RP:The Hedgehog of Doom

This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.

The Hanging Corpse

Valentin tromps into the tavern, still smelling faintly of the ocean. He touches the brim of his bowler hat in silent greeting, the raw red appearance of his right hand bearing indications of having been scalded.

Jolie strolled in, her expression stark and heels ticking purposefully on the black stone below. One sharp glance about had that withering gaze descend first on Derry, then Zira. "Relaxing, are we?"

Derry shook his head,"The Eldermage told me I wasn't currently ready for the guild." With this said, Derry reached behind the bar, grabbing a bottle of the blood wine. Uncorking it, he started to drink it straight from the bottle.

Zira recognizes Jolie's voice instantly and snaps the book closed, "Studying," she says placing the book on the table before her, "I figured it would be a permissible way to pass the time I waited milady."

Jolie stepped aside to make room for the butcher to pass. "We've an appointment at the Blood Bank, Novus." She eyed Derry. "I see. Well, you can still tend bar, am I right?" And then nodded to Zira, "Acceptable, yes. But I have need of you now, apprentice."

Derry nodded, still drinking the wine, a small break was taken so he could speak," I guess..."

Valentin nods "Blood bank it is, Mam'selle" The elven-blood wine would just have to wait.

Zira rises from her seat and offers a bow, "Of course Lady Thorne." The Sceleratus moves to stand next to the Thanatos Domina.

Jolie said to Derry, "Not much good to me drunk. I need barmaids. Smart ones. Not giggling idiots. Understood? This is in your job description: find me a decent barmaid."

Derry waved a hand dismissively at Jolie,"I've got a girl in mind then. Shes a hard worker and I know she'd be willing to make some money."

Zira said to Jolie, "Milady, may I ask if you have heard back from Patron Tiphareth yet?"

Jolie pondered the necromantic uses for that hand... "Just make sure she isn't the type to irk me.." A glance toward the stuffed dandy might prove meaningful there. "You may bring her to me for an interview. Now..." she turned to the Guildmembers. "Let us be off. Nurse Carmine has obliged us by locking the doors for a time."

Derry finished off his bottle before he reached for another, repeating the process of opening it and sticking it in his mouth, "She’s a good girl Jolie. She doesn't take handouts and she’s currently employed at some clinic on the island." Derry resumed drinking at this point.

Zira waits to follow Jolie's lead.

Valentin holds open the door for the guildmistress

The Blood Bank

Jolie led the way to the Blood Bank's locked door. A soft rap on the timber produced a pair of suspicious red eyes from the mail slot, a mutter, the sliding of a bolt. The little woman who answered was rotund, for a vampire, and ... far from sultry. "All set up," she hissed. "As y'like Miz Jolie." The necromancer took a pouch from her belt, and slipped this to the nurse. "Lock up behind us, Carmine." That exchange made, she beckoned her two companions into the clinic, toward the open cellar doors.

Valentin follows Jolie silently, greeting the portly vampire with a tip of his hat.

Jolie would not observe Carmine's fluttering lashes and rotund simpering. She was peering down into the gloomy space below.

Zira follows behind silently, awaiting the master necromancer's orders.

Jolie said, "Valentin, the bones you gathered have been put to good use. Again, Vailkrin's defences demand that I push you both beyond the scope of your current learning. Today we make a bone beast like no other before it. I must warn you, however, there are alchemical factors that could prove disastrous.. " she glanced aside to the pair. "I strongly suggest that you use the gloves provided. All our materials are ready. Down you go, then."

Zira bows her head, "Of course milady." and immediately moves to do as ordered.

Jolie pointed down to the cellar.

Cellar of the Blood Bank

Where the cellar was, usually, bustling, today it was all but empty, having been cleared somewhat of its usual crates and barrels, and entirely empty of the traders generally found to be wandering and to and fro, courtesy of a sign along the tunnel reading 'Closed For Repairs'. A large stack of bones reeked in on corner, various tables had been set up as workbenches, and a large steel drum marked with a bright red 'X' sat centrally to the cleared space, a metal funnel and protective wear including goggles neatly placed beside it.

Valentin grimaces, and rolls up his sleeves to reveal the scarified sigils and markings on his arms, wards and bindings knit with an obscure kind of carnology favoured by the twisted vampire who had sired him, heavily interwoven with hints of the black tides. The butcher dons the thick gloves provided "A'right, Guildmistress. What d'we have to do?"

Zira enters the cellar and instantly moves to don the gloves provided then looks at Jolie expectantly.

Jolie glanced about, nodding her satisfaction with Carmine's neat assistance in preparing the workshop. "Valentin, I need the bones shaped in a specific way. Cut at an angle, on one end, so.." she demonstrated the sharp angle needed to produce a point. "Zira, you'll be filling the marrow spaces with that red stuff from the tub marked 'X" - do not, for the gods' sakes, get any on your skin - and sealing them with the putty provided. Once this is done, I need them all brought into this space here..." she ticked toward said space. "Where the ritual will occur."

Valentin puts on some goggles with a grin. "Cuttin' things, mam'selle, is m'callin' in life." The butcher commandeers a workbench, and and examines the bones. Withdrawing his monstrous razor-sharp cleaver from its holder, he holds the bone steady and cuts down with a fluid movement in the angle demonstrated by Jolie "Like this for all of 'em, guv?"

Jolie said to Valentin, "Yes. Wonderful. If you make quick work of it, you can help at this end..." she noted Zira's bench, ".. stacking the filled ones for me."

Zira nods once and sets to her task, utilizing her vampiric reflexes where needed to avoid getting the red substance on herself. The vampiress works steadily and quickly.

Jolie added, "Oh - and no smoking down here. Unless you wish to be central to a very large, very deep and entirely burned crater."

Zira continues her work, "Lady Thorne, if I may ask, what is this?" she asks indicating the red mixture. Carefully she adds the putty to one of the bones before setting it gently to the side.

Jolie approved of the care taken with the loaded bone. "Alchemical naphtha. Highly incendiary, especially if ignited by magical means." The Thanatos Domina smiled, "Enough to fill half a wine glass costs ten thousand gold. I need not explain how precious that drumful is."

Valentin nods, and brings several bones to his table at a time, ensuring that he had enough space to cut in an uninhibited fashion. It's slow and tedious work, but that's the nature of the butcher's game. Cut meat. Cut more meat. Seperate the bones, seperate the flesh, day in, day out. It's a vocation which takes a certain amount of focus and concentration, given the sharpness of the blades used. And Valentin has plenty of singleminded focus to spare on the task at hand. The muscles on his arms bulge with each precise cut, and the pile of prepared bones rapidly grows by comparison to those still requiring his attention.

Zira nods, "Understood." her movements become more smooth and careful as she works.

Jolie, once her two assistants were busy at thier appointed tasks, stepped into the ritual space and checked that all necessary items were in place. Coils of wire lay on the floor, and a pair of wiresnips, another of pliers, along with sundry unholy vessels. No candles were present, but Jolie no longer needed such small symbolisms to effect her magics. The real power lay in the sigils she had drawn on the floor in a circle around the space, dormant for now.

Happy with the ritual site, Jolie tested the edge of one of those bones - so clean-cut as to be near as sharp as the cleaver that cleaved it, and where the angle became the tip of the cut bone, she tapped her finger. A single blood drop had her smile widen. "Good job, butcher."

As the pile of bones needing preparation dwindled, Valentin makes enquiries of the guildmistress in between cuts. "Mam'selle" *Thunk* "Apart from bein' a waste o'materials, what... *Thunk* "...would that naphta stuff do t'your skin?" *Thunk* "...out o'curiosity."

Zira continues methodically moving through the bones, after a sizeable stack is built up she moves those to the indicated area, clearing room for her to lay following bones with less of a chance of them falling.

Jolie said, through the finger she sucked free of its small sting, "Murn nike..." The finger popped free. "Burn like hell itself, until it runs out of fuel. The best part is that it's viscous, sticky. It melds to the skin like honey, only with an oily residue that's extremely hard to wash off. Therefore, anyone with a spot of it on them will find themselves on fire when the spell command is spoken. Or they run into contact with flame."

Zira hesitates for just a second, but inevitably continues smoothly.

Valentin nods, and the pile of unprepared bones eventually dwindled down to the last handful. With the same methodical rhythm, those too are prepared, and Valentin once again decides that vampiricism has its perks. Back in the old days, effort like that would have worked up one hell of a sweat. "A'right guv. That's your bones all cut up an'piled. How do I go about handlin' the firejuice best wi'out spillin' it." Admittedly, Valentin's sire had made the butcher handle acids and assorted other liquid nasties in the years spent as his lackey, but it never hurt to ask.

Jolie gestured to Zira. "The Scleratus is filling them. Perhaps you could help bring the filled ones over here.." once more she trod toward the ritual space. "And help me with assembly. There's... oh, wait a moment." A short episode of fishing about in the pocket of her grab produced a crumpled sheet of parchment, which she flattened against her thigh and smoothed before handing toward the vampire. "You can see how the assembly works." Indeed, the diagram would indicate how the bones would fit together, wired in place. The sketched end result looked rather like an aggressive, hunchbacked porcupine.

Zira is moving steadily, and has worked the amount to be done to a little less than a fourth.

Valentin looks at the plans dourly "Someone 'ad a bad dream 'bout hedgehogs, didn't they. Goin' t'take ages. Lucky for you, we don't need sleep, eh mam'selle." The butcher sees the tacit wisdom in leaving the task requiring more manual finesse to the Scleratus, and begins carefully bringing over the parts required for what Valentin secretly called 'th'hedgehog o'doom'.

Jolie left them to their duties for a time, in order to perfect the painted sigils, a vague odor of blood and acrid herbs rising from the wet 'paint' as she daubed it carefully over the dried designs already in place.

Zira moves the last bit of the naphtha impregnated bones to the designated area, "So you wish for me to assist the Novus Morior with construction or do you have a different task for me Lady Thorne?"

Jolie nodded absently to Zira. "It's an arduous task, assembly. I need two beasts, and we have enough materials for those. Perhaps best to work one at a time, so yes, please do assist the Novus. This ritual is complicated.. " she offered the girl a chill but encouraging smile. "One that you'll learn, some day."

Zira fights back her own pleased smile and moves to assist Valentin in his task, "As you wish milady."

Valentin nods to the Scleratus "Right, mam'selle. I'll hold the bones where they need t'be held. Might be best if you do th'wirework, innit. Less risk o'fumblin the finer splicin'" No smile of any kind from the taciturn butcher.

Zira nods, "Sounds amicable to me." she responds.

Jolie silently observed the two, her cold, pale perusal leaving no doubt that judgements were being made upon their every move.

Zira studies the diagram carefully, making note of any specific ways that the connections were to be made.

Valentin gets wire while Zira peruses the plans, commenting as he does "It may help t'think of it as an angry hedgehog."

Zira smiles, "That might help," she says with a nod. Setting the plans to the side she motions for the wire, "Shall we begin?"

Valentin nods "No time like th'present, unless you're Vuryal." The burly butcher picks up the bones for the feet "Shall we work our way up? He turns to the guildmistress "Will the cryumbral tide set these things off mam'selle? Or shadows?"

Jolie shook her head. "There's a specific order, geared to the naphtha itself, makes it burn hotter. The cold fire of the Black Tide won't do. A simple flicked match would suffice, really, were there not wards in place to prevent random firing - but it would lessen the effect.." she stepped over, pointed to the diagram. "The beasts, if all goes well, are designed to lash out and throw off sharp bones, filled with the stuff. Whether they shatter, fall or pierce, all one needs to do is speak the spell. Boom."

Valentin thinks about that. "Well, that jus' makes life a whole lot easier, mam'selle." The butcher starts the incantation to bind his shadow with the cryumbral tide, dissonant syllables colliding with each other as they pass out into the darkened room. His shadow rises, expands as Valentin alters the ritual as he had been taught, growing into a squat golem of black ice and shadow, its arms replaced by a dozen or so ropy tentacles. The scars on Valentin's arms pulse in time with the black tides and the vampire's eyes as the butcher commands the conjuration to stand still, and carefully positions its dark tendrils to hold all the bones required for the foundations. While Valentin dedicates all his attention to keeping the iceshadow golem in place, Zira deftly goes to work with the wire. As one bone is wired in place, Valentin directs the emptied tendril to collect another, his hands carefully pantomiming the gripping motion, not trusting the iceshadow golem to handle that part of the task in complete autonomy.

Jolie's smile is just about beatific, as she watched her necromantic wards get about the job, particularly the ingenuity of Valentin's shadow-manipulation. She'd lean in to inspect Zira's wiring, craftily wrought joints designed to hold the thing together until the necromantic work was complete. "Well done," she'd say, at last, stepping back to observe the spiny, hunchbacked 'sculpture' that did, in a way, resemble a colossal, irritated hedgehog. If one squinted. "I trust you both have been studying your basic sigils and incantations?"

Valentin grunts "I would ha', if you'd given me th'book t'study in th'first place, mam'selle." His words are forced through his teeth as he doggedly maintains concentration on the task of controlling the iceshadow golem. Fine movements, the butcher was rapidly discovering, took a lot more effort than the usual thuggery he'd put his shadow to use for. "Been studyin' bones, shovels, and a combination o'the two, innit." Zira gets another femur wired in, and a tentacle reaches out to grasp a replacement while the scleratus continues the fine wireworks required to put the hedgehog of doom together. "The banker what necked me, didn't like letting me at th'sigils, save the ones he burned into me. Didn't want me learnin' how to break th'ritual o'control he had over me, an' such"

Jolie sighed, and nodded. "I'd assumed you'd have the basics.. never mind. I'll give you a reading list tomorrow. And directions to the Library.." To Zira she said, pointing to several of the outer sigils, "You can intone the rites for those, they are not beyond you. Be careful with your pronunciation, a single slip in a spell of these magnitudes can throw a work into ten kinds of unexpected directions. And I don't facy that thing turning on us..." This stated, with a cold grin, she stepped into her designated place, gesturing to Valentin. "Ward yourself against magical fallout, Novus. Stay in that small circle there, and watch." With no further preamble, the master necromancer set to her own onerous business, harsh and ugly cantas that seared past her lips like spat-out arrows of darkness, as each sigil in turn was detonated into darkly luminescent life. Dull red and oscillating, each added to the power of the next until the circle was thrumming with an ominous almost subsonic pulse.

Valentin does as told, wrapping shadows around himself, a phrase ready to drop from his lips at a moment's notice should things get particularly bollocksed up.

Jolie 's attention could not waver from the spell, but in the back of her mind she hoped to heck that Zira had grasp of the simpler phrasing she'd been tasked with. The novice necromantic butcher would observe a subtle transformation begin in the spiny horror he'd helped to assemble, as bones knit together, and the cellar was filled with a deafening, constant crackle as that dead matter reconfigured itself, almost melting into calcified rubber, each wired joint taking on the form of a socket or fusing with the bones surrounding. This initial phase ended with the creation far more resembling the final sketch - the blunt skull appended to one end hardly visible over the shear-ended spines it bristled with, its legs crouched underneath. Pausing but for a scant space of several breaths, Jolie began the final ritual that would reanimate the monstrosity, to the crack and shiver of stone about the trio, vague and alien howls of sounds pouring not only from her, but from the blackened atmosphere in which all were dimly uplit by those malevolent markings on the floor. The bone-beast twitched. Jolie intoned the final words, and a dire roll of thunderous rumbling shook the very foundations of building and body alike. Standing amid the waning pall of dark power, the necromantic team would witness the bone-beast's first creaking steps.

Valentin pays very close attention to the cadence and pronunciation of the incantations - even if the sigils are beyond his learning at the moment, the butcher was trained in the incantations for certain rituals, and he knew what he'd seen today was important. As the ritual passes its climax, and the creature takes its first steps, Valentin quips "Adorable, innit. I bet the little hedgehog calls you Mummy."

The look the Thanatos Domina shot toward Valentin was fifty leagues from complimentary. "You may tidy up the workspace, Novus." Actually, she'd employed Carmine and her goons for that, but since the butcher had the energy to quip, she may as well make him cheap labour as well. "Zira, come with me. We'll station the beast at its post, mind how this is done - it is a being of dead bone, but more than that, too. Not so smart as the flesh-golems, but it won't drain its creator while fulfilling its basic duty...." and so on, her nattering fading as she led Zira into the tunnel, followed by the clattering, shuffling abomination, loaded with its incendiary marrow.

Jolie would hear an echo of the butcher's coarse chuckle as she left, the man not particularly bothered with the task set for him. He will take a moment to recover his energies, and then set to cleaning with the same focus he applied to every task.