[ Dr. Kerenski / Kopusha / Leemy ]

I looked over my Soul-Song stats once again. Hello? Where's my battery?

Did I lose Battie?!

The menu flickered once again.

Name:

_______ Alana Skyisle

Age:

22 weeks

Species & Subtype:

female - human - foetus

Affinity:

Astral Phantom [Various stat bonuses from subsumed soul-shards and affiliated affliction]

Spark of the Morningstar [+ 3 skill channels]

Blessing of Lunaria [+ Soul-Song skill]

Agromancer [+ Life-Forge skill]

Dryad [+Chrysalis skill]

Level:

2

Experience:

198/450

Health:

2/2

Stamina:

2/2

Mana:

2/2

Mana regen:

2 m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

0 [+3]

Charisma:

0

Magic:

0 [+3]

Luck:

15

Intelligence:

0

Wisdom:

0

Soul:

1 [+3] [-3]

Skills:

[Soul-Song LV 0] [ON]

[Raising Spell efficiency by 0.1%]

[Providing detailed Soul-Stats]

[Translating the Soul-Song's Language]

Known Song-Spells:

[Tamus-Anima] [Sectus-Anima] [Conjugo-Anima] [Identify]

[Life-Forge LV 1] [OFF]

[Chrysalis LV 0] [PAUSED]

[Sectus-Thread LV 3]

Phylactery: [Battie] [Astral Battery] [10/10 mana]

Affliction:

[Soul decay: - 3]

There you are! I thought I lost you, my precious battery spore. I felt Battie.... tried to determine her position. Battie was safely tucked inside my soul, smooshed into the small foetus body along with everything else. She wasn't properly connected to me. Some kind of a tether was required to properly control her if I wanted her to function as a spore and not as a battery. Eh, whatever. She'll be a battery for now. I could use the extra mana to resolve my... problem.

I stretched, opened up my eye-stalks, spread my ghostly branches out and pushed them through the aura of the unborn Miss Alana Skyisle. It was dark inside of the womb, but my eye-stalks were used to the darkness of the Astral Ocean, so it wasn't that much of an issue.

Yep, from the looks of things... I was definitely a female foetus. The most important question to ask here was - WHY I was inserted into an unborn girl like some kind of a parasite? Did these people WANT their child to be born a monster? If Hollow Mother was able to follow the blue-thread so could any other small, completely random Phantom!

I searched the memories of Acolyte Kopusha for an answer. Nothing came up, except for a general feeling of worry, concern and disgust at whoever had created this human-shaped Phylactery.

Perhaps, I needed to invest in wisdom to resolve this mystery?

[Don't.] A whisper in my soul resonated. [Wisdom dives into the Astral Ocean for answers. Using Wisdom-skills might attract Mother or another Phantom to your current location.]

I tried to think. Why would someone injected a new soul from the Astral into an unborn girl using a powerful tether? It made no sense, felt like an idiotic things to do. If I didn't have Kopusha in me... didn't know how to define or split up my soul with Song-Spells, I would have simply, cluelessly dissolved this little soul given enough time!

The thought made me shudder. I was almost made into a murderer!

I suddenly recalled the words of the Omniscience.

"An interesting experiment..."

It had called me an experiment! Whatever god of Novazem the Omniscience was, it had set up this phylactery for me as an experiment... perhaps as means to extinguish, smother this child's original soul and replace it with mine!

No.

I'm not going to stand for whatever vile plot this was. I'm not going to be the end of a yet unnamed girl from Skyisle!

Skyisle...

[Skyisle still stood! By Lunaria! Not everyone had died. Perhaps there was someone left from our Empire. An Alanian! Someone who could help!] A memory pulsed in my head.

Except... the determined Seditionists, just like the Bolsheviks of USSR, had likely won the last war against the immortality-seeking Progressors. The White army of Imperial Russia lost because they tried to play nice, didn't execute everyone who stood in their way. Likewise, the cultists likely won as they operated with inhuman devotion to their cause, brutality, cruelty and willingness to resort to absolute madness of near-total inhalation. The Seditionists likely controlled, ruled Skyisle town now. If Skyisle wasn't an irradiated wasteland with humans surviving deep underground, then it was most likely now under the boot of the gods.

I had to become completely invisible, hide my skills and levels and be extremely, incredibly careful and paranoid. I could not be revealed as the last Alanian, as a Phantom memory that escaped from the Astral into the world of the living!

"How do I hide my stats completely? Kopusha!? Think!" I prodded the ghostly, half-erased shadow of the Acolyte. "Remember! How can a level of a person be hidden? What can hide information?"

A memory swam to the forefront of my mind.

A hexagrammatic, stilled and modified soul-shard called the Obscurer, created by a Spell-Song "The Signature of Obfuscation".

It was akin to a notice of copyright on a research paper - Kopusha had signed her research mage-tome with this Soul-Signature, signifying that the spell-tome in question belonged to her and nobody else, reinforcing the signature's strength daily as she used her spell-tome.

The Soul-Signature of Obfuscation was incredibly hard to break and every Academic's Signature was incredibly personal, filled with a variety of personal stanzas. It was a mindless, memoryless shard of a soul. The whole purpose of the Obscurer was to scramble the information inside of a book, making it completely invisible to outsider eyes and Identify spells. It was designed specifically to work against Identify, to show a scanner absolutely nothing at all.

The Alanian [Obscurer] functioned akin to a Cryptographic algorithm used for data encryption and authentication in the USSR. The best reference to this Obscurer from my Earth that I could think of was "the one-time pad", an uncrackable cryptographic encryption technique that required the use of a single-use pre-shared key that was no smaller than the message being sent.

The [Obscurer] scrambled information written inside a wizard's tome for anyone but the original soul. Incredible!

The Academics of Tricameron wore titanium pins on their ties for a reason. An [Obscurer] Soul-Shard was woven into their Academia-Branch signifier pin. Its primary job was concealing the Academic's full Soul-System stats and Level from Identification.

YES! This was exactly what I needed! Wait... why didn't I recall this song when facing the Hollow Mother?

[The Obfuscation-shard does not hide the presence of mana, nor itself, it simply scrambles data - if anything it would have made you more exposed, brighter and more tasty-looking to the Phantom life,] the answer came.

"I see," I muttered.

I started to hum Kopusha's personal song of Obfuscation.

The stanzas spoke of her life in the Academy, of the brilliant professors she worked under, of numerous libraries she visited, of her love for the wild and the green. It spoke of complexity, beauty and wonders of botany, of the Acolyte's passion for the magic of Agromancy and of her heart's desire to make herself a best friend that would never question, berate, betray or hurt her.

Kopusha's song of obfuscation was a story of her life and the struggle to be understood by her parents, peers and many other citizens of Tricameron who weren't anywhere as dedicated to Agromancy as she was, who weren't as passionate about plants as she was.

Kopusha was a loner, a nerd just like me dedicated to science. She died without ever making a true friend in the world, had to forge herself a Dryad, an approximation of a human to hug and to love... by cutting apart her own soul. I thought with a small pang of pity as I hummed her personal song.

[Signature song of Obfuscation [Obcultatio-Anima] recalled!]

The Soul-Song resonated. Perfection!

I stilled my Soul and carved another soul shard out of myself with [Sectus-Anima] and slowly made it into an [Obcultatio-Shard] using the song I had just learned.

-1 in Soul.

The Soul-Song declared.

It took me several days of non-stop singing to turn the newly carved shard into an [Obscurer].

I called the new shard "Obsy" and the Soul-Song helpfully labeled her as such.

. . .

I tried to think of who else could threaten me.

I had cut the thread behind me, cut the Hollow Mother off from reaching this body.

I felt safe, warm and happy in the womb.

Could Astral Phantoms even threaten me in the physical? According to the memories of Kopusha Phantoms couldn't get out from the Astral on their own and became reduced to mere weak ghosts if they were pulled into the physical outside of a phylactery.

I decided to use my core skills to give myself a new life in Skyisle.

Using Chrysalis I could change, evolve into something new, get born, figure things out and... thrive and multiply like a good tree should.

But where to start?

Should I remain within the body as a tree-like structure, become a symbiote within the girl, grow along Miss Alana's as a secondary nervous system?

Or perhaps... I could separate us into twins, separate Miss Alana Skyisle from myself and make myself into her sister or even a brother.

Or better yet... I could separate myself, Kopusha, Leemy and... Alana into four!

Alas, before I could meddle with my body, I really needed to...

[Investigate the soul]