Dead Week

Totality aparated back in the catacombs with a kitchen knife, a paint brush, a pair of glass beakers and a bottle of beer.

“One for you, one for me.” She floated an empty beaker to Gamma. Then she levitated the knife to the well worn spot on her foreleg and unceremoniously drew the blade across her flesh. Blood began to seep from the wound and flow into the glass receptacle she held under it.

“Blood’s here; get going,” ordered Totality.

“Right.” Agreed Gamma, brushing his mane from his eyes. He floated the paint brush tip into the slowly filling beaker and began tracing a circle around Comet’s body. He’d arranged Comet curled into a tight ball, trying to make him take up the least amount of space possible, thus making it possible to use smaller blood seals, thus requiring less blood to complete the ritual. “I’ll try to do this as conservatively as possible,” he murmured.

Unfortunately, Comet had to fit entirely within the nexus between the three overlapping circles, while they also somehow had to cram a reassembled skeleton into the remainder of one of the circles. Gamma was going to paint very thin lines.

Totality bled out about half as much blood as she thought they would need based on eyeballing Gamma’s work. She expected him to pick up the other half.

“Even while dead he’s making me jump through hoops,” she muttered as she put pressure on her cut. “Hey, you should bleed now,” she suggested. “I can keep working on the circles for now. Then you can do the runes when you’re done.”

“Yeah, okay,” breathed Gamma worriedly.

They swapped tools and Gamma began dripping blood into a beaker while Totality painted with it. She hated doing things on the fly like this. She much preferred prepping ahead of time in a lab setting to achieve calculated optimum results.

When Gamma began working on the symbols to be circumscribed along the circles, Totality disappeared to go hunt for any white hat approved resources she could find to help rebuild the damage to Comet’s body, despite her mixed feelings about the project.

“I found three dead rats,” droned Totality as she adjusted her glasses. “They’re biggish and still gooey. It’ll help a little with the burns, and honestly I think they’re highly appropriate for him.” She floated the offerings, setting them down inside one of the blood seals. She also added a bucket of water. Water was always helpful. It was too bad they couldn’t do such a thing out in the open with more help. If they succeeded at raising him, they’d always remember that they could have done a better job but didn’t.

This was so fast, thought Totality. Doing this with two ponies from memory is completely different. It would have taken her hours just to make the seals while having to basically sight-read a grimoire. She carefully tipped an open beer bottle over Comet’s head, drenching him in beer.

“What’s with that?” asked Gamma.

“Red herring," she muttered. "If he comes back, he’s going to have mysterious injuries and no memory of what happened to him. Beer provides a more innocuous explanation. If he smells like alcohol, everypony’s more likely to wonder what he did to himself instead of wondering what somepony did to him. Hopefully nopony’s going to be wondering about necromantic rituals and contraband grimoires floating around campus.”

“I guess that’s worth a shot,” nodded Gamma. “I’m all done.” Lastly he dipped his hoof in the blood beaker and stamped his print in the nexus. Then he stamped a bloody hoof print on the self inflicted cut on his own leg. Totality did the same for herself.

“Theoretically it should be safer if both of us give life force,” she explained. She teleported the reanimated skeleton into the cell with them and entrapped it with her magic, pushing it down into an empty circle of fresh blood. “Sorry, Boney. You have to give that life back.”

Gamma checked Comet and the skeleton one last time to make sure they were correctly situated. “Okay, here we go,” he exhaled. His horn glowed white and the silence of the tomb was shattered by the crash of the magical arc of the spark of life spell as it lashed the blood seals. The artwork burned away in a flurry of sparks. Comet Shard’s body glowed brilliantly as the rats and the water dematerialized into the aether. The skeleton collapsed in a pile as the life left its bones.

Totality and Gamma screamed as part of their life force was ripped through the wounds in their bodies. They collapsed on the cold stone, quivering from the unexpected wallop. The light emanating from Comet Shard dissipated and he let out a pained groan.

Luckily Totality had retained enough focus to teleport him out of the catacombs in a blink.

"Where'd you send him?" panted Gamma, wobbling back on his legs.

"To his room… I think. Now let's just hope he doesn't eat his roommate or something."

Gamma illuminated his horn again. "Can't believe it. I've never done anything like that before… and it worked."

"Did you know that donating life force feels like having your soul kicked in the crotch?"

"Nope."

"Me either." She frowned. "I can't believe I bent over backwards for that fucker again and he'll never even know," she grumbled.

"Well… I was really impressed," shrugged Gamma.

“You were impressed with me? You’re the one who just made functional blood seals from memory.” Totality opened a small leather satchel and produced one of the potion vials she'd filled in class when she sabotaged Hazy’s assignment. She floated it in front of Gamma's face. "Drink this."

"Why?" he asked, squinting at the unidentified liquid.

"So you don't die of sepsis," she deadpanned.

Totality and Gamma sat despondently on the edge of the courtyard fountain, preferring the mask of the running water to the silence of the library where it would be easy to eavesdrop on them.

The high from their apparent success at raising Comet was blunted by the anxious fear of what losing the grimoire now implied.

Gamma rubbed his face in despair. “This is horrible. Some black hat is using my book… It’s a defilement.”

“I think they’re a novice, just like you said,” began Totality as she swished the tip of her tail in the fountain water. “They screwed up the ritual in a stupid way, and why would you reanimate what looks like an arbitrary skeleton if not just for proof of concept? Down there is the perfect place to practice, too.”

Gamma shook his head. “Imagine doing your first ritual. You can barely read the instructions, you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You don’t even know… if it’s real. And you kill another pony just to see… That just seems extra messed up to me. We have to tell the school.”

“We can’t. Unless you want that to be the end of our…” She shrugged helplessly. “Everything.”
“There has to be some way we can,” he argued. “I don’t know, an anonymous tip?”

Totality shook her head. “Gamma, there’s no way we can tip them off without it blowing up in our faces. Are you willing to bet that whoever has your book doesn’t know it’s yours? You said yourself that you never took it out of your bag. You didn’t just leave it somewhere where it was found. Somepony else took it from you. If they get caught by investigators, so will we… or at least you.”

Gamma took a deep breath and locked eyes with her. “If this was the beginning, what comes next? We can’t just do nothing and pretend it’s not happening.”

“No, we can’t,” she agreed. “But we can’t involve the school. Let’s try to keep this an internal affair and fix it ourselves. If we can figure out who stole it, maybe we can steal it back. One way or another, they’re going to realize their project in the catacombs was more or less reversed. They’ll know that somepony else knows what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, and they'll have to rethink things.”

Gamma looked away up at the clouds. "So who do we think would do this then?"

"Hazy Sheen," replied Totality quickly. "She absolutely has a predisposition to mess with me and now by association, you, and she loves stealing. Is she in either of those two classes?"

Gamma raised an eyebrow. "Yes but do you think she'd pick up this new hobby and then sacrifice Comet Shard as an experiment?"

Totality stared at the cobblestone ground and thought for a long time. "I actually think she'd be more inclined to say being a Red Umbra fan is 'icky,'" she finally replied with a derisive use of air quotes. "That being said, she's also surprised me and lowered the bar for my expectations on multiple occasions, so while that sounds shocking to me at the moment, I can't really say it's off the table. I think having that assumption and just searching her room first is a good move."

"Okay," nodded Gamma. "You have to do that though."

"I know," she droned.

“Be safe.”