A Jaded Life

Chapter 1348

A part of me was almost feeling bad. After Luna had started to work seriously on the body that would house Sigmir in the future, I had set out to get my part done, too. That meant I needed to push my experiments on human, or at least sapient, souls and minds even further, which, in turn, meant I needed test subjects.

And finding those shouldn’t have been as easy as it turned out to be.

A brief visit with Lia gave me a good starting point, namely, the places where she had tracked down the survivors of the Blessed City who hadn’t recanted their faith in Sunna. From there, finding a few of them was fairly easy, as Lorgar hadn’t managed to maintain social cohesion, or maybe he didn’t even try. Lorgar and his merry band had kept a somewhat small group under their banner, maybe a hundred to a hundred and twenty people. Given that those were the most fanatic of the bunch, I was tempted to kidnap a few of them, just to remove some future trouble, but I wasn’t certain if their faith in Sunna would shield them. Or worse, allow them to draw her divine eye to my prison, or to whatever place I used for my experiment. Divine scrutiny wasn’t something I was willing to casually invite, not without a serious need. It likely was an overblown concern, but even if there was only a one per cent chance of divine intervention, I wasn’t willing to take that risk. After all, Murphy was still going strong.

Instead, Lia and I made a day of tracking down another group that had left the Blessed City but also broken away from Lorgar. They hadn’t gone far; instead, they had settled down in the ruins of a small town deeper in the mountains, sustaining themselves with anything they could get their hands on. While they hadn’t starved just yet, it was quite obvious that it would be a close call whether they’d manage to hold out until spring, mostly dependent on their initial luck when it came to foraging. Well, it would have been dependent on that luck, but after I happened to them, their luck wasn’t all that relevant. They lost three of their number, and in turn gained the meat of two deer I had hunted down, giving them food for some time while also cutting the number of mouths to feed.

Driven by idle mischief, I also placed a small figurine depicting a raven, one of the symbols I considered representative of the Pale Lady, on the meat I had left behind. Curious to see their reactions to the missing people, the meat and the figurine, I infused one of the shadows under the roof with a bit of magic, allowing me to hear and see through it before I left the area with my new captives in tow.

I had taken three of them, leaving the group they had been a part of with nineteen members. Not a terribly large group, but big enough. Additionally, I had taken two females and one male, leaving them with eight women and eleven men, not a terribly unbalanced ratio. I had considered taking two males to even out the numbers, but they might need the physical strength. Plus, there was that issue that most of these females were pregnant. The others, including the two I had taken, showed signs of recent miscarriages, making it fairly obvious that they all had been pregnant, as expected, but weren’t any longer. A part of me, the part connected to the Mother, twinged with guilt at that. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

Taking the three, I had also increased the average level of their group, though not all that much. The three I had taken were the lowest levels of their sex, and none of the three had any obvious special abilities, certainly no magical skills I could detect. Hopefully, that meant they weren’t crucial to the group’s survival, or I might be a little annoyed with myself. Maybe I should tell Lia to keep an eye on them, just to see what happens in the future. She was interested in stalking some of the groups that had left Lorgar and his buddies behind anyway, giving her a project of her own.

If necessary, I might even give them a bit of aid, maybe create a new Warlock or two, which seemed to be a great way to increase the combat ability of a person by a huge margin. Waylon was certainly a massive success in that regard, going from a mildly capable melee combatant, little more than a brawler, to a fairly dangerous mixed fighter in a matter of weeks. His form still wasn’t up to snuff, but just the ability to augment his strikes with Ice and send out blasts of Astral Power gave him a massive edge.

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When it came to keeping these new test subjects, a realisation gave me pause. I had no interest in taking them into one of my primary facilities, certainly not in either of my towers or the Temple of the First Dragon, and the prison didn’t give quite the right message. I was hoping they might be willing to let me perform some tests in exchange for housing and food, at least until the tests became destructive, but that would only work if their housing were somewhat comfortable. The prison was many things, but comfortable wasn’t one of those, and that was by design.

Still, I needed somewhere to keep them, leaving me at a bit of a loss. Creating a new facility would be the most suitable, but I wasn’t all that interested. So, instead of doing that, I made sure they wouldn’t wake and placed them in cells within the prison, and I started remodelling a part of the shelter above.

It still wasn’t as welcoming and pleasant as I might have liked, but it was a good compromise. The space I was using for them had three small apartments, each with its own bathroom, a bed and some furniture and all three were connected to a common area with comfortable seating, a few books and some games for entertainment. I even added a small pantry and simple kitchen to it, stocking it with some non-perishable food, just in case I was delayed or something. It wasn’t a completely comfortable living space, mostly because they wouldn’t be able to see the outside world, let alone leave, but it had to be better than starving to death.

The biggest advantage, however, was that the prison’s enchantments were covering this area, too. They were draining any released Astral Power, preventing them from transferring power to their deity and, hopefully, keeping Sunna from noticing my prison. There was still some risk, but I didn’t think it was too great. The Gods had their rules, and I wasn’t too big a danger to make them break their rules, at least I hoped so. Sunna might dislike me, but I wasn’t making any large waves; I didn’t actively wipe out her faithful, I was just a bit of a nuisance.

A part of me was tempted to turn the place into a facsimile of a closed psychiatric institution. While I had never been committed, I had some idea of what one looked like, so I felt confident to replicate enough of those looks to make it realistic. I would have to play fast and loose with the truth, probably add some Mind Magic to keep them from questioning things, but I thought I might be able to gaslight my test subjects into believing they were insane and that the last two years had been nothing but a delusion. It might yield some fascinating results if I could make them buy into the narrative, to see how far I could push their minds before something snapped, but this was probably not the right time for that. Especially as I would have to keep them from noticing my sparkling hair, my blue skin and my pointy ears, which would probably be quite challenging.

Still, I would have to come up with a suitable explanation for their presence in my shelter, especially as I wasn’t about to let them leave. Something to explain their incarceration without making it obvious that they were prisoners, at least if I wanted them to be willing subjects for my experiments.

Some compulsions were a definite possibility, but I was somewhat leery about the idea of messing with their minds before I had a chance to experiment on them. Or I might just give them the carrot and the stick, the carrot being a comfortable existence in the apartment I had set up in the upper level, the stick being the incarceration in the oubliettes on the lower level of the prison. Either way, I could experiment on them at will; the only difference was whether they were cooperating.

Nodding to myself, I dropped the three test-subjects into their rooms, turning the light within to a dim setting before adding a scrying construct to each room, so I would know when they woke.

Once that was done, I moved down into the prison area, planning to test a few more things on Joshua before his mind was completely gone. Or maybe I could start running tests on his soul directly; that part of him was mostly untouched, just a little ground down by circumstances.

So much work, so little time.