Ari, Female Human, Clr1/Wiz(Nec)12

SZ Medium Humanoid (5 ft. tall); HD 1d8+12d4+13 (41 hp); Init +1 (Dex), Spd 30 ft.; AC 15 (+1 Dex, +4 Bone Armor); Atk +6/+1 (1d4 dagger); SA Death touch 1/day, Rebuke Undead; AL NE; Saves Fort +7, Ref +4, Will +12; Str 11, Dex 12, Con 13, Int 18, Wis 14, Cha 12.

Skills: Alchemy +8, Concentration +5, Craft: Leatherworking (specifically flesh & tissues) +12, Heal +4, Knowledge: Religion +2, Knowledge: Planes +4, Knowledge: Arcana +12, Knowledge: Anatomy +10, Knowledge: Undead +14, Profession: Embalmer +10, Spellcraft +15

Feats: Scribe Scroll, Craft Wondrous Item, Craft Undead, Spell Focus (Necromancy), Extra Turning, Craft Wand, Iron Will, +2

Possessions: Bone Armor, Badge of Bone Soveriegnty, Wand of Stinking Cloud, Wand of Scare, Wand of Web,

Spells per day: Cleric 3/1 (+1 Domain spell from either Death or Trickery)

Wizard 4/4/4/4/3/3/2 (+1 spell / level from Necromancy list)

Forbidden School: Evocation

Appearance: While her husband dressed as a courtier or nobleman, in expensive fineries and with prominent jewelry, Ari always dressed in bland and undecorated robes of tan, grey or brown, of fine quality silk, but so plain of appearance that this would often go unnoticed. She was only 5 ft exactly, shorter even than her husband, and she bustled with an impatient energy, while he was more languid of movement and demeanor, she often was short-tempered and irritable by nature. Her single piece of obvious jewelry was a black iron collar that did not appear to have any hinge or latch for removal. Generally hidden by his extensive collars and headgear, Non also wore an identical collar, and when this was commented upon by an assistant, Ari claimed that this was tradition among married couples in their homeland, to symbolize that each was slave and master to the other, bound forever by these 'shackles of matrimony.'

Ari's area of expertise was animation and the creation of various forms of undead from the corpus of the formerly living.

She would procure a freshly-deceased humanoid corpse and begin her work with a spell known as Mend the Dead, an improved, yet specific version of the standard Mending Transmutation, causing wounds and tissue damage to knit on an unliving, inanimate corpse. Broken bones or even severed limbs would reset, although no significant amount of missing tissue (such as a limb) would be regenerated, only small bits of missing skin and hair and the like.

Now with a corpse as unblemished as if it were but sleeping, she would begin her animations by first draining the subjects blood (restored to fluidity by the Mend the Dead process) into a special container for later use. She would then cast a spell known as Flense, that strips the body of its skin in one smooth gesture (generally begun at the lips, the skin becomes elastic during the full round action of casting, and the caster grabs the lips and stretches them up over the cadavars head and down the length of the body in one smooth gesture). This spell cannot be used on a living subject.

Setting the freshly removed skin aside, she would draw an enchanted scalpel and begin the methodical process of removing the muscles, tendons and other soft tissue from the bones, as well, leaving only the denuded skeleton on the table. She would then move that skeleton into a bath of heated oil to render away any clinging tissue (and the brain, which she could not easily scrape away without damaging the skull, and had no Necromantic use for). She had intended to create a spell to ease this process as well, and in fact one of her students after her death refined a version of Animate Dead that would allow a Skeleton to animate from a non-skeletal corpse, sloughing off all other tissue seamlessly and sliding up from the corpse, without unduly damaging the viscera and musculature.

While the skeleton soaked, she would take the skin and soak it as well in a bath of special salts, while the viscera and musculature went into one sealed clay cauldron.

She would set to work first on the viscera, as the natural acids of the stomach would begin softening and damaging the fragile tissues if she did not get to work immediately. (Like the blood, stomach juices would become fluid and vital again by the Mend the Dead process.) Using an animation technique of her own creation, she would infuse a Ghoulish hunger in the organs, causing them to hunger endlessly, and empowering the mass to slither and move along the ground in a trail of intestinal juices, able to leap upon and Entangle a foe in their serpentine mass, and to disgorge a gout of weak acids (1d4 damage) to anyone within 5 ft. During this process, the hungry Viscera could not be released from its glass-lidded ceramic tub, as it would mindlessly consume any organic matter in the area if not controlled.

Her next bit of work was upon the skin, which would be animated by a similar enchantment into a Skin Phantom, a sheet-like slithering mass that was magically toughened to near-leathery durability, and yet remained elastic enough to constrict a target and restrain it's movements. On a normal attack, the Skin Phantom would simply Entangle a foe, perhaps causing minimal damage through constriction, but on a Critical Hit, it would manage to throw leathery folds over the victims breathing orifices and sight organs, both Suffocating and Blinding it as well!

Near the end of her process, she would turn to the blood, kept warm over a fire in a spinning cauldron, not allowed to bubble or congeal. She would infuse the energies of death into the fluid, taking it from the fire and allowing it to cool as she cast her spells. The fluid would gain a Necromantic animation as a Blood Weird, and a mindless dread of cold, causing it to attempt to restore it's 'warmth' by flowing over and draining the warmth of the living, but in the process, suffocating them in a pool of cold dead blood, crawling over their bodies in a vain attempt to warm itself on their skin.

She would end her enchantment process on the skeleton, animating it as a simple Skeleton undead.

She would sometimes aquire a living subject, and instead of creating a Blood Weird, she would begin the enchantment process by hoisting the subject into the air by chains, and placing a brazier to rest on top of the subject, extinguising every other source of light in the room. The only light would be flickering atop her subject, whose shadow would be under him, writhing on her worktable. She would slice him with her scalpel, using a single slash to the throat, and the victim would be suspended face down, staring at his blood pouring out onto his writhing shadow. Thanks to the enchantment process she would follow at this stage, the blood would literally dissappear into the shadow, consumed by the hungering darkness, and the shadow would seem to thicken and become crimson in color as the living subject become paler and closer to death. In a matter of moments, the subjects life would have poured forth into the now dark and monstrous shadow (which would resemble a man-sized mass of ruddy darkness, and forever smell of blood), and she would bind this new creation under her control, not as an undead Shadow (for her casting was not powerful enough to replicate this creature), but as a lesser creature she called a Blood-shadow, an incorporeal creature able only to 'grapple' another and Blind it in the wet darkness of its form.

Her eventual goal (according to her surviving notes) was to find a way to seperate the various organs and systems of a living person, animating them each seperately, and she had extensive notes on a method to convert the circulatory system into a blood-draining vampiric entity, independent of the muscular systems and the digestive systems, refining the Viscera into three seperate forms of undead construction.

Her purported overall goal was to develop techniques to animate into undeath each of the body's living systems, and then to refine the process so that she could begin the slow process of animating into undeath a living creature, one vital system at a time, rendering it immortal and deathless, and yet able to replicate all the functions of the living through Necromantic means. While this was her stated goal, her notes were suprisingly bereft of any information on this research and it was believed that she was years from even beginning the process of infusing the energies of death into the tissues of a living subject.

Her final experiment did not actually relate to her eventual goal, but was an attempt to refine the Blood Weird into a gaseous mist-like form, a sweeping cloud of reddish vapors that would obscure vision. Instead, the form she created hungered for more blood and rising in a fury of scalding wind-swept frenzy, the boiling cloud of blood drained the life from her (and two of her apprentice students) before roiling out of her laboratory and eventually being slain by an Ice Storm when it intruded upon a fellow researcher.

Bones - as Skeleton

Skin-Wight - HD 1/2 d12 (3 hp) for a human-sized skin, +1 Initiative (+1 Dex), 30 ft move, AC 11 (+1 Dex), 1 Grapple +0 melee for 1 hp Constriction damage + Entanglement effect, 5 ft. by 5 ft./5 ft., Undead, Immunities, Fort +0, Ref +3, Will +2, Str 8, Dex 12, Con -, Int -, Wis 10, Cha 11. Takes half damage vs piercing or crushing weapons. Grapple entangles unless broken, unless broken inflicts 1 hp / round Constriction automatically. Blinds & Suffocates on a critical hit! (Roll each round to check for a critical while grappling) Improved Grapple (does not provoke an AoO from an armed opponent). Appears as a leathery humanoid skin, flayed seamlessly from the body and moving bonelessly along the ground like a freakish serpent.

Viscera (Muscles/Veins/Digestive tract) - HD 1d12 (Medium), 20 ft move, AC 12 (+2 Natural Armor), 1 Grapple +0 melee for 1d2+1 Constriction damage + 1 hp Acid + Blood drain equal to 1 temporary pt of Con / round, 5 ft. by 5 ft./5 ft., Undead, Immunities, Fort +2, Ref +0, Will +2, Str 12, Dex 10, Con -, Int -, Wis 10, Cha 11. 1 / day can belch a gout of digestive acid to affect a single target within 10 ft (as a ranged touch attack, automatically hits if target is grappled) that inflicts 2d4+1 Acid damage. Regenerates 1 hp damage / Con point of blood drain inflicted. Acidic gout is recharged if the flesh of a man-sized target is consumed. Toughness (+3 hit points). Appears as a dripping mass of organs and muscles, pushing and pulling itself along the ground via muscular contractions like some boneless ooze. It rises to engulf another by shoving itself at them violently, with muscles and veins sprouting forth to drain blood from living prey.

Blood Weird - HD 1/2 d12 (3 hp) for a man-sized volume (10 pints), +6 Initiative (+2 Dex, +4 Imp Initiative), 30 ft move, swim 30 ft, AC 14 (+2 Dexterity, +2 Natural), 1 Grapple for 1 hp damage + blinding (and drowning on a critical hit), 5 ft. by 5 ft./5 ft., Undead, Immunities, Fort +0, Ref +2, Will +2, Str 6, Dex 14, Con -, Int -, Wis 10, Cha 11. Damage Reduction 10/+1. Improved Grapple (does not provoke an AoO from an armed opponent). Improved Initiative, Evasion. +5 Hide. Appears as 10 pints worth of reddish-black liquid, moving like a serpentine rivulet of blood.

Bloodshadow - HD 1/2 d12 (3 hp) for a man-sized shadow, +6 Initiative (+2 Dex, +4 Imp Initiative), 45 ft move, 20 ft jump, AC 14 (+2 Dexterity, +2 Natural), 1 Incorporeal Grapple for 0 damage + blindness, 5 ft. by 5 ft./5 ft., Undead, Immunities, Fort +0, Ref +2, Will +2, Str -, Dex 14, Con -, Int -, Wis 10, Cha 11. Incorporeal. +8 Hide. Evasion. Improved Initiative. Shadow Blend (Su): In any condition other than full daylight, a bloodshadow can disappear into the shadows, giving it nine-tenths concealment. Artificial illumination, even a light or continual flame spell, does not negate this ability. A daylight spell, however, will. Appears as a two-dimensional humanoid shadow, moving preternaturally swiftly along surfaces. If it is somehow kept free of a surface or creature for more than a full round it ceases to exist, limiting it to short range leaps.