| rdfs:comment | - Among the forgotten tomes of a Dalaran library, in a musty pile somewhere in the back, there exists a very old journal written by a very old man. If you were to find this journal, though no one is saying you did, it might read something like this: "Stop reading immediately". If you kept reading, the book would explode and you would be feeling very sorry for yourself. That doesn't make a very good story, however, so let us assume you opened to page 68; one of the more interesting pages, to be sure.
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| abstract | - Among the forgotten tomes of a Dalaran library, in a musty pile somewhere in the back, there exists a very old journal written by a very old man. If you were to find this journal, though no one is saying you did, it might read something like this: "Stop reading immediately". If you kept reading, the book would explode and you would be feeling very sorry for yourself. That doesn't make a very good story, however, so let us assume you opened to page 68; one of the more interesting pages, to be sure. It details the third, eighth, tenth and thirteenth days of the fifth month of the third year of the research of a specific project of a specific Dalaran mage, and it reads as follows: "-is unresponsive. I must find a more durable test subject; thus far all experiments have resulted in an unusable sample. Every single one. Perhaps I should present the project, but... no. The consequences would be dire. All I need is more test subjects, but that worthless Garod keeps bringing me unusable corpses. I need undeath, not death!" "This subject is different. Much stronger than the others, more twisted, more bestial. I can't risk destroying this one; it resembles a traditional ghoul. A slow dilution process seems the best choice, but it will be difficult to restrain the subject without any magical tampering... I'll just chain it to the wall, lock the door, and hope for the best. This is my promise not to interfere with the process for at least two days." "Success! As is usually the case, the answer was as simple as it could be. I was thinking of it as a disease, but such was not the case; a simple necromantic contingency, self-perpetuating, is the source of the plague. Yet, this does not explain how the zombies can be organized... by all logic they should wander aimlessly, killing at random. The plague's zombies, however, seem to act as a hive mind. This will be a cause for concern." "As I suspected, the plague does unify its victims under a common goal. It is not, however, a hive mind; they are being controlled, as they would be by a necromancer. Something has created them, and now commands them, but to maintain that many simultaneously... regardless, it should be a simple matter to ward myself against such a low level of manipulation. The only issue will be to prevent mnemonic destruction, which I believe can be done with-" That would be where the page ends. Of course, reading any odd-numbered page will cause the explosion, so it is doubtful that anyone but the author could know the end to that sentence. You would be incredibly lucky to open to page 68 in the first place, of course, since most later pages were destroyed from water damage and earlier pages deal with more common problems such as fireballs that won't burn the caster and polymorph spells that affect the victim's mind as well as body. That simply wouldn't be interesting to read about at all, now would it?
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