The gaunt skeletal figure has glowing green eyes, her bones silhouetted in orange against our lights. The withered vines around the room start to grow rapidly.

Rose Treharris is using Invocation (Plant Control)

Out in the main room, a massive pumpkin grows rapidly, filling the room and blocking our retreat.

Vines try to grab at us, but Hemlock freezes them with a swish of his frost wand. The brittle plants shatter into icy shards and vanish into aether.

Smaller pumpkins spring up around the room, and the room lights up as they open their eyes and mouths to become jack-o'-lanterns. The animated pumpkin faces begin to laugh as vine monsters rise up on their own.

Rose Treharris is using an unknown skill. Aspects: Pumpkin, vine, thorn, movement, spooky. Auto-naming: Invocation (Spooky Pumpkin)

[Spooky Pumpkin]? Seriously? No, I've never heard of it, but the skill is obviously Invocation (Jack-o'-Lantern). Invocations use the proper names for things. I don't have a skill named Invocation (Whatever That Snake Stick Is Called Again). I have a skill named Invocation (Caduceus). (And yes, I'm obviously using [Fractal Consciousness] here and not just getting distracted arguing with my system mid-battle.)

Type: Plant | Rank: Elite | Class: Pumpkin Guardian

However spooky they are, the animated pumpkins continue to be vulnerable to ice attacks. Hemlock's blast of frost puts out the lights of two of them in one sweep. Basalt slices through the stalks of another two with his axe.

"You bear the wand of Hermes and call thunder down upon me," Rose says, her green eyes flaring brightly and her aura wild with glee. "Fantastic! Let the darkness fill you! Reach out and connect to the thorns, and they will bleed for you!"

Rose Treharris is using Invocation (Plant Control).

Thorny vines wrap around me, threatening to slice me open if I don't fight her with my own [Plant Control]. She's a full rank above me, though, and I only just learned this skill. But this is still a dungeon, and I can tell that she's deliberately keeping her control light so that this will actually be possible.

I stop attacking her with lightning and pour my vis into the vines around me to stop them from damaging me. Blast it, even if I use [Ghostly Enchanter], I still only have so much Inspiration. Higher than average, but still finite.

But I'm not a solo hero, and I don't have to do everything myself. I only have to hold them for a second before Rowan hacks them apart with his sword.

Rowan is using Invocation (Smite) and Sorcery (Friendly Fire).

White fire incinerates the vines but, despite being centimeters from my skin, doesn't harm me.

Meanwhile, Melody's belting out an encouraging tune while playing the hurdy-gurdy. I am still not sure how I feel about the hurdy-gurdy, but for the moment, it is enough of a novelty that I am not yet annoyed. It would probably be more useful to find it inspiring somehow. Unfortunately, she has a way to go for that. I suppose that's the polite way to put it. But she's a lowbie still and I have confidence that she will improve.

Slashes of mist crisscross the Revenant Druid's form, Jade's [Wind Slash] causing minimal damage. She starts circling around to try something else.

Rose Treharris sees through her stealth in an instant. Thorns rise around Jade, and Rose cackles, "Save her, if you can!"

Jade is using an unknown skill. Aspects: Mist, movement, blade. Auto-naming: Mist Step Description: Briefly transform into mist and quickly cross a distance between two points.

Jade's body dissolves, and a dense cloud briefly disperses before Jade's body reforms directly behind the Revenant Druid. She jams her mist blade into the Druid's back.

My brain immediately tries to break at this flagrant violation of the laws of physics that we have just casually witnessed, but I shunt the resulting rant off into a psychic fractal and focus on the fight.

With the boss down, Jade inspects the room for traps and unlocks the boss chest. Some more coins, a pumpkin seed aspected with 'spooky', and a necklace of thorns that looks incredibly uncomfortable to wear and we all agree to just chuck into the Hebron spawner at the next opportunity.

"So… how are we supposed to get out of here again?" Jade wonders, examining the giant pumpkin blocking the doorway.

"Anyone got magic herbicide, or shall I just start hacking?" Basalt asks.

"Hmm, [Serpent's Bite]?" I say, and try it to no effect. "No, I think it doesn't work on plants. Hemlock, do you have any poison or decay skills?"

"No, why would I?" Hemlock asks defensively, and lying about it for some reason.

"Oh. That's a pity. They'd be useful and you've got a bonus to 'toxic' aspect from being named Hemlock, so you'd probably be good at them."

Hemlock blinks in puzzlement. "Really? Huh. Fine, I suppose I can take life advice from the weird kid who seems to know everything. Halkyn put me here for a reason. But it seems weird that you'd suggest that I should be more toxic than I already am."

"Your mystic aspects don't need to be your personality," I say.

"And you're far less toxic than the typical person on certain parts of the old internet," Basalt adds cheerfully.

"How familiar are you with Invocations?" I ask, pulling out the skull we'd picked up from the chest on the first floor. "I'm betting Invocation (Skull Curse) would do the trick, but I don't know it yet myself. Saw it listed in a book but I already have a huge backlog of skills I want to learn. I'll pass this over if you want to give it a shot, otherwise I'll see what I can do myself."

"You… would learn Invocation (Skull Curse)?" Hemlock asks. "I thought you, like, considered yourselves the 'good guys' or something…"

"More like the 'Chaotic Good' guys," Basalt says with a shrug. "If you can curse things with skulls, I'll be happy at that being directed at my enemies."

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"I'm already a Necromancer," I point out. "But curses don't have anything to do with Necromancy even if they involve skulls. And this particular skull was a dungeon drop and didn't come from someone we'd just murdered. Look, if you want to reject poison and decay, I'm not going to force you into it. But you don't need to shy away from it just because you think we might judge you for it or something. It's not the tool, but what you do with it."

Hemlock offers no further protest and accepts the skull. He doesn't ask for, or require, instruction in Invocation (Skull Curse), as he clearly already knows it. The fake skull's eyes glow orange, and a paradoxically glowing black beam strikes the giant pumpkin blocking our path. The offending oversized gourd withers under the attack, and quickly melts into protean plasm and vanishes.

We enter the room of the boss across the hall from the Revenant Druid. In an equally ornate sarcophagus lies another aura that I scan and pass the information on to my party.

Name: Bones Treharris Tempest Tiganna Race: Human | Gender: Male | Rank: Heroic | Tier: Ancient | Class: Necromantic Teacher Disposition: Hostile | Mood: Pleased to meet you

"Ah, look, prospective students," rasps the skeleton as he sets his empty eye sockets upon us. "Let me give you a lesson!"

Bones Treharris is using an unknown skill. Aspects identified: Death, bone, movement, soul. Auto-naming: Necromancy (Animate Skeleton)

Bones scattered about the room come together to form a skeleton, animated not by another ancestral Treharris, but by a soul connected to Bones. I peer back into the astral plane, expecting to see the orderly tree of a reincarnator, but what I see almost makes me physically gag.

While a reincarnator's astral tree bears "grafts" of other lives connected like fruits, this Necromancer holds souls in cages. These souls don't resonate as well with the base root as a reincarnated graft does, and look like they were uprooted and captured upon a person's death.

"This is how you do proper Necromancy!" announces Bones. "Come, stay with me, be my students! Don't let the reincarnators fool you into thinking that they're special, that they're the only ones who can do soul magic. You can do it too… if you dare."

I will try to figure out whether I should be taking a moral stance against that sort of magic later. The moral implications of Necromancy aren't even worth spending a mental fractal on when said Necromancer is in the middle of trying to kill me.

I would rather pay attention to how he cast Necromancy (Animate Skeleton) because I would really like to know regardless.

Name: (?) (?) (?) Race: Human | Gender: Male | Rank: Elite | Tier: Ancient | Class: Skeletal Bartender Disposition: Hostile (Compulsion) | Mood: Angry, but not at you

On top of the animation effects, I pick out strands of compulsion influencing the skeletons' behavior. I rip through the Skeletal Bartender's mental bindings with a blast of [Defiance]. He immediately goes slack from his aggressive posture and stands looking about in confusion for a moment before deciding that the sensible course of action is to hurl himself at the Necromancer who bound him.

I release the bindings on the skeletons one by one as I regain Inspiration, directing my party to focus their efforts on the boss and not the minions.

"No, what are you doing!?" Bones Treharris screams. "Those are my skeletons! Mine! You can't have my bones!"

"You know," I say. "I wasn't going to make a moral stand here. But I find I'm not terribly fond of the enslavement of souls. You will desist."

The undead necromancer goes down under the combined strength of my party and his own former minions. While Jade works on getting the chest open without triggering a trap (she finds several on it), I turn my attention to the skeletons. There are four of them, all with food service-related classes that have no business in combat. I can't identify where they're from, but they're from the same place, so they must have been neighbors or cousins.

"So, what do you lot want to do with your existence?" I ask them. "Do you want to move on? Get reincarnated? Or just get new jobs?"

"Man, I don't even know," says the Skeletal Busboy. "Bussing tables for eternity would be its own sort of hell, but it's the class I've got."

"You don't have to do it for eternity," I say. "You can move on whenever you like."

"If you have a kitchen, I'd be happy to serve," says the Skeletal Chef.

I make sure their souls are all free of the Necromancer's cages. That's a much less complicated step than untangling a reincarnator's soul graft, plus I'm not terribly concerned about hurting the Necromancer in the process.

It looks like the 'Skeletal' Mystic Origin helps them to animate skeletons on their own without having to rely on input from the Necromancer for it. Very convenient. They have systems in their souls, but are now unbound, not attached to the Necromancer any longer nor any aether core. It seems like a very fragile state to be in, but they're stable for the moment.

Name: Bat Treharris Tempest Tiganna Race: Human | Gender: Male | Rank: Heroic | Tier: Ancient | Class: Theatrical Vampire Disposition: Hostile | Mood: Ready for opening night

In the final boss chamber, ominous theme music precedes the vampire's dramatic rise from his coffin.

"Fresh blood!" the vampire exclaims, a fanged grin splitting his gaunt face.

Melody tries to wrest control of the opposing Incantation with her own enthusiastic hurdy-gurdy music, but the resulting cacophony winds up sounding less like a perfectly choreographed rap battle and more like a group of overenthusiastic teenagers have invaded a music store despite none of them being capable of carrying a tune.

The vampire swirls his billowing black cape dramatically, and a swarm of bats fly out of it and into our faces.

Bat Treharris is using an unknown skill. Aspects identified: Bat, movement, shadow, cape, transformation. Auto-naming: Invocation (Bat Cape) Description: You may use a black cape to glide through the air, transform into a bat, and conjure temporary simulacra of bats.

I quickly pass the information along to my party, so we're prepared when he starts flying around the room.

A wave of cold from Hemlock puts a stop to many of the fake bats. They freeze in place, remaining paradoxically suspended in midair for a moment before shattering and subliming into aether as though they'd never existed.

The music shifts, as Melody finds her place and finally gets one up on the vampire. The song sways, but the young Bard is determined. It's not enough, though. She's managing to hold off his Incantations, but we're still landing precious few good hits on the final boss. Basalt's axe handle snaps, leaving him awkwardly trying to swing the large bronze head attached to a much shorter shaft.

I look around the room to see if there's something we might use, and notice that despite being three floors underground, there are narrow openings near the ceiling where someone might have put windows. They're only about ten centimeters tall and half a meter long, like the tiny windows of a bathroom, but it's strange that they're here at all.

I made a rock glow. Why not a window? I focus on one of the windows and imagine a sunbeam streaming in, and channel my vis into it. I start off with [Imbue Item], but as my Inspiration plummets, a different system window appears.

Skill acquired: Invocation (Sunbeam) Description: You may cause windows and holes in the ceiling to emit sunlight. You may alter the angle of the beam with additional Inspiration.

Although the light isn't very bright, it's enough to cause the vampire to fly into a panic. "What is that light!?" he shrieks, smoke rising from his body as he frantically bats around the room trying to find a place to hide.

I can't maintain the sunbeam for long, but it's enough to turn the tide. Basalt hands the broken shaft piece to Jade, making for a decent makeshift stake. She slips up behind the vampire and plunges the splintered wood into his chest.

Bat Treharris dissolves into dust as system notifications proclaim our victory.

Your party has defeated Bat Treharris. Congratulations! Your party has cleared the Spooky Crypt. Congratulations! Your party is the first to clear the Spooky Crypt floor 3! Your rank progression has advanced by 4%. Your Dexterity has increased by 1.

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