While Luna and I discussed what we both had learned about our latest acquisition, I also watched how she handled the food and water I had placed in the room for her. Curiously, it wasn’t the food she was primarily interested in, nor was it the water. Instead, it was quite obviously the scent Luna and I had left behind after exiting, or maybe something more arcane. Either way, she had moved over to the area where we had stood and was sniffing around carefully. The similarities to Silva were just a little too amusing to ignore, though I couldn’t tell just what she was trying to accomplish. Other than looking like some very weird mix between canine and simian.
“It’s quite fascinating, now that I could see one up close,” Luna admitted, her eyes a little distant as she was staring at the wall towards the room holding the Sasquatch.
“You mean her soul?” I asked, fairly confident that this would be the most significant takeaway we had to understand. It was so radically different from the change Lia had undergone that it was somewhat impossible to believe both had started out at the same point. If not for the eyes, changed as they were in Lia’s case, I wouldn’t have suspected it myself. But the Sasquatch showed something incredibly interesting, something I hadn’t believed before. Namely, that the Shattered weren’t inherently lost as I had thought, that they weren’t just mindless monsters preying on the living or something like that. I had seen them feast on Astral Power, but I had never questioned why they did. From what I had seen thus far, I was somewhat confident that they didn’t need to consume it for sustenance, so why did they feel the urge at all?
Just some sort of inherent drive to be destructive and attack people? If so, where would said drive come from? It obviously wasn’t evolution, the Shattered weren’t a natural occurrence after all. Unless the system, for some strange reason, had given them that drive, there had to be another reason. They might need to consume a certain amount of Astral Power to evolve or something along those lines, like some sort of strange Pokémon that needed to reach a certain level to undergo a sudden and fundamental shift. A part of me was chuckling just a little at the image of a Shattered pausing in the middle of tearing some poor soul apart, only for white light to spring up around it, a little 8-bit jingle playing in the background and the Shattered turning into something different, like the Sasquatch we saw here. Or something else? Who knew what Shattered might evolve into or what the other versions of Shattered we had seen before might become? As amusing as the image was, I could only deem it unlikely, if only because the traits I had observed thus far would imply that all the Sasquatch had evolved at the same time, something I considered fairly unlikely. Or they deliberately avoided killing Shattered and possibly even evacuated other newly evolved Sasquatch to induct into their community. This was an interesting premise and a part of me wanted to investigate, just like the many other interesting things about these creatures.
Sure, it was only Sasquatch for now, what had been considered fairy tales, mythical creatures, before the change, but who could say that it wouldn’t go further? That Shattered would only become Sasquatch or the odd vampire if the conditions were just right and somebody pushed just the right, or wrong, buttons to make things go weird? While it was only a possibility, it might be that Shattered could, eventually, if the right conditions were met and they survived long enough, become something beyond the animalistic Sasquatch we had seen.
Maybe they could turn back into humans, though I doubted it, or they might evolve into something entirely else. Elves, dwarves, naga, giantblood, who knew what the limits were? Or if there were any limits in the first place? It was only a thought, an idea, but it resonated with a part of me that wondered where those various diverse races had sprung from on Mundus. Because it felt like a major stretch that a single planet could produce that many diverse species without interbreeding turning them into a slurry of a single species, especially as I knew they could interbreed. Not always easily or without complications, but it was possible; Sigmir herself had been an example of that.
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“How far do you think we could push things? To restore what once used to be the person behind the fur, so to speak?” Luna asked, putting my mind back on track.
“Honestly, I have no idea,” I admitted with a shrug, “We can obviously tell that the Sasquatch has physically changed, but I just don't know how deep that change goes. Brains are stupidly complex at the best of times and trying to ascertain how much of the original material is still in its original configuration is futile. At least for me, maybe somebody with a lot more experience and information might be able to do better, though where one would find such a being is uncertain. Outside of the Gods, of course, and even they might have trouble with that particular trick.”
“Yeah, I can see that. While restoring the Soul would be one step, we’d also need to get the experience to filter back through that Soul to restore the person. That… doesn’t sound easy,” Luna admitted, her shoulders sagging a little at the impossibility of it.
“If we had the experience, I’m fairly certain Mind Magic could make that filtering possible, though I’m not sure how exactly that would work. It’s something I’ve been thinking about,” I explained, and it took Luna only a moment to realise why I was interested in the mechanics of this particular process.
“But the Sasquatch’s soul, at least as it currently is, is warped, right? Like a jigsaw puzzle somebody scrambled before reassembling it with a bit of force to make things fit,” Luna asked, and now it was my turn to nod in agreement. This wouldn’t work, even if we had the right experience and knew the mechanics of filtering that experience through the soul to be shaped into the mind we knew. While it would be quite nice to use the Sasquatch, or maybe Shattered in general, as test subjects for potential procedures to bring Sigmir back, it wouldn’t quite work.
We might be able to learn new things about the Soul, and its intersections with Mind and Body, but that would be it. There wouldn’t be an easy way to bring Sigmir back, but I had already accepted that. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Just difficult.
So, we continued to discuss potential tests, things which might work on Shattered and how the Sasquatch might have come to be, though we continued to only have very vague ideas on the second question. Random chance was, at least for now, the most coherent explanation, though some ideas were a little out there, like the one linking the occurrence of Sasquatch in this general area to the province of Saskatchewan, a few hundred kilometres to the east.
There were countless possible explanations, and we couldn’t even hope to follow the old saying popularised by Sherlock Holmes about eliminating the impossible and what was left, however implausible, being the truth. We didn’t know what was possible, what was impossible and which of the implausible things we suggested were actually more plausible than the others. As far too often, we were lacking a whole lot of information, especially when it came to those all-too-important fundamentals. There was only so much one could learn from practical application. Some things needed to be researched slowly and steadily, with generations of researchers all doing their part and building up that tower of knowledge brick by brick.
In the meantime, I was also watching the Sasquatch sniff around the area until she apparently decided that whatever objective she had was accomplished. Then, she had a go at the water I set out, first lapping it from the cup I placed on the floor like a kitten or dog, then actually using her hands to pick the cup up and carefully sip from it. While her furry face wasn’t the easiest to interpret, the joyous glee on it was fairly easy to identify. At least it looked like glee; the flames in her eyes flickered merrily, and her features relaxed in a way that might have been a grin without any teeth showing.
Next, after drinking her fill, she started in on the food I had left, daintily picking at the meat and fruit before starting to eat it, not gorging herself but carefully taking it in. There was a certain amount of deliberation in her actions; she even went back and placed the cup on the table to refill it from the pitcher I had left her. Nothing indicated that she remembered any decorum from her days as a human, at least nothing I could see.
Once the food was consumed and her thirst quenched, the Sasquatch moved back towards the corner she had been in at the start, though she didn’t quite press herself into it as she had earlier. It looked more like she was curling up there, again, looking a little like a dog as she did.
Hopefully, we’d be able to learn what we needed without harming the creature too badly.
