5/20 late afternoon
I had a pretty free afternoon ahead of me. Emeriss was captured, Ysondre was headed north, and nobody but Abby was too badly hurt. I'd been really worried for a moment; I'd almost considered using my reanimate scroll on her. She was just too useful. Thankfully, instead she was just a disembodied spirit incapable of using most of her magic without a host and with almost no proficiency with possession. Lucky for us, her own undead could be possessed easily enough.
When I approached, I found Eliza and a human faced anime dog girl examining one of the dragonspawn corpses. The gnoll zombie turned towards me and nodded. "Ah. Master. I'm sorry for falling. I hope you weren't overly nervous about my fate?" She had a high pitched voice, but from her necklace and her manner of speaking she was clearly Abby.
"How exactly did you just..?"
"Exit my body without being cast into the great beyond? Easy. Eliza here already contained the majority of my vital force, as represented by my still beating heart, so I am tethered to her. When my soul was released from my body, the tether drew me here quite rapidly."
"Are you ok, though? That sounds traumatic."
"By all rights it should have ripped my soul to ribbons, yes. It didn't though. I suspect your amulet had something to do with that. I am quite weakened, however. This one," she gestured at the rag clad body she was inhabiting, "was a student of shadow magic. Barely. I can use my magic as well as she could use hers."
"Which isn't much, from your tone."
"No, as it turns out I surpassed a savage dog's magical prowess at some point. I'll figure out a way to address the problem eventually. Until then, I haven't forgotten any of my alchemical knowledge and Eliza has grown moderately proficient. We can still make the dregs you have had us creating, so long as you provide raw materials."
"Good. We can try to remedy this. Why didn't you use your full heal? That might still be able to repair your body."
"I didn't want to waste it, and I knew something like this would happen. Besides, you'd certainly prioritize me over a few practically untrained adolescent dragons when you acquire that resurrection magic all this is in service of." She had me there. I'd have to think this one through.
"Well, I'm sure we can make it work. At least you can serve well as a ghost."
"So long as I stay within thirty feet of Eliza, yes. The tether starts pulling upon me if there's more than that much distance. Even tearing me out of a borrowed body."
"Of course it does. Well, slightly fewer options, but I think you're probably going to be fine. We can still use this."
••••••••••
I flagged Sadie down for a lesson. I wanted to keep my repertoire of spells growing, and I had given her a mission. The rest of the retinue was starting to disperse; most would return to the area near Quel'Danil until passage via dragon could be arranged to teleport them home. Imriss would fly to Raven Hill to drop off Eliza, Abby, and Stitches, for example.
I insisted, over her objections, that we should absolutely focus on mind control for today's lesson. She was too squeamish about it, and it was honestly one of the spells I most wanted to learn. Especially if, as she claimed, it was an extension of Mind Vision. I brought Lillibeth in to serve as a target dummy; she had been on the road with Auffrey and Prudence towards Menathil Harbor, so she didn't really have anything particularly important she should have been doing.
The process was incredibly fast once I pressured Sadie into honestly trying. Like most forms of mind control I've seen since coming here, it consisted of substituting someone else's will with the caster's. It also had that classic shadow magic drawback of affecting the caster too. While dominating someone else, your will wasn't piloting your own body. In game it had taken the form of switching to playing the target, and that wasn't entirely wrong. While your own body was still theoretically conscious and aware, it had absolutely no desires; not even self preservation was online, since every driving part of the mind had been transferred to the other guy. It seemed pretty subtle though; for the most part it just looked like Sadie was zoning out while she controlled Lillibeth.
Lillibeth danced, sat down, tidied in the kitchen, and recounted what little she could remember of her life. It just seemed like she was deciding to do each thing in turn.
"I died during the darkening. I can't remember much about my life before that. I believe I had a family, and we were happy enough. I was going to follow my mother in her trade? I wouldn't do that very well now. I've lost too much. I'm really happy to have the ability to touch and feel things again, but actually having to do maintenance on myself is much more annoying than I remembered. I also feel useless and want to help more; I liked being always useful. It made me feel special." Her eyes were turning downcast.
"Don't worry Lillibeth. We will figure something out. We have a relatively free day ahead of us while Doris makes her way to the portal in Ashenvale, so we can afford to work on secondary projects. That includes getting you back into a more prominent position."
She nodded, wiping a bit of moisture from her eyes. She'd gone from one of my most in demand girls for day to day operations to one of the least useful. That had to hurt. Sadie, for her part, broke the connection and rushed over to give her a hug. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dredge up pain like that."
"No. No, it's fine. It's temporary, right?"
"Right."
We all took five and had some water before getting back to work. I had watched Sadie's spell earlier, and I was pretty sure I could reproduce it. It took six tries, but I'm pretty sure that would have been days or weeks without soul talent. I looked out through Lillibeth's eyes, and at first it felt just like mind vision. I was a passenger; I didn't get any insight into her thoughts, at least no more than communication talent gave me, but I was reading all of her senses. I felt her dress against my skin, I saw how big I was compared to her, I heard Sadie speaking.
"Alright. Now will for her to do something. Anything will do to start." Looking over at the blonde, I had a slightly wicked thought. It took a few tries to frame it correctly. I couldn't think of an order or a request, I had to just focus on wanting something, and I had to think of Lillibeth's body as my own. The priestly mental gymnastics continued; I wonder if Lividia would be good at it? Anyway, when I wished with all my heart to walk over to Sadie and kiss her, Lillibeth did just that.
I felt her cheeks start to burn, especially when Sadie didn't initially reciprocate, and I felt a force trying to push me out of the body. I was able to hold on very easily. It was like a sudden gust of wind; sure it was a force against me, but there was no way it would knock me over without me already being in a precarious position.
I also checked if my lures worked through mind control. That is definitely why I had Lillibeth try to seduce Sadie; a spirit of scientific inquiry. The fact that I was experiencing everything Lillibeth did first hand and I still had some pent up energy from the fight had nothing to do with it.
The results: communication talent still worked to some degree, but it affects me, not her, so I needed to constantly update her orders, telling her exactly what to do. I don't know if alluring voice worked or not actually, but my communication talent enhanced skills of seduction were apparently enough to get a short makeout session out of a pair of women magically compelled to see each other as acceptable sexual partners. Like I said, it was a poor test; both girls obviously knew what I wanted to happen and were submissive to me by default. Fun though, and I was able to track Lillibeth's resistance to my orders by the level of pressure I felt.
Walking over to Sadie had been easy, going in for the kiss had been a slight pressure, being rejected reflexively had been a surge, and the high point had been dirty talk with the priestess, not that even that had threatened to push me out. Once they had started actually kissing, the resistance had ebbed away pretty quickly.
When I severed the link after around fifteen minutes, I had a moderate case of mana fatigue. I'd had worse but I definitely needed to take a rest and have some water. Lillibeth didn't stop kissing and pawing at Sadie for a few moments, but when she noticed I was watching she turned beet red and stepped back. It wasn't that she had an audience; she just realized she wasn't being mind controlled anymore. She and Sadie were both fairly flushed, but seemed inclined to move right along.
Lillibeth didn't prove a very good target dummy in terms of testing limits. She had very few things she wouldn't do for me, and more importantly she knew that she was being controlled. Naturally, that meant we took Lillibeth's necklace off of her for the moment and slapped it onto another of Vanessa's entourage as she was pulled out of the inventory.
The woman in question was a fighter, not a lover. She was skeletal, with hollow cheeks and bony limbs. The fact that she was glaring at us with undisguised hate also contributed to her unattractiveness. I'd put a limitation on her getting down off of the table, which we had cleared off for this purpose. Sadie was far better at this than I was, so she went in first.
She knew what the holy grail would be, so she started angling for it. I, for my part, started talking and trying to get this girl on the right page to make it easier.
"You know I'm not the monster you all seem to think I am."
"Can it. I don't care what you say, no one should be using magic like you do. I love you." She didn't register that she said something strange there, instead blanking out and saying it in a monotone. So obviously she had the wrong mindset.
"Oh come on. You saw how quickly Vanessa slapped those collars back onto my girls. You really don't have the moral high ground here. Neither do I really, but we can be friends. We want the same things."
"Yeah, sure. What things?"
"You've been asleep for a while. Vanessa, Edwin, and I worked out a deal. I have the king under my control and we are quickly ending the war between the Defias and Stormwind. The Defias shall receive reparations and most of Westfall will be ceded to the newly ennobled leaders of the Defias. Peace, so we can stop stabbing each other and starving people while the nobles are only hurting in their purses." I kept going, framing everything that I was doing as a class struggle and waving away my extracurricular activities as the results of a few early accidents.
Communication talent was on the fritz, or her opinions were changing rapidly. At first she was barely restraining herself from interrupting, and then she started nodding and saying "yeah" at all the right times. Apparently, if she wasn't made to do something too out of character, she'd stay cognizant. As I continued my rant on autopilot, straying further and further from my own actual beliefs in order to get her to buy in, I checked my own necklace and saw her ETE plummeting. When it got under the 120 hour mark, I put in that good old validation command for her and digressed into something for Sadie.
"So yeah. I think you're ready to join the team. You'll be a great addition, and I think you'll love it."
"I love you. I love you." The first time she said it, she sounded a little confused. It was borderline at best. As she said it for the second time, however, she underwent a transformation very similar to Kriss's a few days back. She went from scarecrow to slim, and her brown hair went from the consistency of straw to a healthy mane. It had taken about fifteen minutes of coaching and feeding into a line of bs to go from hatred to love. I'd reinforced her own view of the world and convinced her that I was some kind of communist revolutionary by the end of it, but she was in the bag.
https://imgur.com/a/faith-b2QHFOi
Sadie almost collapsed when she returned to her own head, unfortunately. Shit. She was going to need to go back to the Argent Dawn soon, too. I handed her my arcane orb to help her recover. I called off mind control practice while the new girl, Willa, went over the last fifteen minutes in her head, realizing that she'd just nodded along with everything I said. "You asshole! Was any of that true?"
I was a bit surprised. She was actually angry at me. She was also captured of course, but my freshly caught revolutionary had given a love confession under false pretenses. "Bits of it, mostly that first part. I do want to improve things, I'm just not much of a "burn it all down" kind of guy. Don't worry, I'm also not going to turn you into a fuckdoll. That's more of a Vanessa thing." She stared at me in horror. "Yeah I didn't have the process down when I captured her, so instead of turning into what I wanted, basically just a lieutenant, she got really religiously into the submissive thing. She's a good lieutenant too, so I'm keeping her around, but she also tends to send back anyone I put her in charge of training as a slutty maid in addition to whatever I actually wanted. Oh. Also. Sorry about the table thing." I walked a short distance away and teleported her off of the table.
"Don't get on any more tables in the next day or you won't be able to get back off, alright? You just wait there, I'll figure out what to do with you later. Feel free to have some lunch, but don't pull anyone else out of the closet."
I turned to Sadie, my new binding buddy. I was pretty sure that "willful young woman with some knives" was Sadie's upper limit as far as how strong of a mind she could capture like this, but it was a higher limit than with the ghosts. I was going to have fun with this. But first, I had a bit of information to get out of Sadie.
"So, you prepared a list of enchanters as the chapel. It's a lot; can we go over them before you go back?"