There was a storyline I made a long whiles ago about a character named Plagal. I used this name twice in RPGs I played in; the story I made up about her is based on the first RPG. I kind of like the name Plagal... Anyway, I've been thinking about the story more recently and thought it'd be best to write something down about it. The story has a pretty elaborate setting so I'll start with that, then get into the actual characters themselves.
The setting is around the Medieval times complete with knights and wizardry of that sort. It revolves around the concept of Necromancy and puts a slight twist on it. Basically, its a story about Necromancers not quite being as "evil" as everyone always percieves them to be (even IRL, Necromancy is associated with the "dark side" and those who conduct it must be "evil" or using black mana in Magic: The Gathering). But Necromancy can be good just as well as it can be evil; like all magic, it all depends on how it is used. It's quite efficient, actually; here you can reanimate a body to do some menial and often dirty tasks that one wouldn't always want to do with their own hands... besides, the bodies usually would sit there and rot, wouldn't it be better to make some use of a body before it completely decomposes? Nevertheless, the concept of Necromancy is still taken as to be "evil", even in this sort of world, save a small village which practices it as tradition. This precents a conflict for the characters in the story, as they practice a taboo form of magic that many outsiders would outcast them out of fear.
Despite their ability to "reanimate the dead", it should be taken into account that the dead aren't brought back to life, but the body merely used like a tool, whether it be savagely raiding a city or doing plow work in the field on a farm. This is the case, most of the time. The concept of soul and body exist in this world; while the body can be reanimated (relatively) easily, the soul is usually the "living" part of the being eternally gone after they had died. So can the soul be captured back and, ultimately, the body be repaired enough to bring a person back to life? And can this lead to immortality? Many Necromancy researchers in the village look into this extensively. As so far, the only method that comes close to bring back a person to life is a method they call "Soul Capture".
"Soul Capture", however, is highly looked down upon in the village. This method essentually does what it says: capture the soul and forces it back into the body. The method prevents the soul from going into eternal sleep (whether that is Heaven or whatever comes after death) and makes the soul-enchanted undead basically a slave of the capturer/re-animator. So how is this different from regular reanimation, save that one now enslaves a poor soul? Basically, though the soul-captured zombie cannot disobey its master, it is able to do many things that a zombie cannot do, one of the most notable being able to think and reason without its master doing it for them. Hence, they can act on things without their master's commands, and therefore make excellent companions/warriors/whatever the necromancer wanted to do with it. Therefore, while morally this is a bad thing to do, "Soul Capture" is a powerful skill.
There are many downsides to "Soul Capture". One of which is that, since the soul almost immediately goes to the Great Beyond after death, it is IMMENSELY difficult to capture the soul in the first place. There are very few necromancers, therefore, who have achieved this. The second is that, since the Soul, along with its body, must be, in a sense, "kept alive" for it to continue serving its master, the master usually must constantly provide energy/magic, or essentially, his own soul, for both bodily and spiritual repair; otherwise, the soul would die out as soon as the body is ripped apart (and hence becoming rather pointless in conducting such a powerful spell). This is important; in normal zombies, a master can often repair the body a bit and use it again, but having it take part of their energy it usually not worth it and much more efficient to find a new body to reanimate. However, the Soul can ONLY be associated with its own body, therefore the body MUST be repaired if it suffers any damage; likewise with the soul itself (IE there are spiritually damaging skills in the era).
Before ending the discussion (or rather, lecture) on this new form of necromancy and spells, there are several loose ends to tie up. One is, if a really powerful soul is captured, one that was able to do powerful magic (or had the potential to) when it was alive, then it is still able to do powerful magic when it is in its soul-captured form. This, in the record of the story, has never really happened except for (obviously) Plagal's case, and even Plagal doesn't quite realize her own capability. In this case, they can even "divide" their own soul and control other (soulless) bodies, quite an astonishing feat from a deceased person (Normal necromancers can also control multiple bodies, but they have to be skilled in necromancy and even then have a limit to how many bodies they can control; the whole "raise an army of a million dead warriors" is, to say the least, a very tiring task). Another thing, dead bodies don't age. This should be fairly obvious. Finally, the question of bringing a person back to life has never been answered, but there have been legends and fables within the village about such a thing. This is fairly important, since one of the main goals for the main character of this story is to try and actually bring Plagal back to life, not just as a zombie, but back into an actual person. He often looks into these legends for hints as to how to help his once friend/crush (yes she was probably someone he loved) emerge back into the world he lives in now.
Well... that's one part of the story I wanted to write up. I'm feeling too lazy to write up more now, so I'll stop. (The internet does that to do, seriously) I'm thinking of putting up a little intro/prologue thing of this story rather than a straight out character profile... at least not yet, because I think the intro would make more sense then just putting in characters like I've been doing with the other stories.
Who knows, maybe I'll even make some sort of story out of it.
Or I can just procrastinate forever and never have anythign else to do with Plagal ever again!!! XD
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