Trawling through his own bodily remains sure does give him a queer feeling.

The fact that there is a piece of his jaw both in his hand and currently attached to his skull is proof that his immortality can synthesize arbitrary parts of his body from whole cloth. But apparently it only does so sometimes, or when needful? Is there some limit to the restoration, a level of damage beyond which the existing material is not repaired but rather discarded to make new bodily tissues?

It occurs to him that this particular result is decidedly incompatible with a senseless explosion pulverizing a mortal man’s body against the wall. There should be more than just the remnants of the head.

So Option b) is unlikely.

He should further lay it to rest. He’ll make another pass of inspection, moving up the lane from the last corner. This time he is looking for any wall mounted wires or hooks. If the thing that killed him was a trap and not an active adversary, he wants to see what it left behind.

One of the doors in the lane has a loosely coiled brown string that hangs from a hook mounted atop its frame.  Judging by the look of the fibers, it has not been moved nor made to bear weight in years.

There is nothing else.

As he searches he continues to think.

Whether it’s the stimulant of this odor or the involuntary dry retching he did earlier, his digestive system has awoken now, and his stomach is tightening with hunger cramps, despite the overall gruesomeness of the scene. The desire to eat is beginning to distract him, and testing how his immortality handles mild starvation does not seem like a fruitful endeavor at this time.

He forcibly brings his attention back to the mystery of the jawbone. He knows something of how predators behave. Small pack hunters usually bite at the legs until the prey is immobilized, then make repeated small attacks till the thing bleeds out and lies still. A large predator is likely either to intentionally kill by ripping out the throat, like a lion, or to simply pin the thing and begin eating its trunk, like an ice bear. In all cases, the soft central organs tend to be the most prized portion for their taste and nutrients. Failing to find any of his own in a pile of this magnitude does suggest either that his torso was eaten or that the enemy preferentially smashed his head.

It feels like the same Option a), Option c) forking again… For if the enemy is clever and aware of his immortality, then it might choose to target the brain to cause maximum amnesia. And if the enemy is an insatiable predatory beast that enjoys the taste of his flesh in particular, then it may well have eaten the inner organs, which it did not need to shatter bone to reach, and then moved on to the brain, which it did not fully consume, but was obliged to smash his skull to reach.

Perhaps his torso was broken open, furnishing some of the volume of blood (there sure is a lot here) but it then reconstituted itself in place, while his head was so shattered that it had to be built from scratch? 

Does that mean his tattoos did not need to be restored in this cycle? And if his body were burned to ashes, upon resurrecting, would he have fresh, clear skin? Or would it be restored even more grizzled but with the tattoos intact?

When he's finished his search, he returns to the doors of the lane and knocks again, this time more loudly. He’ll wait about two minutes between each door.

No sounds this time.

Okay. He’s pushing the limits of his abilities as a criminal detective.

He closes his eyes a moment. If he leaves now, what will he regret not having done here?

He might regret not testing the place for the presence of a Sigil portal, but he lacks the means to do so now. He might regret abandoning some obscurely hidden gate key or journal among the rubbish lying about, but that is why he has already doffed his vest and laid it up.

What remains is to stroll about this neighborhood and commit several landmarks to memory so that he can return here later.

He should also speak with those street children they passed earlier.

He returns to the wall, and he ties his vest and its contents up into a bindle that can be looped over his left wrist. The axe he carries in his right. He walks back to the pump and the masonry arch to look for the children.

There are none now loitering about the compound’s entrance. He does continue to hear some occasional high pitched shouts and snippets of conversation from out in the streets beyond.

Unfortunate.

Then he will walk a loop of around two hundred yards radius, marking any visible tall spires or prominent shop fronts and signs. What does he see?

He sees a butcher shop with a line of skinned hogs hanging by their feet.  He sees a schoolhouse with a tall cupola and an iron cross bar where a bell might be expected to hang, but doesn’t.  He sees a large, squat, civic-looking building with an arcade front and a piqued roof wherein a clock is mounted.  The time reads mid-afternoon.

On the opposite side of his circle there is a long line of temporary merchant stalls displaying everything from cookware to leatherwork to street meat.

The rest of the neighborhood could largely be described as brick townhomes and broad lanes.

Then he will enter the butcher shop and part with a common or two in exchange of some waxed butcher paper in which to wrap his pile of Flint Court rubbish. He’d like to be able to don his vest again and be less conspicuous walking abroad.

Glossing over the part where a large shirtless man wielding a battle axe and a bundle of trash enters a butcher shop to general consternation?

Being confirmed now in his belief that he is a well spoken and patient man, and not a bedlam beggar, he will persist and succeed at securing butcher paper if there is any in the establishment, despite the disadvantage of his first impressions.

Plus one square yard of butcher paper.  Minus two commons.

He swaps the vest bundle with the paper. Then he’ll browse the line of merchant stalls in search of a knapsack and a strap or holster for his axe.

At present his wealth amounts to one gold ring, three silver coins totaling four or five ounces, and around four score commons. He is willing to spend some minutes in haggling, and he is unwilling to spend more than a silver on both a knapsack and strap, something that will keep the axe held close across his back, with neither the spike nor the blade end liable to dig into his skull if he is rudely jostled.

At that price, he can purchase this leather satchel with a darkened pattern of the palm-and-eye, and this claymore scabbard with a shaft that is deep enough to secure his axe and whose attached leather belt is cut wide enough to be worn as a bandolier.  The satchel is of thoroughly cracked and blemished leather, and it certainly wouldn’t pass muster in polite company, but it is watertight and not an ill match for his vest and loincloth.

The shopkeeper of the leather goods stall is a duergar with a lazy eye, and he’s a hard bargainer to boot. It takes The Nameless One a solid half hour to locate and complete the purchase of the items he set out for.

Perfect.

The butcher paper parcel goes into the satchel. He keeps the coin purse secreted within his loincloth.

In parting, he asks the duergar which way to “The Mortuary, or Tarry Fields, if you please.”

The Nameless One will obligingly be pointed in a westerly direction.

Then he’ll buy a few commons worth of street meat skewers and swiftly devour them. If the meat vendor gives directions that are remotely in alignment with those of the duergar, he’ll set off there at once.

So she does.

Off he goes then. He vividly remembers the first few turns he made when fleeing the Mortuary earlier today, and he feels that if he can first reach there, he will eventually be able to locate the cuttlefish head tea house and then the alley in which he left Morte.

Having milked the opportunity of the tobacconist to the fullest, he’s now back to sailing in uncertain waters.

The most immediate next step is to find Morte, if the skull has not fled. That much seems obvious. He needs more knowledge of this city, the places to search most profitably for records of his past lives, and the places to avoid. There may also be some hall of learning where the marvel of his own immortality either as spectacle or subject of research might be traded for allyship and coin.

His top priorities now are:

1. To avoid being slain again and losing this day’s memories
2. To recover such resources of his prior incarnations as are not already spent
3. To study his enemy
4. To defeat his enemy

Concerning his resources: He notices he has some confusion regarding the Art and his own past experience with it. Something is amiss.

If he quickly leafs through his mind’s memories and builds up a running list of observations concerning the Art, what are the first ten which turn up?

1. The Art is a term that broadly covers the magic that is practiced by mortals across the planes


2. Unless you are the one-in-a-million mortals who have developed their Art to the point of interacting with the raw, mysterious machinery of the-source-of-all-magic, you are confined to learning and practicing certain pre-configured effects known called spells


3. These spells often vary in discrete intervals based on the mastery of the practitioner.  A Magic Missile spell, for example, has five distinct vibrational modes.  These modes scale the percussive force of the missile(s) linearly.  One may not cast a Magic Missile that is soft enough, say, to pierce through one sheet of parchment but not ten sheets.  The first vibrational mode is the lower limit on its power, and is already more than enough to break skin


4. Spells themselves also have something like vibrational modes of complexity, known as circles, which approximately demarcate them by the magnitude of their effect on reality and by their difficulty to prepare and cast.  As one develops their Art, one always progresses sequentially through these circles, up to the limits of their magical potential.  There are theoretically nine circles' worth of spells known to mortals, though a man fully devoted to pursuing the Art is unlikely to ever even witness an eight-or-ninth circle spell, let alone cast it himself


5. Wizards are one class of practitioners of the Art.  Rather than having their powers be bestowed upon them by a patron or emerge naturally due to a latent magical strain in their blood’s heritage, wizards develop in power through careful study and intellectual grasp of the spell effects.  The only requirements to begin training as a wizard are cleverness and discipline


6. The Nameless One has scraps of memory consistent with being a wizard of at least the third circle.  He has cast Fireball with some regularity.  He knows that wizards constitute no more than one in fifty of the mortal population, and fewer than one in fifty of those who stabilize a first circle spell will ever see fifth circle


7. Unless you are a very, very talented wizard, you will find that most spells require a verbal command, a physical gesture, and a small amount of a particular reagent.  There are many spells which require the verbal, but not the gesture component, or vice versa.  Among common reagents are sulfur, crushed pearl dust, and spider silk.  


8. The quantity of needed reagent material is trivially small for simple spells - one one-thousandth of an ounce or less at first circle - but scales exponentially, such that the few wizards who can cast the most powerful known spells in the planes are often more limited by resources than by the rate at which their magic replenishes itself between spell castings


9. Unless a wizard desires to spend ten minutes quietly meditating in the heat of battle to cast a single spell, they require an anchor, such as a spellbook or scroll, which contains runes and diagrams corresponding to the spell’s shape, marked in a kind of magical ink laced with trace amounts of the particular spell’s material components.  Prepared spells are anchors that are so named because they tie to a particular wizard’s mind and take shape in a conceptual, magical space beyond their mere physical presence. A wizard with a prepared spell must retain close proximity to their anchor, and must exert a constant, albeit minor mental effort to hold the spell, but can release it almost instantly, thereby expending it.  At The Nameless One’s level of wizardry, a practitioner might carry in a bag tiny vials of the material components and mix them with spell ink at the time of preparing their spells


10. The casting of a spell takes something out of a wizard, and a wizard who has prepared and expended the entirety of their quota of spells will require at least eight hours of low-cognitive time to regain their full magical reserves.  The pages of a wizard’s spellbook can be re-used a limited number of times in preparing the same spell by retracing the runes and marks of an expended anchor with fresh spell ink