Lost Worlds character
Time never was a thing that Fetcher had cared about. To him, it had no meaning. He was alive, but birthed through magic breathing life into metal, stone, wood, and other plant fibers. He had neither need, nor want, of food and drink, sleep, or most anything that living creatures shared. Save companionship, perhaps. No living creature truly wished to be alone. Not for the sake of happiness, at least.
While time itself meant nothing, dates certainly did. Dates were data, and data could be used. Different ingredients expired at different times, and the date told you if it was good or bad, reduced in potency, changed from restorative to poisonous, or perhaps worthless all together. Master Kraelix cared a great deal for dates, and so Infused did as well. Master Kraelix was a Wizard, a master of transmutation magics, and he had a true passion for alchemy and enchanting. Fetcher had no talent for magic, but he hadn't been built for that anyway. Instead, he'd been designed to help with all manner of the physical crafting process; fetching different ingredients, mixing, stirring, and so forth. He had to learn about ingredients, so he learned languages pertaining to the manuals that Master Kraelix had on hand.
A great many things were made in Master Kraelix's laboratory, and that is where Fetcher happily lived his construct-life. He had purpose there, he did served it well, and Master Kraelix was quick to praise or celebrate, and slow to anger. He was strict, but the strictness made sense, it too served a purpose, and Fetcher grew from following the instructions he was given. In the hours that Master Kraelix was not working in the lab, and Fetcher had no specific duties to attend for crafting or research, he busied himself with reading through all of the books at hand. He learned of animals and herbs, and all the many known uses for each. Different methods for processing and preserving ingredients, how to harness different elements. He learned the words and actions required for some minor spells, though he could never get any of them to work. He wasn't supposed to be learning how to cast spells, either on his own or under supervision, but the books were there and he had not been forbidden to look through them, so...he did. Other times he would spend days on end making preparations, tending to a brewing potion, caring for plants or animals that needed something harvested from them for a spell, or digging through old books for references that might have been forgotten or overlooked due to missing information in a previous read-through.
On [a date 57 years ago] Fetcher and Master Kraelix were working in the laboratory with another wizard by the name of Nyevnen. She was an ambitious high elf, very talented in the arcane, and invaluable when it came to obtaining rare materials. The project of the day was to study the triggering mechanism of an amulet that had sort of a small, somewhat heart-shaped trio of rubies held by molded bronze hands, which they called "The Periapt" (of wound closure). The amulet was capable of stopping the wearer from dying when their bodies had sustained enough damage to potentially bleed out and die. It triggered a form of natural restoration, not exactly healing, that would close the wounds well enough to prevent death; assuming the wearer's body did not sustain further damage. Though it did not provide any actual healing, it would also increase the body's natural healing process to nearly double the normal rate.
For the time being, their goal was to replicate the automatic monitoring of the wearer's status. If they could recreate that, then there would be countless opportunities for enchanting other items with similar triggers. Command words were easy. Application-activation was easy. Providing the item with the sense to trigger itself as-needed, though? That was something else entirely. They discovered how the magic item worked on the first day. There was no trigger at all, it simply cast a spell over and over, repeatedly, without ever stopping. It was an answer, but not the one that they had been searching for.
They immediately redirected their study to the spell that the item was replicating, spare the dying. The spell would save a dying person's life; simple enough. How did it have such an impact on a dying person, but do nothing otherwise? Some spelled worked on living things, others worked on objects, and others just on a point in space. So what was it about this spell that made it affect dying people, and only dying people? You could cut someone, cast the spell, and nothing would happen. Cut someone to the point that their body gives out and they risk death, and suddenly the wounds would begin to close with the aid of the spell.
A number of days passed, with no headway being made. It was such a simple spell that a novice could learn it, yet they could not define how the spell worked the way that it did. Discouraged and in need of a mental cleanse, Master Kraelix and Nyevenin decided to return to the original direction of studying the continual application of the same spell repeatedly. Enchanting items so that they had a permanent effect was something they could already do, but repeated casting with no need to recharge the spent magic? That was something unique to the periapt as well.
The first three spells they tried it on did not take the enchantment at all. They were somewhat able to recreate the effect with the light spell, but every six seconds the spell would turn off completely, then back on six seconds later, back off, and so on. They expected the light to dim, or flash momentarily at the six second interval, and could not explain why it did this instead. They were still able to come up with some use for such an enchantment, even if it was not what they had intended. However, one hour after the light spell enchantment had been set, it turned off completely and there was no trace of the enchantment ever existing in the first place.
They took note to return to the light spell later, and moved on to testing other spells. The next one that had any notable effect was one they called eldritch blast. Fetcher had heard of the spell before, but never seen it used. The item they were using it on was a glove woven from a giant spider's silk, slid onto a rough replica of a human hand made of hardened clay on top of an iron core. The enchantment took, but instead of repeating blasts of force energy, the cloth of the glove visibly vibrated and rippled in a wave pattern accompanied by a soft whistling sound, but nothing else happened. They touched it, moved it, and eventually even removed it from the fake hand and Nyevnen put it on her own to try to direct or trigger the blast, but nothing more happened.
Frustrated, Nyevnen removed the glove and tossed it down onto the work table. When it landed, the glove exploded with enough force to shatter to the table and blow everyone back across the room twenty feet in different directions. The force of the explosion and being flung into a nearby wall had caused Fetcher to go inert and unconscious. When his consciousness returned, he found himself in the midst of smoke and debris. He could see Nyevnen's broken body near the door, open eyes dull and lifeless. Master Kraelix, he could not see.
Fetcher sat up and noticed a stiffness and pain at the base of his sternum. Looking down, he saw that the periapt has been imbedded in the metal plating of his chest, glowing with a pale silver light. He tried to remove it, but found it stuck fast not only by the pressure of the impact, but also by heat having melted the metal plates of his body to those of the amulet's casing, fusing them together. "Master Kraelix, I must report an error." He said it out of habit, having noticed something was wrong, but having never experienced anything like this, he knew no other words to express what had happened.
With some difficulty, Fetcher stood and saw a number of disturbed crates and broken vials. Behind the crates he found Master Kraelix, unconscious and clearly injured, but still alive. Lifting crates of supplies was one of Fetcher's many tasks, and Master Kraelix weighed barely more than a teenage human, so the warforged lifted him with ease and made for the door. Nyevnen's twisted legs were blocking the door, so he kicked the obstacles out of his way and proceeded through the door and up the long series of steps to arrive back above ground. He came out in the stock room at Master Kraelix's shop. The locking mechanism on the door was not one that could be undone with one hand, nor with his arms full of unconscious human, so Fetcher kicked the door.
The door did not open, being magically warded against such, but that did not stop him from trying. The shop's keeper rushed to check on the door, and opened it for him. She was an adult female wood elf, who he was told males found attractive. Her hair was the color of wet mud, having a perfect ratio of water to dirt, with a some trace amounts of iron oxide. Her eyes eyes were a vibrant green, not unlike the needles of a hemlock tree. Her face was...elven female.
Examining Master Kraelix, she asked, "This was the explosion?"
Fetcher, in that moment, felt that was the most ignorant question ever spoken from the mouth of a living creature. Nevertheless, his head nodded in agreement of its own accord. Vystrie had Fetcher set Master Kraelix on the shop counter in the front room, pushing items off to the side or onto the floor, to make room. "Fetcher, one of the red potions over there. Quickly, now."
Fetcher did as she said, "An explosion of force energy. Ingestion or topical application? Nyevnen is a high elf body near the door, downstairs."
"If he's out bad enough reflexes might not take over and he could suck it into his lungs instead. Topical." Fetcher parted Master Kraelix's robes to reveal his master's torso, and poured a line of the red liquid from the top of the naval up to base of the throat, then gently ran his hands through it to spread it across the surface.
The two of them waited for what felt like a very long period of time.
Time. The word now had meaning.
Master Kraelix began to stir, showing clear signs of agony despite the healing potion working its way into his system. Master Kraelix looked around, his eyes landing on Vystrie. He stared at her for a moment, blinked his eyes four times, and then looked at Fetcher. "Secure the lab. Keep it safe."
"Yes, Master Kraelix," the warforged replied.
Master Kraelix saw damage to the warforged body that Fetcher himself had not bothered to assess, and his face twitched with surprise as he saw the periapt buried into Fetcher's sternum. "Infused?"
"Yes, Master Kraelix," the warforged replied.
Master Kraelix had a fit of coughing, and the pain of bruised and broken ribs shocked him into unconsciousness. The potion would heal them, with time. But it was too soon. Fetcher had Master Kraelix's instructions, so he followed them by going back down the stairs to secure the lab. He main sure there were no fires present, cleaned up spilled chemicals and broken potions or half-potions, and moved the high elf body away from the door, and into a presentable position akin to a sleeping high elf body. What he thought one should probably look like, anyway. The books down here did not cover sleeping positions, but books on development and birth suggested a curled S-shape, so that was what he used. It looked natural enough.
With that taken care of, Fetcher sat and waited for Master Kraelix to return. Until then, he would keep it safe.
Much time passed. Fetcher knew how to count time and track time, but all of the devices they had for that would work for no more than one hour, and being deep beneath the ground's surface, there was no way for him to track the natural progression of time.
What Fetcher did not know, was that Master Kraelix had sustained internal injuries that a simple healing potion could not cure, even if it had been ingested, and he died within the hour. Vystrie knew, but she did not think of the warforged waiting down in the laboratory for his master to return, she thought only of what money she could make from selling the items in the shop, and how she would load them into a wagon, and which cities she would travel to in order to sell them. And that is just what she did.
Seven years later...
Infused still sat in the laboratory, along with the decayed high elf body, keeping it safe until Master Kraelix returned. Somewhere in the middle of all that time, Fetcher had taken the last word that Master Kraelix had spoken, 'infused', and chosen it as a new name. It had been a very long time since he last fetched anything, the periapt still infused him, a shining reminder of the day everything had changed.
Then another explosion happened, except this time it was the world, and the laboratory collapsed.
I'm going to rework my original idea for what followed, as I don't think it's plausible from a survival standpoint, even with the periapt of wound closure attuned and keeping him stabilized repeatedly. I'll get it added as I get the plan reworked. He's going to become conscious covered in various alchemical mixtures and ingredients, half finished enchantments, and shrouded in shadow essence from the Shadowfel, all of which are being absorbed into the open wound at the periapt, which is the catalyst for his wild magic.
I'll get it added, but for now it's almost 1 AM and I need to get some sleep.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:40, Mon 12 July 2021.
Name: Karzok Stormfist