A Jaded Life

Interlude: Sisters Act

Carnelia, daughter of Jade, was quietly whistling to herself, enjoying the surprisingly balmy night. While she wasn’t as susceptible to the cold as a human would be, especially one without any real levels or investment in Endurance, she was quite lacking in that regard compared to her Mother. So, having spring make a surprise appearance and bump the temperature up by some fifteen degrees was quite welcome, even if it meant the snow covering the mountains she was hunting in was melting rapidly, turning the ground into a soggy, muddy mess.

Though maybe that was for the best, as she was able to walk across the mess with limited trouble, her supernatural agility allowing her to bend the laws of physics till they started screaming. With some focus, she could navigate the mud almost as well as solid, even ground, which gave her a substantial advantage over her prey. For her prey didn’t have her advantages; they were barely able to make headway in the mud, which slowed their travels down to a crawl, while making their trail incredibly obvious, to the point that she barely had to look for it. It was easy enough to be almost boring, but then, she wasn’t stalking them just for the thrill of the chase, but because she wanted to make sure these deluded fools weren’t doing anything they had to be censured for.

Well, beyond their continued worship of Sunna. That part was an impressive bit of self-delusion, something she was quite fascinated by. They knew that their minds had been controlled and manipulated while living in the Blessed City, and they were collectively horrified by that. The curious part was that they didn’t consider Sunna responsible for the manipulation, so they still prayed to her every day at dawn and thanked the deity for her light at dusk. Instead, their ire was completely focused on Lorgar, considering him to be the one to blame for their troubles, even those that had absolutely nothing to do with him.

The night of fire, caused by a combination of tough luck, her own alchemical concoction and a bit of Jade’s interference, that had to be Lorgar’s fault. Their reasoning for that was quite imaginative, combining sound reasoning, like the fact that it had happened during the Longest Night because Sunna’s influence was at its weakest then, and completely wild claims, like the one that Lorgar wanted to usurp the deity.

By now, these guy might even blame Lorgar for the muddy ground, their lack of food and some other, fairly unrelated issues. Almost as if they had expanded Murphy’s Law that everything that could go wrong would go wrong by adding that everything going wrong was automatically Lorgar’s fault.

Including the fact that the majority of women amongst their group were pregnant. What they didn’t know was that all the women had been pregnant, but some of them had miscarried due to stress, lack of nutrition and similar issues.

Maybe they’d even start blaming the strange events during the night on Lorgar, as amusing as that would be. After all, she was planning to visit the guards they placed around their camp, not that the guards would ever realise they had been visited. Mind Magic was quite useful for that, and Lia had a talent for clouding people's minds so their short-term memories never became long-term. Sure, it only lasted a few minutes at a time, and it remained unnoticed only if no external change gave away the missing time, but it was very practical for this.

After all, nobody could tell the time at night without a watch or similar device, so how would they know they had recalled nothing that had happened for five minutes in the middle of the night? The missing time would just join the other discarded short-term memories, with nobody being the wiser. And a bit of Blood Magic made it so the puncture wounds on their necks were gone, too, leaving only a bit of light-headedness due to blood loss. Nothing anyone could prove, nothing anyone would consider serious enough to pursue.

But, no matter what, their blood tasted delicious. Maybe due to the smidgen of Divine Power they gained whenever they prayed to Sunna, it might be the cause for that supreme flavour, almost as enjoyable as her Mother’s blood, though that might be due to the sheer amount of power her Mother could pack into her offerings thanks to her Blood Magic.

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Looking at it like this, Lia might have to move into a community worshipping Sunna if the deity’s divine power made the blood of her worshippers into such a tasty treat.

Letting her whistles die with the wind, she slipped into the night, drawing the shadows tightly around her to conceal her presence as she stalked into the camp, looking forward to her midnight snack.

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Looking at her latest creation, Luna couldn’t help but giggle in joy. It was such a wonderful sight to see, even if most people would likely call it absolutely horrifying, or maybe just outright gross. But to Luna, it was the culmination of hundreds of hours of work, numerous days of studying and a number of failures she didn’t want to contemplate too hard.

“It’s alive!” she yelled out, only to break out in giggles at her own melodrama, fueled by some of the books her Mother had given her to read. Something about retaining culture and not raising a barbarian, no matter how badly society had been hit by the Change and the resulting devastation.

Placing a hand against the tank before her, she stretched out her magical senses, using the innate sense of life to hone in on the slowly growing creature. Even with the rose-tinted glasses she wore, she could recognise that the thing looked a little gross, but just as she was aware of the slight mental distortion in her view, she was also aware of people's hypocrisy.

In this case, the gross aspect was mostly due to the fact that her work wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot. First, she had created the initial starter, using biological material harvested from a few rabbits and mixing it together with her magic. It had been a bit of trial and error, but she had managed, mostly due to the stubbornness she had inherited from her Mother.

The more impressive part, at least in Luna’s mind, was that she had been able to create the tank that held the creature. It was a marvel of Alchemy, mixed with magic and classical technology, allowing the Luna to control the amount of Life Magic infusing the mixture within, so the creatures contained wouldn’t grow too fast or too slow. Either option could be dangerous, as her initial experiments with Life Magic had shown. Sure, her Mother had done her best to conceal the worst and most horrifying results of her work, but that didn’t mean Luna was unaware of the damage she could cause. The phrase ‘all the cancer’ came to mind, and it wasn’t sufficient to capture the horror of unrestricted Life Magic and the mutations resulting from it.

In this case, she had to carefully control the flow of magic, alongside the amount of nutrition infused into the tank, allowing the embryo to develop smoothly. And, so far, that was exactly what was happening, including the beating of the bunny’s heart, which was the success she was currently celebrating.

Now, she’d only have to get the bunny to grow until it became viable outside of the magically controlled tank filled with nutrition, to live on its own without any issues. Once that was done, she might have to look into ways to control its growth so she could grow the bunny into an adult form, rather than having it come out of the tank as a newborn, which was the goal of her current experiment.

But she could easily see that this was a major step on the way to creating the body her Mother wanted to have for her Sigmir, even if Luna might have overstated her current progress.

She was getting there, especially after she had taken quite a while to treat and study the numerous pregnant women in Maggie’s community, but she was still one or two major breakthroughs away from achieving her goal.

Nodding to herself, she was scanning the embrybunny once again, slightly increasing the amount of magic she was channelling into the tank and observing how its growth rate was twitching up just a little.

If everything went to plan, this one would be ready to decant in a few days, and once that was done, she would either try the process with human material or attempt to prolong the growth within the tank so she could create an adult bunny directly from the tank, instead of creating a baby bunny and having to grow it the slow, natural way.