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OW NEC 301: Dr. Schreckenstein and Zombie Joe

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Schrecken was excited… well, more than usual, anyway. He had learned, in a previous class, how to resurrect dead animals – a skill that he might have gone overboard with, considering that for that assignment, he had created zombie squirrels and made them fight each other – but now he was going to learn how to resurrect humans. Apparently, it would be much more difficult to do with humans than with animals, which… wasn’t really all that surprising. But for once, Schrecken had slightly more pressing matters to concern himself with.

Specifically, the fact that he had missed the entire previous semester without realizing it.

It wasn’t just Schrecken being easily distracted as usual – he had legitimately missed an entire semester. He tried to remember what had been going on. The bogeyman remembered that he had awakened one day on the floor of a bookstore on Moonseed Lane that appeared to be entirely devoid of people (though, given the nature of the shadow creatures that seemed to run the day-to-day activities of Otherworlde Academy, the store had probably never been empty at all). He vaguely remembered reading a book before that, and some lady yelling at him in increasing frustration… a witch? A ghost? The ghost of a witch? People becoming frustrated and yelling at Schrecken were not all that uncommon, but there was something a bit different about her. It wasn’t an exasperation at the bogeyman’s childishness, obliviousness, or lack of social skills. It was… more like a matter of his disobedience. What the topic was at hand, however, Schrecken had no idea.

He did remember the title of the book, as well.

“Zila Hawthorn”.

He thought it was a dumb name for a book.

So, as far as Schrecken could tell, he had been trapped in a book for almost an entire semester, thus making him fail his classes when he had been so excited to do his work and try to pass them. Well, at least this semester, the fact that he had waited until the last minute to actually do any work was entirely because of Schrecken himself and not due to any mysterious outside forces. Either way, he still had to resurrect a human corpse in the Necromancy graveyard and make it do things. There was a third assignment where he could make it attack someone, but he wasn’t planning to do that one. Schrecken loved trying to startle and scare people – in fact, it was what gave him sustenance – but he didn’t really have any actual interest in hurting anyone. Unless he decided to enter the tournament again. That seemed like fun.

The bogeyman wished he had a lab coat or something to wear when he went to the graveyard. It would be like Frankenstein, robbing graves in order to reanimate a human corpse. Of course, Schrecken had never actually read Mary Shelley’s original book, so his ideas of Frankenstein were full of hunchbacked assistants and maniacal laughter and Boris Karloff. At least Schrecken could do the maniacal laughter part. He did have to settle for an illusory lab coat instead of an actual one, however.

When Schrecken got to the Necromancy building’s graveyard and got everything he needed for actually digging up a corpse, he remembered what Mika had said about the difficulties of raising humans from the dead. That there were some spirits that could never be controlled, and that if he wasn’t careful, he could damage his soul. Well, that wasn’t too much of a surprise to the bogeyman. There were a lot of things that were out of his control, like getting stuck in a book for an entire semester with a woman he didn’t recognize yelling at him to do something he didn’t remember. And back when Schrecken had only been resurrecting squirrels from the dead, he was surprisingly serious about it, even if the commands he gave them afterwards to dress up as ninjas and fight each other were anything but serious at all. The bogeyman knew he would have to be careful for this assignment, more careful than any assignment he had ever done before. He could be silly once he had actually raised a person from the dead and had to give it commands, but right now, he had to actually focus and take this ritual seriously.

The ritual to resurrect a human body was really not all that different from what Schrecken had done to revive squirrels in his previous assignments, but there were a few complications. He needed to focus much more, and stop immediately if the soul he was working with showed any signs of potentially corrupting his own. Furthermore, the particular set of instructions that he had been given stated that he needed to guide the soul using some sort of focusing incantation… though what that incantation was did not happen to be stated. Presumably Schrecken could make up anything he wanted as long as it was useful.

As Schrecken went around the graveyard looking for a corpse to resurrect, he realized that he could tell quite easily, just by beginning the ritual, whether a particular soul would have a corrupting effect and would best be left alone. The bogeyman didn’t really think about why that might be the case. He just figured that he was a natural at necromancy. But there was a definite reason why it was so easy for Schrecken to sense corrupted souls. He was quite a childish individual, looking for friends with little knowledge of how to make them, quite enthusiastic and somewhat naïve. While he enjoyed scaring people – in fact, he needed fear to survive, in some capacity – he didn’t really want to actually harm anyone, and became quite distraught at the possibility of even making people sad. In short, despite his status as a bogeyman and his enrollment at Otherworlde Academy, Schrecken’s own soul was quite pure.

Eventually, Schrecken found a corpse and a corresponding soul that did not seem to have any kind of potential corrupting influence, and started trying to raise it from the dead. He just had to come up with something to say as an incantation. The bogeyman wasn’t particularly good at anything poetic, especially if it involved rhyming. But anything could work as long as Schrecken didn’t stop talking. It was just supposed to act as a guide for the soul. And Schrecken guessed that there was nothing he could really say that would make a soul freak out and go the other way, so he was probably fine. Probably.

He looked down at the illusion of a lab coat he had produced.

“Listen to me, soul! I am… um… I am Dr. Schreckenstein! Mwahahahaha! Hoo hoo. Yes, this is very good so far.” He was quite proud of his attempt at maniacal laughter, even if it turned into his typical goofy laugh near the end. “And I am going to create a monster that will rise from the dead!” He was being very loud. A few other Necromancy students who happened to be in the area glanced over at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “So… I need to get this soul back into its body so it will move and do things! Hoo hoo hoo. Yes.” He pointed at the body, which was relatively intact, though certainly not much to look at, and appeared to have belonged to a man in his mid-30s. Schrecken waved his arms in the air as dramatically as he could. “Move, soul, move!” he shouted. “Get back into this guy where you belong! So I can have my triumph… of making a monster… which is actually not a monster and is already mostly there! Hehehaha. Yes. Hoo hoo.”

A few more minutes and a bit more rambling, and the corpse and soul were united once more with relative stability. Schrecken jumped for joy, clapping his hands together, as the body sat up. “I did it!” the bogeyman shouted in a sing-song voice. “I have done it! Yes I did! I have done the thing that I was supposed to do!” He peered at the reanimated corpse with interest. “I think I am going to name you… Zombie Joe. Hoo hoo hoo! Yes! Dr. Schreckenstein and Zombie Joe!”

After taking Zombie Joe to Mika a few days later for a proper inspection, Schrecken thought about the things that he could train him to do. His first thought was that he could teach his newfound companion to sing… but zombies were generally not very good at singing, and neither was Schrecken. And judging by the lack of athletic ability that Zombie Joe showed, it probably wouldn’t be able to learn to fight in just one week, though the bogeyman realized that he could probably use it as a shield to hide behind during the tournament.

No, Schrecken wanted to do something dramatic. Something fun. Something with flair. Or at least as much flair as the gloomy and mysterious Necromancy department could provide in the first place, given the kinds of magic it dealt with.

So, one week later, when Mika went back to his office to see what kinds of things his student had trained the zombie to do, Schrecken was already there. And he had made some… changes. Ones that Mika probably would not like at all, though they were quite reversible. The bogeyman had taped what appeared to be a makeshift disco ball to the ceiling, and the usual sinister flames of the gloomy candles in the Necromancy building now flickered in a variety of colors, thanks to Schrecken’s illusion powers. There was also what appeared to be some sort of… enchanted boom box in the corner? Nothing had been removed from the rom, and none of Mika’s things appeared to have been touched. Schrecken had just come in early and set some things up, albeit things that were rather incongruous with the rest of the Necromancy building’s ominous appearance.

“Hello!” Schrecken called, waving at his professor, and Zombie Joe followed suit with a wave of his own. “Do not worry! When I am done, I will take everything down and your office will be okay. Yes. It will. But I like you very much, and I think you are a very good teacher, and I wanted to surprise you!”

Mika was unimpressed.

Schrecken, however, did not seem to notice. “You see, I have found out that my zombie friend, Mr. Zombie Joe, is very fast! Hoo hoo hoo! And I was thinking, since the last time I had to make zombies, I had a zombie ninja squirrel fight, I had to do something even better!” The bogeyman was hopping up and down from one foot to another, quite visibly excited. “Now, this will not be as good as it could be, because I have only made one zombie. Yes. But when I am going to make more zombies, when I get better and learn more things from you, I will make this even better!”

With a wave of his hand for dramatic effect, Schrecken conjured illusory costumes for himself and Zombie Joe. He snapped his fingers, though it took him a few times to actually make any sound with it, and the boom box’s volume increased. Schrecken hoped that Mika would be impressed by the fact that he had obtained such an item – it had cost him an entire set of rune stones and a significant volume of Schrecken’s own blood at Moonseed Lane – but he didn’t bother to tell Mika any of that. He thought it might ruin the surprise a bit.

The music got just a little bit louder.

“Hoo hoo hoo! I am going to have a ZOMBIE DANCE PARTY!”

All in all, the bogeyman thought it went well. Zombie Joe did exactly as he had been instructed, though then again, Schrecken had spent virtually an entire week trying to teach Zombie Joe a somewhat silly dance instead of anything more productive.

Even so, he thought that “Thriller” had been an inspired choice.
In which Schrecken raises and commands a zombie... in his typical way.

I would like to point out that, given Otherworlde's general lack of YouTube access or anything of the sort, this means that Schrecken memorized the Thriller dance before he even came to Otherworlde. This bogeyman has too much time on his hands.

For NEC 301 Assignments 1 and 2.

2003 words.
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