A couple weeks after her return from Rettan...
As the waning evening light cast it's orange hues in anemic beams through the dense glass window across her desk there she sat, pouring over notes on anatomy that well surpassed her colleagues. While others were still immersed in middling studies of what makes the fundamental cores of their craft she was already breaking into the territory of modern forerunners in her field. True, she couldn't chill a cup of water or nudge it over without touching it but methods that were only tangential to her purpose were not of immediate necessity and thus relegated to later concerns, well after she masters binding.
Standing up from her desk she looked out from her window, estimating the remaining hours in the day. One might think that by knowing temporal magic she would just use that to tell what time it was but in fact the opposite was true. Being able to use the magic necessitated that she attune her awareness to the flow of all things, not the other way around. The flowing sands of an hourglass did not create the passage of time. Rather, the passage of time is what facilitates the flowing of sand.
_
From her dorm she stepped out into the streets. The bustle of movement of everyone in constant need to be somewhere in time, the miasma of odors from biological waste constantly leaking from the myriad of creatures contained within these stone shells, The dying orange tint which bathed everything in the shadows of all which stood, This was the city that she's called home for well over a year. In the wake of the mayhem her own peers had wrought in the foreign lands of Rettan it put into perspective just how fragile this all was. Like an organism unto itself the city had many moving parts, each part playing it's own role in facilitating the health of the sum. A great beast, each component supping life unto themselves from it's reserves as it pulls in nutrients through the veins they call trade paths. All nutrition had to come from somewhere however. As she read of the great whales who partake of great schools of krill cities too consume great numbers of smaller beasts to feed the many muscles and neurons that many would call people.
And that which is not consumed becomes waste.
Pulling into an alleyway not far from her destination she cakes her form in the special light warping powder which she had procured over in Rettan. Now mostly transparent she slinked her way over to a sewer cover, descending through into system below. In the cramped lightless tunnels where water displaced all manners of sewage which flowed into it from the drains above Trypano made her way through. She lacked light but it was hinderance to her for she could sense the very matter around her, the channels of air and water contrasting strongly against the led and copper pipes. The odor was foul but it was nothing to her but the scent of life itself.
_
While her destination was a winding trail off from where the entrance to the catacombs proper was she was cautious, wary of taking routes too direct should she be followed. Coming up to a section of the sewer where the waters were thin she pressed her hand up against the pipe's surface, it's metal rippling as she submerged into the material. She was simply breaking down the portions coming into contact with her, reconstituting them back into places she no longer occupied. It was a fairly basic binding technique, elevated to impressive heights with the amount of precision and detail used to make it conform to her shape. Once through the material is as it once was, any sign of passage not visible in it's structure.
Down, down she traveled into the stony depths, shelves upon shelves lines with human skulls, alcoves featuring urns where the bones of the deceased are stored. It would seem at some point back in the catacomb's history that it eventually became used to a point where expanding it's depths to accommodate the bodies became unfeasible, the remains reorganized as such to host more and more bodies with only the wealthy and important retaining coffins, at least those that weren't stored in their own mausoleums anyhow. The architecture itself was aged, still holding up but not entirely sound as some areas had collapsed be it from seismic activity, construction from above or other such incidents which have worn at it's structural integrity.
While the path in the upper layers remained largely unchanged Trypano had made a change of her own in recent times: Past a wall that she would pass through in a similar manner to the one up in the sewers she had constructed a tunnel which lead away from the overall network of the catacombs. It's structure was inspired by nature, namely the fine workmanship of the humble ant. While not able to make her tunnels small enough to avoid displacing too much load-bearing soil she used shaped dragon marrow to reinforce it, the spine supporting the roof of the tunnel while ribs lined the walls, an interlocking series of scales laid flat against one another keeping finer dirt from sifting through. Even with all this she kept her tunnel rather claustrophobic in diameter as smaller structures were ultimately stronger than larger ones. She had to crawl on her stomach down a fair ways into the depths where her lab awaited.
_
The lab itself was built in a similar manner to the lower chambers of the catacombs, stone bricks adhered together with sandwyrm claw matter instead of plaster to reinforce the structure. This is where all her work had been moved to. While the place Ingrid had picked for her worked well for a time it was decided that she needed greater secrecy for her work was needed should her business partner prove unreliable, something which proved to be the case after the excursion to Rettan. This location was still not perfect but would have to suffice for the time being.
In the corner of the room stood what looked to be a barrel of organs adorned with various crimson sigils. Through liberal use of blood magic she had built this semi-organism from her own flesh which would consume matter placed within to keep it alive while a pair of lungs contained within would breath in unusable air, converting it into breathable air thanks to the blood magic runes that were being kept healthy through the digestion pool within the barrel. There were also a few plants decorated around it to assist in the process.
Numerous shelves lined the walls, containing jars with various organs and other such samples within, all adorned with similar blood magic runes. She calmly meandered her way to the shelf where numerous blood samples were kept, taking several out from her purse and setting them in the racks with the others. She took a couple minutes to refresh the runes upon the various containers as these enchantments were limited in their longevity, a common frustration of hers she was looking to remedy. There were many tables and slabs throughout the long chthonic chamber with many a strange and possibly macabre experiment adorning them. The slimes she had gathered did not seem like they would fair well in such a clinical and controlled environment so she simply left them to wander a closed circuit of hers up in the catacombs, many a number of breeding pools and nutrient baths left for them to enjoy. She would have to remember to refresh the waters and supply more nutrients to their feeding baths before she returned to the surface.
_
From the top of the room suspended by chains upon a frame was a partially formed dead carcass of the sandwyrm they had slain some time ago. She had collected a fair number of it's parts in that auction and been spending time trying to regrow it's flesh from the organs she had salvaged. Still, no matter how much of it she could manage to regrow she couldn't bring new life to the replicated cells of the dead. She had spent some time trying to recreate the rest of it's enormous body but there were always difficulties in trying to recreate something that was incomplete. This was a lesson she had learned well in her efforts to try and clone herself. Upon many of the tables were dead bodies, her bodies. Much of them were malformed, incomplete not unlike the sandwyrm carcass itself. Trying to replicate an entire body from the memories of only a few cells presented innumerable difficulties. Not even being able to see the cells at a close enough scale to analyze their inner workings largely left her working on her blood-child instincts, instincts which while keen were running up against the limit of what she was able to understand through intuition alone.
All the bodies were being suspended in decay using blood magic of course but most if not all stood no chance at being alive. Such failures brought to mind the enormity of the tasks ahead of her as she put away the samples she had taken from the battle at the imperial palace. A vial of Ogaurac blood, Smirking Dragon she believe they once called him; A plum from an enchanted grove which was rumored to possess unique qualities and last but not least the scale shed at the scene of Wu Long's battle with the emperors. The scale in particular posed to her the greatest challenge as a scale was similar in nature to finger nails or hair. The matter itself was already dead, much harder to rebuild living structures out of as it no longer possessed any will to regrow. Like a fingernail however scales had roots. Roots sometimes could hold nerves in them, nerves which required blood. While this scale might not have still held potential for that now temporal was beginning to open up possibilities. The scale might not have any potential currently but there was once a time where it was fresh, where the nerves that gave it it's sense of touch were fresh. With a bit of manipulation she hypothesized it possible to rejuvenate it into a state where the will to regrow would still linger.
Of course, there was no hope of regrowing the deceased ogaurac or the fallen serpent handler if she couldn't even animate her own body hewn from fresh ingredients. This train of thought brought her attention over to the centerpiece of her lab: A slab upon which a mold of her own body laid. It was made of wax formed from human fat, her own fat. During her sculpting classes she would chuckle internally knowing that those around her never know that this was what she practicing for. All those human figures shaped from stone, marble or clay were simply preambles to forging molds within which she would craft a living being. Surrounding that slab were canopic jars, shaped from glass instead of pottery so one might see which organs floated in the neutral organic fluid within. These jars were enchanted like all the rest but these samples were particularly fresh, carved straight from her own body and sealed within so their death cycle could be delayed. A piece of liver, a chunk of heart, a strip of intestine, a dab of bone marrow, even most of her womb, there was numerous pieces of herself which she had extracted with deliberate care. She even had to apply only a limited use of painkilling agents for these surgeries so as to not taint the samples. She was no stranger to self afflicted agony, something she often took to deliberately so as to challenge her focus. There were always going to be times where she would not have the luxury of pain killers or a reprieve from discomfort. She would not allow her focus to waver, even under the most trying of circumstances.
_
Such is as it was. The parts were all there, awaiting one final piece before she begins another attempt in earnest: a sliver of her brain stem. Her plan is that with enough of a body preserved fresh enough she could utilize the will to regrow within each respective element and grow each part accurate to the piece that it was shaped from. Of course, insight from the book that her and her new business partner Xiuyang had acquired could aid in this but she was prepared to press on nonetheless. She had a plan as to how she would extract this piece of her brain stem as well but it required further advancements in her temporal studies. She needed to bridge the gap and make the jump from simply anchoring points in space and time to actually maneuvering around them. This was necessary for many things, especially the blood bank: an enchanted storage which would allow her to use temporal distortion to delay the decay of organic materials much longer than the blood enchantments were able to. Instead of simply keeping organic materials vitalized she'd be able to cease their temporal progress entirely ensuring that nothing could occur within to bring about decay and diminish the sample's will to regrow.
That was a future matter however. For the time being she simply renewed her blood marks, documented any changes to the other bodies and/or samples and then left back up her bone passage to the main catacombs. She spent a bit of time with her slime samples, cleaning and feeding them whilst studying their behavioral patterns including this new Blue Killer slime which she had acquired from Rettan. While it's effects in Ingrid were disappointing it was clear there was more to learn from this enigmatic invertebrate. The Tsar Bomba was growing nicely to a most prodigious size as well, something she kept a measure on.
Once she was finished with all that she returned up from the catacombs, taking a separate route up from the sewer so as to be predictable. Once out onto the surface she used binding and chemical magic to eliminate contaminants from the sewers, leaving her almost exactly as she was before she went down below. She made her way down the streets in the dying twilight hours back to her dorm before their sleep curfew would enter effect. An annoying ritual, having to constantly come up simply to be seen sleeping where they believe she belongs. This isn't truly where she belonged however. There was no place in the world of these mundane humanoids for a creature like her. Only down below could she truly be herself.
Only down below could she truly build herself.
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