#everything about it was so msgical

[oc3anic-ang3l]

not percico related (i really should be posting this on my side blog but i do not care) but i really miss pre split Panic! at the disco

[welcometomybraincomics]

I’m in a world-building mood, so I’m just going to dump.

Universe: Inashia

So, skeletons. How are they created? Nature, obviously, they're the structure of living things, but moving skeletons are raised by necromancers. However, in this universe, bodies dissolve into magic about 1 week after death, so raising long-buried bodies isn't gonna happen. Raising the dead is, obviously, still an option, it’s just reeeeeally hard to bring back the old dead. That being said, Skeletons here, are a species, so they have to originate from somewhere and that somewhere is various necromancers over the years. There are skeletons resulting from someone trying to bring back a loved one, skeletons that are the revived bodies of dead soldiers, and accidental necromancy done by noobs or sorcerors who are more powerful than they realize.

Since they’re a species and they are created through artificial means that means they their population will eventually disappear. Unless that is, they reproduce. This brings me to topic 2, reproduction! Because they are rattly, rattly bones, they do not have any reproductive organs to speak of, so, how do they reproduce? Why magic of course! But not in the magically conjuring genitalia and a womb sort of way, but in the “this is a magical ritual you must perform” sort of way. To perform the baby-making ritual, the parents (this can be more than 2 parents, there just needs to be 2 for diversity) must take bone samples from their own bodies (either bone fragments or bone dust scrapedbfromntheir bodies), dig a hole, bury the samples after thoroughly watering them with animal blood, and then burying the whole thing and doing a msgical chant, thus making the Dirt Womb where the baby skeleton will grow, using the bone samples as a base and the blood as growth fuel (because blood is made in the bones, so why can’t you reverse it?). It is only after writing this all down that I realize this basically cloning: take a DNA sample, give it a place to grow and the nutrients to grow with, and BAM! Clone. Except here, you make a baby skeleton

Now, let's keep in mind that most of these ideas are made to supplement this one boi (his name is Sacrin)

and his existence, so this reproduction idea mostly just applies to his community of skeletons: a small group that feeds upon the magic of the land and migrates so that the land can replenish its magic. There probably exist other groups of skeletons, but I really haven’t given any thought to them, so they don’t technically exist. Since I’m here though, let's speculate! 

I honestly can’t imagine another group of skeletons that aren’t in the exact same situation as Sacrin’s tribe being anything but dead. If they were a large group raised in the midst of battle, I don’t believe they would have any reason to realize that their existence is sapping the life from the land around them until it’s too late for them to leave. All creatures need magic to live here, so if the skeletons don’t leave soon enough, they’ll passively suck the magic out of everything and die (skeletons "eat" by sucking the magic out of things around them. They can actively suck the magic out if things, but it's much faster  than passive consumption and requires knowing what they're doing). I feel a large group of skeletons would sap magic fast enough for them to be too confused to consider completely leaving the area. I can see them sticking around the help rebuild, do war clean up, and go back to their families and nobody, alive or dead, realizes something’s wrong until lots of living people get an unexplainable illness. As people slowly start to die, people are sent out for aid, and the skeletons, being in the greatest health (bc they’re consuming everyone’s magic) and don’t need to sleep are most of the people sent. Some receive aid, some are attacked and smashed to pieces, their attackers not realizing that the skeletons aren’t being sent by a necromancer to kill or destroy. However, any doctors who come to help cannot pinpoint the cause of the illness. It’s understandable, it’s an illness caused by a lack of magic and, usually, there’s magic everywhere, so it’s not very well studied. It does bare some resemblance to MDD, Magic Deficiency Disorder, a rare genetic disease that causes one to have a difficult time absorbing magic into their body, but the illness is rare and understudied, so many neither know nor consider it. Time goes on and a solution is not found. The city, or perhaps the country (depending on the size of the conflict) dies leaving skeletal relatives who are lost and confused. They come together to work out a solution, but as time passes, the plants and trees around them die. They branch outward, searching for a solution, but ultimately return to their homeland. It is a home base and a place where they will go unfeared and attacked by a terrified mortal population. Isolated and with nowhere to go, they build their own society in the shell of their old home and become sicker and sicker as they begin to experience the same illness the living population did. They are running out of magic to consume, but they do not know this and eventually, they die in the place they once defended, once a bustling city or the country, now a deserted wasteland. One day, life will return, but for now, magic-saturated bones sit in an ancient city, fully conscious as their bodies slowly turn to dust.

Individual skeletons likely fair better. They do not need to draw so much magic they can suck a city dry, they can simply live on slightly more magic than their living counterparts. Perhaps things grow a little slower around them, rot a little faster, but not to a noticeable degree. They can live with their family, watch them grow old and die, and watch over the next generation and the next and the next. Skeletons are functionally immortal. As long as they have a source of magic and they aren’t pulverized into dust, they can live forever. A single skeleton has the ability to travel without causing much of a hassle, they can disguise themselves as a hooded traveler. A single skeleton can escape pursuers much easier, they can slip into a crowd and disappear or simply disappear into the woods. Being a single skeleton traversing the world would be a lonely existence. They would watch all their loved ones die over and over again and they can't often find a fresh start out in the world because they are an emblem of death. They are feared and besides magic, which is difficult to learn, they do not have many ways to disguise themselves.

Then of course, there is the option that the most common spell to raise a skeleton causes the skeleton to collapse when the necromancer runs out of magic to feed the spell either through collapsing from exhaustion or dying. 

The culture of Sacrin's tribe is isolationist. They hide from most sentients, they have their own rattling language, and almost none of them have direct relations to the living. They live deep in a forest where the only sentients they interact with are a group of Fira, fire elementals who consume magic by burning things and must migrate in order to allow the land to replenish. Because of their similar life style, Skeletons and Fira compete for resources and often fight whenever their migration circles cross