Chapter Eighteen - Got a black magic NPC

We covered the body again and walked back.

“So. What?” Livia asked.

I gave her the phone without another word. She froze when she saw the picture.

“Fuck.”

“That’s… That was Greg’s daughter. Lissi Geraldine Hamilton. I only met her once. She stayed with me when he had a court date with his ex about some visitation bullshit. My parents were out of town, and when a nice downstairs neighbour asks, who am I to say no? I think I know why she never came over again in all those years.”

“I can’t really fault Greg for keeping her away from you, though.”

“Neither can I. It’s not exactly safe around me,” she pointed at where the body was hidden under that cloth.

“Who’s Greg?” Samantha asked.

“The guy who drove us here,” I explained.

“Fuck.”

“Amen.”

“What should we do? Tell him? Hide the body?”

“Congratulations, you get to train what it’s like to be a copper and inform the parents of some crime victim,” I said with more edge in my voice than was warranted.

“Shoosh,” Livia interrupted us. She had her phone up at an ear. The call connected a moment later.

“Hey Bill, are you with Greg? No? Good. We have a situation—and it’s going to destroy Greg. No, no, not job-related. We just found a body… Bill, it’s Lissi. Yes, Greg’s Lissi. Yes, bloody fucked up is right, no, we already got the killer. He’s dead, too. I don’t think so, but I haven’t checked, gimme a second.” She covered the mouthpiece and mouthed “rape?” towards us.

Sam and I both shook our heads. We had seen the trousers still on the body, even though one leg had been missing.

“No, Bill. Ok, but I need to pick you up halfway. See you in a sec.”

She hung up and turned towards the road, but I stopped her. “What do we do about the troll?”

“Good one. Um, no idea. Can you maybe drag it out of sight?”

“We’ll try.”

🖹

You’ve got a private message from SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Gamma-10: “Players have a temporary ability to glamour monster bodies to appear as something natural.” Reply? (1) Yes. (2) No.

Thanks, Ten. Keep your time fixing those issues; I like the attention.

🖹

You’ve got a private message from SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Gamma-10: “Don’t hold your breath. There are major incompatibilities between gamification and this setting. Whoever wrote it recycled parts of gamification and mangled them badly to fit their idea.” Reply? (1) Yes. (2) No.

Could you revert us to humans and then re-apply what we had using gamification means?

🖹

You’ve got a private message from SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Gamma-10: “Only partially. And not without hurting you badly. We are currently looking at doing it the other way around, adding a player bridge to the setting. But that would also make all magicals players.” Reply? (1) Yes. (2) No.

What’s wrong with that?”

🖹

You’ve got a private message from SOL-GB-Liverpool-39-Gamma-10: “NPCs. It would connect NPC magicals with the player data of their natural counterparts in other shards. We need to first extend the setting to be able to treat NPCs and real people differently.” Reply? (1) Yes. (2) No.

Good luck. And, this time in earnest, take your time. I’d rather wait an extra day or two than have this blow up.

“Samantha, have you gotten that old table knight ability to handwave monster bodies to look like people’s? That would be the right play here.” Alessandra was standing right next to us, so I had to use hints. Sam picked up on it without a hitch, though and after fumbling with her character menu a bit, a haze lay on the troll’s body. It was like seeing double, a tall dead man and a dead troll lying in the same place.

“Dat is impressive. Ay know, and I still cannot see anything wrong wit dat. Good tinking,” Alessandra said. Oh, right this worked on non-players, not non-magicals.

There was something else. It took me way too long, but then I found it. That not-magical magic bubble had disappeared when Samantha cloaked the troll’s body. No longer needed, I guessed.

🙚⚜🙘

Livia arrived back with Bill in tow shortly after. I had seen him earlier when we had been picked up after the goblin fight but had not spoken to him. He had gotten out of the car and sprinted to another one to make space for us. He looked a couple of years younger than Greg, not as obviously muscled, but the way he moved told me he’d be formidable in a fight. Or would be for a human.

I felt Samantha tense up next to me when she saw his face. Then he saw us and stopped just looking for a moment. Then he nodded his head, “Miss Jane, miss O’Brian.”

“Hi, Bill,” I said.

“Mr. Lister,” Samantha said.

He nodded again, then followed Livia’s guidance to the body.

“You know him?” I whispered to Samantha.

“Ex-copper. Was suspected of taking bribes, but they couldn’t pin anything on him. He left with a good severance payment because the investigation ruined his career. And he’s a D&D buddy of my dad. ‘Is’, not ‘was’…” she whispered back. “Spends every Friday evening at our house, talking about all kinds of things with my dad and a couple other coppers.”

“I hope Livia pays him well,” I said with a smile. “Sounds like he’s worth it.”

“I heard him saying he’s earning more than my dad in his new job as a security consultant once,” Samantha said. “Dad had complained about getting a way too expensive Christmas present from him…”

“…that he probably expensed with the org,” I added, suppressing a big grin. That wasn’t appropriate near the dead body of one of our employee’s daughter. Yes, ‘our’. I had no doubt Livia would treat me as a co-boss if it ever came up.

But damn. Greg had impressed me earlier and I had planned on picking his brain tonight. With this shit happening to him, he’d be out of the picture for weeks. And even afterwards, people who had to bury their kids rarely got back into the saddle of a job that had life and death situations. It’s hard to beat someone senseless when that reminds you of your own loss. And Greg was a real person, not an NPC like Bill. I could feel his soul.

Lissi also had been one. She’d died because…no, that train of thought wasn’t worth it.

🙚⚜🙘

Bill and Livia walked back up to us. His face had a thoughtful expression, and he was sniffing the air.

“What’s wrong, Bill?” I asked.

“Something doesn’t add up here,” he said. He was thinking hard; I could see it on his face. Samantha? Alessandra? Livia? Anyone? Or do I need to handle this, again?

“Speak your mind, Bill. We won’t bite,” I said.

He looked me in the eyes for a second; I held his gaze without blinking. Then he said, “The teeth marks on the, um, roast don’t match that guy,” he pointed towards the troll’s body. “And this whole clearing has a distinct stink to it.”

“What are you saying? That we killed some bridge troll and magicked up a fall guy?”

“I had thought hill troll, but yes.”

I shrugged. “I don’t claim to be a troll expert, to be honest. I just rip them apart.”

“Looks like you were as good at taking it as you were at dishing it out,” he noted with a dry smile, looking me up and down. Oh, right. I was covered in blood and shit.

“Got a good healer,” I said. “Just not good enough for her.”

He nodded. “Nothing any healer could do anything about. But…”

“But what? Spit it out if you have an idea,” I said, slightly aggravated. Why had the system made this NPC a magical? That stunk to high heavens.

“Her soul’s still hanging around,” he said. “There are ways—“

“—you want to raise de dead?” Alessandra interrupted. “Make her a zombie?”

“Zombies are soulless dead,” Bill said quickly, “and mindless killing machines on top. That’d be idiotic. No, I’m talking about making the body a vessel she can control and live in again.”

“You can do that?” Livia asked. “I’m not underpaying you badly, am I?”

He chuckled. “You’re not underpaying me; that stuff is way out of my league. Mice and rats are all I usually do. Useful to eavesdrop, that’s all. But I have the rituals in my spellbook, and with enough power, I think I can lead one.” Sure. All you’re missing is power, Billy; that’s so believable.

“Ay need to see dat before agreeing,” Alessandra demanded.

“Sure,” Bill said and pulled a thick tome out of nothing. I felt a trickle of magic when he did that. It felt like stretching a rubber band. Some kind of magical pocket, I would say, if I had to guess.

He paged through it, Alessandra looking over his shoulder with a stern expression. I left them to it and pulled Livia to the side.

“What do you think of that plan?” I asked her.

“I have no idea,” she said. “Necromancy? That wasn’t on my day planner.”

“Neither was it on mine, “ I said. “Bill’s an NPC, by the way. I’m not sure if you can tell.”

“I can’t. Greg?”

“Has a soul, is a ‘digitised natural person’ as the system calls it. Same for the girls.”

“That means the system made him able to do that on purpose. He’s not showing up randomly.”

“My thoughts exactly. That’s why I didn’t argue with him. Based on any movie I’ve ever seen, and most books, this would be a bad idea.”

“Only most?”

“Yes, there are some books with intelligent, nice, reasonable, and so on, undead. Some even have them as protagonists.”

“Let’s hope for this then. I’d rather not have Greg have to mourn his daughter.”

🙚⚜🙘

“We have three viable options,” Bill explained. “The first is a classic. Lich. It’s a skeleton with the soul stored in a number of objects. Long-term undead, but needs magic to appear human.”

“And no sex drive,” Alessandra added.

“Yes, some see that as another negative,” Bill admitted. “The old men who choose that path less so. The second one is a body puppet. An animated dead body that can be remote-controlled by its master. Usually, the necromancer who created it, but it can be bound to anyone, even a soul. I would need to bind the soul to an object to keep it from passing into the afterlife, but that’s trivial.”

“And the negatives?”

“No regeneration whatsoever. Think ‘Death Becomes Her’ if you’ve seen that movie.”

I had, ages ago. “Doesn’t sound like a long-term solution. We’d need to get her a new body every so often, I guess?”

He nodded. “That’s what people usually do. But then, they’re not using their own bodies in the first place. This is the spell I use when I use a rodent to spy.”

“And the last one? I guess that’s what we’ll be going with?”

“The last group,” he said. Variants of the same concept. Vampire. Great self-healing, immune to being controlled by a necromancer, and the body is nearly alive. It has a heartbeat, metabolic processes, and sex drive, even though the reproductive organs don’t work, but that’s the same for all undead. There’s just the issue of needing an energy source, as all those goodies are too much for ambient mana to sustain.”

“Blood,” Samantha said.

“Not necessarily,” Bill said, holding up the open book. “We have some discretion on that.” He pointed to a diagram. It looked complex, but I could recognise the major nodes. They were life absorption (reality altering), blood digestion (physical), soul digestion (physical), and two more I couldn’t read. For some reason, the system translated those I knew into skill names.

“Life, blood, soul, and what are those two?” I said, pointing to the three nodes I understood.

“Magic and sex,” Livia filled in.

Bill looked at us wide-eyed. A faint smell of fear filled my nose.

“Hey, I told you we don’t bite. I meant it.” I said, realising we just had given away the fact that we could do those things. Also, does the smell of fear count as pheromones? It must, I had nothing else smell-related.

“Um, yes, sorry. That’s rich, isn’t it? Usually, people are terrified of me,” he said. “So, um, what I wanted to say is that we can balance those five according to this diagram. It is a bit limited, as the abilities of the spell caster have a big influence. A human can pull some energy from blood by simply digesting it, so it is the most common one. One can force in another, but that’s tricky. Having you part of the ritual gives us a whole slew of possibilities.”

“Can we make it so she has options? Like being able to eat something only if she wants to?” Samantha asked.

“Usually, that would be a no, but with this group as casters? That’s what I meant when I said possibilities.”

“Good,” I said. “Then we’ll keep blood in the mix. It is a great fallback as it is easily available. I don’t like soul-eating, if it is what it sounds like. Does it have the potential to destroy souls?”

“It would, if we were to force it. We have the possibility to keep it at a lower stage, allowing her to siphon soul energy the victim would regenerate over time. Same with the blood, by the way. At stage three, that’s a killer; at stages one and two, the victim survives and can regenerate. Two would also give her the ability to go all out when eating and kill the victim if she wants.”

“She can’t do that on stage one?”

“Not by digesting the blood. Naturally, sucking and spitting it out would still work; any human can do that.”

“Then I’m fine with blood two, soul one. Sex doesn’t kill, does it?”

“No. There, the stages are more from ambient absorption to being exhausted for days.”

“Then stage three is fine. Magic?”

“Can kill. Stage three is a full Agatha, if you’ve—“

“Yes, we have. Stage two there, too. Life?”

“Ambient life force, stamina drain, eating years of life expectancy,” Bill answered efficiently.

“Two.”

“Good. I’ll map that out.” He pulled a piece of paper and a pen from his magical storage and started copying parts of the diagram.

🙚⚜🙘

Ten minutes later, he started cursing. We left him alone at first, but it got worse.

“Speak with us, Bill,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m missing a suitable upstream tether,” he said, his eyes never leaving his book.

“In English, please?”

“Ok. Let me explain. In urban myth, are you aware that vampires always have some sire? Or a queen? They have a bond to that being. That’s the upstream tether. It doesn’t do much, as vampires are immune to being controlled, but it is so deep in their magic that it is needed. There are some known vampires listed here. Were we making a blood vampire, I could slip in a tether to any one of them. I have two succubi to tether a sex vampire to. I could tether a magic eater to any mage. But I can’t get any of this to fit with our girl here.”

“Does it have to be a single person?”

“Traditionally, it is, but a bonded group would work, too. Like a god and his wife, for example.”

I raised an eyebrow, stared him in the eyes and waited for the coin to drop.

“What?” It didn’t.

“Livia and I? Bonded pair, all aspects? Or does a pair of dames not fit your…spell?” I wanted to say ‘narrow mind’, but we needed him and being mean before he said something stupid wasn’t a good idea anyway.

“Huh. I never thought about using a ritual member as an upstream. But I don’t see why not…let me check.” He went back to his diagrams and formula. I was glad I hadn’t snapped. He seemed to honestly not have considered us for benign reasons.

“Ha!” he exclaimed. “Bonding to a participant even is in the book. It has a big warning that it doesn’t work, but it’s labelled as a method to make an enslaved vampire. I see nothing wrong with the tether itself.”

🙚⚜🙘

His “Done!” came only a minute later. Then he had us arrange the body parts (yuck!) and put us in a circle around it. “Please do not alter the pattern. Just connect your magic and be ready to feed it when I tell you to,” he said. “Livia, Jane, I will need to bind you into the ritual. Please do not resist the magic; it is fragile, and we have to start over when it breaks.”

We just nodded, pretending to understand what was going on. Although I think Alessandra actually did understand some things. She had looked over the diagrams while we worked on the body.

Then, the ritual started. Magic flowed out of Bill, forming an infinitely thin round disc in the space between us. From that, points grew to every one of us, making it a pentagram. “Gram” was the pointy one, wasn’t it? The Pentagon didn’t have points but flat sides, so I assumed I had it right. “Connect your magic,” Bill directed.

I nearly asked how, but then I remembered I had a skill for ritual magic and willed it to take over. It did so flawlessly, weaving my magic with the point of the star in front of me. Livia and Alessandra also had their connections up in a moment, but Sam took almost a whole minute. I could see how she had to guide her magic manually, imitating what she saw or felt us doing. To Bill’s credit, he gave her the time to figure it out without interrupting her.

When all points were connected, I felt the ritual pentagram solidify, its outline strengthening and locking into place. I got the feeling from my skill that I could have done the same. Nice feedback.

Next, Bill filled the circle with magic structures. They were still dormant, sitting on the canvas of the ritual, ready to be invoked. This was the real strength of ritual magic, I realised. The caster didn’t have to form and fire the spell in one go; they could put it up bit by bit. As the circle filled with more and more structures, it became very clear that nobody except maybe an AI could hold all that in their mind at once to use it as a regular spell.

“Here come the tethers,” Bill warned. Additional structures flooded the point anchored to me, and lines of magic made their way up my link and slid into me. I felt the intrusion and suppressed the instinct to block them from entering me. It would have been very easy, just as Bill had said, those lines had no strength to them. I felt them writhing inside me, looking for something. I let them. Three of them attached themselves to what I’d call my core, even though I hadn’t noticed it before. One of them made its way to my head, then faded into another state of existence. Where my soul was? Two withered away.

I got alarmed, but Bill’s soothing voice told me, “That’s ok.” Then I watched the same thing happening to Livia; only there, the two strings that hadn’t taken root in me attached easily and others withered.

The last tethers came out of the centre of the disc and went down to Lissi’s body parts below. Then Bill asked, “Ready?”

We all nodded, and he activated the ritual. “Feed it, but don’t push,” he said.

I did so, and I felt the magical energy draining from me quickly. It felt weird, like eating in reverse to end up hungry as hell. But there still was more to flow. My glamour wavered as my magic ran low and my natural regeneration got eaten up by the ritual. Then it snapped, and I stood there in my natural form. Something similar must have happened to Alessandra, as her eyes turned into cat-like slits and orange.

The draw started to become uncomfortable, drawing out the magic just as it formed. I could feel new magic trickling into me from the surroundings, only to be swept up and flowing into the ritual. How long would this keep up?

To distract myself from the feeling, I studied the other’s connections. Samantha looked like she had run dry already, a sour note on her face underlined by a green tint. Bill was only trickling minute amounts, but he had better control over it. Livia and Alessandra were still going, but Alessandra was close to empty.

Several moments later, only Livia was still feeding the ritual, and I started to feel nauseous like Samantha. I started to envy Alessandra’s and Bill’s control; they didn’t look like it affected them at all.

“Livia?” I breathed, not wanting to disturb the ritual.

“80 percent,” she replied, barely louder. She seemed to be well aware of what was going on. That witch class probably helped a lot with magic. Duh, of course, it did.

It took a good thirty seconds more for Livia to run out of mana, and I grew concerned about Samantha, who started wavering and holding on to Alessandra’s hand for dear life. If she were to drop out, all would have been for nought.

Then Livia announced, “Out,” and Bill activated the ritual. All the mana we had fed into the circle ran through the magical structures Bill had painted in an instant, then rushed into Lissi, Livia and me in different amounts. Within a split second, the ritual disappeared, and all was over. Had it worked?

A noise from below answered that question quickly. I looked and saw Lissi convulsing on the floor, her severed body parts rushing to attach themselves and new flesh forming to cover the gaps. Her face was contorted from pain, as she probably felt all those wounds. We were all out of mana, so Alessandra couldn’t even use that painkiller spell on her. She was busy anyway, helping Samantha, who was hanging limply in her arms, throwing up.

I’d’ve liked to join her, but I had to be there for Lissi. Why? I didn’t know, I just felt it. I was responsible for her. To protect her and to feed her. Was that the sire link—don’t ask me to call it upstream tether; that’s such a cold way to talk about something so warm and inviting. But I could drop down onto my knees, and so I did that, putting my hands on her body to comfort her. I’m here, child. I will always be here for you.