“The father of modern lichdom?” I ask.
Once again, I was studying at Mr. Skeleton’s house. A couple of months passed since the last time I… messed my spells up and I have been getting better ever since, I think. At least I haven’t blow up Mr. Emile again.
Today, Mr. Skeleton was talking about the nature of his life - er, unlife – as he called it, and teaching me the dangers of necromancy and dark magic, or tried to, since we somehow got lost in that topic a couple of hours ago.
“Yup.” Mr. Skeleton hums positively at my question. He’s laying back on his chair, positioned next to the same old chalkboard he uses to write down the process for spellcasting, which now has ‘Necromancy, Liches & You’ written in big white letters.
“See, this Marcos Rudyas was a practical sort of fellow.” He continues, gesturing wildly with his hands. In the months I’ve been studying with him I learned that’s what he does when he’s about to start rambling.
“See a problem, fix a problem. It’s the mentality that he lived by. So, when confronted by absolute mess of inefficient stuff that the lich rituals were, the man decided that ‘hey, I could fix that’ and so he did”
Mr. Skeleton stands from his chair, walking in circles as he continues to explain. I simply listen, somewhat interested on the story, somewhat dreading the ramblings to come.
“So to do that, he goes around asking crazy ol’ liches if they want to improve the state of their undeath, crazy fellow that guy was. Asking them if they were interested on getting back their fleshy bits or seeing if they could just… not kill people for sustenance and so on”
He pauses his movement, before rapidly turning back at me and pointing.
“What’s the problem with that, Minion?” He asks.
After some more training with Mr. Skeleton and some more collateral damage, Mr. Emile decided to call me ‘Minion’ because, according to him, I do as much damage as Mr. Skeletons old minions do, or used to, back when he had any.
Mr. Skeleton picked it up too, he had assumed I liked the name and I can’t really say that I don’t.
Just look at his face whenever he says ‘Minion!’ to me. He’s practically beaming!
Taking a moment to think of a response, I speak to Mr. Skeleton
“…Because all liches are psychopaths? - I mean - Not all liches, just… the ones before… all that stuff…” Mr. Skeleton did say he wasn’t as old as all of those liches, and that he wasn’t as crazy as them.
“…Good save”
“Really?”
“No. You’re grounded” I let out a small ‘aww’ as he continues speaking.
“All liches! -” He starts, his voice echoing through the room “- are psychopaths…”
“…I just said that.”
He ignores me “So that means Mr. Marcos here -” He points to the chalkboard, specifically to a small crude figure he drew, the name of the man in question right below the figure.
“- Spend a lot of time locating and talking to weird, old, smelly recluses addicted to evil magic” He takes a moment to look at me. I raise a brow in question. He sniffs, somehow.
“It ended up exactly how you think it did.” Says Mr. Skeleton, after a moment.
“…Death and destruction?” I say. After all, Mr. Skeleton says that, when angered, a smelly old lich kills and blows up anything they can find.
“Well yes, but not by the crazy old smelly liches. I mean, they tried to stab and burn him, but they didn’t succeed. The liches were the ones that died and burned.”
I officially give up.
He goes back to his chair, then clears the board and draws again.
“He somehow manages to find non-psychopathic liches and some weirdos that do want to live forever, but differently from the other weirdoes that want to also live forever and compiles as much information as he can-” He draws some cutesy looking skeletons in a circle with what seems to be a normal human being standing on the upper part of the circle, next to the skeletons, holding hands, for whatever reason.
On the center of the circle is a rectangular shape, a book.
Mr. Skeleton taps the book “Marcos releases his magical lich book that includes, among other things, ways to make yourself immortal and do cool skeleton magic without having to bathe on the blood of virgins or by sucking the souls out of people without consent.”
“Wait what was that last part?” I ask.
He then quickly goes to the other side of the chalkboard, ignoring me again, and draws angry humans in armor.
“The church of… whatever the god of life was back then, gets angry because we can’t have nice things if they collide with their beliefs or something, and since Marcos is a popular writer who now just handed the secret of lich powers to the common peasant that can read, he’s a problem- ” He says, drawing a line connecting the knights, who I know presume to be templars, to the circle of skeletons, Marcos and the liches.
He quickly deletes most of the board with the sleeve of his robe, a huge smear mark left behind. He then draws some fire on the board, or tries to, and several books inside of it alongside some more templars throwing books on the fire.
“- that needs to be solved, so then the church starts burning books, like usual, but here’s where they messed up!” He says, turning at me as his voice raises. If he wasn’t a skeleton, he would probably be smiling.
He draws a bunch of skinny figures some distance away from the fire, with pointy hats on top, wizards probably. Some of them are crying, some of them are angry.
“Some people at church decide to get cheeky and burn magic books that have nothing to do with the lich stuff” He cuts himself off almost as soon as he’s done speaking “But then -!”
He raises his arm, erasing the little wizards and then drawing them again, this time they’re shooting lightning at the templars.
“The mages of the country get angry that they’re just burning whatever they want, because there’s probably important research inside their books or something.”
He now deletes the templars and the fire, drawing them again, this time the templars fight back.
“And this minion, starts the Second Mage Templar War.” He finishes, putting his hands on his hips and staring triumphantly at me.
Before I can even begin to ask anything, at all, Mr. Skeleton raises his right arm with blinding speed and speaks.
“The moral of the story is!” He stands in front of me, his eye sockets staring deep into my eyes.
“Don’t piss off the weird loner guys with magical sticks. Because they totally can, and will mess you up.”
…
I don’t say anything for some time, staring at Mr. Skeleton, as if tempting him to continue speaking. When a couple of minutes pass and nothing happens, I speak up.
“So how… exactly did we get to this point?” I asked, haven gotten completely lost in this conversation.
Mr. Skeleton places a hand on the armrest of his chair, the other one he puts under his chin as he speaks.
“Well… I realized I never did tell you how I became an undead and decided to tell the story about Marcos while I was at it, and then I realized that’s also closely related to the war – one of many- so then I decided to include the wizard stuff in order to kill four birds with one stone!” He says, beaming.
I just stare at him.
Mr. Skeleton coughs awkwardly at my silence, somehow, before speaking.
“Yeah… maybe not my best idea.”
“You think?” I ask. One eyebrow raised. “I practically forgot everything” I say, exasperated.
“That so huh…” Says Mr. Skeleton, crossing his arms and turning around.
“Well in that case…” He erases the board again, and starts drawing again.
“Let’s just start all over again”
I can only protest from my chair, weakly.
“Uuugh.”
“Now, now, Zombie language lessons are on Mondays, don’t want Emile to think you’re insulting his ancestors or something.”
Alternate title is "The old (skeleton) hermit does a (terrible) info dump"
Define a terrible info dump 😂😂😂 that was all just pretty confusing somehow