Writing is lovely as always. 
Ask Piecewise if he enjoys the window view. Maybe we can gain some insight on the nature of our skeletal friend.
You look over at Piecewise and furrow your brow. You ask him if he likes it there. He looks back at you with the same vacant expression as ever and after a few long moments replies, "I do not know." He stares at you for a few more seconds before turning back to the window. Hmm. This isn't the first time he seemed to do things he either shouldn't know how to do or that he has no explanation for. Its odd. Very odd.
I say go for quality over quantity and just use puppets, assuming we can get them to follow complex commands, like Piecewise can.
I think we can't control the larger ones as easily when there are many? Honestly maybe just one really good bird that we can tell to simply fly about until it finds the place might be best.
+1
+1 We can make a super bird!
You walk over to the basin and start sorting through the corpses, looking for the one best suited to your spying purposes. You discard a few immediately: two have damaged wings and a third has its head blown clean off. You eventually decide on a cormorant; its dark plumage will offer it cover in the darkness and long neck and keen eyes will be useful in observation. Not to mention it was killed quite cleanly; just a small hole in the breast as evidence of its passing. You take one of the cartridges of birdshot and open it up, spilling out a dozen or so of the small steel spheres onto your hand. You select one of them and use your finger to stuff it deep into the innards of the bird, wedging it into place. You use this as the core, anchoring the anima to it before tying the creature to yourself with your own blood. You stick some more of the shot in the wound and then plug the hole up a bit with feathers and dried blood. You want this thing to look as though it were very obviously killed by a hunter, just in case you need to abandon it. A dead bird filled with birdshot is perfectly natural while a bird with a single nail in its breast would be...curious to say the least.
The cormorant perches on piecewise's head and you're about to send him out to spy when you think of something: How is it going to tell you what it sees? You ask it to speak and it can manage nothing more than honking. You sit back and consider for a few moments. You finally put the note book in front of the bird and the pen into its beak. You tell it to draw various shapes and finally to draw a plan of the room its in. It does these things with an oddly machinelike precision, its long neck whipping about and slashing out lines with rapid ease. The resulting plan of the room is accurate so you open the window and, after a quick check to make sure no one is looking, release the bird into the night with orders to find and observe the base before returning here. It flaps off and you lose sight of it almost immediately in the darkness; the only thing left behind is the trailing cord of your blood connection.
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Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 112262 times)