<div class="floatright">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/19/59/d5/1959d5a89df588d70e329492b8e6ff84.jpg)</div><strong>Location:</strong>Professor Merryweather's Office<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>Tara<br/><br/>"Come in," she called when addressed.  The door was unlocked and available.  "You may want to lock the door if you prefer, but have a seat."<br/><br/>Other than the mystical information listed, the office was more or less identical to that of your average faculty professor.  Swap the posters of the arcane for mathematics tables and nobody would even notice.  The teacher gave Tara ample time to decide whether to lock the door - some students preferred privacy, but that was up to them.  Either way, she remained kind, warm, and friendly to the best of her ability.<br/><br/>Once Tara was ready, Professor Merryweather would continue.  "Now, the first question I often get is why a witch can't just scan for something."  Either Tara had figured it out and felt too embarrassed to ask, or she'd rather be able to take credit.  "The hard part with necromancy is that many such practicioners don't want to be chased down, which has set up the practice of expecting a contingency spell."  Compassion showed in her eyes.  "Contingency spells are metamagic well beyond what you'll understand from the classroom, but you're familiar with 'true love's first kiss' as setting a particular trigger for ending the spell.  As such, it's not uncommon for experimenting necromancers to set such triggers that end the spell in the event that someone attempts a divination on the spell in question."<br/><br/>Getting a little more serious, Professor Merryweather explained, "Now, I'm not saying that that's what happened to you, but it's not unheard of.  If it is accurate, then as soon as someone performs a divination to discover the nature of the spell, or perhaps who cast it, then the spell will unravel when one attempts to investigate it.  It's an unlikely scenario, but not worth the risk."<br/><br/>After that, however, she gave a soft smile.  "Personally, having had a chance to get to know you and watch you a bit, I have a simpler proposal.  I've gone over the basics of willworking to some degree in class, and it's a far more base and far less controlled practice such that few even consider it a true practice, but it must be understood as a possibility for your unusual case."<br/><br/><div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/0e/02/be0e0259484a6acae8e42d4e984f2785.jpg)</div>Spinning her monitor, she showed a particular image she'd found.  "I don't know if this is sufficiently 'pop culture.'"  Little surprise that the centuries-old teacher didn't recognize every reference out there.  "However, it springs the concept to mind.  I also don't usually use profanity without reason, but I think I'll need it to make the next point."<br/><br/>Leaving the image up, she folded her hands.  "Dying is every bit as traumatizing as giving birth even when the body and soul are in no shape to handle it.  Intoxicants only make this harder because of the lack of understanding of what's going on."  Her words contained no judgment, simply an explanation for why intoxicants came into it at all.  "By the time a body is drained of the conventional blood and had it replaced, removing the intoxicant effects, a particular being might come into a very simple and devout frame of mind:"  She gave a momentary pause for effect, but her voice remained kind and understanding.  "Fuck this.  I can't be dead.  I'm clearly not dead because I'm still here.  I still have plenty of shit to do and I'm not going to let something like a lack of pulse slow me down."<br/><br/>A flutter of her fingers indicated that the quoting and profanity use was over.  "It's not a conscious decision any more than someone decides to wake up, but willpower is still expended, balanced against the state of reality as we know it.  Psychology teaches that the first stage of denial is grief, but in truth, it's the first sheer blast of willpower created when a human soul comes into conflict with something it refuses to accept."<br/><br/>Next came the harder part.  "Now, you've no doubt heard in classic literature that the Restless return because of this or that, intending to perform some task before moving on to their rest.  This is from back when people looked forward to joining the afterlife, something far less common in the modern day."  A simple shrug gave the teacher a faint jiggle that she hadn't noticed.  "Perhaps you feel some calling, the distant feel of your relatives waiting for you, and perhaps you don't.  My suggestion would be to reflect on the matter in a way that leaves you feeling open; meditation is invaluable but hardly the only way to achieve such a state."  Perhaps a touch of knowing in her smile; Merryweather knew drugs existed even if she didn't partake.<br/><br/>"If you do feel a calling, then the only one likely keeping you here on this realm is you yourself.  If so, you can be cajoled and called by various loved ones waiting for you, but not compelled."  The teacher didn't have firsthand information here, but her eyes danced with the stories and lessons she's acquired in her search for knowledge.  "Ultimately, they're forced to wait for you for as long as it takes you to cross over, which isn't even necessitated by the destruction of your physical form, though Restless without access to their bodies do have a harder time of things."  Her tone came out a little matter-of-fact, guessing that Tara can put all that stuff together without help.<br/><br/>She folded her hands once more.  "If you did reconnect to your body through a self-generated act of willworking, I can also tell you that you aren't likely to break it by accident.  Willworking isn't a continual effort that must be maintained; once activated, it's effectively locked.  Undoing it in the same way would require a superior and opposite act of willworking in the sense of desiring to be dead with the same fervor one desires to be alive, which changes in a fundamental way when the 'death' you now understand is quite different from the 'death' spoken of in gothic poetry."<br/><br/>Her eyes showed that she knew she was throwing out quite a bit, but it was clear that Professor Merryweather wanted to make this as helpful and painless as possible.  "The ultimate question, of course, is if you believe this is the correct answer.  As it's been described to me, an act of pure and absolute willworking feels like a cathartic revelation once discovered."  The Professor had plenty other options and considerations; she just figured that this was the most likely.