Tribulations of an Apprentice Witch

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Background Information

Weissany was a kingdom, once. Over long centuries, the kings and queens of Weissany sent out their knights and their armies, defeating their rivals and driving the inhuman powers and ancient magicks of the old world out of their strongholds and places of power, to hide in dark caves and deep woods and crumbling castles. The kingdom grew, some of its people prospered in this newfound safety, others did not.

But the world changed even as the rulers of Weissany grew complacent. Guns, cannon, factories that could pour out an unheard of amount of goods -- while other countries embraced these processes, Weissany was slow to modernise until it was too late. Their power waned. Abroad, their armies suffered crushing defeats. At home, dissent built up, and monsters and magic long thought destroyed appeared again to stalk the city streets and villages at night.

People knew that the crown's authority was slipping away. They knew things seemed to be getting worse. But no one seemed to be prepared when one day there was no king at all. Successor governments failed before they could even become become established. Outside of the cities, Weissany slipped into lawlessness, or fell into the hands of warlords or petty nobles with ambitions of grandeur. Some less human than others.

The only thing that prevents the whole region from being carved up and swallowed by neighbouring countries is fear of the creatures that now openly operate in Weissany, and the decade and a half of war that has embroiled the rest of the continent.

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and older, stranger creatures. Demons, sorcerers and witches. While to the ordinary populace, Weissany is clearly in decline, to creatures such as these, their star is undeniably on the rise.

You are a creature such as this. A young witch, just completed your basic training, in search of a master to help you go beyond that. In the days of the old kings and queens, you would have had to hide your dark powers for fear of arrest and execution. Today, you are largely free of that worry, but Weissany is far from a safe place for a half trained young witch. You will soon have troubles enough to contend with.

Tribulations of an Apprentice Witch

The wind howls bitingly through the trees, and you can't suppress a shudder. In the summer, the winding track might have been pleasant. Birds singing, warm sunlight filtering down through a leafy green canopy, flowers blooming along the path. It's already well into autumn, though, as well as growing late enough that there's scarcely any sun at all, and last week's gale has already stripped away what leaves remained there. The trees are slender, pale and bare, granting them a disconcertingly skeletal look as they lean menacingly over the path. The only bird you've heard has been a solitary raven croaking overheard. Rather than flowers, the only thing that lays beneath the trees are dead, decaying leaves.

As you pull your cloak closer around yourself, it's very hard not to think bitterly and wistfully over the hot meal you could be enjoying beside a merry fire right now, if only you were back at the academy, rather than out in the middle of nowhere doing who knows what. You're an apprentice level witch studying at Blacktree Academy, a deceptively respectable sounding institution of higher learning for burgeoning witches and sorceresses. You should be there, working on experiments to impress potential masters who might take you on as their apprentice -- you're hardly going to accomplish that out here where no one can see you.

"I need your help! The experiment I was telling you about is going well, but I need you to bring me a focusing lens as quickly as possible, or it might all be ruined! If you can do that, I promise that you'll share in the credit when we present it to the Academy -- we'll both have our pick of master witches to apprentice under after that!

Ivy's letter had been brief, cryptic, and undeniably urgent, brought to the Academy by special courier, detailing the location you're headed to now and swearing you to utmost secrecy. It's taken you two weeks to get here, taking various winding roads and tracks on foot or on wagon, when there's one to hire., By this point you're tired, cold, and hungry. Ivy had better have something halfway decent to eat in this abandoned estate of hers -- according to her directions it should be visible any moment now.

How did Ivy talk you into this, anyway?

[x] Ivy's your friend, and you know she'd do this kind of favour for you as well.
[x] Ivy caught you in a… very unfortunate situation a year back, and the venomous little snake is blackmailing you.
[x] You know that the connections Ivy's family can give you will be invaluable to your career going ahead.
[x] She's cute.

The manor looms up ahead, a large stone building, showing signs of neglect from its weathered walls and deplorable roofing. There's a stone wall encircling the grounds, but the path terminates directly in front of a gate that's been long ago knocked off its hinges, lying rusted and overgrown off to the side within the wall. This would have belonged to some country noble or another -- a baron or baroness at very best. They had lived here with the family, living off of taxes from the local peasantry for part of the year, living in a townhouse in Salvograd, the only nearby city of any note, for the other part of it.

It's impossible to tell what happened to them at this point. Many such nobles simply disappeared following the death of the last king, who no new one was ever found to replace. Some were killed by their own peasantry, fed up with years of neglect and abuse under an unjust system. Others were unseated by low criminals, brigands, or inhuman monsters -- the entire Duchy of Aventium is ruled by vampires now, most infamously. Still other nobles had simply seen the writing on the wall, slipping away with what valuables they could carry to seek safety within the walls of one of the cities, leaving their people to the tender mercies of the various dark forces that now stalked these lands.

As a witch, technically, you are one of these dark forces, though hardly the worst of them. And you're not here to terrorise anyone -- just to delivery Ivy's lens and help out with her experiment. And the lens had better work -- you'd had it commissioned exactly to Ivy's specifications, paying extra for the rush job, and it's put a much bigger dent in your finances than you expected. How bad a situation does that put you in?

[x] Your family are minor nobles, much like the ones who vacated this manor.
you can always go begging for them to help. They won't acknowledge you openly, witch that you are, but might be able to sell off a family heirloom to help you out.

[x] Your parents are wealthy merchants.
They're definitely good for it, although you'll have to explain just how you burned through most of your savings so quickly.

[x] Your family are poor farmers with barely a few coins to scrape together.
They'll likely be able to send you something if things get particularly bad, but not much.

[x] You grew up on the hard streets of a large city -- you have no family.
If Ivy's little experiment doesn't pan out, you're probably screwed.

Regardless, though, you're here now. The worst of the journey is behind you, and you can worry about the rest later. With an heir of dogged resignation, you trudge your way toward the door to the manor.

Spoiler: OOC Notes

This will be a largely freeform quest without strict mechanics or dice. I will do my best to fairly and logically reflect the consequences of reader choices without these things, and write-ins are welcome and encouraged. While the tone will tend to stay largely upbeat, there will also be darker elements reflecting the setting. I'm not going to go out of my way to "punish" the thread for leaning certain ways, but actions will have consequences and sometimes these will be bad ones. Major character death is on the table although it won't be constant or lightly casually introduced. Hopefully, it's something at least a few people want to read and will enjoy.

This is my first time trying to run a quest -- I'll do my best to make things work. Special thanks to @Kei , who helped me out with so much proofreading, editing and general advice and just generally puts up with me. Also thanks to everyone else who read over some of my early ideas, even though I ended up not going with that stuff -- the advice was still really helpful and appreciated.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:
##### 3.2
[x] She's cute.
No. of votes: 9
Dragonloli123, xtra_ore, veekie, Salbazier, ThePastryKing, wingstrike96, MobiusC, Zaratustra, dnzrx

This was basically tied the whole time with the friendship option -- I was going to try and do them both in equal measure, but it looks like this one won out ^

[x] Ivy's your friend, and you know she'd do this kind of favour for you as well.
No. of votes: 8
notthepenguins, tricholysis, Gamerlord, Vauron, Usandru, The Laurent, Hannz, SoaringHawk218

[x] Ivy caught you in a very unfortunate situation a year back, and the venomous little snake is blackmailing you.
No. of votes: 1
I just write

--

[x] Your parents are wealthy merchants.
No. of votes: 10
I just write, Dragonloli123, notthepenguins, tricholysis, Gamerlord, Vauron, Salbazier, Usandru, ThePastryKing, wingstrike96

This one wasn't even close, up until very nearly the last minute ^

[x] You grew up on the hard streets of a large city -- you have no family.
No. of votes: 6
diesel366, The Laurent, Hannz, MobiusC, SoaringHawk218, dnzrx

[x] Your family are minor nobles, much like the ones who vacated this manor.
No. of votes: 3
xtra_ore, veekie, Zaratustra

Sure, you and Ivy are friends, and you'd like to think you'd help out a friend -- but you'd maybe need a little bit more to go off of than "trust me, this will work out" to do this kind of thing under normal circumstances. Sure, Ivy helped you out with your studies occasionally -- because of her family, Ivy's formal magical education started much earlier than yours did, long before she ever set foot in Blacktree Academy. Even as you trudge up to the battered front door of the manor house, cloak still clutched close around you, you're struck by the memory of Ivy patiently explaining to you a finer point of basic soul manipulation that had utterly escaped you up until that point. The way she smiled as you'd finally gotten it, flinging her arms around you and pulling you into a hug…

… aaand you're blushing pleasantly at the mere memory. There is a reason you're out here, and it admittedly isn't just because of how much you believe in Ivy's little scheme. The prospect of being all alone in a big, lonely manor house, working closely together on an experiment Ivy's this excited about certainly has an… additional appeal to it than the simple joy of helping out a friend in need. You can't help but imagine her gratitude at how far you've come out of your way, and the trouble you've gone to to make her this lens special. This was a good idea! you decide, as you bang a fist against the front door, trying to wipe the goofy grin off of your face before Ivy answers.

At the same time, a small, nagging voice at the back of your head can't help but imagine your mothers' reaction to hearing about all of this. You can practically see her standing in front of you, hands on hips, mouth quirked into a frown. She'd definitely bring up that cart-driver's son -- the one with the dazzling smile and the pretty words, who'd kissed you... and made off with half the house's silverware when you weren't looking. You're not 13 anymore, but your mother will never let you live that one down.

"I see they haven't managed to teach you any sense at that witch-school of yours! Here you are again, putting all your trust in a pretty face. Do you think that's how I run my business? How I managed to provide so well for you? Do you think I married your father for his looks?"

She certainly hadn't. That much is obviously true. Fortunately for you, you don't have anything as serious as marriage in mind... and you don't particularly take after your father in appearance. You look very much like your mother, in fact: The same dark hair and eyes, the same skin that goes from tan in the dead of winter to dark brown after you've had enough sun. What else do you have in common with her?

[x] You're tall, sturdy and striking rather than beautiful.

[x] You're slender, willowy and graceful.

[x] You're a little on the short side, soft and huggable.

[x] You're tiny, skinny and people call you adorable more often than you actually like.

You do your best to banish the spectre of your mother from your head as you let your fist fall, waiting for Ivy to answer the door. Several long minutes pass with no answer. Huddling a little closer to the building against the wind, you raise your fist to knock again, this time a little more urgently, and wish you'd worn something warmer.

How do you usually dress and present yourself?

[x] Well heeled.
You spend your allowance well -- even your travelling dresses are finely made and tailored, you're rarely seen without a few well chosen bits of jewellery, and you try to keep your hair done up stylishly. Apart from your black school cloak, you're unlikely to be taken for a witch. You're a lot more likely to pass for the well-to-do merchants' daughter that you are. You look like you're someone who's worth listening to, but also someone who's worth robbing.

[x] Respectable.
Your wardrobe largely consists of sturdy but attractive dresses in a current enough style, although with little ornamentation. You keep your hair in a braid, out of the way but still quite fetching. You can safely intermingle with crowds in most places without either being glared at or making a spectacle of yourself. Your parents approve of how you make yourself look.

[x] Practical.
You mostly wear plain-spun trousers and unadorned shirts. Warm enough, durable enough, and easy to move in, put on and take off. You keep your hair cut short and out of the way. You're too well fed and well mannered to be taken for gutter trash, but you probably need to establish your credentials somehow to be allowed to move in your parents' old circles. Your mother likes to cluck about how pretty you look when you let your hair grow out.

[x] Bold.
You wear a lot of corsets in black or crimson and anime-fantasy-style miniskirts. Your hair is long and flowing, and you wear ornamentation that's very obviously arcane in origin. You resemble nothing so much as a witch from the cover of a trashy penny dreadful -- it's advantageous in some places, but decidedly not so in others. Your parents would have a heart attack if anyone they knew saw you like this. Your legs are also probably pretty cold.

After a lengthy, frustrated silence, you're almost ready to knock again, or maybe even just barge your way in, when the door swings abruptly inward. The thing holding the door for you is decidedly not Ivy: It's nearly six feet tall, corded muscles barely concealed beneath a loose, cheaply sewn smock, staring down at you with steady, dead eyes. "Ssstate your busssinesss," it intones in a low, wheezing voice, sibilance strangely drawn out. From its mismatched, heavily stitched-together appearance, you suspect that Ivy has thrown the thing together from a few different sources.

Trying not to show your disappointment too openly -- not that the servant is likely to care, given the average intelligence of such constructs -- you pipe up: "I'm here to see Ivy. Take me to her. She's… she's expecting me." It's hard not to be intimidated by something this large as it regards you with its slow, vacant stare. You're not entirely surprised to see it, though. Ivy's a highly accomplished necromancer for her age -- she comes from a well-known line of necromancers, going back to her great grandmother. You don't have such an advantage, being the first of your family ever to show an aptitude for any form of magic, witchcraft or otherwise, but you've managed well enough on natural talent and hard work alone.

What is your speciality? Witchcraft is the magic of manipulating living creatures -- or dead ones, for that matter. You're not a sorceress to throw around fire and other elemental forces. Your magic either needs a living target, or a target that was once living -- objects made of wood, leather, cloth or bone are fair game, but you can't do a thing with metal or stone.

[x] You're talented at alteration magic.
The art of changing the physical form of organic matter. This includes things like repair spells and healing, but also anything that alters the body of a person or animal, up to and including the infamous "turn into a toad" spell. That one is a little out of reach for a relatively recently confirmed apprentice. Principal disciplines: Body, Order, Entropy.

[x] You're adept at placing curses.
Any intangible change to a living creature. You can strike someone with a string of improbably bad luck, or make them utterly unable to lie (that one is a particular favourite of a certain teacher back at Blacktree). At the upper reaches of this craft, you've heard tales of curses that could strike someone instantly mad, or leave them in constant, imaginary agony, or trap them forever in bonds of servitude. You're not exactly chomping at the bit to try out anything like those last ones on someone, even if you did have the power. Principal disciplines: Mostly Soul and Entropy, a bit of Order to make things more permanent.

[x] Like Ivy, you have a knack for necromancy.
Necromancy isn't simply about raising zombies or making creatures like the one Ivy's set to guard the door -- it involves summoning, binding and banishing the spirits of the dead, compelling them to speak or to act, placing them in physical vessels or setting them free. Granting a semblance of life or intelligence or intelligence is possible, but very difficult. They say that powerful necromancers -- women like Ivy's great grandmother -- can rend a person's soul from their body simply by pointing at them. You're definitely not there yet, even if you wanted to rend anyone's soul for some reason. Principal disciplines: Body and Soul.

[x] Potions and charms.
Related to but distinct from the science of alchemy, a witch's potions combine natural reactions with amplified magical effects. A salve that can normally speed healing becomes a cure-all. A poison that normally weakens can kill. A recipe for a flammable liquid can be made to burn hotter than a forge, so long as the components are organic A closely related art is the creation of charms -- inanimate objects made from organic materials imbued with an enduring magical effect. Amulets of protection carved from rowan wood, bone rings that cause wasting and sickness. These creations can be potent, but require a degree of preparation. You can hardly conjure a potion out of thin air, after all. Primary disciplines: Mostly Order and Entropy, with some very basic Body.

The creature continues to stare at you for a long, uncomfortable moment, and you can't help but imagine how easy it would be for this monster to simply reach out and snap your neck where you stand. It tilts its head to the side on its too-thick neck, struggling to think or recall what it should do in this situation. At long last, it says: "Thisss one will take you to mistresss. Follow." Without a further word, it turns around and shambles back into the manor. You barely have enough time to rush in behind it, before the door slams behind you with a resounding thud.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:

[x] You're tiny, skinny and people call you adorable more often than you actually like.

No. of votes: 10

Dragonloli123, Brakus, veekie, dnzrx, tricholysis, Nevill, xtra_ore, Zaratustra, emeralis00, Kei


Well, we're going with this by quite a wide margin. Tiny witch it is.


[x] You're a little on the short side, soft and huggable.

No. of votes: 6

MobiusC, Hannz, Salbazier, Macros, I just write


[x] You're tall, sturdy and striking rather than beautiful.

No. of votes: 5

The Laurent, notthepenguins, Andelevion, Shiranui, SoaringHawk218


[x] You're slender, willowy and graceful.

No. of votes: 2

Pyro Hawk, Muer'ci


--


[x] Practical.

No. of votes: 8

The Laurent, MobiusC, notthepenguins, xtra_ore, I just write, Macros, Shiranui, SoaringHawk218


Practical it is -- I actually thought it was going to be a three way tie for a bit there. Practical means you'll get boots and cool jackets, though!


[x] Respectable.

No. of votes: 7

veekie, Pyro Hawk, Hannz, Andelevion, tricholysis, Muer'ci


[x] Bold.

No. of votes: 6

Dragonloli123, Brakus, dnzrx, Nevill, emeralis00, Kei


[x] Well heeled.

No. of votes: 2

Salbazier, Zaratustra


--


[x] You're talented at alteration magic.

No. of votes: 8

The Laurent, xtra_ore, Salbazier, I just write, Macros, Zaratustra, Muer'ci, SoaringHawk218


So, we're an alteration specialist. Lots of potential there!


[x] Potions and charms.

No. of votes: 6

MobiusC, notthepenguins, Pyro Hawk, dnzrx, emeralis00, Shiranui


[x] You're adept at placing curses.

No. of votes: 5

veekie, Hannz, Andelevion, tricholysis, Nevill


[x] Like Ivy, you have a knack for necromancy.

No. of votes: 3

Dragonloli123, Brakus, Kei

The manor appears to have been stripped of anything even remotely valuable years ago. You're honestly surprised so much of it is even still standing -- give it another ten years, and you're sure the local villagers will have torn the whole thing down to its foundations in order to re-use the stone. As is, the monstrosity is lumbering on stoically ahead, leading you out of the mouldy carpet and sad gloom of the formerly grand entrance, and taking you down a series of side corridors, many of which you suspect were originally for servants -- they're so narrow that the thing leading you has to turn itself sideways just to fit, and many so dark you worry about tripping over something.

Eventually, though, the thing pushes open a door in a wall, and shambles out of the way as you emerge, blinking, into a blindingly lit room. It's large and high-ceilinged, and its original purpose has long since been obscured -- all that possibly remains of the original furniture is a single battered table, and both it and every other possible surface is heaped with paraphernalia of a clearly arcane origin. A cauldron bubbles away in one corner. The table is mostly taken up by a large pile of assorted talismans, a stack of large, menacing looking books, and a pile of what look distressingly like human bones. The centre of the room is almost entirely dominated by a large, ad hoc looking apparatus -- a pale amulet hangs by its chain from a hook a bit above your head, directly in front of what looks like a dusty, wood-backed mirror. A series of focusing lenses are folded out of the way of one of the room's many oil lamps -- you can already see the space where the one you've brought is intended to go.

"Mina!" a cheerful voice pipes up from the far side of the apparatus, as a familiar red-haired head peers around to shoot you a quick, excited smile. "Glad you could finally make it! The roads are just not to be trusted this time of year, are they?" The way Ivy says it, you might have been late for an engagement a few hours down the road, rather than having made fairly good time for having crossed the distance you had to on such short notice. "You have the lens, don't you?" she adds, expectedly.

Ivy is taller than you are, as nearly anyone is, but she's hardly a giant. Her red, flyaway hair is tied back in a sloppy sort of bun, and over a serviceable green work dress, she's swapped out her school cloak for an ominously stained apron. She's already holding out a pale hand before you even manage to produce the lens from within its many layers of protective wrapping, and she snatches it up with a little squeal of delight. Watching her hurry over to her apparatus with barely a backward glance at you, you can feel your dreams of an affectionate shower of gratitude directed at you slipping away in the wake of being in the same room with the actual Ivy once again.

It's not as if she's a terrible friend -- Ivy helps people when she doesn't need to, and she's rarely unkind. But she has a tendency to… take liberties, and become a little too wrapped up in her work and studies to pay much attention to the needs of others around her. From the way she's already up on tiptoes securing your lens to her strange device, you can tell that it simply hasn't occurred to her that you might be tired, or hungry, or that you might deserve anything for your trouble beyond a very abbreviated greeting. Her obvious enthusiasm makes it a little easier to swallow, though; it's fairly endearing.

"So… this is what you've been working on?" you ask a little weakly, taking a step forward as you allow all of your planned greetings -- calculated to make you seem clever, collected, capable -- slip reluctantly away. You're careful not to get too close -- the device has an intricate looking circle of power spaced around the apparatus, painted by a steady hand directly onto the floorboards. You know some Soul magic, and a bit about necromancy, but it's not exactly your specialty -- you can't tell at a glance what any of this is for, except that she seems to want to focus light into the strange amulet, and possibly through it.

"Yes!" she chimes in. "Like I said, it's very nearly done! But I need to do this ritual before the seasons turn, and I needed that lens of course, and having another set of hands around couldn't hurt. Brute tries, but he's not exactly built for finesse."

"... Brute?" you murmur, glancing back at the necromantic creature standing statue-like by the door you came in.

"A little on the nose, isn't it?" she asks, cautiously taking her hands away from the lens -- the curving, strangely reflective glass disc is now set securely in a brass frame, alongside the several simpler ones you noticed before. "I needed to call him something after all, though, didn't I? Here, hold this!" She's deposited a heavy, tallow candle into your hands -- you're surprised enough that you barely manage not to fumble it as she fusses with a little packet of matches from the pocket of her apron.

You try not to sound too annoyed as you speak up again. "Ivy, what is all of this? You haven't actually told me anything about what this experiment was about!"

"Oh," she flings her free hand up in a small, careless gesture, even as the other one strikes the match and she leans in to light the candle you're holding. "It's quite simple, but fascinating! It's about my great grandmother's amulet--"

"Your great grandmother, the Necromancer of Dunsal?" you ask, suddenly regarding the pale amulet a little more warily. Ivy's ancestor was still infamous despite being several years dead in the ground. A noblewoman who had turned to the dark arts and raised an army of horrors to crush her enemies, known for many impressive but dangerous and unsavory feats of magic. Anything associated with her has the strong possibility of being very bad for your health.

"Well, yes," Ivy says, taking the candle from your arms to set it carefully down at the head of the circle. "It's not as though the other ones ever did anything worth talking about." To your dismay, you can tell that the candle has left greasy residue on the sleeves of your jacket. Hopefully, that will come out with a bit of magic. "This amulet is harmless enough," she goes on, looking neither at me nor at the amulet in question. "At first, it just seemed to amplify magical ability a bit."

Looking closely at it, you begin to suspect that the amulet in question is not simply white, but carved from bone. Its intricate shape is vaguely star-like, with sharp looking ridges along the sides. Set in the middle of it is a strange, pale crystal. You don't particularly like the way it catches the light when you look at it.

"... at first," Ivy goes on. "You also get this strange, awful sensation when you wear it, like you're not alone, or someone's standing right behind you. And it puts whoever wears it in a terrible mood. Really not worth it! At least, that's what I thought, until I did some tests. Now I'm convinced!"

"... convinced?" you ask, a little exasperated, once it becomes clear that she's deliberately keeping you in suspense in order to hear your reaction. This is all very interesting, but a strong part of you wishes that all of this could have waited after you'd had a chance to eat something. The tallow from the candle adds an unpleasantly perfumed odor to the strange smells of Ivy's little laboratory -- chemicals, oils, and the very faint aroma of death. It's enough to make you feel a little bit light-headed.

"Yes!" she echoes. She has the candle arranged to her liking now, and now she's rushing around retrieving particular talismans or pouches of powder to deposit at various points around the circle. Whatever it is she's doing, the potential power of it all makes goosebumps stand up along your arms, and a shiver go through your body. "Convinced that it has a soul in it." She lets that stand for a long moment, and you're just about to ask what could be interesting enough about that to go to all this trouble, before she finally clarifies: "A living soul."

Your eyes go a little wide, and you take a few steps back from the circle and the amulet. Something about Ivy's preparations has apparently sent minute vibrations going through the apparatus, making the amulet swing slightly on its chain. The movement seems oddly ominous to you, although you know that's irrational. "There's… a person in there?" you say, voice coming out squeakier than normal.

Ivy actually laughs at that, pausing to ruffle your hair like you've said something adorably naive. You hate it when she does that. "Mina, it's not a person. It's just an amulet! You can't really call something human anymore once it's been bound to something like that for so long. Don't think of it that way -- this is a soul affixed to an inanimate object for decades without losing any of its lifeforce! That hasn't been done before or since! If we can study it, show our work... any master witch would love to take one of us on, just to learn more about it!"

You're… not entirely certain how to feel about that statement. "What exactly are you trying to do?" you ask again, looking dubiously at the apparatus. "Why did you need a lens in the first place?"

"Well," she says, straightening up from where she's carefully poured a pouch of greyish salts in a neat pile at the final segment of the circle. "I can tell the soul is there in the amulet, but I can't precisely do anything with it in there -- it doesn't seem to be able to talk, or really do anything. So I'm just going to amplify it. I'm going to send a beam of light into it, through the lenses, and when it passes through the crystal on the amulet, it should hit the mirror, and project an image of the trapped soul! I think."

"You think?"

"Well, I haven't exactly tried this before. It's mostly just something that just… came to me while I was studying the amulet." She's remarkable flippant about all this, as she stands up on her toes again in order to begin flipping the various lenses down into place, producing a searing beam of light from the powerful little gaslamp, currently landing against the far wall to no particular effect. She's already adjusting its trajectory to make it line up with the amulet, though. "Exciting, right?" she asks.

How do you respond to that?

[x] a. Tell the truth and say you think this all seems a bit dangerously reckless.

[x] a. Tell the truth and say you think this is fascinating.

[x] a. Lie and say you think this is fascinating.

[x] a. Stay as noncommittal as possible; it won't be your fault if this goes disastrously wrong!

Spoiler: OOC note

Ignore the "a." In front of the options. The tally program lists answers alphabetically, so I'm just using it as a way to group them up.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

[x] a. Tell the truth and say you think this all seems a bit dangerously reckless: 9 votes.

[x] a. Tell the truth and say you think this is fascinating: 4 votes.

[x] a. Lie and say you think this is fascinating: 1 Vote.

[x] a. Stay as noncommittal as possible; it won't be your fault if this goes disastrously wrong: 0 Votes.

"Ivy, slow down!" you say, a little sharply -- enough so that she pauses what she's doing, somewhat comically freezing in place up on her toes, hands still stretching up to adjust the lamp.

"Why?" she asks, frowning at you. Seeing her looking at you like that -- annoyed, impatient, unhappy -- makes your heart sink a little, despite the overwhelming exasperation and worry you're otherwise feeling. You didn't come all this way just to make her frown at you, after all.

"Because you're experimenting on a strange artifact you know nothing about, using a complicated Soul magic ritual that 'just came to you!'" You fling your arms up as you say this, as if to emphasise how bad an idea this all is. Ivy's normally pretty driven. Distracted. Obsessed, even, when a notion or a topic of study gets stuck in her head, but this feels... different. She's not normally careless about safety. Or, not this careless, at least. "Don't you think that maybe having a strange ritual just come to you when you're handling an amulet that has someone's soul in it might be worrisome?" you demand.

She stares at you, frowning, still frozen absurdly in place. "... maybe," she murmurs. And you can tell your words are sinking in. She's going to listen, take a step back, maybe get away from the amulet for a while. And then she'll give you a decent meal, and belatedly be so grateful that--

Later, you can never quite decide whether Ivy did it on her own, or if she simply jarred the lamp into place while trying to move her arms back down. Either way, one moment everything is going fine, and the next… the beam of light is passing through one lens after another, adopting a pure, white colour distinct from the ruddy light of the oil lamp.

"Well, I have to finish it now!" Ivy says, caught between alarm and renewed excitement, eyes locked on the beam. "It's going to be worse if I don't!"

"Is it really?" you ask, doubtful. But you know that this kind of complicated ritual can be catastrophic if interrupted part way, and by the time the beam has passed through your special custom lens, Ivy's already shouting out a quick string of incantations. The beam of light struck the amulet, and the air is suddenly filled with an eerie, horrifyingly human howling. The sounds are distant, as if someone is shouting at the other end of a long, echoey tunnel you're standing at the mouth of.

"You were worrying over nothing!" Ivy says over the noise, incantations finished as the light seems almost to… gather around the amulet, going from white to silvery grey. "See? It's working! … Why are you backing away?" The very moment she finishes speaking, the silvery grey light gathering around the amulet fires out, striking the mirror directly.

Then it reflects off the glass, arcing straight for where Ivy is standing. You hear her yelp, see her tense to leap out of the way… and the whole apparatus explodes in a dazzling flash of silver light, as something fast-moving and heavy slams you to the floor.

It's a dazed, alarmed moment before your senses return to you enough to realise that the thing laying on top of you is Ivy herself -- her leap carried her into you, and your small frame, unprepared, could hardly stand up against the weight of a person. Under other circumstances, Ivy having landed on top of you would not have been particularly unwelcome. Right now, though, you are for once too alarmed to be distracted by a pretty person in close proximity to you.

"Ivy?" You cry, struggling to push her away far enough that you can see whether she's been hurt. "Did it hit you? Did anything hit you?"

Ivy seems dazed and confused moreso than in pain, and as her eyes focus enough to make out your face, she merely rolls off to bring herself into a sort of awkward sitting position, examining her hands and arms almost quizzically. The room is now something of a disaster. The lens apparatus seems to have been flung directly into the table, scattering its contents onto the floor. Somehow the cauldron has tipped over, and something thick and runny is slowly spreading its way over the floor. Brute has shifted forward slightly, apparently having attempted to protect Ivy from whatever it was that had happened, but seeing her now relatively unharmed, it has come to a stop a few steps from where it began.

"Ivy?" you ask again, pushing yourself up to a sitting position as well, with a bit more effort than Ivy took to do the task. Which was understandable, given that you were the one who'd been tackled to the floor. "Are you alright?"

She looks at you then, a little startled. As if she might have forgotten you were here since last seeing you. "Ivy," she says, thoughtfully. Making it a statement, rather than a question. "Yes, I'm not hurt." She glances around, a look of intense dismay coming over her face at the mess around her. She starts in surprise upon seeing Brute. This is starting to get a bit suspect.

Nearby, you catch sight of something white among the shards of shattered glass from the mirror -- the amulet, apparently unharmed on the floor nearby. You glance back at Ivy, a core of suspicion growing in the pit of your stomach. Something is wrong here.

"Well, that wasn't supposed to happen," you say, getting stiffly the rest of the way to your feet. The wreckage actually looks worse from this vantage point. So does Ivy -- she's staring as if she has no idea where she is or how she got there.

[x] Obviously and aggressively try to find out if something is wrong with Ivy.

[x] Subtly try to find out if something is wrong with Ivy by.

[x] Play things by ear and don't jump to any conclusions. You don't have enough information yet.

[x] Attempt to cast a basic Soul spell to see how things look magically. As an Alterationist this falls outside your wheelhouse, but you can theoretically still do it.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21
[x] Subtly try to find out if something is wrong with Ivy by.
No. of votes: 9
ChildishChimera, notthepenguins, Hannz, Undead-Spaceman, Pyro Hawk, ThePastryKing, Dragonloli123, emeralis00, SoaringHawk218
Okay, trying to talk our way through this without setting off serious alarm bells is the clear winner here.

[x] Attempt to cast a basic Soul spell to see how things look magically. As an Alternationist this falls outside your wheelhouse, but you can theoretically still do it.
No. of votes: 4
veekie, Macros, Dromeosaur, I just write

[x] Obviously and aggressively try to find out if something is wrong with Ivy.
No. of votes: 2
The Laurent, xtra_ore

[x] Play things by ear and don't jump to any conclusions. You don't have enough information yet.
No. of votes: 2
Nevill, Muer'ci

[X] Yeah, she's obviously possessed. If we can come to an arrangement about making them a suitable replacement body, then it might not turn out badly, but otherwise we're going full Exorcism.
No. of votes: 1
chocolote12

[x] Order Brute to subdue Ivy.
No. of votes: 1
Ziel

If something has gone seriously wrong here, you won't help things by blundering into a mess or flinging accusations openly. Not until you have a better understanding of the situation, at least. You walk over to Ivy, and hold out a hand, offering to help her up. It takes her a moment to notice you, and a second of hesitation before she accepts and uses you as a brace to pull herself to her feet. She seems oddly shaky on her own legs, as if she doesn't quite remember how they work. "This is almost as big a mess as that time Samuel came back from studying in the lowlands," you comment, idly.

Ivy blinks at you, before slowly nodding. "... yes," she says, surveying the wreckage once again.

You try not to show your reaction to that, made easier since she's not actually looking at you. Samuel is Ivy's least favourite classmate. From the first day they met, the two of them have gotten along like two disagreeable house cats. Samuel's return from an expedition to the Lowlands, culminating in an artifact he'd brought back from there reacting violently and levelling half of a study hall, is something that she has never let him live down, nor passed up any opportunity to bring up or gloat about. The mere suggestion that this is anything like what he'd done should have set her rounding on you angrily.

Heart sinking further, you decide to test the suspicion you least want to be true. "You seem dazed," you comment, moving into her line of sight. You hold up your hand in front of her face, causing her to jerk back in slight surprise. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Her face visibly relaxes again, and she says, "Three. Now five. Now two."

You nod, trying to look relieved, before adding: "What year is it?"

A series of unreadable expressions seem to go across Ivy's face, and she gives a nervous sort of laugh. It's nothing like Ivy's usual, borderline offputting cackle. "Oh, uh… hm," she says, taking a step back and waving a hand, as if to dismiss the question. "Maybe I am a little dazed! It's hard to think straight right now. I should go… sit down. It's 720-something, right?" she laughs again in the same vaguely unsteady fashion, before backing away another step or two. The year is 739.

You watch as she makes her way over to a nearby windowsill -- the window long since shuttered up to guard against a broken pane -- and plants herself down, looking genuinely disorientated. She still looks like herself, if perhaps a little bit more rumpled. She has the same face, with a full mouth that goes a little crooked when she smiles, and eyes that are lost somewhere between green and grey. But the way she's moving is different -- unsteady, uncertain in a way that goes far beyond the physical. As far as you've seen, Ivy hasn't had a thought or action she's felt uncertain of in her entire life.

As she moves, your eyes shift down to the amulet, still sitting half buried in the mirror fragments on the floor. Slowly, not quite taking your eyes off of Ivy, you kneel down to lift it up by the chain.

"What are you doing?" Ivy's voice cuts out, just as the chain is just barely hanging on one finger. You freeze in place, looking back at her. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch sight of Brute stiffening, suddenly looking a lot less vacant and a lot more alert. Okay, so, that is something you'll need to take into consideration before doing anything rash -- whatever it is that's wrong, the flesh abomination clearly lacks the capacity to pick up on it. And you know perfectly well that Brute would have no hesitation in tearing you limb from limb if Ivy ordered it.

"... getting your great grandmother's amulet?" you offer, innocently enough. "We should see that it's okay, right?" Just touching the chain makes you feel… strange. Distracted. Almost like something intangible is poking you in the back of your neck. You don't really have the time to focus on it, though. Still only holding it, you lift the amulet up to show her. As you thought, it's made of bone. The intricate star shape glints paley in the light from the remaining oil lamps, and there's a strange sort of crystal set into the middle. It's a pale green, now that you look closely at it, although you initially took it for grey or white. Crystals and other inorganic material on magical items made with witchcraft ordinarily are either ornamental, or serve some sort of non-magical purpose. So it seems unlikely that it actually changed colour.

Ivy stares at the amulet for a long, hard moment, her arms crossing over herself in a strangely insecure gesture. "Yes," she murmurs, crossing her arms over her chest in a very insecure gesture. "Can't lose something that belonged to my great grandmother, can we?"

The amulet definitely feels different to hold than Ivy described it. Rather than feeling depressed or 'terrible,' holding it mostly seems to encourage a feeling of panic rising up in your chest, which you have to keep pushing aside. And the prodding sensation continues. It's pretty distracting and irritating. At the same time, though, you can definitely feel a lingering magical potential about the amulet. You could probably tap into that, to increase your power. There's a good chance Ivy would notice, however.

"She was a monster, you know," Ivy suddenly blurts out, face hardening in anger.

You blink at her. The amulet has been occupying your attention for long enough that you can't immediately pick up on who 'she' is in this statement. "Your great grandmother?" you offer, confused.

"Yes!" she cries, slapping a hand down on the windowsill. "A monster! Do you know what she did after the king died?"

You continue to stare at her, more than a little taken aback, although you can't help but notice Brute continuing to react slightly to Ivy's hostility directed at you. "She fought the first provisional government, didn't she?"

The Necromancer of Dunsal, also the Duchess of Dunsal, had famously summoned up an undead army to destroy the forces that the Regent in charge of the first provisional government had sent across her lands in an attempt to quell an uprising elsewhere. The act had cemented her place as a power in her own right, as well as effectively shattering any faith anyone had in the regent's ability to control the country before he'd had a chance to really even establish himself. It's the reason why Ivy's family still has its duchy, title and wealth even while many other great noble families has fallen on hard times. It's also the first thing anyone ever hears about Ivy's great grandmother. If someone knows nothing else about her, they have at least been told this story.

"She was a traitor!" Ivy suddenly spits out. "All w-- all they were trying to do was cross her land! It had nothing to do with her! But all she cared about was power and making a point, so she set an army of abominations and brigands on the Regent's army! Without even so much as a warning!" She glares at the amulet then, as if it were Ivy's great grandmother in miniature. "Maybe we'd be better off just throwing it away," she says, speculatively.

You feel another attention-arresting pulse from the amulet even as she says it. You have more than enough evidence to be able to say that something is clearly very wrong with Ivy at this point. She hasn't leapt to trying to attack you yet, but you aren't convinced that that isn't coming, given how angry she's gotten at the mere mention of Ivy's famous ancestor.

[x] Just keep trying to play it cool.

[x] Outright ask her what's going on.

[x] Just run now, while she's not expecting it.

[x] Take a moment to try and make contact with the amulet.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21
[x] Just keep trying to play it cool.
No. of votes: 10
Nevill, Muer'ci, Undead-Spaceman, ChildishChimera, SoaringHawk218, I just write, Hannz, MiracleGrow, Ziel, xtra_ore

Playing it cool it is!

[x] Take a moment to try and make contact with the amulet.
No. of votes: 6
Pyran, emeralis00, Prent, Macros, Seventeen, veekie

[X] Mafia Eating PockyDoka
No. of votes: 1
chocolote12

"She's dead," you say, trying to make your voice soft and soothing. "She's been dead for fifteen years. She's not… traitoring anyone anymore."

You finish the last a little lamely as she continues to fix you with a hard, thoughtful stare… but she relents, dropping her eyes down to the floor. At her feet, a stray mirror shard rests where it had been flung when the mirror shattered. She stares thoughtfully at her own reflection, raising a finger to prod gently at her own face. "... she still has heirs though, doesn't she?" Ivy murmurs. Her eyes flick over to the family crest embroidered on the sleeve of her dress. "The duchy of Dunsal is still alive and well, isn't it?"

Oh dear. Time to distract her from that line of thinking. The last thing you need is whoever or whatever Ivy currently is descending on her family to take vengeance on a dead necromancer. "... hungry?" you offer, with a forced, awkward smile. You subtly get a better grip on the amulet -- no way you're letting that out of your sight. It's still seemingly trying to grab your attention, but you keep it from distracting you too badly.

Ivy blinks at you, a little surprised at your complete non sequitur. Then, she admits: "I am absolutely starving. I haven't eaten in…" she trails off, grimacing awkwardly, before summing up: "... a while."

"Great!" you say, at this point more from relief that you've gotten her off of that line of thinking than because of your own hunger. You keep smiling -- you're not sure how convincing it is, considering your worry about what precisely has happened to your friend, and furthermore what might happen to you. After a stretch of silence, you add: "... So, where do you keep the food in here?" As if you still think you're talking to Ivy. You wouldn't be surprised if "Ivy" is already well aware that you're not buying it anymore, but you both seem as though you intend to keep up the pretence until the other says something.

She stares at you for a lengthy, unencouraging moment, before finally, doubtfully saying: "... in the kitchen?" She gives her head a little shake. "Yes. Where else would it be?" She glances up at the cross beams overhead, the arches of the windows. "All these 600s manor houses keep their kitchen at the back-right corner of the bottom floor. The pantry will be right there." She slides down off the edge of the windowsill, still seemingly a little unsteady on her feet, but better than she was as she begins to strike off toward a different door from the one you entered the room from. With her back turned, you hastily drop the amulet around your neck, tucking it into your shirt to escape her notice. The sensations of fear and urgency amplify a little, but it's not unbearable yet.

Alarmingly, as she heads for the door, the floor shakes a little as Brute begins to follow behind the two of you. She whirls around, staring at it in surprise. "... No!" she says, more forcefully than she really needs to. Not that Brute cares how she speaks to it; it comes to an abrupt halt a few paces from where it had been standing. She flounders for a moment, uncertain about what to do with it. "You… clean this up!" she says by way of explanation, waving a hand at the wreckage of the room.

Brute nods its misshapen head in what could almost be a bow, before giving a "yesss, missstresss," and turning to sift through the broken glass and rubble of the experiment. After a further second or two of watching Brute work with a wary expression on her face, the girl who looks like Ivy takes a step back, turns on her heel, and begins to make her way out the door she was aiming for. You follow along behind.

Without the immediate presence of Brute to make things more complicated, you can feel a bit more confident in your chances. Or you would, if you knew anything about what exactly the person you're following is capable of. She goes along at a brisk enough pace, navigating the narrow servants' corridors like someone who knows the general layout rather than someone who has actually gone this way before. Occasionally, she extends a slightly shaky hand to brace herself against the wall. You consider mounting some kind of attack while she's doing that, but you worry Brute might be able to hear if she cries out, and you're still theoretically trying to avoid a fight.

Eventually, you emerge from the narrow hallway into a larger, gloomily lit room sporting a table, a few rickety chairs on a slate floor, with an enormous brick oven taking up the outside wall of the house. It's a full-sized kitchen for a house this size, and not quite as neglected as the rest of the house. If Ivy's been living here, she's had to have been preparing meals here, you decide. The small stack of tin travelling dishes at the far end of the table confirms your assumption. It's far too much to hope that any of original dishes or silverware survived the owners' flight and subsequent plunder by the locals.

Not-Ivy, gripped by a sudden onset of fatigue, settles herself down in the nearest chair, letting out a deep breath. It's a far cry from the almost manic energy Ivy herself was displaying upon your arrival, and you'd feel a little bit of sympathy for how vulnerable and lost she looks, if you weren't currently concerned about more pressing matters. She glances up at you as you crane yourself up on tip-toe in order to flick a hanging gaslamp on. "The pantry is… over there," she says, waving you toward a door on the far side of the room. "Anything will do, at this point."

Her fatigue may be deceptive. Right now it seems to you that you could take the girl in a fist-fight, let alone a magic fight, but it's possible she'll rally again if you give her that much of an incentive to do so. The pantry's also private and out of her immediate line of sight -- it might give you enough time to do something where she won't notice.

[x] Take the opportunity and try to subdue her.

[x] Just go and get some food, no funny business.

[x] Go and grab some food, using the privacy of the pantry in order to synch up with the amulet. She's less likely to notice, exhausted and in the next room.

[x] Pretend to go and grab some food, but really search the pantry for something you can use to subdue or defeat her. Ivy might have some magical components kept in there that you can use.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21
[x] Go and grab some food, using the privacy of the pantry in order to synch up with the amulet. She's less likely to notice, exhausted and in the next room.
No. of votes: 15
I just write, notthepenguins, Nevill, Muer'ci, veekie, MiracleGrow, Pyro Hawk, Undead-Spaceman, SoaringHawk218, Andelevion, chocolote12, ThePastryKing, ChildishChimera, Shiranui, The Laurent

-[x] While doing so, keep a close eye on the door to make sure Not-Ivy doesn't sneak in.
No. of votes: 6
SoaringHawk218, Andelevion, chocolote12, ThePastryKing, Shiranui, The Laurent​

Well, there wasn't really much of a contest there.

[X] How... how long did she have you trapped in there? Express as much horror and disgust as possible, to hopefully draw some empathy from the spirit.
No. of votes: 1
Pandemonious Ivy

[x] Just go and get some food, no funny business.
No. of votes: 1
Hannz

The pantry has clearly seen some use -- you're not sure how long Ivy has been living in this mansion, but she clearly intended to stay for quite some time. There are benefits, you suppose, to travelling around with an undead amalgam creature with the lifting strength of a small ox. Bags of grain, strips of dried meat, cabbage and root vegetables. Jars of fruit preserves. A loaf of bread catches your eye -- it looks fairly fresh, if rustic. You wonder if Ivy's been going down to the village for supplies herself, or if she's been sending Brute on its own with a purse and very specific instructions. You decide that the former is probably more likely.

You don't close the door entirely, but you let it swing almost shut without latching it, reaching up to flick on the gas lamp hanging in this room as well. That accomplished, you set your back against the shelves letting you face the door, grab hold of the chain around your neck, and fish out the amulet. You stare at it apprehensively, almost worried about what you might find, take a deep breath, and reach out to it with Soul magic. This is very basic level stuff -- simply connecting with a magical artifact without manipulating any moving parts or compelling any active effects. So you just mutter a simple two-phrase cantrip three times under your breath to speed the process. You feel the presence from the amulet sharpen in your inner eye, going from vague emotions into something that felt very much like a person. When the words start, you don't 'hear' them -- it has nothing to do with your ears. They're simply words being sent into your head by a voice unlike your own, but very familiar nonetheless. They begin mid-sentence. It's a little like someone had been shouting at you from the far side of a very heavy door, and all you could hear before you flung it open were vague, muffled sounds at the edge of your hearing range.

"--ou hear me now? Please tell me you can! You have to help, Mina, this is a disaster!" It's unmistakably Ivy. You recognise her presence instantly, and that seems to make you perceive the words in her speaking voice, even as thick with fear and anger as it currently is.

"I can hear you," you say, speaking as lowly as you possibly can while still technically producing sound. You know that you could simply will the words to her through the connection you've established, but you find technically speaking makes it easier. This isn't your specialty, after all. "I'm just glad you're okay! Well… maybe not okay, but you're alive at least. Or around. I was getting worried that--"

She doesn't waste a lot of time -- she never does -- and simply cuts you off as if you hadn't been saying anything. In her defence, it's a high stress situation: "Oh, good! What's happened to my body? What's it doing? Is it just lying there, or is there something in it?" Clearly, Ivy's remained calm enough to at least pick up on the gist of what's happened to her, which is encouraging if you expect to have any hope of fixing it. You think about how to answer that.

"There's definitely someone in it," you offer, a little inadequately. "Right now, she's currently waiting out in the kitchen for me to bring her something to eat."

"You're… feeding it? Ivy sounds both incredulous and a little offended.

"Well," you say, feeling strangely defencive, "she was hungry! And I wanted to get her away from that room, at least, what with Brute hanging around getting scary every time she even looked a little angry. I'm trying not to make her angry before I know what she is."

"Brute's listening to it?" Ivy sounded distinctly dismayed. "Right, of course he is. The self-sustaining clauses in the binding means he doesn't actually need an intact magical connection with me to control him, so if it looks like me and sounds like me…"

"Wait," you say, frowning, "so, Brute rates a 'he', but the soul from the amulet is still getting an 'it?' She can actually speak in complete sentences, at least!"

Ivy makes an impatient tsking sound, and you get the vague sense that she'd be waving her hand dismissively under normal circumstances. "It's been in an amulet for decades! Even if the soul is technically living, it doesn't even have a body, or any…" she trails off, as if realising the hypocrisy of this statement.

"Ivy, you--"

"My body isn't dead!" she says, clearly not wanting to contemplate the ethical ramifications in her current position. "But… okay, fine. She. What is she doing? Aside from waiting for food, I mean. Is she threatening you, did she attack you -- you're alright, aren't you? You didn't get hit by anything in that explosion, right? Oh, of course you didn't -- is she threatening you if you don't feed her?"

You shake your head. She can't see it, but she gets the impression of the gesture, at least. "No. She's just… pretending to be you. Badly. Like she's confused and doesn't really know what to do. At one point she started ranting about your great grandmother, and she started thinking about taking revenge on your whole house before I distracted her with food. Or, the promise of food -- I really should get back out there soon, before she gets suspicious."

Ivy sucked in a deep breath, as if imagining the kind of damage a not-quite-undead soul with a vendetta against House Dunsal could do with her face. "If Brute isn't in the room anymore, why don't you just subdue her? Don't damage my body, obviously, but you can manage a sleep spell, can't you? Then you can tie her up, and we can… we can figure out how to switch us back. How badly damaged was the mirror? The lenses?"

You straighten up, still keeping the door partially in your vision, and let the amulet fall back against your chest as you gather up some food -- the bread, some salted pork, a wedge of cheese -- you can't help but tear a chunk out of that last one and shove it into your mouth. It's the expensive kind from the lowlands, which you haven't had since leaving home. Ivy clearly springs for the best in long-keeping travel food. "Well, I don't want to go attacking her when I don't even know what she is. She could be a witch, or have some other kind of magic. What if it doesn't work and she just hits me with a spell herself, or calls for Brute or something like that? And the mirror's completely smashed -- I don't know about the lenses. She ordered Brute to clean up right before we left, so he'll pick them up if any of them are intact, right?" For the first time, involuntarily, you think wistfully of the money you gave to that lenscrafter which you're now certain you'll never see any kind of return on. Your mother would not be impressed.

"Oh, no!" Ivy moans. "He's incredibly clumsy! I hope he doesn't break anything worse! He's designed for heavy lifting and punching wolves, not for picking up delicate glass equipment! Anyway, she's definitely not a witch. If she had any actual Soul magic, she could have talked to me like I am to you. The most she could do even when I was making direct contact was send me vague sensations and make my mood terrible. And increase my magic a little, but I'm sure that's just great grandmother's spell harnessing her life-force. As for Brute, I can try to feed you some power to send a command to Brute's -- if he recognises it as my magic, he might listen to orders given to him directly through Soul magic."

"Soul magic was literally my worst subject," you complain, trying not to think about how many bones an enraged Brute can break before he get to your neck. "I'd have better luck turning him into a toad. Or, four toads sewn together, I guess."

Ivy sighs impatiently. "I told you, I'll be feeding you magic. It can work -- once we have her under control, and we have Brute under control, we need to see about how many of the lenses are still usable, then try and replace the mirror. If the lenses are broken… we need to go to my family. Try to explain to them what happened -- none of us are exactly Great Grandmother, but there are enough master necromancers in the family that we'd have a better chance of figuring that out." Then, because it's Ivy, she can't help but correct you: "And Brute has parts from twelve people. That I counted, anyway -- I won't swear to that number. I bought the parts loose from a flesh merchant in Salvograd. Such people aren't precisely forthcoming with the origin of their wares."

"So you have no idea where this merchant even got the body parts?" You try not to consider the worst sort of possibilities that that question brings to mind.

"They were already dead, does it matter?" she says, clearly exasperated. "We can talk about this later! Right now we have more important things to consider, I think!"

"Okay, okay, fine," you relent. "Even if this plan of yours does work… what is your family going to do with her, do you think?"

"With her? With the soul that stole my body and is plotting to destroy us, you said? Destroy it, most likely. Or put it back into the amulet and make sure no one ever finds it again. Or put it into a zombie and use it for quarry labour until she falls apart, if my father's feeling particularly vengeful." Ivy doesn't sound particularly broken up about any of these possibilities, although it's perhaps not entirely fair to blame her for feeling that way under current circumstances. Then again, you note that she's dropped back into calling whoever's sitting out in the kitchen 'it'.

"Are you finding anything?" not-Ivy calls from out in the kitchen, sounding a little suspicious. Despite her voice technically being Ivy's exactly, it's much easier to note the differences now that you have the real Ivy talking in your head. The cadences are wrong, the word choices are wrong, and more than that, the intangible feel of her is wrong.

"Yes!" you call back. You hear the chair scrape as if she's getting up -- she's likely coming to check up on you. "I've got some food here -- I'll be right out."

"Okay, so you're going to rush out the door and surprise her, right? With the sleep spell?" Ivy apparently heard that exchange, where she didn't quite hear the previous ones. You suspect that your connection to her is allowing her to perceive at least some of what you are perceiving. That should save some time on explanations, at least.

What are you going to do, though?

[x] Go with Ivy's suggestion and try to put not-Ivy to sleep with some basic Alteration magic (intermediate level spell, Body and Order).

[x] Be direct with not-Ivy to try and find out what her intentions are and if she'll be reasonable.

[x] Don't attack not-Ivy, but try to suss things out without talking to her directly or tipping her off to what you're doing.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21
[x] Go with Ivy's suggestion and try to put not-Ivy to sleep with some basic Alteration magic (intermediate level spell, Body and Order).
No. of votes: 9
Macros, cB557, Prent, Shiranui, Dragonloli123, ThePastryKing, veekie, notthepenguins, wingstrike96

This actually ended up being very close, but looks like we're going with Ivy's plan insofar as putting the person in her body to sleep goes.

[X] Be direct with not-Ivy to try and find out what her intentions are and if she'll be reasonable.
No. of votes: 8
Hannz, MiracleGrow, SoaringHawk218, Power, Pandemonious Ivy, The Laurent, Nevill, Seventeen

[x] Don't attack not-Ivy, but try to suss things out without talking to her directly or tipping her off to what you're doing.
No. of votes: 1
Muer'ci

As she sees you start to open the door, not-Ivy is speaking: "I hadn't even thought of it until you mentioned it, but I think I might actually die of hunger right here if you took any long--"

The sleep spell you use has three parts -- a verbal cantrip, a simple gesture, and your knowledge in order to guide the Order and Body magic into your target. So, flinging yourself around the doorway, you point your hand at not-Ivy, shout a short string of incomprehensible words, and feel the magical connection between you and her form, carry out its function, and dissipate again. Not-Ivy didn't have enough time to scream, or to call for help, or to say anything or exhibit any sort of magical defence, but she did have enough time for her eyes to cycle through surprise, to betrayal, before being consumed by the unnatural, bone-deep weariness that had overcome her. She slumped sideways in her chair, the table fortunately breaking her fall. Less fortunately, her head made contact with the table with enough velocity that it likely would leave a bruise.

"Watch what you're doing with my body!" Ivy said, sounding distinctly alarmed. "I want it back after this!"

"I would have caught her if she'd fallen forward," you say, a little bit wounded at the lack of praise for your perfect casting. You'd been a little afraid that she might recognise what was happening in time to cry out, alerting Brute to her distress. As it was, he evidently had failed to notice anything was amiss, multiple rooms away as he was. The spell should work on its own for several hours, leaving not-Ivy looking very peaceful, serene and harmless laying half draped over the table.

Ivy sighs in your head. "Okay, fine, it's not like you broke my arms or anything. There should be some rope in the bag against the wall over there. It was in the same bag as some of the food, and I didn't entirely empty it."

"Rope?" you ask. You duck your head back into the pantry, snatching up the bread to bite a chunk off of it. It's coarse-ground rye bread -- not normally your favourite, but right now it's the most delicious thing you've ever had. "You want me to tie her up?"

Ivy makes an annoyed tutting sound. "Of course I want you to tie her up. That way we can question her when she wakes up. Or something. Quickly, before Brute has a chance to finish cleaning and check back in for more orders!"

You bite into the remainder of the bread, holding the edge in your mouth as you use both hands to sift through the bag Ivy indicated. Sure enough, there's a length of thick, well woven rope rolled up at the bottom. You lift it out in one hand doubtfully, taking the break back in your other. "I'm not exactly an expert at tying people up," you tell her. Looking at not-Ivy's sleeping form, you're not even sure where to start.

"Well, neither am I!" Ivy complains right back at you. "Look, how hard can it be? We can… figure it out."

Long, awkward minutes later -- you wouldn't quite know how to feel about tying up Ivy's sleeping form at the best of times, let alone when she happens to be looking over your metaphorical shoulder the whole time -- you're standing over a somewhat clumsily bound not-Ivy. With a grunt of effort, you shift her up to sit back against a cabinet, her head lolling senselessly with the motion. Until the spell runs out, she should be able to sleep through the whole house coming down around her ears.

"Mina?" Apart from offering technical advice, Ivy has been oddly quiet during the whole process. Which is better than her getting angry at you over where you might have inadvertently put your hands during the tying process, the way you were half terrified she might. Now, though, she sounds a little more tentative and uncertain, rather the the panic or brisk annoyance her voice has otherwise had since you made contact with the amulet. That gives you pause.

"Yes?" you ask, before straightening up wearily.

"I'm sorry, she says, as if not quite certain what she wants to say or how to say it. "I'm sorry for being… not sounding very grateful to you. If you weren't here helping me, I'd be…" She trails off, but you get the picture -- she would be trapped in an amulet, maybe forever, with no hope of getting out. "I know I promised that you'd get something out of this to impress a potential master," she added. "I'm sorry if that's not… looking very likely, right now."

You sigh a little, thinking about that, and the other hopes you'd had for this trip, which weren't looking any more likely than Ivy's promises were of coming true. "It's okay," you say. "You couldn't have known this was going to happen." You're not really sure it is all entirely okay yet, but you doubt that's what Ivy needs to hear in her current situation. You glance down at not-Ivy again -- now your prisoner, you belatedly realise. You're also not sure if you're okay with her probably fate if turned over to the tender mercies of Ivy's family. But that's a bridge to cross when you came to it, you suppose.

"Do we… have to try and get Brute on side?" you ask. "Couldn't we just… I don't know, take her and run? Before he notices anything's wrong?"

"Sure, if you want to carry her in my body the whole way," Ivy said with some justifiable derision. Given your relative proportions, you're not even sure it would be easy for you to drag her out to a wheelbarrow or something of the like. If there's even one to be found on the grounds anymore. Then, adding further incentives, she adds: "And if it looks like you kidnapped me, he'll follow you... more or less forever. He's not smart -- doesn't really think much at all, honestly -- but the spell has parameters that mean he'll follow me if anyone takes me away without me ordering him not to."

The last thing you need right now is Brute chasing you down a forest road while you try helplessly to drag Ivy's unconscious body away from the manor. You're not happy about it, but it looks as though Ivy might be right.

--

With a heavy sense of apprehension, you pull yourself together, and make your way clumsily back the way you came to the workroom where, sure enough, Brute is awkwardly holding a broom in one hand, perpetually seeming at risk of snapping the thing with his crushing strength. He's made some headway, though, and with a mixed feeling of relief, you notice that he's stacked a pile of lenses on the table; some of them look intact, while others are mazed with hairline cracks. As you enter through the doorway, he looks up and around at you briefly, before dismissing you as unimportant and going back to his cleaning.

"Oh no," Ivy moans, seeing the wrecking through your perception for the first time. "What a mess! We'll… well, we'll see about replacing whatever's broken later. Right now, I just need you to make contact with him with a bit of Soul magic, and issue a command. Just… 'stop cleaning' will work for now. I'll feed you magic, and hopefully he'll recognise you as me while You're doing that."

"Hopefully?" you murmur. As you watch, Brute actually does snap the broom in half accidentally. You try not to imagine one of your bones in place of it.

"Probably!" Ivy amends, not quite making you feel as much better as she may have hoped. "Ready?"

You feel the passive flow of magic between the two of you briefly intensify, and with a deep breath, you stare at the back of Brute's head, and murmur the same cantrip as you used to make contact with the amulet, repeating it three times for added power. Unlike with the medallion, however, the stream of magic you let flow out comes up against something almost like a hard surface physically blocking your magic: Ivy's wards against another necromancer banishing or taking over her creation. The ones her magic were going to 'hopefully' or 'probably' let you bypass.

Slowly, ominously, Brute turns around to look at you. There's no rage in his blank, dim-witted eyes. No emotions of any kind. Just a dull, menacing, and very obvious intent as he lumbers his way toward you.

"Ivy, that really, really didn't work!" You say, taking a few steps backwards as you watch the abomination approach.

"It will! Just… keep trying!" she urges you.

[x] Do as Ivy says and redouble your efforts to bring Brute under your control with more Soul magic.

[x] Forget about it and run.

[x] Try to turn Brute into something before he can get you.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21
[x] Try to turn Brute into something before he can get you.
No. of votes: 8
ThePastryKing, cB557, Power, The Laurent, Macros, Undead-Spaceman, Nevill, Brakus
cB557
-[x] something like a beast of burden.
No. of votes: 1

-[x] fuse his leg bones together
No. of votes: 1
ThePastryKing​

Wreck Ivy's toy it is!. Only one vote for each of those write-ins and they're a little bit mutually exclusive. I know which one of these I prefer, but that's also the meaner result so I'm going to be nice and flip a coin. Heads is leg-fusing, tails is beast of burden (because tails is a caribou, which is a beast of burden for Santa Claus at least): Heads.

[x] Do as Ivy says and redouble your efforts to bring Brute under your control with more Soul magic.
No. of votes: 5
Hannz, Shiranui, ChildishChimera, veekie, Muer'ci

You discard Ivy's suggestion, bolstered by the iron-hard certainty that if you don't do not want Brute to flatten you while you're still trying to do necromancy that's clearly beyond you, with or without Ivy's help. Maybe her trick of using her magic to fool her own constructs could work, but you'd probably want to try it with something a bit simpler first. And a bit less lethal in terms of its response to a failed attempt.

So you improvise. A memory comes unbidden to your head -- your first year at the Academy. Late, so you were running in the hall. The alteration teacher seeing you, raising a disapproving hand, all your limbs locking up at once… There and then, it had not been fun when you'd fallen face first onto the floor. Here and now, though, the demonstration shows just what might save you. Certainly easier than turning something into a toad.

You brace yourself in the path of the onrushing giant, take the power Ivy is offering you, and instead of using it for its intended purpose, you add it to your own energy already fueling the beginnings of an Entropic alteration spell. Brute is more than halfway to you as you raise both hands, stare him in the eye, and say a word of power that slips fluidly out of your mouth, before snapping taught in the open air. You see him stumble, and you say the word again. You see him begin to slow, to stagger, struggling to move his thick arms in any meaningful sense. You say the word a third and final time. It's enough -- he crashes to the floor in front of you with a thud that sends a vibration through the floor beneath you, limbs completely unresponsive, letting out a low, irritated grown from the base of his ruined throat as he tries to stare up at you.

"That wasn't the plan!" Ivy exclaims, in dismay more than anger. "What if you've damaged him? Do you know how much trouble I had to go to to make him as strong as he is? A lot!"

"He was going to kill me, Ivy!" you remind her, letting out a general shudder at the thought. You take a step or two back from Brute's immobile form.

"That's why we were going to just take control of him!" Ivy protests. "It… would have worked." She sounds a little more doubtful than when she did a second beforehand, though, and a moment later, she relents. "... Alright,it's more important that you're alright. And it's not like you did anything irreversible to him. I guess we could take him over while he's like that, and you can just reverse the spell. You can reverse it, can't you?"

You consider making a comment about who exactly would cast a spell that she has no way of reversing, but you bite your tongue. She's trying to be reasonable, and rubbing her situation in her face isn't going to do anything but make her mad at you, and that won't be a comfortable situation for anyone involved, considering that she's currently little more than a voice in your head. So instead, you just reassure her: "Yes, I can reverse it. It's more or less the same spell, but reversing the effect. Are you sure we can actually break your wards? They felt pretty solid."

"We should be able to," Ivy says. "Especially now -- it's not as though he can do anything if you don't manage it. Are you ready to try again?"

You nod. You've been doing a fair amount of magic in a short period of time, but most of it has been pretty basic. You're good for a few more attempts to bind Brute to your will, at the very least. And it does take a few more attempts, and the better part of an hour, before you forge a strong enough connection that Ivy doesn't entirely despair of you -- your first attempt was so shaky that, ordering Brute to blink three times, you could see him visibly trembling with the effort to disobey you.

"I don't know how well this is going to hold up, still," you say, a little worried. A large part of you just wants to leave him like this -- safely unmoving, rather than risk him breaking free of your spell once he's back on his feet. It is true that he could carry not-Ivy and any number of supplies, but you're not sure you trust your control. "She'll be up in another hour or two," you add, a thought occurring to you. "Since she's all tied up and can't do anything, maybe we should... talk to her before we decide on anything."

"Why?" Ivy demands. "The mirror's broken, we're missing some of the lenses… we'll have to go back to Dunsal to get help anyway. What's there to decide?"

"Well," you say, looking at the lack of any remaining daylight filtering through the boards on the windows, "It's too late to go anywhere else tonight. I'm still pretty hungry, and I'm tired anyway. There's no rush on fixing Brute's limbs until we have to leave. So… I guess I can just renew the sleep spell to keep her under until morning, and decide what to do then. If the spell on Brute gives out overnight, it was never going to hold to begin with, and this way we're not testing it unnecessarily."

"... Well, I guess we can't set out right away," Ivy admits.

You're grateful that you finally at least have the prospect of a meal and some kind of bed to spend the night in, but even with a full stomach, you don't sleep well. How could you, considering everything that's happened?

What do you actually decide to do in the morning?

[x] Let not-Ivy wake up, and try to have a talk with her before deciding on anything.
[x] Keep her under, free Brute's limbs and order him to carry her, heading for Dunsal.
[x] Try to find some other way to transport her, heading for Dunsal.

 

[Gazetteer]

Spoiler: Results

Vote tally:
##### 3.21

[X] Let not-Ivy wake up, and try to have a talk with her before deciding on anything.
No. of votes: 8
Hannz, notthepenguins, Power, The Laurent, cB557, SoaringHawk218, kinigget, ThePastryKing

Wake her up it is.

[x] Keep her under, free Brute's limbs and order him to carry her, heading for Dunsal.
No. of votes: 3
Pandemonious Ivy, Muer'ci, veekie

You find your way to the little servants' bedroom Ivy had cleaned out and converted for her own use. It's a simple, Spartan room -- a rickety little writing desk scattered with odds and ends and a journal Ivy scolds you away from even glancing at for too long. A small chest of clothes. A bed, and a wash basin. You fumble your way through making use of this last. Filling it is a chore -- your parents' home, well defended and lavish, has indoor plumbing that was, when last you visited, only a few years out of date by the standards of the world beyond Weissany. The Academy isn't quite that modern, but they had been better than many places. This manor, long abandoned when such conveniences were in their earliest stages of dissemination in the country, had very limited facilities that the long years of neglect and abandonment had done little favours to.

"Why did you even come all the way out here?" you demand of Ivy, in a fit of frustration.

Ivy mentally shrugs. "It's private, and it's reasonable secure. The people nearby are too afraid to bother me, but they still accept my money. A lot of secluded places, if a necromancer arrived and tried to set up like this, the local peasants would be out to run them off with pitchforks and muskets. I don't mind a few inconveniences when it's such a good place to run experiments."

Inconveniences like half the second story being ready to fall in and an infestation of fats that requires her to keep setting up wards around the parts of the manor she lives in seem like a bit more of a deal breaker to you, but you suppose you don't have to deal with the animosity many people have toward necromancy in addition to the general fear of witchcraft -- Alteration, when it's kept to innocuous things like healing or putting people to sleep, can even be considered the most publicly acceptable form of witchcraft. Still, it doesn't make it any more convenient for you to prepare a hasty meal or wash up before bed.

You sleep fitfully, and you have multiple strange dreams that you can't quite remember once you've woken up. That's usually a sign of stress on your part. By then you've already decided that you'd rather talk to the prisoner than simply bundle her off to Ivy's family. Finding out who the lost soul is and what she wants seems like it's an important first step. If you can avoid sending her into the hands of Ivy's vengeful parents, then that can only be a plus. She took over your friend's body, certainly, but she hasn't acted particularly maliciously or violently toward you. Mostly, she seemed lost and confused.

Ivy seems pretty conflicted about this plan. She's alternately irritated and resigned. She seems to understand the logic of finding out some basic information before setting out on an irreversible course, but over the course of the morning, she flipflops and often enough that you finally get the impression that she's mostly afraid. It's easier for her if the prisoner is just some inhuman lost soul who tricked her and stole her body and plans to destroy her family -- a problem that can just go away, that she can deal with and put out of her mind forever. Actually talking to not-Ivy is making the situation more complicated. Ivy is very good at not thinking about things that are uncomfortable or inconvenient -- at compartmentalising. Forcing her to confront the person in her body as a human soul with wants and needs, who can be talked and reasoned with like any other person, makes it harder.

You're cooking some of the salted pork and vegetables for breakfast. Not a wonderful meal, but better than what you had the night before. Your connection to Brute is still holding up, but it's not feeling any better than it did the night before. not-Ivy is still in the kitchen, although with some effort, before bed you moved her from the floor to a chair, binding her in place with the last of the rope so she won't fall out of it.

You could use a counterspell to wake her up, but you timed your second casting last night well -- you can already see the magic began to slough off of her, falling away and leaving an incomprehensible bleariness in its wake. She stirs in place, murmurs, starts to crack her eyes open.

"I still don't know if I like this," Ivy murmurs. "Are you sure you know what you're doing, mina?"

"No," you admit freely, moving the breakfast onto two separate plates. "I've had no idea what I'm doing ever since I got here. I have to do something though, don't I?"

She doesn't fully respond to that, only sending you a small, implied sense of uncertainty. The mental equivalent of an ambiguous "Mm." You wonder, then, what it will be like if you never get her back to her body. If she has to stay like this, a disembodied voice in an amulet around your neck. Would she get used to it, or would it eventually drive you mad? What would you be able to do to make things easier for her? Very little, you suspect. And you're not ready to let that happen yet.

With a small, confused waking sound -- not unlike a cat gently disturbed from rest -- not-Ivy raised her head, and cracked open one eye more fully, looking blearily around the kitchen. She sees you, takes note of you, and frowns, as if trying to suss out where she is and what happened. You can see the moment where she remembers, her sleepy confusion burning away in an instant into hot, searing rage.

"You!" she shouts, rocking the chair forward in an attempt to sit up. This causes her to look down, note the ropes binding her to the chair. This, if anything, only redoubles her anger. "You… you lied to me!" she says, with a note of oddly self conscious betrayal in her voice. As if she's already reproaching herself for ever assuming you wouldn't do such a thing, stranger and friend to the girl she displaced that you are. She goes on before you can answer: "Of course you did. You're… you're a witch too, aren't you? I knew you must be. You're all the same. All of you. Give you half a chance, and all you'll do is stab us in the back every time. Like you've always done! You're closer to monsters than to people, you're not like--" here her voice cracks noticeably, and she visibly halts, swallowing in discomfort.

Hesitantly, you hold up a tin cup full of water. "Are you… thirsty?" you ask. You already know that she is, and she obviously knows she can't hide it from you. She doesn't want to say yes, though. She's too angry to admit that she needs anything from you at all, and so instead she just glares for a long, resentful moment. Until finally, reluctantly, her parched throat wins out, and she nods her head, giving consent for the cup to be placed to her lips. She drinks it down thirstily, and once she's done, her stomach growls noticeably.

"You can have some food after we talk," you say, reasonably. Her outburst shocked you, a little; it's hardly an unexpected outlook from someone who had lived through the fall of Weissany as a nation state, especially if she was someone who had somehow had her soul ripped from her body while still alive by a witch she'd thought wasn't even her enemy. But the water and her own hunger, and perhaps your lack of an angry or vengeful response seems to have quite halted the momentum of her anger.

"What do you want?" she mutters, after a while.

"Tell her we want my body back!" Ivy says, speaking up for the first time since the prisoner had awakened.

"Ivy wants her body back," you say. "And I can't really leave her how she is, can I?"

Not-Ivy looks back at you almost sullenly, her eyes tracking down to the familiar amulet around your neck. Clearly, she knows where Ivy is and the position she must be in. "So she can actually talk from in there. She's a necromancer, so I suppose it makes sense. All I could ever manage was… well, I could tell when someone was wearing me, and sometimes what they were feeling. That's it. That's all I had for… for I don't know how long!" Her anger abruptly rekindles to its full force, and a savage, desperate glare stabs out at you from eyes beginning to brim with hot tears. "I will not go back to that! I won't! Just kill me if that's what you want to do!"

"Does she think that it's fair for me to stay like this instead?" Ivy demands. She's upset too, but her anger is tinged with… a strange discomfort. Something she doesn't particularly want to think about, but is being forced to.

"Are… those the only two options?" you ask, a little uncertainly. Soul magic isn't your specialty, but you know enough about it to know that if a soul can be put into one body, it should be able to be put into another.

"How should I know?" she snaps at you, at the same time as Ivy says: "Does it matter?"

You sigh a little, and fork a piece of pork into your mouth. You see not-Ivy track the passage of the fork, but stubbornly set her jaw against asking for any. "Ivy just wants me to take you to Dunsal," you tell her. "She thinks her family will know how to get you out, and you can probably guess the kind of things they'd do to you for this. Ivy's not their heir, but she's their second born child, and she's the most talented out of all her siblings and cousins -- her father will be pretty mad."

"Well, why are you even talking to me, then?" she snaps. She's afraid now, though. You can hear the edge of it in her voice. "If that's all you're going to do, what's the point?"

You shrug a little helplessly. "I… don't know if I actually want to do that," you admit. At the back of your head, Ivy is a little annoyed, but apparently not surprised, and she doesn't muster much of an objection. "I mean, I definitely want Ivy to get her body back, but… well, I don't know what I should do with you."

"Well, she can't stay where she is!" Ivy intersects.

"I just said that," you say out loud, without really thinking. You ignore not-Ivy's questioning, suspicious look. You lower your voice, sub-vocalising so that only Ivy can hear you. "We'll get you back into your body, but… do we have to just give her to your father, if he's going to do that kind of thing? We could try to work something out. Like… we could go back to Blacktree -- the head necromancy instructor could--"

"No!" Ivy interrupts. "We don't have to do that! If we go back to Blacktree, that'll be as good as telling the whole world what incompetent witches we are. I don't want to end up having to carry around books for Aunt Mara because no one outside the family wants to take me on! Besides, no one at Blacktree is going to be more qualified than my family to solve this, and for all you know they'd keep her to study her anyway."

You glance at not-Ivy, who is frowning at you, clearly aware that you're having a conversation she's not privy to, and just as clearly trying not to let herself feel hopeful. "Well, there has to be somewhere else we could take her," you murmur.

Ivy sighs. "We could try to do it ourselves. But we'd need a lot of supplies, and preparation, and… no offence, Mina, but we're going to need another necromancer if we're going to try and bring a body back to a semblance of life enough that it won't just rot around her. I mean, I assume we're not willing to steal some random peasant girl and put her soul in an amulet."

"Okay, what would we need for that?"

"A replacement for the mirror, a replacement for some of the lenses. Plus a body and a necromancer to help us with it. If you're really going to insist on that, the best place to start is probably Salvograd. Being a witch isn't illegal there, and there's a black market for the parts of witchcraft that are. The man who sold me the parts for Brute would be a good start - he'd sell us some of the things, like a body and some materials, and be able to point us in the right direction for the rest of it."

"I thought you said he's not trustworthy," you point out.

"Well, no, he's not. At all. He's a businessman, but I wouldn't want to show any kind of weakness around him," Ivy tells you bluntly. "I'm just giving you an alternative since you're getting all bent out of shape out of this. We could… just go back to Dunsal, and we could ask my father not to hurt her, maybe?" She sounds extremely doubtful about either of your ability to restrain her father from acts of retribution against not-Ivy. Which is not particularly encouraging. It would be so much easier just to go for them for help, though...

Once again, you find your eyes drawn back to your bound prisoner. She's in Ivy's body, so of course she technically has all of the physical features you'd admired in Ivy. She wears them differently, though. Instead of Ivy's almost manic energy and contagious enthusiasm, behind the tears, you can see a fiery determination. A will to survive, to do what it takes and endure what hardships she has to. And that thoughtful, troubled frown pulls Ivy's face in a direction you'd never seen before. None of Ivy's abrupt, almost sparrow-like mannerisms and brisk movements. Despite her fatigue, you've noticed that your prisoner moves with a deliberate self awareness. Not self-doubting, but wary. Her voice has a similar quality. She makes Ivy sound older. More experienced. No matter how awkward the situation, you know that you won't feel good about leaving whoever she is trapped or dead. You can't help it -- it's the same thing that led you to come out here after Ivy, overlooking many different, less foolhardy ways to impress a potential mentor: She stirs that instinctive and tragically shallow sympathy you've felt from your early teens for anyone with a winning smile or pretty eyes or a laugh that makes you flush with pleasure. You want to help Ivy, first and foremost -- she's your friend, after all -- but you'd like to also help this woman too, if you can.

"What?" not-Ivy demands, her frown deepening. "What are the two of you saying about me?"

You sigh. "First things first, what do I call you? I can't keep thinking of you as 'not-Ivy' forever."

"Not-Ivy?" not-Ivy asks, looking annoyed and incredulous. "Why would-- Fine. My name is… it's…" she falters here, her frown taking on a more worried, inward quality. As if she's trying to decide what to say. "... Star," she decides. "You can call me Star, if you're going to call me anything. Aren't you just going to sell me to necromancers, witch?"

"I'm Mina," you say, ignoring the comment. "And, uh… I wouldn't like to." You tilt your head, thoughtfully. "What would you do if I untied you?" you ask.

"What?" Ivy demands. "You're not serious!"

"Are you… serious?" Star asks, looking at you incredulously. "Why would you just untie me?"

You shrug. "Well, if you're going to agree to not to attack me, or to run away with Ivy's body. Would you mind giving it back to her, if we could find you something else?"

She continues to look a little unconvinced, and a little offended now. "You think I'd rather you tore some other person away from their body, just so some spoiled necromancer can have hers back?"

"I'm not the one who goes around stealing bodies in the first place!" Ivy shoots back, although Star can't hear her. You decide against passing on the sentiment for now.

"Well, no," you say. "We could… find you something. Necromancy isn't all zombies and gross things like Brute back there." You jerk a thumb in the vague direction of the room where the creature still lays immobilised. "We could get you a real body."

"And you think her family would go along with that?" she asks you, looking pointedly at the amulet around your neck. "Houses don't change so much in a few decades. Never trust a Dunsal. I won't go along with you just for that!"

"We shouldn't untie her no matter where we're taking her," Ivy cautions you. "She could be dangerous! We need to be careful here."

"We could… take you somewhere else," you say, slowly. "If you promised not to try anything stupid, and to work with us. I want to help you too."

"I won't make promises I have to break," she says, giving you a hard look. "Where are you planning to take me?"

A good question. You'd rather untie her and do things in a civilised manner, but you suspect how trustworthy she'll be will depend in part on what plan you can lay in front of her.

[x] Take her to Dunsal, and try to talk some sense into Ivy's family. Maybe they can be talked out of punishing Star too severely.

[x] Take her to Blacktree -- Ivy really won't like it, but it's the safest option you have.

[x] Go to Salvograd and start trying to gather the materials you need to duplicate Ivy's experiment yourself. You can use Ivy's money, and finding a necromancer willing to try shouldn't be that hard.

Spoiler: OoC Note

To be more explicit, one of your (Mina's) major character flaws, as implied by one of your first choices in the thread, is that it is very hard for you to resist a pretty face. This is going to create situations where you act rashly or against your own interests, although there will always be a choice that has the potential to avoid or mitigate damage from that. You would like to trust Star, not entirely but in part because you think Star is cute and it makes you feel bad for putting her in a bad situation. You're a bit shallow that way.