many Epic Successes in a row! Be warned, this could push a regular Overshot up to 7 and screw you over even more if your roll is bad. Note that this won't apply to summoning spirits as that's a separate thing from corpses, since you're dealing with beings that have no physical form, and may yet still have agency.

Also, you'll notice in my turns that I post text with underlines a lot of the time, and a lot of {_} brackets. Just hold your mouse cursor over them to reveal the text they contain; I use the [*acronym=(text)][/acronym] command (without the *) to make that happen. It helps me compress text into easily digestible chunks without clogging the screen.

[~Neri]

((Move your cursor over it and you'll see.))

Zakir lets out a pained noise, surging foxfire over their arm as they fling the rod away. They stumble backwards and sit down. Before beginning to burn the foreign influence out.

[NRDL]

Help out Zakir, try to use magic to determine what's wrong with him, and what the skull rod is doing.

[ATHATH]

Make psychic contact with the rod using my telepathy, provided that Kevak tells me what happened. Try to calm the rod down by explaining what happened and that we are Lakhmet's apprentices.

Then attempt to use my telepathy again to latch onto the telepathic signal, following it to its source.

[Xantalos]

Zal-hasar briefly contemplates pursuing corrective measures, but decides against it. Instead, he decides to latch onto the telepathic signal, and use one of the still-plentiful (I assume there were more than six corpses in the stockpile?) corpses as a focus for the presence - whatever it wishes to communicate will be said by the corpse. Undead radio!

[Mallos]

Move to the mausoleum to investigate what's going on and see if there's enough corpses left for me to raise a few

[Dustan Hache]

command my zombie to dance for my amusement and as practice for fine horde control, then try again at summoning a ghost.

[7thOutpost]

Tries to discern the nature of the planar pocket below the pile of bodies. Unless he deems it dangerous (possibly capable of sucking things into it, be they flesh or spirit), he tries to uncover the connection by moving the bodies closer to the entrance to the mausoleum. If he can't move the whole pile at once, he tries in small piles, so long as it doesn't take too long to be worth anything.

If the planar connection isn't worth his time, or if he has examined it already, he tries to in turn examine the handle and the magical machinations behind it. Does it connect to anything outside of the wall? Does it stretch tethers somewhere below, perhaps? If It's connected only to the wall, like a moving mechanism, he floats over some of the bodies between himself and the wall, throws a few wards on himself and a binding enchantment on the corpses in front of him. Then he uses Mage Hand to pull the lever.

However, if the mechanism stretches in strange directions, refrain from moving it yet and examine it further.

[Xvareon]

Turn 3

Make psychic contact with the rod using my telepathy, provided that Kevak tells me what happened. Try to calm the rod down by explaining what happened and that we are Lakhmet's apprentices.

Then attempt to use my telepathy again to latch onto the telepathic signal, following it to its source.

{_} You feel a general pressure on your mind, but can still decipher no message, and you fail to make contact with the presence. You're apparently too far away from the source to get a solid signal. All you're able to discern from here is that the pattern of psychic pulses feels like an urgent call of some sort. The source of the signal is... ... You slowly turn, glancing out across the demiplane towards your companions. Two are wrestling with a strange-looking rod tipped with a skull.

Froza climbs the orb and tries to summon spirits to bound at it turning it into a floating meat orb

"Spirits from beyond that are here now, obey my commands or I will beat you all and force you to obey me anyway"

{_} You scamper forward and climb atop the flesh-orb. Unfortunately, summoning spirits is quite a bit harder than manipulating physical, dead bodies with no agency or personality. Your flimsy attempts at beckoning a ghost to inhabit even one of the bodies fall flat, though you are at least able to sense that the possibility of doing so exists; the boundaries between the material and ethereal realms of existence feel conspicuously weak here. Though it could be a false opening; Lakhmet would likely have accounted for unwanted guests here in some way or another.

Help out Zakir, try to use magic to determine what's wrong with him, and what the skull rod is doing.

{_} After identifying the nature of the wild, scattershot messages thrumming through your telepathic senses, you soon detect the source:  The rod itself. If you had to guess, it looks like it's sending some kind of distress signal or warning.

Zakir's grunt of pain spurs you into action. Realizing that he might hurt himself trying to get the rod away, you reach out to grasp the skull, and mentally utter a single word of command:  STOP.

Though you're used to applying the technique to undead servants, it seems to work just as well here; the chaotic pulses actually stop for a heartbeat or two, then assume a slightly calmer, more focused stance. You feel a mix of... curiosity, relief, and worry, all pouring out from whatever presence lurks inside the rod. However, the connection breaks when Zakir hurriedly drops it to the ground like a hot iron. Still, you feel good to have at least made contact. Whatever inhabits the item was undoubtedly put there by your old master, likely to serve as some kind of sentry or line of communication between him and this place; though why it was apparently "switched off" when you got here is anyone's guess.

Move to the mausoleum to investigate what's going on and see if there's enough corpses left for me to raise a few

{_} You walk towards the obvious aura of necromantic energy streaming out of the mausoleum, step across the threshold, and enter. Your nose wrinkles; the place is practically a charnel house. A giant orb of conglomerated dead bodies with a baby dragon riding it sits in the corridor, with several other corpses littering the floor. Two of your other fellow apprentices, the lizardman and ethergaunt, are at opposite ends of a mound of corpses that sits on top of the central tomb. Several of the bodies look viable; indeed, quite well preserved, as though someone really knew what they were doing.

Tries to discern the nature of the planar pocket below the pile of bodies. Unless he deems it dangerous (possibly capable of sucking things into it, be they flesh or spirit), he tries to uncover the connection by moving the bodies closer to the entrance to the mausoleum. If he can't move the whole pile at once, he tries in small piles, so long as it doesn't take too long to be worth anything.

If the planar connection isn't worth his time, or if he has examined it already, he tries to in turn examine the handle and the magical machinations behind it. Does it connect to anything outside of the wall? Does it stretch tethers somewhere below, perhaps? If It's connected only to the wall, like a moving mechanism, he floats over some of the bodies between himself and the wall, throws a few wards on himself and a binding enchantment on the corpses in front of him. Then he uses Mage Hand to pull the lever.

However, if the mechanism stretches in strange directions, refrain from moving it yet and examine it further.

{_} The pocket dimension at the bottom of the sarcophagus is still there, just flattened out from having been emptied like an overfull slingshot. The entrance is closed now, but could perhaps be opened again for storage with the proper spell. Of course, it's a bit hard to get to at the moment when the sarcophagus is choked with bodies all around it. You assume that there was probably a way to get only one out at a time for the sake of convenience, but somehow the entire stockpile was released at once; a handy tool if one needed to perform a mass-raise of undead, though, for sure.

The handle in the wall is another matter entirely. It was clearly made to hold or conceal something within. {_} Your attempt to use necromancy to create a suitable cover while at the same time magically gripping the handle proves a little more challenging than you thought, and you barely manage to get the bodies before you to shift themselves around enough so that they're turned upright, and thus more easily walkable. {_} You stretch forth an arm, willing force to manifest as an extension of your hand, and quietly grasp and turn the mechanism's handle. It slides with a rolling of smooth stone on stone, until you can feel it turning no more. You wait, but hear nothing else moving or responding to the device's operation. Instead, you pull away from the wall—

CLICK!

You twist to the side, ripping the handle out of the stone! There is a thunk of something hard striking the floor, as well as a papery rustle, and the sound of... glass? You look back to the wall, finding that there was no trap, but merely a release catch, and that the handle was actually attached to a cylindrical container embedded inside. Large, brown-tinged scrolls litter the floor around the base, along with a couple thick-walled glass bottles filled with varying colors of fluid, or powder. Each bottle is marked, though you can't tell with what from here.

Zakir lets out a pained noise, surging foxfire over their arm as they fling the rod away. They stumble backwards and sit down. Before beginning to burn the foreign influence out.

{_} You growl in pain! Foxfire reflexively dances up your arm as you enter defensive posture, focusing on burning away whatever hold this thing has on you. At that moment, your fellow necromancer Nix steps up by your side, and grasps the skull-head end of the rod. The nerve-wracking sensation that had your fingers locked around it instantly fades, allowing you to hurl the offending object down onto the dirt, and take a cautious step back.

The foreign voice in your mind cuts off as abruptly as a lightning bolt flashing through the sky. Perhaps due to the fact that you've now had such close contact with it, though, you can actually still make a couple words from the telepathic signal it still emits.

...master's... voices...

command my zombie to dance for my amusement and as practice for fine horde control, then try again at summoning a ghost.

{_} You run your new corpse-puppet through its paces, working your magic into each kink to animate it fluidly. It obediently assumes a pose with its arms held over its head, palms outstretched, then turns around slowly. Another twirl, this time with a rhythmic swaying side-to-side. Humming thoughtfully, you issue another command, and the zombie squats low, bones creaking like no healthy body should ever do, and looks you straight in the eyes. You push it over with one hand onto the ground, where it falls in an ungainly pile. It raises itself back up again easily enough; you seem to be getting the hang of this. It shouldn't take long for the zombie to be able to actually do something useful.

{_} In an attempt to speed the process along a bit, you leave the zombie to its own devices, and focus your attention again on trying to contact a spirit. Luckily, there are indeed a few that still have some connection to this small plane, or at least have remaining threads between their graves and whatever place they've dispersed into. Since you aren't particularly picky at the moment, you magically grab hold of a cluster of these threads at once and yank, intent on picking out the one that actually responds the best to your clumsy summoning.

In hindsight, you probably should have practiced spiritual binding a bit more in magic class. You gasp in numb shock, falling to your hands and knees in a nerveless heap; an excruciating pressure bears down on your mind, not unlike opening a hatch on the bottom of the ocean and letting it all explode right on top of you. If you don't hurry and stop it now you'll get possessed at best, boil your brain out of your nose at worst! {_} With a sheer effort of will, you drive a lance straight through the multitude of spirits all straining to come through the gap you so nicely created for them to enter, and twist. Since it was too early for them to gain enough traction to manifest in the material plane, the squirming masses of spiritual energy are shot back into their home plane as though by a slingshot. A mournful, waspish cry of "C***TEASE" buzzes in your ears for several seconds.

Before you can fully recover from your ordeal, something prods you in an uncomfortable fashion. You glance up, looking into the dead eyes of your zombie, who has seized your hand and is actively poking you in the neck with your own fingers. He now has a strangely... mischievous glint in his eyes. "Whr... eyeu... hittin urshelf?" he murmurs through rotting teeth. Poke, poke, poke.

Zal-hasar briefly contemplates pursuing corrective measures, but decides against it. Instead, he decides to latch onto the telepathic signal, and use one of the still-plentiful (I assume there were more than six corpses in the stockpile?) corpses as a focus for the presence - whatever it wishes to communicate will be said by the corpse. Undead radio!

{_} Standing a "safe" distance from the baby dragon Froza and her death ball of fun, you turn your focus towards the telepathic signal. Immediately, you identify it as belonging to your old master; in fact, you remember how he used to use sentries to send messages directly to him should his enemies come knocking. Apparently it couldn't save him this time. But somehow, this one is still transmitting; and the signal is coming from the very plane you're located on.

You drag one of the corpses over, prop it up against the wall, and lean down, pressing both hands to its head. Latching onto the signal is easy enough; creating a dweodem of enchantments inside another object capable of interpreting it and repeating it as aural sound is somewhat more difficult. You manage, however, after a bit of wrangling, to isolate enough of it to be intelligible, and funnel it into a set of nervous impulses for the corpse's barely-intact vocal chords. Its mouth cracks open, its jaw works... and you miss whatever part it was just trying to interpret as a result, but soon the rest starts to come in.

"Mas... ter..." comes the slow, deliberate murmur. "Wher... where... arrre... mas..."
Background: {_} No one notices anything new in the environment this turn.

Name: Zakir Varuk
Race: Kitsune-Tsuki
Gender: Unknown. Check, or don't. Very ambiguous.
Location: Around the periphery of the demiplane.
Status: Dazed.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Zal-hasar
Race: Lizardman
Gender: Ambiguous (uses male pronouns)
Location: Standing just inside the mausoleum.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Froza
Race: Baby blue dragon
Gender: Female
Location: Standing just inside the mausoleum, atop the rolling ball of conglomerated corpses.
Items: Cute little black sash and bow (neck).
Abilities: Dark Adept

Name: Urist McNecromancer
Race: Dwarf
Gender: Male
Location: In the graveyard, around the periphery of the demiplane.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Victor Superbia
Race: Humanoid black dragon
Gender: Ambiguous
Location: Standing just inside the mausoleum.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Nix
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Location: With Kevak, around the periphery of the demiplane.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

Name: Kithrax
Race: Incutilis
Gender: Male
Location: At the very edge of the demiplane, right next to the fog barrier.
Items: Black sash (wrapped around his shell).

Name: Naoztxr'itra
Race: Ethergaunt
Gender: Male
Location: Inside the mausoleum, behind the pile of bodies, inspecting the back wall.
Items: Unadorned black robes.

1x Zombie (Dustan Hache)|Location: In the graveyard, next to Urist McNecromancer (Dustan Hache)|Items: Old rags|State: Fresh
1x Fused Zombie Orb (ziizo)|Location: Inside the mausoleum.|State: Fresh

[~Neri]

"I refuse to touch that rod again until I know what makes it tick."

May as well investigate the surrounding fabric of reality. Any notable spacial fucky?

[NRDL]

"I'll check it out. Whatever's inside had something to do with our Master."

VERY carefully use magic to gently probe at the presence inside the Skull Rod, and ascertain as best as I can what it is.

[ATHATH]

Make telepathic contact with the rod. Explain to it what has happened, and ask it what it knows.