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The trees thinned out around P03 as he approached the location of the old well. It was an ancient thing, shoddily built and perpetually on the verge of falling apart, and the earth around it was long barren. Whether that was a consequence of toxins naturally seeping out from its depths or a direct result of the visits of one of the other Scrybes was not known to P03, despite his extensive analyses of the site. But it was a part of his domain and so, regardless of whether it was built by the same people who had established the research facilities he worked and lived out of or if it was more ancient than that still, P03 made sure to occasionally roll through to check on it and make minor repairs when necessary.
And the repairs were indeed minor. The other Scrybe who shared custody of the well had very specific aesthetic preferences that P03 had to adhere to or risk his ire. That suited P03 just fine. The less he had to come to this dead place that even the most daring of birds or most desperate of prey animals feared to approach, the better.
Today, however, he wasn’t here simply to make repairs. There were more interesting plans afoot.
P03 carefully set down the thin but wide and heavy package he’d carried in, propping it against the side of a boulder, then situated himself so he was facing the well and put himself into standby mode to conserve energy. His bioanalysis drone, a twitchy little orb of a bot that hovered in the air above him and (mostly) acted only on his command, was set to monitor the environment and alert P03 if anything changed.
It wasn’t half an hour before the drone sent P03 a ping that roused him from his nap. He read the report sent to him by the drone—there had been no sounds of organic life native to the continent since it began monitoring, but now it had detected a slick squelching emanating from deep within the well and a foul scent like crude oil was permeating the air—and P03 knew he’d have to wait no longer. The person he’d been waiting for was here.
In moments, a clawed, bony hand reached out of the well and grasped onto its edge, then a second joined it. A grey-green mass of fur hauled itself up from the well and a pair of wide, glowing eyes met P03’s screen.
“P03,” it spoke in a guttural, breathy voice like its windpipe was being choked out.
“Magnificus,” P03 replied. Then, thinking that came out a little too flat, he repeated, “Magnificus!” with an exclamation point to put a little enthusiasm into his TTS voice.
Ordinarily, he didn’t have much to be excited about when Magnificus came around. He was a tentative ally at best, and any attempts they’d made at forging a less flimsy relationship were thwarted by a number of difficulties, even with something as simple as just meeting up. Magnificus, as the Scrybe of Death, left an inky black snail trail of caustic slime wherever he went, literally poisoning the earth he walked upon, while P03’s inefficient battery and slow charging times made travelling all the way across the bridges to Magnificus’s land of the dead nearly impossible. If only P03 had enough time and resources to craft a vessel that could transport him more easily perhaps things might have been different, but as it stood the only place they could meet was here, at the one location in P03’s domain where the land was already dead.
How Magnificus managed to travel all the way from his isles to the well so quickly every time was beyond P03. Probably the guy could just teleport to any area he considered to be a liminal space. P03 didn’t even pretend to understand it.
Magnificus crawled over the lip of the well and landed on the hard dirt with a wet splat. P03 backed up out of habit even though he was already out of the splash radius. Even a few drops of that vile black fluid could rot the leaves that sprouted from his body as it had in the past when Magnificus had been permitted to get too close, and now P03 wasn’t taking any more chances.
The Scrybe of the Dead tilted up his head towards P03. “The slab,” he croaked, reaching out a grey-skinned hand. “Show me.”
Straight to business. Of course P03 shouldn’t have expected Magnificus to make petty small talk when he himself didn’t offer the warmest greetings, either.
“Of course. Be careful when handling it. Okay? Scans show it’s fragile.”
When Magnificus gave no reply, P03 turned and retrieved the package, then set it down between the two of them and pressed a sequence of buttons that made its panel pop open. Inside the thin metal box was a flat slab of stone with clean, laser-cut edges, and embedded in its surface was a beautifully preserved fossil of some kind of small creature with its neck tilted back like a dead bird, and yet its bony tail was long and curved, its arms were so tiny they were nearly lost in the mosaic of its shattered ribcage, and its narrow skull preserved rows of sharp teeth.
“A remarkable find, isn’t it?” P03 said as Magnificus leaned in to inspect it. “Yep, came across it while patrolling the quarries. Excavating it without damaging any part of it was a bitch, but the data I collected from it was worth it. There was already some old data in the system from fragmentary remains of adults of this species but this has to be the most complete…”
He trailed off when he noticed Magnificus wasn’t even looking at him. Oh no, he was probably boring him with the details. P03 clinked his digits together awkwardly, unsure of what to say next.
“Do you. Do you like it.”
Magnificus at last turned his glowing eyes up towards P03. “Yes,” he gurgled. “It is very ‘cool’.”
P03’s screen flickered to a pursed-lipped expression. He knew his own voice wasn’t the greatest at conveying tone, but Magnificus’s was no better. What did he mean by “cool”? Was he being patronizing? He sent out a signal to his bioanalysis drone to scan Magnificus’s slimy, hair-covered face to try to untangle what expression he was supposed to be making but the drone simply returned an error. Great. Very goddamn helpful.
“So,” P03 said, rolling back and forth idly. “Can you inscrybe it? If you require more information on what it would have looked like in life, I’ve got a 3D model reconstruction with speculative integuments that could be—”
“No,” Magnificus interrupted, holding up a hand. “The bones…shall speak for themselves.”
Fine, jerk, P03 didn’t say aloud. He sullenly cancelled the boot-up of his 3D modelling program and folded his one arm over his chest as Magnificus reached a hand into his hair to retrieve his legendary ink brush and a tiny leather-bound sketchbook. The brush, his inscrybing tool, needed no inkwell. He needed only to dip it into his own fur to refresh its load of black pigment.
Watching him carefully paint the bones of the fossil in his sketchbook, whose pages were already decorated with the borders of his designs for deathly cards, was kind of disgusting—that ink was made from his own vile secretions, after all—but P03 couldn’t help rolling in a little nearer to get a closer look. There was something satisfying about the way the fossil gradually grew more and more recognizable on the page with each quick stroke of the Scrybe’s brush. Such an imprecise method, very unlike P03’s technique where every conceivable biometric of an animal would be captured when they were scanned with his drone. He’d be tempted to think of Magnificus’s painted cards as inferior to his own if not for how much their organic look appealed to him.
After only a few minutes, Magnificus lifted his ink brush from the paper, examining the stylized portrait of the fossil for a moment, then took a clawed finger and cleanly sliced the page from the book. “It is done.”
As soon as the card was separated, the bones embedded in the slab began to glow with a sickly green aura. Excitement built within P03 as he watched the dark bones pull away from the rock and rearrange themselves in the air. Even though he’d expected this to happen—and was the very reason he’d called Magnificus all the way over here in the first place—he’d never before been a witness to the Scrybe of Death’s magic reanimating a dead body. He’d almost expected it not work on an animal so long-dead that its bones had mineralized but it looked like his bet had paid off.
Through the camera feed of his hovering drone, P03 could see Magnificus was watching him with his big eyes slightly narrowed. Dammit, had P03 offended him somehow? Maybe he was under the impression that P03 was only using him for his abilities to revive the dead rather than seeing the invitation to make a new card as an extending of the olive branch that just so happened to provide a benefit to P03 on the side. But it was impossible to get a read on Magnificus’s expression, anyways, so P03 did his very best not to stew in anxiety and turned his attention back to the fossil instead.
The little creature had finished assembling itself at last. A ghostly glow surrounded its skeletal body, giving the faint impression of a coat of fine, downy feathers, quite unlike the vaned feathers P03’s model had predicted. Already his waiting drone was collecting a wealth of new information on this animal as it sniffed the air and tilted its head curiously at the robot and undead hair monster. P03 made to extend his arm to the beast to see if it would be interested in interacting with him, but he forced his servos to halt. No, to express too much excitement over this wondrous little animal would only confirm Magnificus’s belief that P03’s invitation to him had been a selfish attempt at gaining a new beast.
“Well, then,” he said, wincing when his emotionless voice made the creature hiss in fright and hurry off to hide behind Magnificus. “It would seem that my reconstruction of this proto-bird was not entirely accurate. I will have to update my models once I return to my base. And give the species a name and sort out its phylogeny.”
Magnificus did not reply. He looked behind him at the proto-bird, which was keeping close to his furry body even as it crept nervously forward, then back to P03, his eyes wide and unblinking. Guilt twisted in P03’s wires. He totally had used Magnificus, hadn’t he?
“If…” P03 began hesitantly. “If you want to go now, you can. You may take the bird with you. If you want.”
Finally, Magnificus spoke. “You…don’t wish to inscrybe it…?”
“No. No. Of course not!” P03 stuttered out in reply, holding up his claw defensively. “No, it’s yours. It may be a beast, but since it’s also undead, I cede it to you.”
Magnificus’s eyelids fell partially over his eyes and he turned slightly to gently pick up the proto-bird in his clawed hands and hold it out to P03. The beast chirped and wiggled in his hands, its long tail wagging back and forth like a dog.
“Don’t you…” Magnificus croaked, “...like it?”
P03 lagged out for a moment as his system scrambled to process the situation. Magnificus…wanted him to fawn over the animal? Oh, P03 had to be beyond defective to have misread him this badly.
“I. I do. It’s.” P03 at last reached out his claw and gingerly touched the top of the proto-bird’s head with it, and he couldn’t disguise the expression of delight that blinked onto his screen when the bird nuzzled against his digits. “It’s very cool.”
The sad look that had come over Magnificus’s face was replaced with a narrowing of the eyes that P03 had previously read as scrutiny but now realized might be something akin to gleeful eagerness. As soon as he’d set the proto-bird down on the ground, it began circling P03 curiously, nipping at his treads and tapping the tip of its toothy snout against his boxy body. Though P03 tried to hold still so as to not frighten it again, he couldn’t help excitedly flexing and extending his digits to stim.
“This might be foraging behaviour at play,” he said, looking from the beast to Magnificus, “which would imply its diet would have consisted more of small prey like insects and lizards rather than hunting proportionally larger prey like it would have done in its adult form. Perhaps this means it would have been independent from a younger age. Or it might have still required parental care, but its jaws might not have been developed enough yet to rip and tear larger pieces of flesh so it needed to consume smaller meals. This would mean its juvenile form would have occupied an entirely different ecological niche than…”
He caught himself rambling again and cut himself off. “Sorry. That must be boring to you.”
“It is not,” Magnificus wheezed. His eyes followed the proto-bird as it scared itself by accidentally kicking a rock and scrambled away behind P03’s body to hide while tripping and falling twice along the way. “You are…very knowledgeable.”
A smile formed on P03’s screen. “I try to be. It’s what I was made for.”
Magnificus looked back at P03 with another inscrutable expression. P03 guessed it was supposed to be friendly? At this rate, he’d have to develop a program made specifically to analyze and decode Magnificus’s facial expressions, especially if they wanted to maintain an allyship. P03 certainly wanted that. Perhaps they could even someday be friends? A distant dream, to be sure, but a possibility nonetheless.
“Before I forget.” P03 pinged the bioanalysis drone, switching it from passive scanning mode to inscrybing mode, and it floated lower to hover half a metre over the proto-bird, which tilted its head at it and gave a chirp. “Hold still,” P03 said to the skeleton, as if it could understand him in any capacity.
But the proto-bird stayed in place long enough for the drone to sweep its orange scanning beam over it. The creature only sneezed in response, which P03 found bewildering considering it was nothing more than mineralized bones contained within a ghost and it had no internal respiratory system. For a moment, the drone hovered motionlessly with various lights on its surface flashing as it processed the information and P03 started to fear the undead state of his subject would make it impossible for him to inscrybe it. Then the drone sent him a .zip containing the data from the scan, and when he opened it onto his screen, he was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was it a valid beast card, its stats were quite impressive. Though it would cost eight Bones to play in a game of Inscryption and its statline was a middling 2:1, it possessed both the Fledgling and the Bone King sigils. He previewed what it would look like upon the activation of its Fledgling sigil and was blown away by its increased 4:2 stats. The image of the little beast was also transformed from the auto-generated 3D model of its skeletal structure—it seemed its ghostly integument was invisible to the scanner—to the reconstructed 3D model of its adult form that P03 had already had on file.
“Magnificent,” Magnificus garbled out as he stared at P03’s screen. “A worthy undead beast indeed…”
“Yep,” P03 agreed. “Now I just need to assign it a name before printing it. Let’s see.” He thought about it for a moment, tapping his claws together, while the proto-bird distracted itself with trying to climb up Magnificus’s slippery back. “While this specimen is small, its adult form was monstrous, and its Bone King sigil connects it to royalty. Yes. I think I have the perfect name for it.” P03 straightened up proudly as he inputted the name into the blank space at the top of the card. “Nanotyrannus rex. What do you think?”
Magnificus didn’t reply for a moment but squinted as he considered it. A pleased squint, perhaps? “...That name is…very lengthy.”
P03 chose to interpret that as a neutral comment. “Don’t worry about that, the whole thing fits in the name slot.”
“...I…see.”
P03 dropped the newly-named file into his printing queue and his internal printer whirred to life. A moment later, the card was spat out of the slot in his chest into his waiting claws. After smiling in satisfaction at his new card, he held it out to Magnificus.
“Would you like this one? I can print more later and have the Trader distribute them, but I think it’s only right for you to have the first copy. After all, I never would have been able to inscrybe it had you not revived it.”
Magnificus looked from the card to P03’s face, then reached out and took it, stowing it away somewhere inside his fur. Great, the first-ever Nanotyrannus rex card was now probably covered in evil death slime. P03 was so busy trying not to look disgusted that he almost didn’t notice that Magnificus was holding something else out to him.
“For…you…”
Surprised, P03 took it. It was the card Magnificus had painted of the Nanotyrannus rex—okay, P03 wasn’t about to agree that that name was a bit long, but from now on he decided maybe he ought to call this particular specimen ‘Nano’ for short—and though it coincidentally shared the cost of eight Bones and stats of 2:1, its sigils and name differed. Magnificus had given it Unkillable, a very generous sigil for a mildly powerful card, and had named it Ancient Bird.
“The name is…now outdated,” Magnificus said. His breathy voice almost sounded apologetic. “I can no longer change it.”
P03 shrugged his shoulder. “It’s not a problem. I like it anyways.” After a moment, he added, “Thank you.”
Their attentions were diverted by Nano, who had fallen out of Magnificus’s hair after a valiant attempt to climb all the way up. P03 tucked his new Deathly card into the storage compartment in his torso and made a clicking noise at the skeletal beast while gesturing with his claws. Nano immediately scrambled to its feet and trotted over to eagerly nibble at the tips of his digits. P03 emitted a laugh and freed his claws from its tiny teeth, then skritched it on its head. Presuming this little guy didn’t need to eat, its continued presence in the forest shouldn’t disrupt the ecosystem all too much. P03 hadn’t considered what he’d do with it once it was brought back to life—or, rather, undeath—but he was already too fond of it to part with it.
By the way Magnificus was gazing at it as he stroked his own shrunken hand along the side of its jaw, P03 guessed he might be feeling the same way.
“If. If you’d like.” P03 twiddled with his digits and looked off to the side. “You can come back to my forest to visit it anytime you like. Well. Not anytime. Try to send me a message first to warn me that you’re coming.”
Magnificus blinked slowly at P03, then nodded. “I hope…next time, you will tell me more…about this animal…”
P03 perked up. “Sure! I’ll do my best to conduct further research on Nanotyrannus rex in the interim. I’m very busy with other research, of course, but I can have my drone passively collect behavioural data. If that’s something that interests you.”
“Yes, it is. Then…we have a deal…?”
Magnificus held out his hand to shake and P03 couldn’t help flinching. That old, slimy, dead hand…P03 was supposed to touch it? Willingly? His mind went back to the last time he’d gotten within such close proximity to Magnificus and how long it had taken for his beloved vines to grow back…but back then, they’d understood each other less. Magnificus hadn’t recognized how much damage his oily excretions did to living matter, and P03 hadn’t known that Magnificus didn’t know.
Now, however, years after that incident and with many neutral or even positive interactions between them later, P03 got the feeling the mutual understanding between the two of them was stronger. They didn’t just have to be allies out of necessity anymore. They could be allies because they wanted to be. And maybe, if P03 kept finding more fossils and inviting the Scrybe of Death to admire them with him—and possibly make a few more cross-faction cards with them—Magnificus would want to be his friend. Someday.
With that pleasant thought in his processor and their shared denizen happily dustbathing between them, P03 overcame his revulsion and took Magnificus’s hand in his claws.
“Deal.”