World of Agatha - 8 Progress

While walking through her lair, Morgana suddenly entered a very large room with ample amounts of materials neatly stockpiled. This was her alchemy lab. Many herbs and other organic substances had their proprieties systematically compiled.

New recipes were created here every day for the most varied uses. There was a little bit of everything. Medicine, poison and even general utility.

The wizard took out a notebook and, with an indifferent attitude, started writing down results while observing new substances. After a few minutes she stored it once more inside her crude robes and walked away. But before exiting the room, she stole a quick glance at the creature standing at the corner.

It was a massive two and a half meters tall earth golem. Right now it was using a large wooden spoon to steer the liquid inside a giant cauldron. A very menial task compared to its capabilities on the battlefield.

Golems like this played a vital role in order to keep the research facility working properly. Without them, she wouldn’t be able to accomplish even one-tenth of what she did in the past few months.

Since Morgana didn’t have easily available labor like in the old days in her guild she was forced to improvise. After all, there were only so many actions an individual could take simultaneously.

However, things hadn’t always looked so bright. At first Morgana had failed repeatedly on her rituals to create these servants. Even after several attempts she had no idea of what was going wrong.

Usually after a succession of trial and error, Morgana’s five hundred-year-old’s worth of experience would supply her with insights and ideas for adjusting the formulas and making things work as they should.

But the solution to this problem eluded her for a long time.

In her homeworld, creating a golem was a relatively straight forward process. It was expansive, however, since you needed a magical gem, and took time as well as a decent knowledge of both elemental and life magic tô produce. Through an array the wizard would convert mana into life essence while molding the body and linking it to the gem, which would become the golem’s heart.

Perhaps Morgana would still be seeking a solution if she was not so well versed in the dark arts. The idea appeared while she was walking through the forest one day and saw a mushroom sprouting from the old corpse of a deer.

Life was a circle and it was possible to reuse vital energy from the dead. So why was she losing her time trying to convert mana into life when she could take a more direct approach?

It worked like a charm and Morgana had, since then, greatly increased the number of hands at her disposal.

….

She entered another door at the end of the same corridor which gave access to the aforementioned alchemy lab.

This room was divided into two halves, one had many kinds of plants, while the other was filled with animals in cages.

Morgana once more started to take notes, being particularly interested in a plant whose exterior was calcified, becoming very hard. The other vegetals didn’t seem to catch her attention and as such she turned towards the animals.

There was a wolf whose entire face was covered in bulges. It seemed very frail, at the brink of death. The situation was such that not even its eyes were visible anymore. Truly a being worthy of pity. But not Morgana’s pitty of course. She looked at it coldly and said.

“So this method also doesn’t work. It just leads to cancerous growth. However it’s not a complete loss either. Very interesting. Maybe there is a way this can be used as a weapon. I remember that about two hundred years ago there was a great priest on the Kingdom of Frankia who used defective healing as a means of fighting. What was his name again?”

As she searched her memories, Morgana surveyed the other subjects until finding something else that picked her attention. This time it was a small rodent. On the place an incision was made, only a scar was left.

“Hmm. This is good. However, the speed of healing is a bit lacking. Using it in battle wouldn’t be practical, but it will do nicely when treating injuries during rest or in case of an accident.”

Content with her results, Morgana left the room. As one could deduce, here were conducted both, experiments concerning healing and transmutation of organic matter.

…

At the end of the hall stood a golem guarding a door.

As Morgana gave her command, the giant stepped aside, allowing her to enter. She didn’t position it here so it would keep safe the contents of this room, but to prevent the content itself from scaping.

Inside, just like in the other room, there were several animals, but with three key differences. First, they were all chimpanzees. Second, the contact between them wasn’t prevented by cages. And third, almost all of them were dead.

Morgana shook her head in dissatisfaction.

“They died too quickly. There was no chance for an effective spread.”

When people think about dark magic the image that often comes to mind are the flashy spells like “life drain” or even scary necromancers and demonologists.

But what could be just as deadly or even more was the ability to create and spread diseases.

The reason why people often forgot about this was because storytellers found the topic not to be a very glamorous one. A bard wouldn’t lose his or her time singing about some plague when there were literally armies of the dead walking around.

This was even more of a reason for Morgana to focus her resources on the subject. Since there was a bigger chance any potential enemy would know less about this method, making use of it was even more worthwhile.

She wasn’t quite sure if there were other intelligent creatures populating this land, but if this was the case, it would behoove her greatly having biological weapons in her arsenal.

There was only one problem. The lethality of the virus had killed it’s hosts far too quickly, preventing it to spread further. That’s why even now there were healthy survivors.

“Alright. I will correct this in the next round of experiments.”

As mentioned before, the golem on the door was to prevent any subject from scaping. If the virus were to leak before she made the decision to release it, all sorts of problems might emerge.

However, Morgana herself didn’t need to worry about this particular malitie. It was a disease that already existed in her previous world, although with slight alterations. So naturally she had been thoroughly immunized.