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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
"I do expect I will find it rather uncomfortable." Leareth takes her hand, though, and heads over to the monkey lab with her.
"If you like you can look the other way."
She gets a mirror and edits her monkey - she got it pretty close and knows what the last tweaks are to take it from "could be her cousin" to "creepy copy". And then she can get underway on stuffing it full of Gifts. This monkey has recently had a second baby; she arranges that it will not have another one so she won't land in a pregnant monkey (she'll take the risk on a lactating one), though in a less destructive way than her own sterility so she can maybe Fetch egg cells into other monkeys for the genetic diversity later.
Leareth helps her out with the required concert-Sight and mage-gift tweaks for the Gift-channels. He does mostly look the other way during the monkey's features-editing; the final product is actually less creepy than some of the interim stages, watching it get closer and closer to looking like Belrun is quite uncanny.
"I'll be a mage, won't that be fun? You can teach me everything you know." She puts the monkey back where it goes. "Is there some way for this to be openable from the inside for me but not for a monkey..."
"Hmm. We should probably not make it rely on using a mage-gift you have no practice with, so - non-magical lock mechanisms that a monkey cannot manage to figure out. I think I have a book on lock designs in the library..."
This sounds like something Dara would be good at, does Dara want to figure this out?
Dara would be delighted to read a book on clever puzzle-y lock designs and make a lock that even a very persistent monkey won't figure out, but that a human with abstract reasoning ability will be able to master fairly quickly.
She picks one out that doesn't require too much dexterity, too, in case Belrun starts off clumsy in her new body like the poor reincarnated mice did.
"We could also consider placing a key in a sealed box somewhere concealed in the cage, which you would know about but the monkey will not. My method would not leave this as a reliable solution, I could not count on specifically recalling that, but with the better linkage, yours might allow it."
Dara peers at a page in the book. "Hmm, I think there's a puzzle-lock in here that has a quick way to be opened, with a key, but it's still possible to figure out without, in case Belrun doesn't remember or can't find the memory because she's all disoriented. How's that?"
"Sounds good. And there can be two keys, one for normal use so the monkeys don't see the puzzle in use and one hidden in the cage."
"Makes sense!" And Dara heads off to make an experimental lock design.
Leareth kisses Belrun. "I am ready to prepare your book now. Do you have a specific book you would like to use for it?"
"I have this really nice leatherbound blank book," she says, "that my dad got me for my birthday one year, and it has my name on the front endpaper, and that's all, because I never had anything that seemed far enough away from scratchwork to go in such a nice book, I figured maybe one day I'd draft a memoir and copy it in there but since we came up with the idea of putting me in a book that's the one I've had in mind."
"Seems fitting. Are you going to write things in it now or just have it be blank?"
"I think I will have it blank to start and perhaps at some point write in it to see if that does anything to me so I can use it to help my memory or whatever."
"Interesting. I am not sure that would do anything without the spell being specifically designed to include it, but it is worth a try."
"Maybe I will write 'testing' and then remember what the Rethwellani word for 'testing' was in two thousand years for no good reason."
"Maybe!" Leareth chuckles. "All right, if you give it to me I will do the spellwork on it. I will only need you at the end of the day, I think, for the final linking. Though you are welcome to share my Sight and watch the process."
"I was not planning to wander off and do something else while you enchant my book to catch my soul!" she says. She collects the book. It's a dark red leather, fat with empty pages.
"It is a very beautiful book," Leareth agrees. He takes it between his hands, snuggles up against her while he starts the spellwork.
It's very complex. Layer and layer and layer of magic, intricately folded-up, anchoring a tiny pocket not quite contained inside normal space, which will (very briefly, if it works according to plan) catch a Belrun's soul when her bodies dies, so the second link can spring back and pull her into a new body. If there's any disruption, though, it should work just fine to hold her for a little longer while the monkey situation is sorted out.
