The blood seeped into the fossilised parts of the skeleton as they jumbled and moved and fused, like metal parts being disturbed by strong magnets, the blood like water being absorbed by the driest sands. The procedure issued foaming and bubbling sounds, dampened crackles and the tight flushing of fluids through impossibly small openings.

It smelled of blood, of iron, and rock wetted by soft summer rain.

And then, Dema closed her hands, halting the process.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m getting kinda nervous.”

“About what?”

“Why, what if she doesn’t wanna stay with us! What if she’s gonna run away?”

Theora gently shook her head. “Dema. If she wants to leave, we just let her leave. You will still have granted a life to another person. Or, a second life, in this case. It will be fine.”

“No, but— Gah!” Dema ruffled through her own hair in desperation, smearing blood all through it. “What if she’s gonna hate me!”

Theora frowned. “Why would anyone ever hate you?”

Dema just grumbled at that, and Theora wondered if it had been the wrong thing to say. “I’m just worried, alright!” Dema whined. “I feel like… maybe… What if she’s not gonna be nice to us! I don’t know…”

Theora wanted to pat Dema’s shoulder, but held back for now. Instead, she said, as reassuring as possible, “Don’t get hung up on things that haven’t even happened yet. Let’s deal with them as they come?”

At that, Dema just started laughing out loud, in a very sudden and unexpected burst that almost contained the smallest hint of mockery. “Why, ain’t that an interesting thing for you to say,” she said, the anxiety leaving her expression. “Should big time consider that sentence you just formed and write it down! Like, as a mantra or something.” She shook her head, took a deep breath, and then continued, “Alright, fine! Let’s do this.”

Resuming her prior work, she started pumping blood from her fingers and gently letting it flow into the fossilised bones on the ground. Surprisingly, they absorbed every single drop — all of it, even though there was no way so much blood should have fit into these rocks.

At the same time, more shale pieces that were lying around started floating towards the centre formation, breaking into pieces or joining together, like a puzzle reforming in front of their very eyes, aiding in building the body in front of them.

What Dema eventually created was a very realistic looking, complex shale sculpture of an isopod girl, probably a head smaller than she was. Numerous rounded, segmented plates formed her back, though they were partly broken and cracked, held together by Dema’s blood running through the crevices. The girl had a cute head, formed by another plate, big, black eyes imbued in it. Two large antennae probed out to each side, and two smaller ones above them.

She also had a mouth with little mandibles and smaller fingerlike structures beneath it, presumably to aid with eating.

Her belly-side was complex and segmented, with many strands of rock building something akin to a ribcage. She also had humanoid legs and feet, and additional dozens of claw-like feet issuing from her front.

The segmented plating reached further down than her buttocks; a few very thin pieces of rock formed lamella-type structures in the low front that, counter-intuitively, swayed in the wind. The very end of her back was shaped into a wide fin that seemed perfect to aid in swimming, made up of a few outreaching parts of shielding.

Within each of the crevices of her complex structure, Dema’s blood still flowed, glowing faintly.

However, the girl also looked rather rattled. Large parts of her body were still straight-up rock — not fossilised bones, but rock that couldn’t be separated from them, a bit as if they had grown out from her in a petrifying process. Also, one of her longer antennae was too short, broken in half, the rest nowhere to be seen. One of her mandibles was also damaged. Some parts of her back shielding were clipped away, and one segment was even completely missing. In her front, a lot of the sideway bridges were collapsed.

She looked very much like a revived fossil. Somewhat incomplete, and put back together slightly wrong.

“She’s missing a few legs,” Theora said.

“I know!” Dema whined. “Couldn’t find all the bones!”

Saying that, she let out another big wave of blood. It gushed around, forming a bubble around the girl, swirling and wobbling, and then, over the course of a few minutes, all of it got absorbed into the black stone of her body.

“There we go! Perfect!”

“Is she alive now?”

“Nah,” Dema said, waving off. “That was only building the body. Same as what I practised back then in the chasm, you know? Still gotta apply [Immortality] for her to wake back up!”

Theora nodded. “So, you are sure you want to do this?”

Dema’s eyebrows raised up in shock, as if betrayed. “What!” she blurted out. “You ask that now? After I already built the entire body and spent all that mana!”

Oh. That’s right, normal people used resources for their Skills. Theora had completely forgotten about that.

“If you wanna jump off the boat, just tell me,” Dema added, raising her eyebrows further into a playful show of utter sadness. “You know. You can go to the store to get some bread or whatever and never come back! As they do!”

“Not what I meant,” Theora said. “I already told you.” She caught Dema’s gaze, staring into it intensely to make sure to get her point across. “I won’t leave you behind.”

Dema grasped her heart with one hand as if something had just hit her chest. “Ah,” she yelped in her raspy voice. “Never gonna get used to you saying that,” she mumbled, but then took a deep breath. “Alright, then. Fine! I’ll do it. Any last words as a person without any big responsibilities?”

Theora wanted to open her mouth and respond that, actually, she already did have some big responsibilities — but then again, was that really true? All she did was walk around all day and do side quests. Raising a child? That was going to be serious.

That is, if the child actually wanted to be raised. If they actually considered themselves a child, if they even liked the two of them. Would they even stick around? What good was there in travelling with Theora, after all?

Now she’d somehow managed to get herself worried too.

And yet, Theora gulped, and managed a weak shake of her head, and then a nod to signal her okay to go ahead.

With that, Dema activated the Skill, a wide and happy smile on her face. As she did, she got engulfed in a red glow, like a blood sun rising behind a mountain. When she used her hand to gently touch the forehead of the fossilised crimson black statue, the glow wandered over to it, and for a moment, the two of them shared it. The isopod person started floating high in the air, and Dema stood up to keep the connection.

When it slowly ebbed away, Dema took away her hand, sitting back down to watch what was going to happen.

And then, almost sudden enough to surprise Theora, one of the tiny claw-legs twitched.

And another one. The girl landed on her legs, and crouched down, wrapping her arms around her shins. A shiver went over her entire body, resulting in a cacophony of soft clatters of rock on rock. She was leaning too much to one side, but she wasn’t making any movements to correct the slow downward motion. For a few seconds, it seemed like she was staring at something invisible right in front of her, when actually, there was nothing.

“Oh my. Wait. She going through System initialization?” Dema asked, and waved a hand, although the girl didn’t respond at all. “Hello? Can you hear me? I’m Dema!”

“Sure seems like it,” Theora mused.

“Then she’s older than the System! Damn, can you believe that?”

The isopod girl let out a welp as she finally lost balance. She knocked against the stone beneath her, rolled onto her back, then dragged her feet closer in front of her chest, and curled herself into a pill.

And then, she rolled away.

“Wait!” Dema yelled after her, but it was to no avail.

With a splash, she entered the water, and was gone.

Dema’s shocked expression turned to Theora. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Our girl ran away!”

“She sure did,” Theora replied.

“No, you don’t understand! She ran away! Our daughter! Be more upset!”

Theora stared at the spot the girl had disappeared to, bubbles still rising in the waving sea. Her head was completely empty as she stared at it in disbelief. “… We never even got to name her.”