>>6119049muscles straining, skin stretching, ligaments moving and tearing, no living mind to direct it all. You account for the stress tolerance of the whole thing when its lying down but then it stands up, half congealed blood slurps through dead arteries, you've got thermal irregularities, stiffening, bloating, gas build-up, look, here, you've punched a wrack slice right through a sinew, so when you ask the thing to move it's going to tug that line and saw its own limb off. Happens more often than you think.
The traditional method for overcoming it is engraving your wards on copper plates then nailing those to the skull. Gets you a nice solid surface to work with but then the nails eventually work loose and its a whole *thing*.
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So an hour or so later after Phridon and Icarus have decontanimated their gloves and scalpels and spent a fruitful few minutes discussion anatomy, the shambling broken bits they've left all over the field have done wonders for our supply situaton.
On account of how everyone watching has lost their appetite. One of them turned around. All the way around. The head popped clean off of the spine.
Apparently that happens to fleshbound animants, because intentonal engravings don't really know how to account for the pressure differentials. You bind the need to move into the shattered thing and throw some reflexes and mobility you've taken out of a convention rat or scraghound or bird into it to control the motorcortex and five minutes later one of the legs is broken because it started pumping its muscles too hard.
Icarus groans. Phridon groans. Two of the nearby ward specialists throw up. Though that could be wrack exposure.
A N Y W A Y, Phridon eventually offers, what we actually want to do here is Incarnate a Reflection. It's obviously heresy to do anything but the Empyreal Eye but "heresy" is a really strong word for what is a pretty simple process. If instead of all this mucking about with meat*bits* we instead bound a vestigal fragment of the Empyreal Eye into the form of the fallen, the flesh-housing would serve as a brief link to this world from the Other and let the animant move about until it inevitably detonated in a wash of fire. That always happens to the Flamebound, since meat is so leaky.
That Wrackcrystal idea was clever, though. They're good for absorbing backlash and energy. If we polished a few and stitched them into the stomach lining, the Incarnated vestige would probably be able to last longer because the Wrack-crystals would absorb some of the enormous pressure of the energy until they blew up. Novel theoretical idea but actually feasibly possible, given current understanding of Iconotheurgic manipulation.
HEY ANYONE AROUND HERE HAVE A NEEDLE KIT
GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FUCKING FREAK
WHAT NO I NEED A NEEDLE KIT FOR SEWING A PIECE OF CRYSTAL INTO THIS CORPSE SO I CAN MAKE IT STAND UP
Weird. No one's volunteering to help. Well, luckily the Whitebone Needles are sharp enough . . .
