What We Do to Survive

Analyzing outsiders may as well have been a field of study all its own. Avalon’s library contained records of nearly ten-thousand unique specimens, not to mention their various offspring and hybrids built from their corpses, stretching back to the founding of the Academy. Some had been summoned on site for research purposes, others hunted down by students and graduates, and further records had been brought in through the Academy’s eternal goal of hunting down every scrap of knowledge our world had to give.

Looking through it all was starting to give me a headache. While the Academy library was technically well organized, the head librarian would allow no less within her domain, there was only so much organizing that could be done with a mountain of research notes, journal entries, and barely coherent texts written by the sort of lunatics who thought summoning outsiders was anything other than insanity.

The ‘Outsider Anatomy and Analysis’ section was spread across three tall sets of shelves, each stuffed to the brim with materials of varying usefulness. A few of the books were obviously useful. ‘Containing Denizens of the Void’ was the book on dealing with Outsiders according to everything I knew about the topic and Archmage Alitra’s ‘Analyzing Anomalous Abilities’ was similarly broad in scope.

Unfortunately, past that things began to get complicated. The main issue was that I didn’t really know what the outsider I’d captured actually was. I’d done my best to get a good look at it, but with most of its body hidden under its thick clothing that was frozen with it under my stasis spell I hadn’t been able to see much.

What I had seen wasn’t overly helpful either. It was vaguely humanoid with very pale white skin and a face that could pass for human at first glance. The rest of it was somewhat more difficult to categorize. The brief view of its torso that I’d seen showed a bundle of tightly wound tentacles covered in large, lidless eyes.

Most of its torso was now covered by its coat, but the problem was that the skin I could see looked perfectly normal. Even when I’d shone a light into the small gap in its clothing I hadn’t seen anything unusual.

Similarly, it certainly acted as though it had two arms and two legs, but normal arms couldn’t extend the way its had, nor did they have claws that could cut through stone. My biggest clue here was the extended arm that had attacked my eye, but that had proven to be less useful than I’d hoped. The ‘hand’ inside its glove that had been cut off by my spell had dissolved into some sort of disgusting slime that I had nevertheless stored in a tightly sealed container and then placed under stasis as well. What parts of its extended limb I could see sticking out from its sleeve did support my tentacle assumption, but it honestly looked more like a woven metal cable than any sort of mollusk’s tentacle.

My initial assumption was that perhaps the limbs were similarly formed from yet more tentacles wrapped together to give it a more human shape, or perhaps it was some form of shape-changer. Perhaps it was a mix of the two even.

Even with those two assumptions however, that left me with a towering pile of books and loose papers to look through. What I’d seen so far wasn’t particularly promising either. Most tentacle-based outsiders tended to be massive, disgusting creatures that couldn’t pass for humans even with the help of magic. Conversely, most shape-changers tended to appear far more human than this thing had and tended to be less obviously alien than my new specimen.

Still, if I let myself be deterred by a mountain of reading I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as I had over the past three years. Since some of the texts I was browsing couldn’t be brought out of the library, I reserved a private room and got to work.

I left the library four hours later rather disappointed and carrying a very heavy bag. I hadn’t found much of anything that seemed promising, but it was late and I had to go to class in the morning. It wasn’t like I’d made no progress, I had some ideas of how to analyze the creature to discover what it could do and a new layer of wards I wanted to add over its corner, but that wasn’t nearly as much as I would have liked to find.

I was somewhat surprised to find a very anxious looking Miranda waiting for me in my room. She was sitting on the edge of my bed chewing on her lower lip as she dispassionately watched Rea beat Mistletoe’s thighs with a metal crop while her other hand vigorously thrust a thick stone rod between the quivering elf’s legs. Every few seconds she would glance towards the corner of the room where I’d stowed my newest prisoner before looking back at Rea.

The moment I stepped into the room, Miranda jumped to her feet and turned to me with a wide eyed stare. “Orion,” she asked shakily, “why do you have a starspawn doppelganger locked up in your room? Please tell me this isn’t your plan to get revenge on Brenda.”

My overstuffed bag hit the ground with a loud thump and I tilted my head to stare blankly up at the ceiling. I had no idea what that was, but apparently it meant something to Miranda. What a bloody waste of time.

“It has nothing to do with Brenda,” I told her reassuringly, “I’m taking my time to deal with her properly. Still, how about you take a seat and tell me more about this,” I turned to look speculatively at the creature’s frozen form, “starspawn doppelganger thing.”

Miranda looked confused but much less concerned than she had been before, so I counted that as a success. Maybe it should have occurred to me to ask the outsider-descendant before I went and wasted half my day. I’d literally met with her right before I went to the library.

Even if she didn’t know anything it would have taken an extra few minutes maximum and potentially saved me a lot of time and effort. I really needed to get better at asking people about things. It was strange to have people I could trust implicitly to consult with, but I was criminally underutilizing my new assets. Something to remember for the future.

Miranda, as it turns out, knew a lot about outsiders. Growing up she’d always wanted to know more about her mother but her flock hadn’t had access to any such information. Over the years that interest had swelled into a general curiosity about outsiders, one that she’d taken no time at all to begin indulging once she’d discovered the Academy’s enormous collection of texts about the creatures. Apparently she’d spent much of her free time during our freshman year reading through most of the books I’d been browsing through earlier today.

I felt very, very stupid now that I knew that. I would have to look into compiling a list of things my slaves might know more about than I did at the earliest possible convenience. Outside of knowing what classes they had taken, I had never really bothered to ask about other interests and areas of exploration.

Even with Miranda, who was technically the closest thing I had to a ‘best friend’ at the Academy, I was slowly starting to notice that I didn’t know her nearly as well as I’d thought I did. It was a… disquieting realization.

In any case, I was very glad Miranda had decided to come by for her meal when she did. Otherwise, I had no doubts that it would have taken me several more similarly fruitless sessions before I found the information I was actually looking for.

After I’d exhausted what she could tell me about my new resource, I’d rewarded Miranda with an entire shot-glass worth of freshly collected milk, nearly three times as much as had been in the vial I’d given her before our meeting with Clarient.

I would have happily given her more, but that was about as much as I could reasonably expect her to safely consume in one sitting. Even with my precautions, the girl was currently laid out on her back in my bathroom, entire body quivering as she digested her meal.

The interaction between her inherited abilities and the materials I was harvesting from my elves was honestly rather fascinating and I fully planned to study it in further detail in the future. I would just need to make sure to do so in a slightly less… trauma inducing way than I had the first time around.

In hindsight, particularly now that I knew the entire story about how she’d ended up at the academy, I cringed internally at how things must have looked to my poor Miranda. Being considerate took an annoying amount of effort, but even with my bindings in place I could see the value of having happy subordinates instead of resentful ones.

Though Elpha’s book hadn’t had any such warnings, other texts I’d found since recommended indulging altered personalities and behaviors resulting from soul-based binding magic. It helped stabilize the effect and could often prevent fragments of the former personality from causing unintentional issues.

The information Miranda had for me was somewhat spotty, but much better than what I’d known before. Even better, she’d been able to direct me to the exact books I should start with, though those would have to wait until I could return to the library tomorrow.

What she did have for me was very interesting indeed. The creature I had trapped under stasis was a type of outsider broadly classified as a starspawn, a group of vaguely related creatures that were assumed to come from the same world within the endless void. As far as scholars could tell, our two worlds were relatively close together on a cosmic scale and seemed to be traveling along similar paths through the void.

Every few centuries we would brush past each other close enough that some of the so-called starspawn that possessed an innate resistance to the void’s corrosive effects could even enter our world without being summoned. Most of the time the outsider in question would be one of the gigantic disgusting masses of tentacles that I’d immediately discounted during my initial search and would be immediately discovered and chopped up for ingredients, but occasionally one of the smaller, more adaptive creatures would slip through as well.

When they did, they tended to go to ground within human societies and try to integrate themselves into local power structures. Though they could not use magic the way a mage could, they were versatile shapeshifters and had a natural grasp of language and culture that let them rapidly acclimate to whatever location they ended up in.

No one was quite sure why they did so, they weren’t particularly good at hiding from high-circle mages, but tended to commit suicide as quickly as they could once identified so it was hard to know why they did what they did.

I’d been rather surprised by that revelation, the creature’s magical camouflage had seemed excellent. If something hadn’t gone wrong, I never would have known it was there. I knew my mana sense wasn’t as good as that of an archmage or even just an upper class student, but hadn’t realized it was still so shabby.

Then it had been Miranda’s turn to be surprised. According to her, the creature shouldn’t have had any such ability. In fact, starspawn tended to be easier to identify compared to most other outsiders because they had a particularly stark impact on mana currents around them. Either this was an otherwise undocumented ability that this particular specimen possessed or it was the result of a magic item that had malfunctioned. I would definitely have to look into that once I removed the stasis.

Other than that, there wasn’t much more to it. Miranda did mention that the creatures were considered very dangerous, but I already knew that much. She didn’t know any specific spells that were particularly effective, nor any weaknesses the creatures possessed. For that I would have to consult the books, though that task had rapidly become much less daunting than it had appeared just a few hours earlier.

I was dealing with a very fast, very strong shapeshifter that could quickly learn languages and cultures. It shouldn’t have any sort of offensive magic beyond that, though the creatures were known to form very sharp spines that could extend several inches from their main bodies so I would have to be careful about that.

As far as Miranda knew, my stasis should be perfectly suitable for keeping it contained. If I didn’t find anything further in the library I would probably burn one of my one on one meetings with a professor to consult with either Laushring or the void studies professor to make sure my precautions were sufficient. Getting killed in my sleep by something like that sounded like a terrible way to go.

Still, I was very happy with my new acquisition. I wasn’t certain I was going to keep it yet, but either way it seemed like a very valuable commodity. Perhaps I might use it for my required enhancement ritual, I was rapidly running out of time to locate a different specimen and it did have a number of very interesting abilities by the sound of it. I’d definitely heard of people using outsiders for that sort of magic, though I couldn’t remember any specific examples. Another thing to look into then.

I went to bed feeling very satisfied with how the day had gone. Despite some minor hiccups, things had ultimately fallen in my favor. A few minutes later, a freshly showered Miranda slipped under the covers beside me and spooned against me. Seemingly not to be outdone, Rea joined us as well a moment later. Perhaps I should have chided them for the presumptuousness, but it had been happening more and more often over the past weeks and I hadn’t said anything yet. It would be… hypocritical to do so now.

Miranda shifted in her sleep, mumbling something incoherent under her breath as she nuzzled her face deeper into my side. I reflexively wrapped an arm around her shoulders, brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek. She was very warm and the gentle rise and fall of her chest against my side was oddly comforting. I closed my eyes. It would be a shame to have to wake her up anyway. Maybe next time.