"You made up puzzles?"

"Mhm! Mostly illusionary ones that wouldn't translate well to mass printing, but there are probably some that other people would find fun. I'll have to think about it, but it'd be nice if my seemingly pointless boredom ended up benefiting me in some obvious way, you know?"

"I can give you startup capital for this."

"I would appreciate it, but it is not required! And you should maybe wait to see if I can come up with a good puzzle book that people actually like. There's a difference between puzzles that amuse me when I have nothing better to do and puzzles that amuse other people when they have lots of options, you know?"

"Yes, that makes sense. I could test drive them."

"You can absolutely test drive them if you'd like to!"

"That sounds like it would be really interesting," he says, and means it.

"eeeee," she squeals, very quietly.

He laughs and stops walking to hug her.

Hug!!!!

"I really appreciate how supportive you are. It's great. Good boyfriend. Full marks."

"I didn't know that was particularly supportive," he says with a wry grin.

"I maybe have tragically low standards after spending an unknowable amount of time alone in a very boring landscape with nothing meaningful to do!" she admits, with a snort. "But it's still. It's sweet. Thank you."

"You're welcome," he says primly.

She leans up and kisses him, then beams at him.

"Okay, back to work, before we get more distracted."

"Not that there's much to be distracted from, with all this nothing ahead of us."

"That's true. Uh. If you don't mind my being useless and vulnerable for a little while, I could show you ancient necromancer spells?"

"That sounds interesting!"

"Okay. Do you want me to show you something related to blood magic, necromantic hexes, or my two spells related to dead things?"

"Let's go with the two spells," he laughs.

She giggles. "Okay. But I'll need two corpses, so uh. Next time we find something to kill on the way up this damn volcano?"

He gestures at the flesh golem and it dies.

Vetareh cackles, then carefully swaps out two of her spells for her two death magic spells. She'll drop one of the wastrel's hexes and her hex breaker; they're not super useful here anyway.

"So," she says, after her spells have settled again, "I want to be clear, that I kind of really suck at death magic, and this first spell was learned on principle of 'I am a necromancer, I should know how to make a minion.' So here it is."

She casts the spell animate bone horror. A twisted and wretched monstrosity bursts from the flesh golem's corpse. It is... small. And not very powerful. Or sturdy. Or well balanced. It is, to put it lightly, not a very good minion. Already, it's starting to fall apart. It wobbles precariously, then dutifully shambles over to its master, who looks at it with a mixture of guilt and pity.

"Oh, honey. I'm sorry about your wretched existence," she tells the mindless and obedient minion.

He blinks at its existence. "Is it just... leaking life force?"

"Yeah. A better necromancer than I could keep it from leaking it quite so quickly, but the modern magical standard in ancient times did not involve minions that didn't eventually and inevitably die after all of their life force leaked out."

"...huh. So from what I got there you used the life force lingering in my golem's body to fuel this one, but it leaks, and it's not connected to your life force? That's an interesting way to do it. Does that mean you can have dozens of minions around at the same time?"