Histaff

by Andries Louws

  [ New skill learned; Mathematics lvl 1 ]

  Tips and tricks that all require something to write on only confuse Douglas even further. Each time he tries to do mental math, a confounding and steady stream of nudges make him feel like taking out parchment, ink, and quills. But even the scornfully suggested charcoal and tree bark alternatives are out of the skeleton’s reach. The final straw is when Douglas observes that regenerating bone does not follow the health regeneration rule. Maybe it would be correct if he had all his bones available, even in powder form, but the missing mass is going to take longer to reshape.

  Giving up on his calculations, the spacesuit-clad skeleton instead requests more data about his class, which now has a rather interesting word behind it.

  [ Class: None (scholar) ]

  Douglas’ interest is piqued, and he mentally asks what a scholar might be.

  [ Scholar; the starting point for any class that has to do with mind or magic, this class has been the humble start for even the most powerful archmages, priests, spellblades, druids, warlocks, librarians, and more. Skills; Meditation, Mana Sense, Mana Control, Spell Shaping. +Int, +Wis ]

  Douglas is now nearly popping with dim curiosity as he requests information about spell shaping. Like many of his failed attempts before, nothing happens. He tries to request information about the unknown term a few more times, but no new screens are presented.

  The only thing that pops into his mind as he reads the words is that it’s a requirement when using mana for something external. Douglas ponders the possibilities for a bit longer, but soon realizes that he has little choice in the matter. The scholar class promises him more mana, which he sorely needs if the ever wants to regain the rest of his body.

  He starts mentally begging the blue boxes to please make him a scholar and is greeted with a screen nearly immediately.

  [ New skill learned; Spell Shaping lvl 1. Select a basic spell shape: ]

  [ Phlogistonate ]

  [ Dephlogistonate ]

  [ Calcinate ]

  [ Decalcinate ]

  [ Death (ERROR 404) ]

  [ Life (ERROR 404) ]

  Baffled by the total lack of useful information, Douglas asks if the blue screen can please tell him what it’s talking about.

  [ Phlogistonate; turn air into water, Waterbeam ]

  [ Dephlogistonate; turn water into air, Fireball ]

  [ Calcinate; turn air into earth, Rockfall ]

  [ Decalcinate; turn earth into air, Gustgale ]

  [ Death (ERROR 404); turn earth into water, UNKNOWN ]

  [ Life (ERROR 404); turn water into earth, UNKNOWN ]

  Douglas was getting worried something had gone wrong with the ever-so-useful boxes, the mental silence kind of unnerving after having meaning come with each word he read. The number of hints, nudges, and suggestions that comes with every word in this latest list is nearly drowning out his own ponderous thoughts. Passionate opinions about the interplay between elements, angry interjections, definitions of terms, and more pour into Douglas’ skull. Almost like the magical theories of an entire world are represented behind those six lines…

  When the roaring pressure of understanding fades, Douglas tries to take inventory of his new knowledge gains. He finds that magic seems to revolve around a substance called phlogiston, the fuel of life that is burned by all living beings.

  There are other, more esoteric concepts that play at the edge of his awareness, but the sheer mass of information needed to support these hints is preventing Douglas from willingly digging deeper.

  Douglas decides to ponder something directly relevant to him. The amount of water and air he has come across so far is extremely limited. The only water was the liquid that was floating in front of him when he woke up amidst stars, and the air currently surrounding him is the first dense gas he has come across.

  Metal is earth, which seems to be abundant. One more concept he does understand now is that these magics are about changing states. The change is what the mana is used for, the effect of the change being the visible spell, and Douglas doubts that wafting some wind at people is going to impress them enough to leave him alone. Especially if the people around here act the same as those villagers did.

  Douglas looks at his spacesuit-wrapped hand with a melancholic feeling in his heart. The two pinpricks of light that reflect off the inside of his helmet are a constant reminder that he is a skeleton with a soul forcefully attached to it. He is not even sure if this skeleton was his own to begin with.

  Then the odd moment of clarity vanishes, his sudden bout of introspection gone like a breeze in a storm. Douglas looks back at the screen and knows what he should pick, the firm knowledge that his current body is a symbol of death the only remnant of his desolate mood.

  [ Death (ERROR 404); turn earth into water, UNKNOWN ]

  [ ERROR; required component DEITY is currently UNKNOWN ]

  [ Please choose a relevant action: Cancel, Sideload, Offload ]

  [ Cancel; not acceptable. New ingress point has power gain priority ]

  [ Sideload; no alternate acumen ]

  [ Offload; Subject is non-biological, mental overload non-fatal. Mental capacity theoretically limitless ]

  [ Beginning offload procedure ]

  Then Douglas loses track of his thoughts. A series of suggestions with the subtlety of a sledgehammer smash into his skull. The mass of knowledge delivered into his mind is the size of a mountain, and hits like a meteor impact. This all has the effect that the poor skull passively watches as his own mind is summarily smashed to pieces …

  [ ERROR; lvl 9 spell requires Full Spell Foundation ]

  … until the thundering mental stream halts midway and four small rocks careen through his head.

  Two small pinpricks of wispy flame flicker into life as Douglas’ mind regains enough clarity to function. Jerking around in a slight bout of panic, the dead calmness that has accompanied him until now once again settles into his bones as he looks around.

  Douglas finds himself in the spacesuit still. Seeing nothing changed inside the small cabin, he feels for his mana flow. He senses the stream flow through his spine, splitting into four bones.

  He tries to look downwards but his skull clanking against his glass visor prevents him from seeing his body. Instead, he sinks back into meditation, feeling his bony self.

  Both his arms are perfectly healed, none of his mana needed for the reshaping of bone any longer. Instead, his power flows into his second pair of ribs, the vertebra that will support his third pair, and his sternum.

  The new vertebra is nearly done, his ribs are halfway, and his sternum one third. The way his bones form from nothing, slowly growing as mana pours into the regenerating area, is quite interesting to the white cranium. The process has sped up quite a bit with his race-change, but the growth merely went from extremely slow to very slow.

  Done with inspecting his body, Douglas decides to check what that spell business is all about.

  A monstrous formation stares back at him the moment he tries thinking about the spell. Inside his mind, he finds an image, an image the size of a planet, filled with scribbles, lines, circles, and more scribbles. Douglas feels like he should be having some form of a headache, but his bleached bones don’t seem to be capable of feeling pain.

  Douglas studies the enormous thing for a bit more but relatively quickly finds that he’s not going to make any headway into understanding that thing, probably not for many years at least.

  It takes him half an hour of mentally staring in muted horror when he finds four more squiggles. Off to the side, this collection of formations looks minuscule in comparison.

  Douglas immediately gets an idea of what these are supposed to do, and the skull grins happily to himself. The rather unpleasant sensation of watching his own mind crumble under a deluge of forceful hints resurfaces in his memories. His positive mood wiped away, Douglas asks more information about spell shapes, curious about why he was mind blasted like that.

/>   [ Spell Shaping; influence the world around you by feeding mana into a spell shape ]

  Eyeing the massive formation with suspicion, Douglas instead focuses his attention upon the four smaller shapes. Staring at the four items engraved in his mind, he once again finds his knowledge sorely lacking. Picking one at random, he studies it patiently.

  He sees a roughly circular formation, wavy lines forming malformed concentric circles with all kinds of symbols stuck between the layers. It’s about as complex as a single page of written words, except that he doesn't know the alphabet, the language, nor in what direction the thing should be read in.

  Douglas floats inside his capsule while studying the new knowledge in his mind, blissfully unaware of the rest of the universe as he submerges himself into figuring out this mystery. The idea of trying it out, feeding mana into one of these shapes, doesn’t even cross through his skull. All too happy with having a simple yet doable task set in front of him, Douglas starts studying the thing with gusto, if a bit slowly.

  He doesn’t notice when the escape pod he's inside falls closer to the red planet’s surface. He merely shifts around in annoyance when the capsule enters the upper layers of the atmosphere. The faint traces of gas hanging around at such altitudes are enough to bleed off a fraction of the orbiting object’s momentum, pressing the spacesuit-clad skeleton into the mattress.

  The trail of superheated vapour the pod leaves in its wake is unnoticed by all, its occupant not even waking from his contemplative meditation. The resistance is soon gone as the capsule leaves the upper atmosphere again, starting another eccentric orbit around the planetary body.

  Douglas thinks he has an idea of what one of the recurring symbols means when the capsule enters its second planned aerobraking manoeuvre. Douglas once again fails to react to the slight bit of gravity pushing him against the cushions. Shooting past the planet once more, the capsule’s carefully planned and calculated orbit takes it a bit deeper through the faint hint of atmosphere that floats a couple hundred kilometres above the red planet.

  The third, fourth, and fifth orbits go by unnoticed as Douglas keeps up his mental effort, spending entire days slowly pondering each symbol, curve, and position of the circle he is studying.

  At the apoapsis of the latest and now much smaller orbit, Douglas is finally woken from his meditation. The rocket thrusters on the ship fire full force without a single warning or alarm, slamming Douglas against the lower end of the capsule. Neither suit nor mattress does much to cushion his fall as he ricochets off the metal bottom plate, his skull bouncing around in the transparent helmet.

  Confused about what happened, Douglas shifts his attention to the outside world as he reads the screen.

  ‘Welcome to your emergency landing. You have chosen: Spacestation A0672 (Histaff infection detected) as your landing point. Your trip will follow the following steps:’

  ‘4 - Aerobraking, 3 orbits.’

  ‘5 - Apoapsis course correction burn.’

  ‘6 - Suicide burn.’

  ‘7 - Docking manoeuvre.’

  Douglas glares at the screen and capsule some more, but a lack of response causes him to lose interest and return to examining the spell shape. He was just starting to get a vague feeling for what that recurring patterned line between circles means, and he eagerly gets back to studying the thing.

  The next three orbits cut through the atmosphere slightly deeper still. The single guiding fin in combination with a slight tear shape guarantees that Douglas experiences the change in momentum in relative comfort. His back pressed into the mattress, the kilometres per second of relative velocity he is losing fail to register on any significant level.

  The capsule’s orbit evens out even more, going from lopsided to roughly circular over the course of the last three orbits. Now constantly floating at a height of two hundred or so kilometres, the planet is an enormous patchwork of red and brown, dust storms and cloud formations painting the speckled surface with monotone greys that are cut through by streaks of brown and red here and there.

  The last course correction burn is a rather small one. The impulse of barely half a second is not enough to shake Douglas awake. Had he paid any attention to the screen instead of locking himself up inside his own skull, he’d have seen an orbital map of the planet and the destination, space station A0672, located on the opposite side of the planet.

  The capsule’s slightly smaller orbit intersects the station’s circular orbit at a single point. The fact that the capsule is on a smaller orbit causes it to fly around the planet slightly faster, letting it catch up with its destination over the course of a few round trips.

  Douglas fails to realize any of this; he is comparing similar runes from all four smaller shapes, trying to puzzle out their meaning. He fails to employ any form of mental strategy or system, his bone-dry mind content with slowly going over the four formations time and time again.

  Although the space station is going at roughly the same speed as the capsule, the vastness of space still guarantees that differences in speed need to be rather extreme to get anywhere. In order to catch up with something that goes a couple of dozen kilometres a second within a reasonable timeframe, the speed difference needs to be equally large.

  Around the capsule is nothing but the emptiness of space and a massive planet. Then a small pinprick of light becomes visible in the far distance. The moment It becomes recognizable as a ring-shaped object is the moment the capsule’s engine fires again. The burst of combusting gasses shooting from the single-use engine goes on for several seconds as fatal amounts of force are being applied to the escape pod.

  Any form of living being would have died from ruptured organs and internal bleeding after exposure to such g-forces. Douglas stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that he is being bounced around inside the tube again. He is confirming that all lines of runic symbols end with the same small spherical mark and is not willing to lose his train of thought.

  The pod matches velocity with the large space station with a few more pulses of its smaller thrusters. The raw force provided by its main engine is too imprecise to make these fine adjustments. These small bursts of the pod’s integrated reaction control thrusters rattle him around a bit as the vessel rotates, but nothing compared to the near bone shattering forces from moments before. Douglas pays it no heed and continues his studies.

  The slow drift towards a detected docking port goes by without much ado. The hollow sounds of metal colliding with metal are similarly ignored. The clamps slamming into place and the automated equalizing of atmosphere does not rouse the musing skeleton.

  The two-metre-long, wickedly curved sickle that cuts through the top door does catch his attention, though. The blade tears through metal with seeming ease, nearly chopping Douglas in half from top to bottom. It slides against his transparent visor, leaving a large scratch in the crystal dome. The blade retracts, twisting a large hole in the hatch and ripping the entire door free.

  Douglas is frozen, unable to react to the unexpected intrusion after days of calm introspection. He idly muses about the lack of any of the four Fs. No desire to flee, fight, feed, or procreate bubbles up in his skull. Instead, he slowly shifts his neck, tilting his jaw upwards to see what manner of being has intruded into his small home.

  Long strands of drool drip from a segmented maw, teeth sticking out of red, fleshy folds, covered by stringy red mucous. Douglas recognises the shape of a human skull hidden under one of the monstrosities pulsing slabs of semi-transparent flesh. Then he recognizes another and another.

  No, that skull has four eye sockets, Douglas notes. Those bones that stick out of putrid slime in disorderly rows also seem rather unusual. The collection of randomly pasted together meat and bones then undulates away, leaving a combination of mucus and multicoloured fluids in its wake.

  Douglas is still pondering the meaning of this development when his sight is blocked by a skittering mass of fleshy bugs.

  Chapter Five – Taking Steps
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br />   Douglas doesn’t move a single bone as he watches these new creatures. He handles this second encounter with the new type of being with the same reaction as the first, by acting like an actual skeleton.

  The mass of endoskeletal critters explores the capsule’s insides, crawling over every single surface with their finger-like legs. Looking like an animated conglomeration of glued-together body parts, the flood recedes while carrying off all the loose objects. Some of the critters try pulling on Douglas’ suit, but he proves too heavy a burden to carry. Douglas silently watches as the empty food wrappers and pill strips are being carried off towards an unknown destination.

  He lies there a bit long, the thought of returning to analysing the spell shapes no longer present. The image of that collection of slapped together flesh and bones is churning through his mind. He’s pretty certain that his bony frame would stand no chance in a fight against that.

  Slowly, Douglas crawls out of the tube, stumbling into an empty room. He tries to stand but immediately falls flat on his face. His thoughts still occupied by the sudden and abrupt intrusion by flesh horror and finger golems, he fails to realize that there is gravity here, wherever here might be.

  The escape pod has no means of looking outside, or at least Douglas has not found any, so he has no knowledge of his current location. All he knows is some pretty gross things are walking around, and he probably won’t stand a chance if it comes down to a scuffle.