Weekly Digest 142 - (#446 - #448) (Patreon)

How To Burn A Corpse

Burning a corpse was harder to do than Lori had thought as she glared at the uncooperative dead hunk of flesh.

She stood near the disgusting, bleeding, oozing thing that was the inverted abomination—for lack of a shorter term, since referring it as 'the inside-out one' was too wordy even in her own head—a binding to keep away bugs surrounding her body and anchored to her fingernails as well as the bone clips on her hat, watching as a small fire on a flesh extremity that was now bare of dragonfrost burned but did not spread. Another binding of airwisps kept blowing the air towards the dead abomination and away from her in an attempt to reduce what she was smelling. It wasn't as successful as she'd wished, as she could still smell the thing, but the intensity was greatly reduced.

Lori was willing to admit she didn't have a lot of experience with burning corpses. She'd killed beasts before, but she'd done so cleanly, since they had wanted the bodies intact so they could skin it for leather, pluck it for feathers, and butcher it for meat. Still, she had thought it wouldn't be that hard. She'd picked up some fallen wood on the ground, melted off the dragonfrost, and then dried by claiming the waterwisps and in the wood and pulling it out. It wasn't something she did to wood they intended to build with, since the abrupt desiccation damaged the grain and weakened the wood's structure, but this was firewood, so that didn't matter.

She'd warmed the wood with firewisps to give herself something to anchor to, and then anchored the binding of firewisps to it. It was a simple enough binding, one the raised the temperature significantly in a thumbnail-sized point, which she had used before to start cooking fires. Since it would be very hot, and her staff was only so long, she added a binding of lightwisps—also anchored to her nails—as a contact to access the binding at a distance. After all, lightwisps were plentiful around her, and now that she had learned to claim and bind it through the thinner sections of her skin, it was much more convenient to use.

Oh, how annoyed she'd been at seeing her classmates using lightwisps as threads of contact so easily and not realizing why…

After she had laid down the bound piece of wood under a promisingly fleshy part of the inverted abomination that didn't look too wet, and hurrying to some distance away because the smell had been more than her binding of airwisps could push away, Lori had activated the binding of firewisps. A line of faintly glowing white light had appeared, only visible because it was so dim under the dome because of the overcast and the bugs flying about, had connected the back of her hand to the wood. The wood had begun to smoke until an open flame appeared. The flame had flickered and died as the dragonfrost around it sublimated, the solidified air asphyxiating the fire as it would have a person.

Lori had needed to start again, specifically heating the area she wanted to set aflame and using a binding of airwisps to blow away the sublimating solidified air and snow to remove them from around the abomination's corpse. While the dragonfrost had been somewhat mitigating the decay of the flesh, it had not had much effect on the other sources of foul odors coming from the abomination. With the air cleared, Lori had ignited the piece of wood again. The wood had sizzled for a moment, the water that had gotten on it bubbling and steaming away before the thing had finally ignited again, flame dancing on the blackened spot where her binding of firewisps had been centered.

She had quickly claimed and bound the firewisps from that flame, as well as the firewisps of the flame itself. In only a short time, the heat had begun to penetrate the flesh that the flame was under, and Lori was able to bind those firewisps too, the fire growing as she fed it air while at the same time blowing away any sublimating dragonfrost. The smell of cooking meat began to fill the air, which quickly turned into the smell of charring and burning meat.

Forming all of the firewisps into one binding, Lori was able to begin increasing the temperature of the flesh further. The bits of wood she had gathered were being consumed faster at the increased heat, but that was fine. The corpse itself would start burning any moment now. After all, it was already charring and burning, and that was basically the meat turning into charcoal, right? Soon she'd be able to deactivate the and binding the process would become self-sustaining, although she'd still have to worry about it being  snuffed out by the sublimating dragonfrost.

It would be any moment now.

…

Any moment now…

…

What was wrong with this corpse!-? Why wasn't the rest of it catching fire? She'd tried to deactivate the binding of firewisps, and when she had done so the flames had slowly started to weaken and sputter out!

"Huh, that's new. Having trouble?"

She turned her glare towards Rian, who was holding his rock with the lightwisps anchored to it. At the moment, the lightwisps was sharing the rock with a binding of lightningwisps to keep back bugs, although latter binding's radius wasn't very wide. Rian had to occasionally kick and jump to dislodge bugs landing on his knees and lower legs. This was quite unfortunate as he was wearing tsinelas instead of boots, leaving his feet mostly bare and putting his footwear in very real danger of being chewed up by bugs. At the moment, he was enthusiastically dancing in place to keep the bugs from having a stationary target. "Obviously," she replied.

Had she made his binding smaller than it could have been? Of course! He hadn't put her notes into her pack.

He glanced at the rather pathetic little fire. It was a small fraction of the inverted abomination, which was three times the size of the wooden houses they had here in River's Fork, and was far more heavy since it was presumably not simply hollow and full of air.  Rian nodded. "Yup, that's why we haven't tried burning it yet. A cute little bonfire isn't going to be burning this thing. We'd need something bigger and hotter, and with wood we would have needed a lot of it." He turned back towards me. "So… now that your test-fire is done, are you going to desiccate the flesh so you can scape things up and burn this now?"

Lori paused. "Desiccate?"

"Well, it's probably not needed since you've already managed to set a bit on fire, After all, flesh is wet. You're not going to burn it properly without drying it out. It's why we would have needed a lot of fuel. Not only does it need to be really hot to burn flesh, we need to at least get rid of all the water first to even get started."

Lori turned to look towards the burning flesh, where the flames were already flickering and beginning to die, and sighed as she realized what the problem was. She activated the binding again, adding more heat, even as she used the thread of lightwisps connecting her to the firewisps to feel out the rest of the dead flesh, feeling out for the waterwisps. And where there was waterwisps, there was water.

Most people didn't understand why water snuffed out fire. It wasn't just because the water snuffed it out, separating the fire from the air needed to fuel itself. There were alchemical mixtures that could burn even when wet or immersed in water, but water can snuff those out too. This is because water can absorb a lot of heat before it starts to get hotter.

That same water in the flesh of the abomination was absorbing the heat from Lori's firewisps, and the outer-most layer of that water was probably frozen from the dragonfrost around them, further increasing the capacity of that water to absorb heat. That was why the part of the corpse she'd managed to ignite slowly kept dying when she deactivated the binding. Even with the binding active, the cold and frozen water in the flesh that wasn't actively on fire was vastly slowing down how quickly the surrounding flesh grew hot, inhibiting the rest of the corpse catching fire.

Ugh, this was going to be another thing she had to do slowly, wasn't it?

Well, at least firewisps was easy to make a lot of.

"By the way, lunch is almost ready."

Lori waved a hand dismissively as she started walking around the abomination corpse, refamiliarizing herself with its dimensions. "Yes, yes, I'll be there. Just need to do this…"

It was unusual for her to alter and reposition a binding while it was still actually functioning. Most of the time, it was highly unsafe. Still, the firewisps were only creating heat, a function that didn't really change even as she claimed more and more of the firewisps that the binding was generating, while using others as anchor points as she walked around the corpse of the inverted abomination.

Around the corpse, the dragonfrost was popping as the heat affected the solidified air, causing little pops and cracks that had Lori stepped back and cautiously raising one had to try and shield her face from any flying debris. Frost turned to slush as the dragonfrost that intersected the firewisp binding melted, turning into water that poured over solidified air and caused it to bubble up cold mist that was blown away by the airwisp binding Lori was using to push the terrible smells of the corpse away from her.

The smell was quite… intense, but she pushed through, and soon she had surrounded the bottom edges of the dead abomination with a single binding of firewisps, from which originated an ever-expanding puddle of water and cold mist. In the process, her initial ignition point had sputtered and gone out, leaving behind only the smell of burnt meat. Still, she knew she could ignite that point again, so for the moment she let it be as she continued spreading the binding, and generating more and more firewisps.

With the abomination's lower portion now encompassed by the firewisp binding and themsit cleared as the last of the solidified air sublimated away to leave only water, Lori stepped further back, the line of lightwisps connecting her to the rest of the binding as she had the firewisps produce in earnest heat. It was a strong, even heat and soon the dragonfrost that had been thrown around the corpse was melting and sublimating, the cold mist dispersing in the heat.  

The abomination's flesh began crackling and sizzling merrily, and soon the disturbingly delicious smell of cooking meat filled the air once more. It also caused the bugs that had continued swarming and nibbling at the parts of the abomination's flesh that hadn't been covered in dragonfrost take flight and fly down lower, no doubt following the scent, only to be repulsed by the heat of the firewisps. A few fell to the ground, their wings withering from the heat as they got too close, and their struggling bodies fell into the sludgy mixture of water, abomination blood, and whatever humors had been released by the ruptured organs hanging from the inverted abomination.

Still, it seemed to be working. The point that she had initially been able to set on fire reignited, and the streaks of golden abomination blood that were usually thick and dense seemed to melt and become runny. There wasn't much abomination blood left, as most of the exposed blood had been licked up and devoured by bugs, but there was some and one little rolling droplet made contact with the flames of the initial ignition point. The abomination blood burst into cloyingly sweet-smelling fire that quickly moved  along the trail that the blood had left behind, setting a portion of the corpse alight. That flame quickly burned out, but for the next little while parts of the corpse started bursting into sweet-smelling fire, which mixed alarmingly with the smell of burning meat.

Eventually, finally, the corpse started to burn. She stared at it, because one needed to make sure that fire didn't go out of control, and to do that one needed to watch very carefully and intently. Even from where she was standing, nearly ten paces away, she could feel the heat of the flames on her face from the burning corpse. It was nothing like watching a candle burn, or wax-soaked raw cloudblooms. The now-hot flesh was bubbling, and from a novel she'd read where a plot point had been someone had died by immolation, she knew that meant that the fat in the flesh was being rendered out and now burning as fuel, adding to the blaze…

"Oh good, you finally got it going," Rian said cheerfully as he suddenly seemed to appear next to her. He looked tired, and was covered in sweat still dancing in place to keep bugs from settling on his feet and lower legs, hopping very high and kicking back and forth when a rather large bug settled down on his ankle. One hand still held the rock his binding was anchored to, while the other was pinching his nose shut to force him to breathe though his mouth and avoid most of the smell. "Ah, what a waste. All that meat, and whatever leather there might be on the inside… completely inaccessible because it's too disgusting to touch."

"Hmm…"

"By the way, you missed lunch, since you were having so much fun playing with fire."

Lori's flow of thought ground to a halt, and she turned towards Rian, even as she suddenly realized how hungry she was. "What?"

"You missed lunch. I told you it was almost ready, remember, and you said you'd be there, you just needed to do something…? When I came back and saw that the food I'd set aside for you still hadn't been eaten, I came here."

She stared at him, the burning corpse hot on one side of his face. Her stomach kicked her from the inside to remind her it was still empty. Turning, she began to head towards the mine, where the food had likely been served because she could see the dining pavilion was still empty. "Where is it?" she demanded.

Rian fell into step beside her.  "I'll show you. And may I just say, I'm really glad you're starting to be more trusting of people."

Lori gave him a bewildered look. "I'm always trusting." She trusted her idiots to act like idiots.

"Well, I'm glad you now trust people to not try spit or poison your food after it's been left unattended for so long."

"…"

Lori kept walked for a few moments. "Get me some fruit from storage," she ground out.

"Are you sure? The stew and bread was pretty good. It's probably cold now, but that's not a problem for—"

"Get me fruit."

"Well, if you say so, your Bindership. But if you're not going to eat the stew, does that mean I can have it?"

Lori gave him a level look. "What if someone spat on it or its poisoned."

"I'm a trusting soul. I'm willing to take the risk."

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How To Get Rid Of Dragonfrost (Limited Mass Implementation, Version 2) And Other Cleaning Hazards

While Lori would normally have no objection to eating lots of nice, tasty and presumably untampered-with fruit for lunch, it was annoying when she saw the stew that she had missed. Rian had eaten it with enthusiasm, despite the fact the stew had grown cold and slightly congealed, and the bread had become hard.

"You know, it's still good. You sure you don't—"

"Eat quietly, Rian!"

With her stomach full, Lori moved on to dealing with the rest of the dragonfrost as she left the corpse to burn. Well, she left the corpse to burn fter she found some rocks she could use to anchor a binding of airwisps that drew the smoke—and other gasses, many of which were nauseating—as far upward as she could send it, which was very far. The ground around the corpse as wet so there was little chance of the fire spreading, but Lori still formed a second binding for firewisps and lightwisps in a low ring on the ground. The lightwisps demarcated the binding, while the firewisps were set to reduce anything that crossed it to human body temperature, in case one of her idiots decided to poke it with a finger or something. Any fire that somehow managed to stay alight despite the mud around the corpse and tried to spread across the ground would be reduced to well below the amount of heat needed to sustain itself.

After heavily imbuing everything so that it would last a while, Lori could finally leave to deal with the dragonfrost. Drawing water from the river and using a binding to increase its viscosity and surface tension so she could roll it as a ball across the ground, she combined the binding of waterwisps with firewisps, and turned the ball of water into vapor.it exploded around her, shockingly cold, but the firewisps were quick to start raising up the water's temperature again… which quickly become hideously uncomfortable. It was like being covered with hot sweat, even if it wasn't condensing on her skin!

Lori hastily reformed the binding of firewisps until the vapor felt nice and cool on her skin. After all, it didn't need to be all that hot, simply hot enough to melt the dragonfrost. As long as the vapor was above the temperature that water froze, it would work. The binding she'd used in her demesne had been hot mostly so that it would self-sustain in the face of a widening area while she did something else. Most of the dragonfrost inside the dome was manageable with shovels and didn't really need to be moved, but outside was a different matter.

Their two fruit orchards, the cluster of trees with the bindings to let it grow branches quickly so they could be harvested for firewood, the original fields where the demesne had grown crops, and the newer ones such as the terraced plots that allowed them to grow on sloped land were all covered in dragonfrost, as were the trees themselves. The meanings on the trees had been deactivated when the dragon had first arrived, but Lori couldn't help but note that keeping them active might have been more beneficial. The meanings caused the trees to produce excess heat, after all.

Not that it was all cold. There was a pile of burning abominations outside of the dome, and while it gave of some smells of charring meat and hair, it was mostly woodsmoke from the wood and plants that had been fused to the bodies of beasts and bugs. Some of the abominations seemed full plant, if several plants fused together and deadspoken to be mobile. Certainly it was burning far cleaner than the corpse she had set alight, although there was still the cloying sweetness of burning abomination blood. Two people had been tasked with both tending to the fire as well as throwing in further abomination corpses from another pile, otherwise the fire would have grown far too big.

Lori skirted them to keep her vapor cloud from shrouding their work. In this, the relative stillness of the weather was a boon, as the only air turbulence was coming from the updrafts generated by the two fires. There were no winds she had to account for to keep the vapor she'd bound to her staff in place, so she was free to let it mostly trail behind her without having to worry about it drifting. She walked the border between the down and the fields, anchoring the binding of waterwisps to the ground at regular intervals as Rian and Riz fell into step next to her, a spear in one hand.

She paused, then turned towards him. "Rian, Erzebed what are you doing here?"

"I saw you walking outside the dome and thought you might be planning to do something about… well, that," he said, nodding towards the dragonfrost-covered fields. "It's safe on this side, but there might still be abominations further from the dome. I don't know how far from the dome is safe, but it's just generally a good idea to have someone to watch you back when you're doing Whispering that might be taking up all you attention from, say, some abomination coming up behind you." He jumped and kicked his feet to dislodge some bugs that had buzzed around his legs as he looked behind them. "There probably won't be any, but you're our Dungeon Binder. Best you're protected."

Riz nodded in agreement. "The others are helping with the bug clearing, so it's just us."

She looked down at Rian's feet. "Won't that be difficult when you're dancing?" Riz, in contrast, was wearing boots.

"Yes, I was sort of hoping if I stood close enough to you I can be standing inside whatever binding you have around yourself." Rian said with… well, completely expected blunt honesty. "I'm sorry for whatever I did. Can you please make my bug repeller bigger now?"

Lori gave him a blank look. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"This is about the notes, isn't it?"

"If you're going to be protecting me while I work, than stop talking and let me work. You're being distracting."

"Come on, if I'd put the notes in your pack, it would have gotten wrinkled and maybe damaged! And this time you didn't bring a pack, so should you really be bringing home your notes! They might get wet!"

…

She hated it when he had a point.

Lori gave him an annoyed look. "You have a solution, I presume?"

"We can put it in Riz's pack," Rian said. "There should be room inside, and the soap's dry by now. Of course, that's if she agrees to—"

"Erzebed, let me put my notes in your pack to keep it from getting wet on the way back to Lorian Demesne."

"Yes, Great Binder."

"Wow, instantly?"

"I'm the Dungeon Binder."

"She's the Great Binder."

"… well… all right then. See, there was a solution after all!"

"Stop being distracting Rian, I have work to do."

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Lori had finished going around the parts of the perimeter of the dome, anchoring the binding of waterwisps she was trailing as vapor, and had just finished walking out to the stand of trees whose growth had been accelerated to grow branches quickly when they did actually encounter a dragonborn abomination.

She had been in the midst of the now-routine motion of anchoring the binding she'd been trailing when she heard Riz say in a calm, level voice, "Rian, be ready to get the Great Binder out of here."

The words prompted Lori to turn to see what she was talking about—and cause her to spin around instantly, the binding she'd been handling becoming a secondary concern as she raised her staff diagonally before her, gripping the wooden stave with both hands.

The beast—no, abomination—the abomination wasn't notably big. Though shaped like a leaper, it seemed smaller than normal, its head only level with Lori's shoulder. A juvenile or or perhaps an adolescent? Instead of a normal coat of feathers, it looked like it had been fused to a honeydungeon's worth of sweetbugs. The coat writhed with countless semi-transparent wings that beat futilely, the bugs seemingly fused onto its feathers and skin, though most of it seemed fused to the left side of the abominations body. It was some distance away—Lori would estimate it to be twenty, maybe thirty paces—and if it hadn't been for Riz' warning letting her know there was something to look for, Lori probably wouldn't have noticed it until it was much closer. Riz had leveled her spear at it, putting herself between the abomination and Lori. Rian had moved next to Lori, trying his best to hold his spear like Riz was doing and looking halfway succesful.

"Should we yell for help?" Rian asked through gritted teeth, as if the very act of moving his mouth would draw the abomination's attention.

"Don't move. Maybe it will go away. If it moves towards us, you and the Great Binder run and start yelling, in that order," Riz said, much more quietly and calmly. "I'll hold it off. Don't argue."

"Wasn't planning to. Don't die."

As a rule, Lori didn't normally rush when she was forming a binding. The binding was formed when the binding was formed, and if she wanted to form it properly, she ahd to pay attention to all the details. That being said, ripping lightningwisps from the binding around her repelling bugs and hastily forming a binding of lightningwisps and airwisp was definitely rushed as she tried to create a binding. Her heart beat rapidly as Lori tried to remember how she had seen it made. Lightningwisps in the middle, airwisps and lightingwisps around this core to keep the lightningwisps contained, airwisps to provide thrust and maneuverability, lightwisps anchored to her skin to allow her to control the binding at a distance…

After the initial hurried panic, Lori watched the beast intently as she she continued forming the binding. She'd never made this before, but when she'd seen it, it had stuck to her mind despite her having written down the flow diagram and adding as many notes as she could through her far-remoed, non-visual observations. It had probably helped she'd done so early in the duration of the dragon's passing, when her mind had still been fresh. It had been fascingating to observe, the lightningwisps being contained in a ball to prevent premature eruption, and she had immediately hit upon the idea of guiding it as an airwisp projectile.

Her 'lightning-ball' would no doubt have a velocity far slower than a stream of lightningwisps, but theoretically it would have the advantage of not needing to lay a pathway for the lighting to travel across, meaning it could be launched immediately upon forming and taking aim. No need have a stationary target or having to maneuver the target towards the pathway she had made. Just form and blow it towards the target, and if it misses, the connection through lightwisps would allow her have it correct and perhaps even self-propel.

If it worked. After all, this was the first time she'd formed it.

…

She wished she'd kept a piece of wood on her person to throw. Thrown firewisps were always reliable.

The three of them stood still, although Lori was prepared to throw her binding and start running it need be. Rian had even stopped his silly dancing, holding still lest his sudden movements draw the abomination's attention as he moved to her side. The bugs on the abomination's skin continued to buzz, and it seemed to shudder as if the abomination was trying to dislodge the bugs off itself. The abomination seemed to turn away—

There was a blur of movement, and by the time Lori had realized the abomination was running towards them, it had already crossed half the distance. Rainbows! She hated how fast leapers were! Her hand snapped up, the binding she had preprared ready, and even though it wasn't a water cutter, she let it go. Air blasted away from her and towards the abomination, carrying the binding of airwisps and lightingwisps. Through the channel of lightwisps anchored to her hand, she activated the binding, and a line of light appreared between her and a rapidly moving point in the air. That point erupted in lightning, lines moving outward in all direcitons, only to be stopped as it hit air, becoming a ball of swiftly-moving light—

The ball of lightningwisps slammed into the abominations chest, and there was a deafening explosion of thunder, a blinding light, and a feeling of heat on her face. Lori felt someone grab her raised hand and start pulling her in a run. She stumbled a bit on the dragonfrost, dropping her staff, but Lori didn't fall as she heard muffled yelling.

Then she was running, her ears ringing and bright spots in her eyes…

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Sample Containment

According to Riz—who had survived staying behind—Lori's binding had caused the abomination to run away—because the binding had exploded violently on the abomination's chest—which was fortunate because the binding had also half-blinded the not-an-officer. That is, she'd managed to close one eye when she'd seen the binding start to crackle and glow, and had saved at least one of her eyeballs. Rian had closed both eyes, giving him the vision to grab her hand and pull her to safety.

Rian had looked relieved when Riz had returned unharmed, and while had hadn't fussed and molested her the way Mikon would have, he had hovered conspicuously near her doing a circuit around her to check for wounds before letting out a relieved sigh. Lori had been vaguely surprised, since given Rian's tendencies she'd have expected some sort of dramatic proclamation. Instead, all he'd said was "I'm glad your safe. Next time let's remember to bring backup," and had resumed acting as he'd usually have.

A group had tracked the abomination through the dragonfrost while Lori had sat at the dining pavilion waiting for her hearing to come back—it wasn't urgent enough that she'd risk letting whatever-his-name-was being the one to heal her—and found it dead not far away, its chest wounded and its syrupy blood on fire. However, the injury was too small to have been the actual cause of death. Rian and what-his-name—Lori had sighed and checked her rock—Lidzuga had discussed it while they had waited for the area around the fields to by checked for any more abominations, just in case.

"I think her binding might have stopped its heart when it hit," Rian suggested. "I'm pretty sure what she used were lighitngwisps and not firewisps, since I got sparked when I grabbed her to run."

"Hmm… yes, that would do it," Lidzuga had agreed. "From the damage, it the binding hit on the chest, the lightning could have passed through the heart before grounding. If it had hit anywhere else, things might not have been so lucky."

"What about the head?"

"Well, yes, if it’s the head, but you can say that about anything that hit the head. Uh, is it really all right if I don't heal her?"

"Yes, it's fine. Shanalorre can take care of anything when we get back home. Uh, sorry your house isn't ready to clean yet."

"So am I…"

The rest of the day had Lori under heavy guard as she finished anchoring the mist in place around the fields and stands of trees to start melting away the dragonfrost. Riz and some of the local men followed her, all wielding spears and acting as a screen between her and the woods beyond River's Fork's agricultural areas. Lori might have worked a bit hurriedly as well, but that was only because it was getting dark earlier than usual because of the overcast!

Eventually, she completed her circuit and pulled binding close to the ground by the anchor points and anchored the mists to the parts of th dragonfrost that she could, leaving a thick mist that rose up to mid-calf enshrouding the ground. The magic she had imbued into the binding would let the mist last overnight, and while it wasn't as hot as the vapor she'd used back home, the mass, contact against the dragonfrost where it was anchored, and the binding of firewisps that would keep all the mist from growing too cold would eventually be enough to sublimate the solidified and air melt the ice.

Lori had then gone straight home, a relieved Rian in tow, her notes safely tucked Riz's pack where it was pressed between two bone tablets.

"I'm glad you didn't die," Lori heard Rian say to Riz, the two of them sitting behind her at the stem jet driver. Lori did her best to ignore them.

"Oh, now you're paying me attention?"

"Yes, I know, but we were both still working earlier. Besides, I know you can take care of yourself better than I can. But I'm glad your safe and didn't have to fight that thing by yourself."

"I'm glad I didn't have to fight that thing by myself too…"

The two shared a laugh for some reason, while Lori had rolled her eyes and enjoyed sitting on her wonderfully comfortable chair. Ah, backrests! They were as luxurious as socks. No wonder Dungeon Binders always had thrones. She wondered how comfortable their chairs were? When she had finally established sufficient infrastructure for her demesne and she could spend most of her days sitting around, she was going to have the carpenters build her the most comfortable chair ever made…

Lori let these thoughts distract her from the urge to open up Riz's pack and review her notes. There was just enough spray that she decided not to risk her notes getting wet. Riz and Rian had degenerate to what sounded like cuddling quietly, so as long as she didn't turn around and see what the two of them were doing, Lori shouldn't get nauseous.

Out of habit, she watched the shore for the Typhon beast. If it had died, the beast probably wouldn't have fallen somewhere she'd see, but she could hope…

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It was fairly dark by the time they returned to Lori's demesne, even if it wasn't all that late. Still, Lori had needed to anchor lightwisps to the tops of the poles lining Lori's Shed Boat to help with visibility, as well as letting them maintain contact with the other boat that was accompanying them. The men who'd been mining in River's Fork when the dragon had arrived seemed relieved to be heading back home after their extended stay, even after being told that their families were fine. Why did they need to see for themselves? It was the truth, and if Rian wanted to lie to them, he would no doubt do a much better job of doing so.

"Oh, right," Rian said while Lori was letting out a sigh of relief to finally be back home after crossing the border into her demesne, "now that you're back, your Bindership, I have to ask: what are these things for?"

Darkness was already beginning to set in, and Rian was pointing at a blacker than black patch of the shore, so it took Lori a moment to realize what he was inquiring about.

She fixed Rian a flat look. "Sample containment."

"Sample containment?"

"Sample containment."

It had been an idea that came to her… well, she had lost track of time by them, but sometime after the dragon had entered her demesne. Study as she would, write as quickly as she could, Lori had not yet managed to learn how to use Mentalism, and thus no matter what she though and observed, she would have great difficulty remembering it all save by writing in down. The problem was there was so much to remember! The dragon had formed many, many things, and she hadn't had time to observe and study them all in the moment! It had been frustrating, but she had needed to prioritize what she was observing, since she only had one mind to study with. It wasn't like she could use Mentalism to schism her mind so she could think several different flows of thought at once, after all.

However, even limiting herself simply to bindings and ill-bound wisps that seemed complete and made sense, there was still too many bindings worth studying! Lori had needed a way to preserve bindings for later study. At first, she had tried to claim the bindings and ill-bound wisps, but that had quickly proven unfeasible and counterproductive as it had diverted her attention from her actively studying interesting bindings.

Sample containment had been her answer. All the bindings—as well as the ill-bound wisps, meanings, rampant life, vistas, twisted vistas, thought force formations, and insane thoughts—would land on her barrier of darkwisps and be blocked off from passing through. Depending on what manner of working they were, the working might try to penetrate the darkwisps, which expended the imbuement of the working and the darkwisps ablative barrier. Previously, she had made her barrier of darkwisps to encompass all the open air of her demesne, meaning that she hadn't been able to perceive how that dragon's workings had interacted with the binding, only that it had… which on consideration had been a terribly shortsighted mistake.

However, due to the fact that the dragon being inside the boundaries of her forcing her to modify the shape its shape, she'd finally been able to observe the interaction of the dragon's various workings and her barrier. And she had noticed that most workings—not all but most—tended to have a generally downward trajectory, as well as have some interaction with gravity. Some workings bounced off her barrier, some didn't. Bindings with an airwisp and waterwisp component tended to be at the mercy of air currents, vistas and twisted vistas tended to just stop and rest on the surface of the barrier, but most tended to go down. And since the darkwisp barrier wasn't physical, workings tended to slid down smoothly along its borders… if the shape was right.

So Lori had, as one of her last clear recollections—and already things had been a bit blurry from what was presumably a lack of sleep—had reshaped her barrier into a cone and funneled workings towards the edges of her demesne, into the sample containment 'trenches' composed purely of darkwisps. The sample containment was inside her demesne, meaning she could observe and examine them, or at least the ones composed of or incorporated wisps. As long as she remembered to keep them imbued, then the samples should last… well, indefinitely.

Not all of them had. Some had been wisplings that the dragon had formed—birthed?—had devoured each other for their imbuement, something that she had observed previously the first time that a dragon had passed over her demesne, back when her defenses hadn't been so prepared and thorough. She had tried to imbue the wisplings to try and prevent this behavior, but she'd been… well, very sleepy at the time, and she'd been observing another binding, so…

It had probably been bad scholarship on her part.

The past few days, she'd simply been maintaining the bindings and ill-bound wisps in her sample containment, doing her best to get a sense of how many remained, and doing her best to identify and isolate promising samples for immediate study when she had time. Lori  had tried taking notes, but given how she had… um… anyway, to make sure she remembered to sleep, she'd only taken notes at the dining hall, with the night shift stationed near the door under orders to inform her when a certain amount of time had passed on the water clock.

Suppressing the temptation to continue taking notes in her room had been difficult, but she had managed it by reminding herself the headache from trying to do whispering on an hour's sleep would be agonizing.

Unfortunately, it had become clear that there were slightly fewer of her samples every day, and while she'd been able to identify and isolate a number of the predatory wisplings, it was clear she hadn't caught all of them. That wasn't getting into the possibility that some of her samples were being devoured by predatory lifelings—distinct from undead and abominations—thought-shades, or twisted vistas, which she really couldn't rule out.

Rian stared at her for a moment. "On a scale of 'humorous play vignette shenanigans' to 'everyone dies horribly without even realizing they're dying', how dangerous are these samples you're containing?"

"They're not dangerous as long as no one touches them."

"Somehow I doubt the bugs and beasts are going to be smart enough to not go inside your darkwisps."

Ugh, she hated it when he had a point.

Lori spent time until they got back to her Dungeon integrating lightningwisps to her darkwisp sample containment binding to kill anything trying to get into it that could. Tonight… tonight she could review and organize the notes she had made in preparation for when all this cleaning would finally be over and she could start properly experimenting with the bindings she noted down under controlled conditions.

Tomorrow… well, there was still more work to do.

Hopefully her samples would continue to survive until then.