Magicist: "Trash. Defective Products."


Magicist: "It works because of the entire system. If a Product is grown without a, link, to a mother, it ends up not having a spirit at all, but is still a perfectly functional human with rational thought. Just incapable of magic.

The link with Base 2 allows the Products to inherit her abilities, and the Incubator takes care of binding the spirit to the Heartstone. Without proper binding, the Heartstone does not work.

The Persistence Trigger is a machine in the Research building that forces a spirit to remain for a long period of time after the death of the host body. I'm sure by now you know that Emiel worked on the project for some time. He built many of the prototypes of our machines, including the Persistence Trigger. The early model had a few... Interesting additional functions, such as encoding genetic information into the spirit itself, and making them bind to Heartstones much more easily. However, that caused them to bind to other things as well, which was unwanted. Those operations were removed in the future iterations of the machine.

Alku has had numerous focus modules loaded. About as big as firewood logs. They fit into a slot on the Mother Incubator and the machine loads the contents of the module into the Mother. To put it simply, they give her more abilities.

As for Base 1, I'm not sure. She had male spirits merged into her, but that damaged her ability to create child spirits. I imagine whoever was handling that part of the operation disposed of her."


Magicist: "If your definition of a lich is a grown body with a spirit attached, that would make all of us liches."

Tuhota: "Hmm. Maybe I could work on blocking, too. Defense seems pretty im-"

A fiery explosion nearby interrupts your training session. Turning towards the source, you see a spot of burnt grass, with Horoma lying on the ground close to it.

Miimas: "Holy ♥♥♥♥! Horo you okay!?"

You, Tuhota, and Miimas run over to the doll. A few flames on her clothes that Miimas pats out, and several cracks in her body that let out a red liquid.

Horoma: "I'm okay, sorta. I think my visual sensors got disconnected or damaged. Might have to whip me up a new one, Kyeltziv."

She reaches her hand up to feel her eyesockets, which are spilling gore.

Miimas: "Caelus Horo, you're bleeding!"

Horoma: "What? I can't-Oh my god, I hit someone. Who did I hit? Who's missing?

Is it Tuhota?"

____________________


Magicist: "The Products that were grown without a spirit were sterilized and then released to an orphanage. It was decided that creating an entire race of sentient, non-magic capable humans would have serious consequences in the future, and at the same time we didn't want to outright kill them.

Products are defective if they are unable to survive without life support and are unable to be medically corrected. Early growth tests created Products that were simply too fragile to live on their own without the support of a machine, and if attempts to correct their defects failed, they were euthanized.

The Persistence Trigger, I'm not familiar with the way it works. There's another team that handles it, I handle the Incubators."


She looks at you in a strange way.

Magicist: "Well, first off, we don't kill them with the incinerator. Secondly, Base 2 is a volunteer. I'm not sure if you understood, but many of the machines here require magic, thus, we can't use any antimagic here. That means Base 2 has an enormous amount of magic at her disposal that she can readily use at any given moment."

There's a tapping down the room, and you turn to see Base 2/Alku weakly waving from inside her Incubator.

Magicist: "As for your other questions, I'm not really sure what kind of answer you're expecting."

There aren't any smears that would indicate someone being exploded, and there aren't any loose spirits around either.

Horoma: "Weird. Also there's like, a tingly feeling all over.

Wait, that's pain. I'm not supposed to be able to feel that."

She slowly sits up, some of the cracks in her doll body spreading and dropping fragments, revealing red flesh underneath.

Horoma: "Oooooow. Am I really bleeding?"

Miimas: "Yeah. Looks like blood, smells like blood. Your eyes are mush, too."

Horoma: "Well. This was unexpected."

____________________


Magicist: "Which girls? Focus stones what?"

"The 'modules.' The girls you've been holding in the side buildings.

Nevermind."

PINGAS

Alku traces her finger on the glass tube.

"CLD B BTR"

Magicist: "The Directors were in the building just south of this one before the fighting broke out. If, you're interested in talking to them."