Quest Manipulation (Minerva Agatha Zipporah)

[Arcane]

The hooded man brushed away her words impatiently as if they were unwanted noise. "His memories, Miss Zipporah. You can do that yes? I also want his... cognitive faculties to be working as they are, and of course, a means to transfer that knowledge into understandable language. Cognizance draws from memory, so I will need both. Can you do that?" He began urgently. "Dolei..." A harsh gasp came from the poor excuse for a living person, his lungs rattling as he tried to draw in air to fuel his next sentences. "Use... it..." There was an evident pause of silence as the hooded man considered his comrade's quest, before he turned to face Tock once more. "There is a way, but we will need your knowledge of Animation to keep it going. We have... discovered a possible method of transferring knowledge and possibly consciousness, but we did not have the time to properly test it out." Moving to another clearing in the cellar where a large white cloth covered the ground, he removed the cloth, leaving it crumpled untidily at the sight as he revealed what it was covering. Three large circles were drawn in chalk, with a series of intricate glyphs lying interlocked with each other. If Tock were to attempt to decipher it she would find that her knowledge in glyphing too lacking to even attempt to figure out what the glyphs were. The three circles were placed such that they were at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. The man walked over to the bed where he rolled the bed easily to the first circle, revealing that the bed's legs actually had wheels attached. "You will attempt to transfer the man's consciousness to yourself, before transferring it to the... repository we have here. That will be the first step... your expertise would be required for the next as well." Taking out a smooth stone from his pocket, he placed it on the other circle, gesturing for Tock to take the place of the remaining empty circle. "You must activate the process, and I will guide you along."

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

"I can does memories," Tock told the man. "I can does..." she paused, not quite sure what the word 'cognizance' meant, except maybe it meant 'smarts.' "I can puts all 'is smarts inta sommat else... But ya want language, I's gonna 'as ta build 'im some vocal chords, 'less ya got a plain ol' dead body 'round 'ere I can throw 'im inta..." Why couldn't people ever understand that Animation was a far more complex process than they realized? She needed to build something to put the man in, plot out which memories would be transferred, and in which order. He was asking for things that would take weeks to do properly. The dying man didn't look like he had weeks left... She frowned deeply when the man started talking about his 'possible method,' and her face scrunched up in utter confusion at the magic circles he revealed a moment later. She didn't understand what she was seeing. Animation only used two circles. Alchemy one. This... whatever it was, had three. It didn't make any sense to her, and it made even less sense when he started talking about transferring the man's consciousness to herself... ...could she DO that? The implications were staggering. The idea of transferring memories out of a Source and directly into herself, instead of into an Automaton... she considered the things she could learn, the possibility that she could program knowledge directly into her own mind. She considered Cutty, and how maybe, if she could copy his memories directly into her own mind, then she could see where the problem was in his programming. It was too much for her to get her head around. Frowning, deeply disoriented, and already thinking ahead to other ways she could potentially use this for her own purposes, she stepped into the third circle. The stone confused her... was it like an Alchemy Keystone? Her eyes traced along the lines connecting the three circles, from herself, to the dying man, to the stone. "Which way's the energy flow?" she asked, pulling her dagger out and touching the tip of the blade to her finger. It seemed like the cycle could go in either direction, and she needed to know how to control it properly. She supposed clockwise made sense... that would channel the energy from the dying man, to her, then to the stone. Maybe that was what 'repository' meant... like the stone was going to be a temporary Golem brain. "Oy... look, mate," she said, "I know maybe what as we ain't gots time 'fore yer friend 'ere dies, but ya needs ta gimme a rundown o' 'is setup, aye?" A drop of blood fell from her hand onto the circles, but she had no idea what to do next...

[Arcane]

The hooded man made no comment with regards to verification of Tock's theories, and instead he dropped a bit of his own blood into the glyph even as she began the first step of any world magic operation. His own thick, diseased-looking, coagulated blood plopped on the ground in a way that blood should not behave, while Tock's drop of blood flowed to the ground normally. He seemed to concentrate on the circle together with the gadgeteer, and guided her along with obscure instructions that he read from a handwritten journal that he produced from his inner pockets. Despite being an expert in animation, Tock would find that the series of instructions that he gave her with regards to manipulation of the animation process would make little sense. It was as if he was giving her an encrypted sort of operation, but in a magical sense. There was a low thrum of power that began to emanate from the circle, and the bedridden man gasped as the glyphs began lighting up with a sickly pastel glow. Suddenly, the hooded man stepped away from the glyph, nodding to himself as he did so. Tock experienced a strong and sudden flash of white as a split-second migraine struck her heavily like a sledgehammer striking a vulnerable skull. The headache would lighten to a dull throbbing, but it would begin to worsen in intensity as she felt a sort of presence threatening to move into her skull. The last bit of instruction that was given began to make sense, and if she had been paying attention she would soon realize that the last bit would be allowing this presence to invade her mind. Of course, she still had the power to terminate the operation by reversing the concept of implanting a soul core, which any sane human might do. Yet, was Tock even sane to begin with?

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Tock frowned when she saw the man's blood, being briefly reminded of a Nuit's ichor. She wondered just what was wrong with him, and whether he, too, was dying. Not that it mattered to her; he could drop dead as soon as they were done here, for all she cared. As long as she got paid, and had a chance to figure this new ritual out before the old fart croaked. Transferring the man's memories first to herself, and then into the rock, turned out to be a more fluid process than she had expected. It made a sort of sense; when she had attempted (and failed) to copy Mikey's memories into a new body, she had first copied them into a puppet, and then from there into a new body. It had been like building all of the individual parts of a wagon, carrying them to a new workshop, and then assembling them separately. She knew from experience that it could be far more efficient to assemble everything as you went, since you could save time by performing any related tasks in unison, instead of one after the other. It was faster to lay out each board and nail it in place as it was cut, instead of placing the boards in a pile for later assembly. There was a certain similarity here, even if she couldn't quite seem to understand what the process was. Rather than dumping the memories into her mind, pausing, and then transferring them from her to the stone, it was designed to be a continuous flow. There was no pause, no halt to the flow of information. It was something akin to being swept up in a river, carried along by its waters, and guiding the flow downstream as she went along. Following the man's instructions, she tried her best to relax herself and not fight the energy flow that came with such sudden force. Fighting against it would only make the whole process harder. Instead she relaxed, the mental equivalent of letting herself go limp, and she allowed the foreign memories to penetrate her mind. It was hard to let go, hard to surrender herself to something foreign like this. She wanted to be in control, take charge, grab the energy and force it to do what she wanted. But just as there had been the first time she took a man inside her, there was something liberating about releasing that control. It wasn't a complete surrender; she still had her part to play, and she could still guide the energy as it passed through her. But the guidance was more subtle. Her hesitation was short-lived, before she allowed her mind to be invaded. Whatever risks might have been there were meaningless to her, when faced with the chance to learn something new, something she could quite possibly refine and make her own, something that she could apply later to her own works. She would give up anything for that sort of knowledge, be it mind, body, or soul.