"So that's how you learned your craft, a mix of your past knowledge and the things written in those books." Carla asked. "Yes, pretty much. Had to experiment a lot obviously. Only hard work can give you skills you can rely on."
This last statement made Carla smile a little. Humans don't have innate abilities and their body is quite weak. The only way for them to get strong is by learning and pushing their limits. She remembered how much time she spent training to use weapons properly. Life back then was tough: In such a small village, everybody had to work hard just to survive. They made their own cloth; they grew their own food. And when outside forces attacked, they had only their own blood to spill and their own axes to kill. Their community couldn't afford weakness nor laziness. Such was the way in the Savage Land.
As naïve as it might seem it was the reason why she wanted to believe Margot stories: Even after ending her own life in despair, she found strength. She escaped Death itself through pure willpower, snatched a monster's body and still thrived to get more powerful. Falling in the deepest pit to rise stronger than ever. In Carla's mind, it was the very definition of being human.
Or maybe Margot was toying with her. Maybe she was just telling a nonsensical story just to make her feel more comfortable. Maybe this thing enjoyed creating a feeling of trust between its prey and itself just to betray them at the last minute. Just to see hope disappear and be replaced by despair. It wouldn't be the first she was lied to…
"Can only agree on that." Was the only thing she answered to the Eye Tyrant's statement.
Without sunlight she couldn't really tell how long it was since she woke up in this cave.
While thinking about that, her mind started to drift back in time, as memories forced their way to her consciousness. Purple blood on her hands, tentacles piercing her brother's skull, screams, red blood. She was on the floor, powerless, weak. She hated herself, "not again" was the only thought she had. She tried to stand up, but her legs were weak. Then she saw it – or her? A floating sphere covered in eyes. At this point she lost consciousness. She recalled waking up afterward on a rudimentary bed carved out of stone. Water was dripping on her face, falling from the ceiling. Some time passed, seemed long, maybe not, she wasn't sure. Then a deep and guttural voice came out of nowhere "Are you awake ? Do not be alarmed, I'm going to enter". A large stone moved. And this horrifying orb revealed itself.
"Is everything alright?" Those word threw her out of her weird trance. "Yes… Hum, everything's fine. I was just lost in memories" she muttered.
"It happens after traumatic events; I think it's called post traumatic stress disorder or something. To be honest I suck at psychiatry. Not good at talking. Still if you wanna talk ...? But I'm not sure it will help much."
"I'm confused. Are you trying to get me *not* to talk to you?" She could not help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.
"Hum well, I mean that I'm not a good listener, but if you feel the need, I'll try my best."
"It's the thought that count I suppose… You know what, I kinda like your story. Can you please continue?"
"Oh hum well…"
*********
When you try to evaluate if a medical procedure is effective, the first step is always to test it on animals. Back in her original world many argued about the ethical aspects of this practice, and she agreed that it was best to avoid useless suffering. However, for the time being, she didn't have any fancy lab equipment and computers to run simulations in silico. Ethical debates are a luxury you can only afford when you live a rather privileged life. Right now she was alone, in an hostile environment and her only goal was to grow in power as fast as she could.
The other issue was that after spending hours reading books, she was getting hungry. And she didn't find anything in her lair that she could eat. With those two objectives in mind, she decided to go out explore the network of caverns surrounding her new home hoping to capture some critters.
Hours passed as she tried to find the exit of this place. It was built like a labyrinth, trying to make enemies waste time before reaching the core chamber, and forcing them to walk on as many traps as possible. The worst part was that the stone was smooth everywhere, making all the corridors look the same. The layout was also quite impractical for non-flying creatures as it was full of vertical shaft that looked ridiculously hard to climb. She suspected that the original "owner" of the place used its disintegration ray to carve the whole network directly out of stone. After some time, she finally found the exit.
The cave she entered seemed to have been naturally formed. She decided to go in a random direction since she didn't really know where she was and where to go anyway. After moving around for hours, she arrived nearby a large body of water.
It was truly a sight to behold: The ceiling was concave, and the highest point was approximately at one hundred meters above the surface of the water. The lake had a roughly circular shape, with a diameter of at least a kilometer. Large fluorescent stalactites adorned the roof filling the cavern with an eerie blue light. The water itself had the same blue hue, and large shadows could easily be seen slowly swimming in it.
"Maybe I can fish with telekinesis ?" She thought, while moving toward the pond. As she did so, she started to distinguish grey mounds half submerged in the shallow water near the shore. Creatures were entering and exiting them, dragging dirt, small fish, and crystals. She took some time to observe silently. They looked like lobsters, and were around thirty centimeters long, except their exoskeleton was covered by fluorescent crystals. Some of them were running aimlessly on the shore, and they didn't seem to have problem staying out of the water for a long time. She suspected they were semi-aquatic crustaceans. Using her telekinesis ray, she grabbed a few and dropped them in her maw. Disgusting wet crushing sounds echoed in the otherwise completely silent cave.
The taste was disappointing, in fact she was surprised by that they had almost no taste, they were just a bit bitter and salty. The texture was pleasant however: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. She ate more until she felt full and decided to bring back some specimens to experiment on.
Back in her lair she returned to the central chamber and decided to create a new room that would be her laboratory. She was surprised by how quickly it was done using the disintegration ray : In an hour most of the stone was cleared. She carved a small stone table and started to exercise.
Her objective was to successfully graft a second set of pincers on a crystalline lobster. She was pleasantly surprised by how skilled her host was with the disintegration ray. Focused properly it acted like a perfect scalpel. The sleep and paralysis ray were ideal for anesthesia. Finally, small pulses of petrifying ray were enough for coagulation. With those tools the grafting part wasn't hard to accomplish. The main issue was that the limbs were nonfunctional. Obviously adding a limb was not enough, you needed specialized brain tissue to control them… While those creatures on the outside looked like the crustacean from earth, their brain anatomy was far more complex and remarkably close to that of vertebrates, making the task of locating the correct brain area to extract even harder. The best way to do so was to destroy selective part of the central nervous system and looking at the results. After weeks of trial and errors, and many valuable subjects lost on the path to Science! She finally managed to locate the poor beasts motor cortex.
She discovered the last part of the puzzle by accident: After hours of exhausting work, while being completely focused on her task, she simply wished she could shape their brain directly. She immediately felt something reaching out of her body and entering the lobster's flesh. She instantly felt an innate understanding of what was happening in the creature's body and discovered that she could force the neurons to connect in certain ways. Such a thing was not normally possible, but Margot's soul was completely abnormal. After absorbing fragments of the Sea of Souls and remnants of her host, it became plastic in nature. She formulated the hypothesis that it was the way souls communicated normally with their body and that since she was basically a big mass of "Soul Stuff" she had room for more connections. She decided to experiment more later on to verify this idea, but right now she had more work to do.
A side effect of this discovery was that she gained more insight in the inner working of her own body. While exploring another entity's anatomy was quite exhausting, figuring out the purpose of her own organs proved far easier. She had to enter a meditative state, then she imagined that she was reaching out and looking at herself from a third person perspective. She spent many hours doing those exercises. She quickly understood why the lobster were tasteless: She had no sense of smell and could only distinguish between Bitter, Salty and Acidic. Which proved to be a merciful fact since her digestive tract ended where it started: In her mouth...
Those insights combined with what she learned from "Grafts and Symbionts" were enough for her to go directly to the last step : Adding more eyestalks to herself.
The real reason she wanted to do so was not to gain more eye rays. After all it seemed to be hard to use more that 3 at the same time, and every eye tyrant had the same magical powers. The real reason was something she read in a book called "Lord Of Madness". This book covered various subjects regarding aberrations and their powers. Of course, there was a chapter on Eye Tyrants. It described many things she already knew but one detail intrigued her: The only way for her species to learn spellcraft, was to use their eyestalks as a "focusing medium" and to do so they had to remove the magic lens focusing the magical energies into specific effect. After such a surgery the eyestalk would only be able to spew "raw magic" which was, well, useless if not shaped correctly into a spell. However, such a sacrifice was still worth it: the versatility of casting magic is far superior to a unique effect. The more complex a spell, the more eyestalk were needed to extract and weave the magical energies. Ultimately to reach the spellcasting capabilities of the other races, the Eye Tyrant would have to lose every single eye rays they had.
But why make such a sacrifice when you can just graft more eyestalk?