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Zombies used to be understood as flesh automatons before more advanced mind-reading procedures confirmed what some have already assumed. The process was one of the simpler ones: the practitioner (traditionally a houngal, but zombification had nothing to do with loa and was associated with vodou in the same way as barbershops with pulling teeth) would kill the target with an enchanted poison, causing a sort of posthumous locked-in syndrome where the conscious spirit is bound to the body and unable of affecting it, yet experiencing every sensation, only there as a medium to understand the master's simple verbal commands, which the body would then perform. Zombies were traditionally used for primitive hard labor until connective tissue on joints wore out to the point of uselessness, and then the master would rend the soul from body. Zombies nowadays were always a kill-on-sight, which they appreciated.
She was not a zombie.
Mary Shelley was not a practitioner, but personally knew several, Shelley and Byron being among the more notable. Her description actually lacked the "stitched from corpses" element, and she really mostly fluffed up a variation of the homunculus creation process known since Paracelsius, but the name stuck. Some laymen insisted on saying "Frankenstein's monster" and then presumably went on to not say "Diesel's engines" and "units of force named after Newton", but nonetheless actual frankensteins resembling their movie counterpart was not incidental and was just a case of knowledge leaking into the general public. A frankenstein was charged by a direct lightning hit (aether stuff, sockets didn't work) and working until the charge depleted. The challenges were twofold — stitching corpses in a way that nervous tissue would still transfer electricity, and the fact that every charge cycle was a complete wetware reset. Work on stable memory devices still continued, but there was little hope. Frankensteins were considered a dead end. She was not a frankenstein either.
Not a dyubbuk, obviously — none of the murderous impulse. Not a necrolaborer, not a revenant, a lament, a fleshward, a fleshwad, no smell of vitamelange either... Rushia also wasn't familiar with the workings, but suggested just saying "flesh golem". You suggested shutting the fuck up.
She wasn't sure herself, but said that the term she heard once or twice was "eigenvessel". She didn't know how helpful that was, and your searches came up blank. One of a kind, perhaps, in more than one way.
Your preferred term for her was "my love".
You woke up to the sight that has long since become familiar — your love watching you sleep. You had no idea how long, possibly since sunrise, but Ollie had excellent night vision, as the undead tend to, so it could have been much longer. She didn't really need to sleep, only doing it sometimes to conserve energy. She certainly didn't dream. She said that she sometimes dreamt of you, but you both knew that to be a lie.
You took in a lungful of her smell — flowers, force majeure and formalin. She saw daybreak touching your eyelids and prying them open, but waited till you were fully awake to invade your personal space, in her usual way.
"GOOD MORNING, MY SUNSHINE!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, almost right into the holes on the sides of your skull that were currently mainly producing tinnitus. "TODAY IS A BIG DAY, BUT THEN AGAIN, EVERY DAY IS BIG WHEN WE'RE TOGETHER DON'T YOU AGREE BUT TODAY IS A PARTICULARLY BIG ONE BECAUSE OLLIE WANTED TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING UNLESS IT'S NOT TOO LATE SO HURRY AREN'T YOU EXCITED AND SPEAKING OF EXCITEMENT SORRY OLLIE ALMOST FORGOT", she nudged your hip, then somehow whispered, while still yelling, "wᴀJt, do ʏou wᴀɴɴᴀ..."
cont.
