The nature of Seymour’s new sigil powers meant that in order to test them out he’d need to find viable targets. This wasn’t the same as Infringement or Cash Out – inanimate objects simply weren't going to cut it as test subjects. This trio of newly-gained powers were all for use on people. Not necessarily living people, but people, nonetheless.

  Once again, sleep had proved damned near impossible. This was becoming an all-too-common experience now that he lived in a giant magic shop. He’d exorcised three demons from his soul and each had subsequently transformed into a card which was usable only on their corresponding sigils. Doing so had more than doubled the number of sigil powers he possessed overnight, going from two to five, and he was beyond eager to test them all out.

  But all that would have to wait a little longer.

  Because it turned out that Penny really hadn’t been kidding around when she claimed that of all the messengers employed throughout the Empire, ravens were the most reliable – in spite of their notorious orneriness.

  Eusebio had taken his mental health day as he had promised Dan he would the night prior, and even though he was simply staycationing in his private quarters just up on the second floor, he had commissioned a raven to deliver a message to Seymour rather than walk downstairs himself. The midnight-black bird somehow opened the door and flapped into Seymour’s room in the hour before dawn.

  Caw! It crowed from the workbench, startling Seymour out of his shallow sleep.

  “No,” he commanded with his eyes still closed. “Say no more, Bird. Way too early for that shit. Just leave whatever you've got for me and get gone.”

  The raven wore its funny little backpack thing into which the bundle of tightly-rolled scrolls it was meant to deliver had been slotted. It reached back with its black beak to pluck out the proper scroll from its pack, carefully leaving it there on Seymour’s workbench.

  Caw caw caw! It then screamed as it flew back out into the showroom. Seymour winced and wished he had something close at hand to throw at the bird. But it had already gone; a single black feather drifting down onto the floor.

  He crawled out of bed and went to retrieve the letter:

  Hi Seymour,

  When I am away from the Adventure Depot for any reason—even when I’m hiding out right upstairs—my sales lead becomes Acting Manager in my stead. You have been presented with an exceptional opportunity to prove yourself worthy of your new post. As acting manager, you will have the final say on all disputes, and can override any pricing decision made by your subordinates. To excel in this position, you must be constantly aware of everything taking place in the showroom(and beyond) so that you are prepared at a moment’s notice to step in if one of your salespeople is struggling with a difficult customer.

  And ultimately it is your job to fill in everywhere else as needed, too – which brings me to the true impetus for this letter:

  The Matron of the Ressurectory has informed me via a raven of her own that she is under the weather and will not be able to report for her scheduled shift today. Per the procedures established during the most recent collective bargaining between the Sales Team and Management, it falls to the current manager to man the Ressurectory in her absence.

  That means you.

  All Best,

  Eusebio

  PS: I’ve yet to congratulate you on your promotion.

  Seymour read the postscript and it wasn’t lost on him at all that it still didn’t actually offer any form of congratulations. Eusebio was trying to be a dick, but right away Seymour recognized that being forced to fill in for the Matron might actually be the most serendipitous way to spend his day, on account of his new Cost of Living sigil power.

  I mean, I’m legit just gonna be surrounded by dead bodies all day – fresh ones. He snorted and shook his head. Can’t believe I’m excited about that, but here we are.

  The Matron was what everyone called the woman who oversaw the daily operation of the Ressurectory in the shop's basement. Her actual name was Martha; Martha the Matron. She didn't do much more than just sit around all day watching corpses come back to life, but everyone knew how important it was to have eyes down there. Apparently when resurrecting dead adventurers there always existed the possibility that something would go wrong and you'd pop out a zombie, instead. That sort of thing would obviously need to be nipped in the bud early, before they could shamble upstairs and disrupt the commerce going on in the showroom.

  Perhaps most importantly, Martha looked the part of a matron, in order to lend credibility to this side-business of bringing folks back from the dead. Seymour had learned that the Ressurectory was one of the newer additions to the shop, having only been permitted by the Guild of Architectural Wizards a few years earlier. To bolster the operation’s legitimacy, Martha would wear a black religious habit with white trim, even though she wasn't particularly religious. Her prayer beads were ever in-hand, the focus of her constant fidgeting. She owned a face full of wrinkles, jowls like a bulldog, and a wide nose which had been plopped smack in the middle like a gnarled apricot left to rot on a musty dishrag.

  Eusebio had explained to Seymour how Daria—the manager who had preceded him—never really stopped to adequately consider the importance of optics when it came to the newly-established Resurrectory. Clients used to wake up in the basement unsupervised before sometimes staggering upstairs, and if they overlooked the complimentary robes hung on the wall down there then they’d emerge into the showroom confused and completely naked.

  But Eusebio had proudly explained that he possessed better instincts for this sort of thing than his predecessor. He knew how important it was to deliver on the customer’s expectations. Matron Martha had the look and smell of a sweet old hag who sat in a crypt all day watching moist guts re-inflate. She was perfect for the role.

  But now she was supposedly sick. She wouldn't be able to come in to work her shift.

  Seymour crumpled up Eusebio’s letter and threw the wadded paper at his wastebasket, which it missed high before bouncing off into the corner. Eusebio had obviously put Martha up to playing hooky in an attempt to punish Seymour for receiving his latest promotion. And there was no telling how long the manager would be hiding out in his room. It was possible Seymour might find his days confined to the crypt-like Ressurectory for the foreseeable future. No doubt the rest of the sales team would enjoy his suffering, too, when they learned of his new role as Sales Lead

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Well joke’s on them. With my new power, a couple days hanging out with some corpses might be exactly what I need right now.” Seymour said to himself, but he did so while leaning in close to Jerome, his blood-sucking cactus, and his words suddenly struck him as more than a little evil. “Maybe Eusebio was right about me putting off villain vibes, huh? Anyway, whattya say, bloody little bro? Want to come to work with dad today down at the corpse bakery? That’s what I’m gonna call this Ressurectory gig.”

  Covering Martha’s shift in the corpse bakery meant that Seymour probably wouldn’t have any appetite left by midday, so he knew he’d better have a big breakfast. He scooped up his cactus in its brand new terracotta pot and together they went out into the dark showroom and up the stairs to Gordon’s bistro.

  Gordon stood out as the lone exception amongst all the other magic shop employees in that he neither lived onsite nor did he ride Ermin’s shuttle back-and-forth from Ghizo’s Crossing. Instead, he kept a cozy little dwarf cottage on the edge of the jungle where he soruced many of his ingredients, and arrived at the shop each morning well in advance of sunrise so that he could prep for the morning rush.

  “Seymour, what can I fix for you this fine morning?” he asked as Seymour approached, cactus still in hand. “Huh, what have you got there?

  “It’s a blood-drinking cactus,” Seymour replied matter-of-factly. He had quietly decided that if he was going to be running the shop in Eusebio’s self-imposed absence, ramping up his eccentricities would probably be the most effective means of staving off the inevitable mutiny among the longer-tenured sales staff, as it would keep them off-balance. He figured few actions he could take would unsettle the staff more than the constant presence of his pet cactus – particularly if he fed him on the salesfloor. “And I’ll have my usual, but let’s have an extra side of taters. I’ve got to do a shift down in the Resurrectory today so I expect I’ll be skipping lunch.”

  Gordon held up a finger like he was just about to inquire further about the cactus but then he shook his head and decided better.

  “Seymour’s usual omelet with two sides of taters,” he announced, turning to the grill behind him. “Comin’ right up.”

  When Seymour’s plate was ready he thanked Gordon for the grub and had a seat in the empty faux-patio area. He placed Jerome on the table beside his meal and dug in. He assumed that the first bodies would likely begin to materialize the moment the shop opened at sunrise. That meant he didn’t have much time to savor his food, delicious though it was.

  The Resurrectory looked like a straight up crypt. Four low, stone slabs were spaced evenly on the floor like mattresses in a torture chamber. Each slab looked a little wet and slimy on top, and Seymour could only deduce that the dead bodies he’d be tasked with observing would reconstitute directly on top of them, right in those wet spots.

  Complimentary robes hung on one wall, but the rest of the chamber sat empty except for a comfy chair with a permanent depression in the shape of Matron Martha's butt and beside it a stone podium with a GLCD on top. Seymour would be using that GLCD to monitor the customers’ progress toward resurrection.

  He plopped down into Martha’s butt-groove and touched the gnomish tablet’s screen to turn it on. A status window appeared, informing him that there was only one body in need of resurrection at the moment, and it was ready to get cooking immediately:

  Brute Force Billy was a well-known regular customer and a straight up barbarian. Seymour had seen him around plenty. The fact that this dude was already in the queue for a resurrection—first thing in the friggin’ morning—meant that he must have done an overnight shift in Vol’kara’s dungeon.

  He liked to call himself a “solo artist,” which meant that he rarely entered the dungeon with a party. He also hardly wore any gear at all and going in nearly naked actually happened to be a big part of his strategy. All Billy really wanted in life was mead and adventure—in that order—and to get it he was willing to die once every three days.

  Ideally, he only ever intended to survive inside the dungeon for thirty or forty minutes, tops. Anything longer than that would cut into Happy Hour. He'd dash in wearing at most a loin cloth. His favored weapons were great clubs with iron spikes, but anything he could swing with both hands would work.

  His tactics were simple: he intended to bash his way through the first three or four rooms of the dungeon while collecting as much loot as possible. The trouble was, looted items didn’t join the body in being resurrected unless they were legit part of the body. Fortunately for Billy, stomach-contents were designated as part of the stomach itself, and rings were among the most common loot the dungeon had to offer. With any luck he’d come back to life with four or five rings waiting to be regurgitated, or at worst pushed out the other end the next time he took a dump.

  Brute Force Billy had saved a fortune by purchasing the 6 Month Resurrectory Package, a surprisingly shrewd move for a guy who spent his waking hours wearing little more than a flap of furry animal hide to protect his junk. This was Life Insurance, meaning that if he died inside the dungeon, then the Adventure Depot would indemnify him; literally making his body whole again. The way this worked was necromancy, the same force behind all insurance products.

  Seymour activated the slabs using the GLCD and the reconstruction of Brute Force Billy got underway. The display confirmed that it would take just under five hours to put him back together. The process ran longer when the client was exceptionally large, and Billy happened to be exactly that.

  After situating Jerome upon the podium beside him, there was nothing to do but settle in for the long haul. To Seymour’s surprise, he suddenly found himself relieved that he was looking at even one day of respite. He’d been running himself ragged, barely finding time for sleep, let alone the kind of quiet introspection encouraged by his current, crypt-like surroundings.

  “Remind me to thank Eusebio,” he snarked to Jerome. “He’ll hate that.”

  But he felt genuinely grateful for a chance to sit with his thoughts. He had still only just begun to process what Infringement had revealed about Penny – how he’d seen the sacred geometry within her and what it might mean about all the people he’d met in Heschia. If he wasn’t careful, he’d start objectifying everyone he met. The idea he might become some kind of necromancer capitalist who exploits everyone around him made Seymour’s skin crawl – in no small part because his eye twitched with unwanted excitement when he thought about it.

  And then there was the fact that last night he’d performed a fetish-assisted exorcism on a trio of demons who had been living inside his soul for the past twenty-plus years. That whole reveal had him questioning the exact cause of a lot of his behavior back on Earth.

  Was I self-destructing because I had three demons snacking on my soul?

  In a way this explanation felt comforting. But Seymour suspected it was something else. He suspected he had drawn the demons to him; his own thoughts and actions functioning as bait for the creatures.

  While Seymour pondered this and that, Brute Force Billy's bones began to manifest upon the nearest slab. The process was something like the opposite of melting; the spine bubbling up first from a puddle of white foam which frothed out of the stone slab itself. To Seymour, it had the look of a great big tadpole made from bone, crawling its way out of a primordial puddle of bone-mush.

  He watched the ribs form next, a reef of spongy marrow bubbling out from the spine and then a sheath of bone crawling to encase it. The marrow was shockingly red. The ribs arched to form the cage which would soon protect Billy's squishy organs. And oh man, the organs. They began to inflate like fleshy balloons, turning from gray to pink as they became re-engorged with fresh blood, all connected to the spine by the nervous system which was wiring itself to everything else, like lute strings festering into Billy’s meat the way maggots do but much faster. The body convulsed, all the while still completely skinless.

  Seymour was forced to look away before he painted the floor with the big breakfast he'd eaten earlier, but he couldn't stop the squishy sound of the whole ordeal from invading his ears. This was going to go on for five more hours, if Seymour let it.

  And then a sad little voice suddenly spoke within Seymour’s mind:

  Feed me, it pleaded. Feed me, Seymour.