Vigor Mortis (part one)

This fast-lane review was commissioned by @Gore17


This is another web novel I haven't heard of before. Katalepsis turned out to be pretty interesting to talk about, so hopefully this one will be as well. This one was written by user Thundamoo on the Royal Road platform. The descriptive blurb reads as follows:

“In a world of sky islands orbiting around a core of mist, humanity is besieged with countless threats. When a young girl from the slums unwittingly becomes one of those threats, she finds herself capable of horrific things that she can’t help but learn to love...

Vigor Mortis is a lighthearted story about existential terror. Come for the horror, stay for the hope.”

Sounds like we're going real hardcore retro pulp. Cool.

The Royal Road rating system gives this story a score of 4.5 out of 5 stars, but since I'm new to this site I can't testify for good or ill about its community's sense of taste. I guess this will be our first data point!

Chapter One: Wavering Souls​

Hah, the very first paragraph of this story makes me self conscious:

““Stop, thief!”

I can’t help but wonder why people say that. Has any thief in the history of the world ever actually stopped? I suppose the call was more to alert other people to the thievery, but wouldn’t ‘stop that thief’ make more sense? Even better, describe the thief. You know, something like ‘that black-haired, green-eyed girl in the cloak stole a loaf of bread! Get her!’”

Not because of anything it actually did (though the shopkeeper bothering to call out her eye color is a bit of a headscratcher in context...), but because the "why would you bother telling a thief to stop" thing is almost word for word the same as a passage in the next Twilight Man book. I was really proud of it too. Oh well, I guess you'll just have to believe me that I didn't rip it off of Vigor Mortis.~

Anyway, as the wording tin the quoted part suggests, our protagonist is the thief in question. Also, nice way of obliquely inserting a physical description of the protag in a first person POV, well done author. She's Jean Valjean'd this particular bakery several times before, on account of Grig the baker's habit of leaving fresh loaves out in the front display, and so it's been getting harder and harder to keep getting away with it. She clarifies that she definitely *would* buy the bread like a normal person if she could, but as one of the City of Skyhope's many homeless she just doesn't have that option. The passage describing the local socioeconomics is...pretty clumsy, honestly. Very much a case of the author telling when they could just as easily show. But regardless! Grig the baker chases after the thief this time, and being healthier and better fed than her she doesn't have much of a chance at outrunning him. Fortunately, she anticipated this escalation, and has friends backing her up this time. A more experienced thief, Lyn, appears out of nowhere and has protagonist Vita toss one of the two stolen loaves to her. She gets the baker to focus on her for a moment, giving the slower Vita a chance to slip away out of sight.

Once she's sure Grig isn't on her tail anymore, Vita has a few bites of mediocre - but fresh! - bread, and brings the rest to her friend Rowan the street clown. As Vita puts it, Rowan is the smart one, Lyn is the skilled athletic one, and she herself is just desperate to not feel like she's dragging the others down. Rowan takes the bread and gives her a few pennies to divvy up among herself and the other urchin newbies. She's tempted, as always, to run away with the pennies and keep them all for herself, but it's a temptation she knows everyone in her circle is sharing at all times, and they have to trust each other not to succumb. If it hadn't been for that trust, she wouldn't have been able to save up enough pennies to get that warm cloak she's still wearing, and everyone else needs a cloak too.

Then, there's this shoehorned bit of worldbuilding:

“Of course, a few of those kids will get something far more valuable than a cloak regardless of whether I give them money or not. Not many of them, but some people are just talented. It is said that the Mistwatcher grants each person a gift when they are made, and while the Church likes to present that as some wonderful thing, it’s no secret that whatever gives the gifts gives them absurdly unequally. Some people have talent beyond comprehension, like Lyn. Some people could shoot fire from their hands without even studying to be a mage!”

I'm not sure if this is actually a My Hero Academia situation where everyone gets a minor supernatural power, or if it's just the Church interpreting the occasional rare wild magic talent as just another version of having good hand-eye coordination or having a knack for languages. Vita says that they're still waiting to see what gifts the young urchins are going to end up developing, which suggests that it's a MHA thing, but again, it could also just mean that they haven't found something they're good at yet. "Some people are stronger, smarter, faster, or can take levels in Sorcerer, it's all part of the same spectrum." Again, maybe.

Vita explains that this is another incentive for honesty among (very young) thieves. If any member of the gang could manifest the ability to cast transmute pancreas to live piranha at any time, you don't want to give anyone a reason to want revenge. Presumably, this also means that they have to avoid stealing from other young people in general, regardless of gang affiliation.

She goes into their usual alley to look for the other urchins awaiting allowance, only for Grig the baker to suddenly come barrelling out of nowhere again! He's really, really pissed this time, it appears. She tries to climb up onto some crates and into an alley-facing window, hoping his weight (god, this story really, really wants us to know how fat the baker is. Even from a starving orphan POV, it's fixating on this to a weird extent) will prevent him from climbing after her. But, she's just a little bit too slow.

As he drags her back out of the window she was halfway through and into the street, he...hmm.

““All week! All week you’ve been raiding my shop! You think I’m just gonna let you? Huh!?””

Well, either he's seriously exaggerating, he's been targeted by other thieves she doesn't know about, or she's been astonishingly brazen. Stealing from the same store three or more times in the same week is something only an extremely desperate or extremely stupid thief would do. He can't have the only bakery around, right?

Regardless of how justified her last week's worth of decisions have been, Grig pulls Vita back into the street and starts kicking her. While launching into a soliloquy about how the cops are useless, how he's sure he's losing business by having to leave his dumbass of a son in the shop while he goes thief-chasing, etc. Like, in a lot of detail. If this is an intentional character quirk, then I really hope that Grig the baker is going to stick around for multiple chapters, because it's kind of hilarious. If it isn't, then this is not good writing. When Vita tells him that if he hates thieves so much he should stop leaving bread out in the outdoor display (WHY WOULD ANYONE SAY THAT IN HER SITUATION?), he loses his shit completely and starts literally stomping on her face.

It's pretty clearly attempted murder at this point. Although perhaps not in the legal sense. When he raves about how he's going to bring her severed head to the police and expect a reward, I get the impression that while he might be exaggerating about the literal head-hunting, he really is serious about how little the authorities will care about a business owner killing a street urchin. Either the law just doesn't include the homeless, or it's very consistently not enforced where they're concerned.

There are definitely cities in the USA where I could believe this happening, to be fair. Most police departments would probably be annoyed at a baker killing a troublesome homeless person instead of letting them do it, but I'm sure there are some who wouldn't care.

Although...hmm. It could also just be a matter of the cops having more self-preservation instinct than this guy does, on account of the whole transmute pancreas to live piranha principle. Granted, you'd think that would give society some pretty strong incentives to provide for children in general at least until they've manifested a harmless "gift," and yet it doesn't seem to be doing that.

Well. There are societal status quos that keep themselves more or less the same for centuries on end, and there are ones that disintegrate under their own stupidity in just a few decades. This one feels like it's much closer to the latter end of the spectrum.

And, speak of the devil! Grig is beating Vita to death. Vita screams, but then starts choking on her own blood. Bones break. She resigns herself to a pathetic, ugly death, just like the pathetic, ugly, and only sixteen year long life that preceded it. While she gives up any hope of survival, however, she still burns with hatred for the baker who's killing her. She can tolerate her own death, but she can't tolerate his survival. Even him dying like her wouldn't satisfy her. She wants him to suffer. And also goes on about how fat he is, alongside his other, much more condemnable, attributes. How could he have even caught up to her and be kicking her around with how fat he is, he must have a super-strong-legs quirk that he's been squandering, what a degenerate.

...

Okay. Look.

A baker being fat doesn't mean he's rich or wasteful. It means he spends his day standing in front of a counter and surrounded by empty carbs. Thin bakers exist, but they're a rarity. Him being fat doesn't illustrate much of anything when it comes to social inequality.

Do I blame the starving orphan girl who he's trying to murder over a tiny fraction of his potential income for being petty? No, of course not. But at this point, it's really starting to feel like the author's bias rather than the character's.

...

She's losing consciousness, and descending into an abyss of hate. Suddenly, something compels her to reach out with her less injured arm and grab the baker. Then, she pulls *something* out of him, and the attack stops. Heh, well, I guess we've just been given a demonstration of what I was talking about earlier!

If trauma or desperation are often the triggers for a quirk manifesting, then abusing children and teenagers is even riskier than I already thought. We know that this isn't always how it works, but even if it's only sometimes the principle still applies.

Once she finishes blinking the blood out of her eyes, she brings the thing she tore out of Grig in front of her face. It's a luminous, barely-visible thing, and she instinctively knows that it's his soul. She has the power to tear people's souls out of their bodies. Hopefully she isn't too beaten up to survive and drag herself out of the alley, or that will be a waste. Unless she can absorb the souls to heal herself too, or something.

End of chapter one.


That was pretty short, and I have four more of these to finish. So, let's read chapter two and then see how I feel!

Chapter Two: Their Soul and You​

Hah! Clever title. I guess in this chapter we'll be learning the ins and outs of her newfound stand, Soul To Squeeze.

Her first reaction is panic. Alarm at having done what she just did. Followed by some really tonedeaf exposition.

“Wait! Oh no, I should put it back! It’s his... it’s his soul! I try to shove it back in the corpse, but it just passes through. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no!

Souls are not for mortals to touch. The magic to control and manipulate souls, known as animancy, is very illegal. Study on it is forbidden across the entire island. But of course, some people don’t have to study magic... they’re born with it. Am I a natural animancer? Is that less illegal or more?”

Including "known as animancy" in the thoughts of a character who's in the middle of panicking is just...no. A better alternative would have been to have her think "I took out his souls! But...that's animancy! It's a capital crime!" or something like that.

Anyway, she has a wild animancy talent, which is something she's never heard of happening. She tries as best she can with her injuries to crawl back over to Grig's dead body and tries to ram the soul back into it. No dice. It just won't stick. Sure that she's going to have the Church's religious police coming down on her now for practicing heretical magic on top of murder, she follows another random impulse, and reaches inside of herself now. She extracts a small piece of her own soul and uses that as a kind of glue to stick Grig back in his own body. Still nothing.

Deciding to give up trying to fix it, Vita picks the baker's pocket (it turns out he had a fair amount of cash on him, which to Vita is more money than she's ever seen at once in her life) before fleeing. Not that she can flee very effectively, with broken ribs, one blind eye, and one arm and one leg that aren't working properly. Honestly, she's lucky she doesn't have a concussion, or a spinal fracture.

Also she...just leaves the little piece of her own soul that she sheared off behind in Grig's body. Um...maybe she's hoping it'll revive him eventually, or something? I'm not sure why else she'd do this. Leaving bits of your soul behind you can't be healthy, especially if you've already just taken a savage beating like this.

Before she can get far, though, Grig does get back up. He coughs, wriggles, and then pulls himself back to his feet. Cursing herself for not just leaving him dead and hoping no one finds out who did it, Vita tries to limp away faster, but collapses in pain as she overworks her broken body. Grig catches up to her, and apologizes, telling her he can't believe that he just did that to her.

Either his out-of-body experience has given him a new perspective on life, or that fragment of her own soul she fused to his is causing him to regard her differently. Probably the second one. Maybe it's a sort of self/other distinction that's just glitching out for him now. I don't think she put enough of herself into him to like, dilute his personality with her own, or anything like that.

Anyway, he promises to bring her to a healer and pay for her treatment. He also asks for her name, and begins addressing her as "Miss Vita" once he knows it. His smile has a blank, wooden quality to it.

Oh. I see. Yeah, no, she did something a little worse than I suspected there.

Dreading what she might find, Vita asks Grig to hold still and let her feel his pulse. She's dismayed, but unsurprised, to learn that he no longer has one. And also that he isn't bothering to breathe except when he needs the air to speak. Undead, it seems, are well known enough for Vita to think to test for this. She informs us that while animancy is heretical and illegal, necromancy is outright blasphemous and hated. Gright, for his part, informs Vita that he never realized until now how important it was to serve her every whim, and that he wants nothing out of existence besides that from now on. He might still have all his memories, but his personality seems to have been watered down to a muted shade of its original self, and he's bound to her will via soul fragment.

Well. She knows she'll die herself if she doesn't take Gright up on his "voluntary" offer of healing. So, reluctantly, she instructs him to bring her to the healer and pay for her treatment, but to be careful not to let the healer look at him. Off they go, Gright murmuring happily over how fulfilling it is to obey his mistress. Healing, we learn, is a basic application of biomancy. It's a school of magic with immense potential for abuse, but healing is so valuable to society that the authorities have to encourage its study even if they also need to monitor each practitioner carefully. The healer herself, when they reach her, then explains that for cases like Vita's the best thing to do is to just accelerate the body's natural healing processes. That means that she'll have to set the broken bones and clean the open cuts before casting the spell, and also that Vita will have to fill her stomach with protein. If there's a spell that lets you accelerate someone's healing using an external nutrient supply, this lady can't cast it. The protein gel tastes like ass even by Vita's less-than-discriminatory standards, but she's in no position to complain.

After all this exposition, we then blow passed the actual spell itself in a third of a sentence, with no descriptive text whatsoever. Our first look at proper spellcasting in this world just wasn't deemed important or interesting enough to include. Neither was the sensory experience of our protagonist undergoing a biological process that's completely alien to the reader.

The minutiae of how magic interacts with the legal system and the laws of thermodynamics that aren't even relevant to the story yet, though? Well, those merit multiple pages of excruciatingly slow detail!

-___-

This is not a well written story.

With the healing over with and only some lingering pains remaining, Vita leaves the building and asks Grig to bring her back to his bakery. She also decides to test his memories, and instructs him to take some indirect routes and detours to see if he can still remember his way around the city. He can. As they walk though, she notices that he's looking increasingly pale. She asks him if he's feeling alright, and he says that he's fine besides the swollen feet. He and Vita both realize that missing a heartbeat is causing some fluid mass issues. She asks him if he can will his own heart to beat, but he regretfully informs her that he has no idea how to do that. Keeping him disguised as his living self is going to be difficult.

Is his immune system still working, though? Probably not, if his blood is pooling in his lower body. He's going to start rotting soon, and then the jig will really be up.

As they walk, Vita wonders over the morality of necromancy as well as its practicality. She doesn't doubt that she was in the right to kill him, self defence and all, but killing someone is still a pretty big deal that calls for introspection. At the same time though, she isn't sure if she DID really kill him. He remembers everything. He isn't a mindless drone. This is reinforced when she refers to him as a zombie, and he corrects her by saying that he's a revenant. His father was a member of the church militant who did some undead-fighting in his day, and so Grig grew up learning some general information about types of undead. He's able to not only remember details from his childhood, but also proactively volunteer it. He even makes smalltalk about his family history without her directly encouraging it. So, while she definitely fucked up his mind, she isn't sure if it qualifies as killing.

When she asks him if he wishes he was still alive, Grig says that he would prefer that...except that if he were still alive, he'd never have realized how important it was to serve Miss Vita, so ultimately he supposes he's grateful that this happened. That unnerves her significantly more. Especially once she remembers that he has a wife and at least one child. She asks about them, and...hmm.

““...So, uh, you mentioned while you were beating the shit out of me that you have a son, is that right?”

”Yes Miss Vita! A wife and a son, though she’s an unfaithful bitch and he’s useless swamp slog, if you’ll forgive my language.””

This is either a reassuring sign, or a very, very unreassuring one. Either he still has his opinions and emotional issues from life, or the memories of everyone he used to love have been twisted into some hateful undead mockery that will compel him to kill them all. Granted, the way he talked about his son before he beat up Vita wasn't too far off from this, so if undeath has twisted him it didn't have to work very hard at it. Vita decides, perhaps self-servingly, to interpret this as him having felt this way about his wife and son to begin with.

As they return to the bakery, she reminds him to keep up his pretend-breathing. The last thing they need right now is paladins showing up to smite them. He obliges, happy to do anything he can to prevent Vita from being smote by paladins or coming to any other type of harm. When the smell of burning bread greets them, Grivenant's placid face becomes enraged again, and he asks Vita for permission to leave her side so he can go discipline his son.

Okay. He IS the same person, then. Probably not actually dead in any meaningful philosophical sense. Warped, transformed, but still the same consciousness.

Vita is reluctant to let Grivenant unleash his acute anger management issues on his son, but she's also afraid of him acting different than he normally acts and drawing suspicion. So, she grants him her permission, and he charges into the bakery screaming insults before grabbing his 14 year old son by the hair and dragging him in back. His wife, standing out front, just avoids watching this happen. Once again, giving the impression that this behaviour isn't out of the ordinary for Grig.

...wait, why wasn't SHE making sure the bread didn't burn? The smell is apparent from well outside the shop, but she's still just standing there out in front? Eh, whatever.

Vita hears Grivenant beating his son inside the house, and wonders if perhaps she made the wrong decision back there. Or even if she made the wrong decision in resurrecting Grig in the first place. Wondering about her complicity in whatever Grig is doing to his son right now, Vita also starts musing about her own soul. To distract herself from the sounds from inside the house, she pulls out her own soul and inspects it. It's smaller and fainter than Grig's, and also a shadowy black color. Vita takes this to mean that it's because she's weak and pathetic and has evil powers. Which is possible, but it could just as easily mean that she's young, or unhealthy, or hasn't had many happy memories to FILL HER DARK SOUL WITH LIGHT. Anyway, she's obviously not in a good place, so her coming to a depressing conclusion based on the evidence at hand is understandable.

The sounds of the beating from inside the house escalate, and she grits her teeth and decides she'd better go in and make him stop after all, before his son has his own trigger event and starts shooting death lasers. End chapter. Chapter three is much longer than the first two, so I think I'll call this a post.


Ehhhhhh. There's some good stuff here, especially the philosophical musing about personhood, consciousness, and the nature of the soul. The interactions between the street people at the beginning were also interesting enough to make me want to learn more about them all, and humanizing and protagonizing homeless people is something I can't not approve of. Other than that though...

This might seem hypocritical coming from me since I make so many D&D jokes and the like in my reviews, but this reads as RPG-inspired in all the wrong ways. Nonchalantly referring to "schools of magic" as if the reader is expected to know what that means, while devoted excessive description to worldbuilding minutiae that aren't borrowed from generic fantasy tabletop. Brushing past the healing spell as if it isn't a wonderful thing that merits description, again, feels like the attitude of someone desensitized to the point of total apathy to fantasy game standbys like "visiting the town healer," and who expects their readers to be the same way. I wouldn't notice this if it was just a case of the character being nonchalant about common things in her own world, but then she DOES go on at length about whatever details the author thinks make her look smart or whatever, so it's clearly not deliberate.

As original worlds go, this was also just sort of generic. There's nothing wrong with the classics. I remember pointing out back in my Wakfu review that there's nothing wrong with playing the tropes and conventions straight as long as you take them seriously and put your passion into them all. This tired retread of the classic pseudo-Victorian high magic dystopian hub city feels like it's draining energy out of the clichés rather than breathing more life into them. Vita's likable enough, but she also feels like a half-and-half cross between a fantasy 1800's street urchin and a modern middle class teenager, when she's only supposed to be one of those things.

I do think things might get more interesting once we reach the premise advertised in the description. Sky battles in the clouds between flying islands, with humans up against ineffable horrors and our protagonist finding out she's among the latter, that sounds more engaging. These first two chapters did have some good stuff in them, but overall I found them forgettable. Not really bad, just forgettable.