We keep to our basic pn for the final floor… we haven't encountered any serious resistance, and I don't detect any minds on the other side, but we have run across plenty of mindless undead, and there's always someone better, so it pays to be cautious.

  By the numbers: Weapons hot, pointed at the door, we're all invisible, except for a summon, and then we open it… to a bunch of shelves, full of books. Like… actual bound paper books. Thousands of them. The entire floor, floor to ceiling, shelves and shelves of carefully ordered books, with one small reading desk, currently occupied by a skeleton, slowly flipping pages.

  It looks up at our decoy, “Oh, hello. You look like a summon… which means the summoner is nearby.” He pauses a bit, “You can rex. This puppet is not a threat to anyone who can manage that size of a summon, and I would rather not damage it… I have no way to repair it, and wish to keep it intact for access to this library: It's magnificent.”

  Alice speaks first, “Good to know. Can I get your name?”

  As I'm not involved in the conversation yet, I have time to look at things… like the carved lines of a permanent containment spell on the floor.

  The creature pauses, “Hayden Flux, not that it matters.” He pauses again, “Sorry I can't meet you in person.”

  I take a bit to examine the creature in front of me… it's moving like a puppet, that's for sure, and is only acting deliberately… there's none of the unconscious movements associated with a live mind, nor any vocal inflection… like it's being told what to do for every little movement.

  Alice continues pying face, not canceling the invisibility, “You can call me Alice. So where are you?”

  The puppet pauses for a while, then shrugs, “Sealed in a metal coffin on some asteroid… I think. There's no sound, veru light gravity, and the temperature cycles every sixteen hours, thirty six minutes, and fifteen seconds… if my counting is right. I've been trapped for a very long time, with only my necrocortex for company.”

  “That would be the Eoxian impnt that lets people control their undead minions from a distance?” Alice guesses.

  Again the pause, then: “Indeed. Mark five. System wide instant command of the army I raised that was so good at conquering everything…” the puppet shakes its head, “...until someone better came along and destroyed nearly all of my servants. He couldn't find my electroencephalon, so rather than destroying me only to have me pop up again he bound me up tight, locked me in a metal coffin, and set me adrift in a stable orbit somewhere in this system.”

  “So you're a lich, then?” Alice is still talking to the Sealed Evil In A Can.

  There's an extra long pause this time, “Yes, although we use the term ‘Necrovite’ now. That is a very old word you used… we stopped using it long before I even became one, and I only know it because I have had time to catch up on my pre-Gap history. How do you even know it?”

  The Invisibility wears off, starting with Alice, as she continues talking, “Let's just say I have some familiarity with throwing off the mortal coils…” she smiles, showing her fangs.

  The creature again pauses, “What are you, exactly? You're clearly undead. I thought I knew a lot about us, but you're not any type I recognize.”

  Alice smiles, “I don't think there's even a name for us.” Mostly because we never assigned one, but still.

  Again, the beast pauses while the actual mind tells the mindless undead what to say, “I see… so you're something previously unencountered. Well… that's wonderful. Oh, and… you're on the outside of the seal… would you mind erasing it?”

  Brenna casts Detect Magic and looks at it, “It's from a Hallow spell. Someone inverted a Hallow spell to act as a forever containment spell. The lines are a decoy, or maybe to mark the spot… but it's an Instant effect. The lines are meaningless, erasing them won't help.”

  I consider, “Theoretically an Unhallow spell would counter it… but we don't have the materials,” not that we could cast the spell… but he doesn't need to know that.

  The creature pauses and speaks again, “You speak so freely of pre-gap magic. You must be very old indeed. Well… this is just a puppet, and having it stuck in a library isn't the worst thing in the world. Still… it would be nice to have another option… I don't suppose you could perhaps find me and let me loose, could you?”

  I switch to Telepathy to get just the party, and look at Alice, “Do we really want to mess with the Sealed Evil In A Can?”

  “TV Tropes, seriously?” Brenna sends back.

  “Look, I needed a nice little phrase for what that thing is, and it fits a lich locked away in a metal coffin to a T, now doesn't it?” I roll my eyes, “nguage aside, are we seriously considering letting loose an undead monster that admitted it built an undead army and was busy conquering when some hero interrupted and locked him away?”

  The creature appears to be able to read us fairly well, “If it's a trust issue, I could tell you where to find my electroencephalon. That would give you leverage: Insurance that I'm not going to betray you or anything.”

  “Why haven't you just killed yourself to reform at your phyctery?” The obvious question has an obvious answer, Charlene.

  There's the pause, and then the beast gives the obvious answer: “Because my captor thought of that. I can't move so much as a millimeter to bang my head against my prison, cast spells, or anything else.”

  “He would be a powerful ally… it takes fourth level spells to animated the dead,” Alice switches to our racial nguage, which is theoretically known only by us, “so he has to be at least tenth level… and the standard Necrovite is thirteenth, with a minimum of seventh per the tempte. We're just fourth. This is a golden opportunity to get a big favor owed us”

  “A RISKY opportunity,” Brenna objects telepathically, “he comes with the ability to command other undead… which we are.”

  “An unreliable method,” Charlene adds in our racial tongue, “with a limited control pool. He'd have to constantly watch for us breaking free, and wouldn't be able to control as many others in the meanwhile. Willing allies are a safer bet in the long run, and immortals think very long term.”

  “Even if we decide this is a good bet…” oh, man, am I seriously considering this? “...how would we even find him to set him loose?”

  “We have information on where he is,” Alice shrugs, “In this system, close enough to the star that he can feel the warmth of the sun - which also means he's on the surface - on a big enough object that it has gravity and has a specific rotational period. There's only going to be a few stelr objects that match that. We map the system, find them, visit them, and scan for his can.”

  “...fine. But we don't bckmail him. Holding death over a person's head is a bad long-term strategy,” Brenna shakes her own head as she speaks into to ours, “as soon as he felt he had ‘enough’ resources, he'd be looking for an out, and if we have a gun to his head, he'll be wanting to be rid of it… and finding wherever we hid the leverage is as simple as him killing himself.”

  Charlene thinks for a minute, “I can live with that.”

  “Unlive,” Alice corrects, “We're not alive. But that pn works.”

  “All right then…” I possess my companion fully, and switch to speaking in Common, “Okay. Let's go over the details… the exact timing on the heating and cooling of your container should help us find you, and we'll also need the details for retrieving your… electroencephalon,” I make a point of pausing before the word, like it is new to me, “but this is going to take weeks or months.”

  “Thank you,” the beast bows slightly, “And I can wait… what's a few months compared to the centuries I have been waiting? You may want to record this to have better notes ter…” I turn on audio recording on a personal comm unit, and he goes over everything we'll need to know to get into the hidden stronghold where he keeps his phyctery, the box that holds his soul, mind, and life force.

  We also stick around for a full heating/cooling cycle of the prison, to get the exact timing… it's actually sixteen hours, thirty six minutes, and twenty-six seconds, Mr. Flux's timing was off by kess than one percent… but the real reason for doing so is to narrow down the spot on the asteroid, moon, or dwarf pnet: Having the timing on a clock will get us a retively narrow slice of the stelr object to search, rather than needing to search the entire thing, because we know when sunrise and sunset are for the location.

  We then get to work: Pack up the loot we choose to keep, Put summons in the vehicles to pilot them, get them up (one at a time) to the surface, and then fly all together to Zisfahani's spaceport. Selling the vehicles goes well, and we keep the armor and weapons. We then rest up outside of town, board our ship, and bst off while cloaked… and carrying the pass cards so we can actually fly, although the city is a blind spot in the no fly zone anyway.

  Still… we can now visit that continent in retive safety, which is nice.

  We start with a full sor system survey, for two reasons: One, it will take a long time for the computer to chew through the data to identify the types of all the pnets, asteroids, moons, and other things we'll find when searching for gravity wells. Two, we need that map to find Hayden's stronghold.

  And it takes weeks. We have pretty good sensors: Charlene handles those to map the gravity wells… but the onboard computer isn't great: We can only run celestial analysis on one such gravity well at a time… and that's a hard task. Charlene finds an average of two per day, and it takes me three or four days to process one. When we hit the point where she hasn't found any new wells in a week, we start using the Drift Engine to zip around the system and simply look at them to speed up the work. I'm slightly faster at it, but not by much.

  We do complete the job, however.

  Getting the electroencephalon and backup gear for Hayden is… straightforward, but time-consuming. Once we identify the dwarf pnet in the oort cloud where it's hidden, we still have to authenticate with the automated defenses, wait the requisite length of time for the protocol drones, and still end up needing to fight a few mindless robots left behind… because we're not recognized as their undead master. Not too big of a deal, as they hadn't had maintenance in AGES. Finding Mr. Flux's grave is a little harder, but we only have three candidates… and we find him at the second.

  We nd on the low gravity asteroid after spotting the metal object from orbit, do our space walk, and look at the coffin… it is seven feet long, two tall, and two wide, with rounded corners, made of starship hull metal. Durable stuff, but we do have the tools to work with it; they're standard items.

  I talk telepathically with Hayden while we're working on getting him out, “So, how are you doing in there?”

  “I'm doing wonderfully,” he replies, “that's getting a bit hot at my toes, by the way.”

  “Yeah, well…” I would shrug, but Charlene is handling the engineering, I need to be in a body that has the limited Telepathy graft for this, and we don't want to give away my nature, so I'm currently a ring, “...these tools aren't really intended for dealing with someone baked into such a tight space... sorry.”

  “Oh, I'm not compining,” the lich sends back, “honestly, I'm not going to be upset if you end up destroying my body. Sure, I'll lose the connection to my surviving minion, but I'll live. Ooh, I can wiggle my toes again.”

  I gnce over: Charlene is carefully peeling back yers of metal with a hull cutter, and Hayden's toes are indeed exposed… and looking surprisingly fleshy; I was expecting bones or something. “I was expecting more decay,” I inform him.

  “Oh, that,” I get the impression of a shrug, “I never did like the decayed look in others. Okay, yes, it's much more expensive to set up an electroencephalon to keep the body's appearance looking almost alive, but I found it was well worth the expense. Most people only ever notice my glowing red eyes and a slight paleness to my skin. A pair of sungsses and I'm set to pass for human most pces.”

  Wait, what? That's more a concern for…

  “Ah, there we go…” Charlene sounds pleased with herself, “That's the st hard connection. Now for the reveal; Alice, if you would?”

  Alice uses one of the mechs to lift the top off of the casket, revealing Hayden Flux, a well-endowed human WOMAN with pale skin and glowing red eyes. Her blonde hair is a complete mess, but I'm not paying much attention to that, as her bare bust bounces beautifully as she sits up, quite nude and seemigly not caring at all.

  She smiles, fshing dazzling white teeth in gray gums, and actually speaks to us, “Know where a girl can wash up? It's been AGES since I had a good bubble bath.”