“So, what do you think those creatures you’ve seen yesterday might have been?” I asked Lia, as we took a break from training. She only shrugged in response, trying to control her breathing. After a little while, she managed to respond verbally.

“Whatever they were, there were four of them, at least four I could smell. Of those four, I could only see two, the other two remained out of my sight, no idea if it was due to stealth or cover. Either way, their scent was bestial, somewhat similar to the dogs but still different enough that I’m certain they weren’t dogs. Something furry, I’d bet, and from the size I’d say something about the size of a cat but again, I’m not sure what. It was dark, they were trying to hide, the usual,” she explained, shrugging at the end.

Nodding in response, I considered things for a moment before asking more questions, such as their method of locomotion, whether she had seen their tails or anything that could give us a better idea of what they might have been. My initial guess was a coin flip between feral cats, working together in a bid for survival, or the racoons we had fought before. Either species fit the rough size requirement, especially given that the change could easily have, well, changed the size of certain creatures, as it had done for Silva. Or maybe Silva had always been the size of a calf, I wasn’t quite sure but I was somewhat confident that she had gone up by a few centimetres since we met. A few centimetres in height and roughly her own original body weight in muscles, if I had to guess, the latter mostly since we had gained access to the fields here and the nearly unlimited hunting she now had access to.

We discussed what possible threats might be lurking in the city for a little longer and decided that we should head into it again. If there were still living creatures lurking in a city filled with Undead, that should be something we look into, if only to make sure the living weren’t… corrupted by the energies that caused the many dead bodies to rise. I had no idea what such energies would do to a living being, at least if the living being survived the infusion, but I was confident it wasn’t anything good.

My own experience with channelling the energies of Death was that doing so took a toll on your health, with prolonged exposure likely sapping your Vitality, at least eventually. But that was only for me, with my somewhat limited affinity to those energies, an alternative could be that the creatures became something akin to Lenore, after her crossing of the second Divide. A spirit creature with enough affinity to those energies to bestow it to me, thanks to our bond. But also a creature that could conjure up Undead with little more than the flap of her wings. Sure, lesser Undead, little more than shambling bodies of little value in combat, but that was mainly due to our travelling and Lenore’s limited interest in creating Undead, not something innately to her. I had full confidence that Lenore, if she had decided to focus on summoning, would eventually have been able to reanimate entire fields of corpses, simply by flying over the field. Enemies with such capabilities were something I wanted to know about and, if possible, deal with before they became a threat to me and mine. If dealing with them required me to kill them, so be it, if I could win them over as allies, all the better. But I didn’t want them to be a threat, simply because of their danger.

And so, Lia, Silva and I made our way to the city once more, moving out as soon as the sun had set. Just like the night before, we eschewed stealth to cross the fields between the city and our lair, trusting in our power to overcome whatever beast might lurk nearby. Nothing bothered us, slightly diminishing a part of my vigilance, only to make my paranoia flare up with a vengeance at the question of what might have driven the beasts away, other than the Undead. There might be a different predator lurking, one that could threaten us, the thought bringing my vigilance levels back up.

My plan was to slowly move through the city, keeping an eye out as we moved to another objective of mine. Namely, move to my original apartment and take a look at the Capsule, if it was still there. Given the circumstances, it might very well be buried in rubble, thanks to a fire or the earthquakes the city had suffered since the change, but I wanted to check it out. It had to be a rather significant object of power, or at least a focus of power, given that it had been able to give the Travellers access to Mundus and the system. At least that was my current hypothesis, one that I held onto with all my might. Because it meant that Mundus had been real, and Sigmir was somewhere out there, in whatever place souls went after they died. And if she was out there, I would get her back, whatever the cost. There were legends of people returning from the dead, so the possibility existed.

Examining the artefact that brought me to Mundus in the first place was a good place to start, even if I doubted I had the ability to understand it just yet. Simply seeing it, maybe using Inspect or my magical sight on it would hopefully give me something to start my work.

And as we made our way there, we’d hopefully see more of these curious creatures that lurked in the city.

Moving through the city was just as interesting as it had been the night before. Given my plans, we had packed to spend a day or two in the city, planning to hide out in a dark cellar or something like that. It also meant that we had much more time than the night before, enough time to idle a bit and observe the Undead, both with the actual Observe ability and in a more general sense, simply watching them, taking note of their movements and patterns, those kinds of things.

Amusingly, the patterns we discovered were quite similar to those we had observed amongst the Shattered. They seemed to move within a distinct pattern, though contained with an area. The longer we observed, the more obvious that pattern became, it was as if they were repeating the same sequence of actions again and again, each time returning to the original point.

One of them first crossed the street and then moved through a burned-out building that used to be a bakery, even moving slowly through the building’s burned-out shell as if advancing in a line, before moving across the street and stopping at the remains of a bus stop. There, the Undead waited for a few seconds, before returning to the original spot and starting the sequence again.

As we observed similar sequences, Lia and I began to make guesses about where those might come from. What we felt to be our best guess was that it might be a sequence the body that had risen to become Undead had done in life, maybe a habit they had formed or a single sequence that had played out before their death, maybe on the day of the change.

Trapped in a loop of actions, endlessly repeating the same sequence of events, until they would eventually be laid to rest. It was quite tragic, an eternity of taking out the trash was not something I wished on anybody. But then, the people that those bodies once had been were hopefully long gone, not trapped in some sort of dream-like hellscape in which they repeated the same action, again and again, until their bodies completely decomposed.

Other than those repeating patterns, the Undead did very little. Just the same repetition, at least until a stimulus hit them. We did a few experiments, moving objects, creating sounds, those kinds of things, trying to figure out how far they could see and hear.

Interestingly, it didn’t seem like the Undead were actually using sight or hearing to hunt, nor scent for that matter. It was almost as if they had some sort of detection for living beings, allowing them to detect those even through solid cover.

And even that strange detection seemed to be rather limited, maybe thirty metres in range, but as soon as one of them detected a living being, it caused a ripple-effect, as if they were soundlessly telling all the other Undead. Only, the ‘telling’ didn’t only work along a distinct range, in one case, we managed to observe how one Undead was ‘told’ about our presence, while another wasn’t, only the one that wasn’t ‘told’ was closer to the one that spotted us.

Clearly, more research was needed. As was more time to find the creepy critters Lia had noticed the night before, as we hadn’t spotted hide or hair of them by the time we got into my old neighbourhood.