The Professor’s experiments with animagnetism continued, and after making a magnetograph of one of the crows in his yard, he was able to craft his most sophisticated creation yet.

Using a series of broken and blank keys obtained as a job lot from a local tinker, the Professor was able to craft an animagnetic field in his cyclotron, based on the magnetograph, that resulted in a raven that assembled itself out of keys, with the metal being used as feathers around a hollow core. Though the Professor was able to add a tin whistle of his own design to allow the creature to approximate a crow’s cry, the metal rendered it too heavy to fly, though it would reverse its polarity to hover and “fly” through the Professor’s lodestone drome on occasion.

The keyraven was intended to be the first of a number of animagnetically created creatures, culminating in the first homo magneticus or magnetic man. Indeed, a number of magnetographs were taken for this purpose, including a cat, a dog, a horse, and an unidentified human long thought to be the Professor himself. But problems with the process soon revealed themselves.

For one, the magnetic field was self-sustaining but would fade over time and had to be periodically replenished in an expensive and time-consuming process. For another, the powerful fields tended to attract other ferromagnetic objects in unsafe and unpredictable ways, requiring the Professor to clear his magnetic lab of all iron and steel, relying instead on earthenware, wood, copper, and brass at great expense. The sheilding of the magnetic equipment, accomplished through a procedure not yet fully understood, was reportedly especially expensive and time-consuming. Worse still, the Professor’s other experiments, not all of which dealt with ferromagnetism, were so disrupted by the animagnetic work that they had to be held in a seperate building halfway across the estate.

For this reason, after the Professor’s sudden death at his desk due to heart failure, the other academics and intellectuals retained to examine his work were at a loss to explain, understand, or build upon it. The heavy contents of his lab, built into the structure itself, were ultimately left to rot.

The key crow, the sole animagnetic being known to exist, was recharged several times by the Professor’s housekeeper, who had learned some of his secrets through discreet observation. But upon her death of tuberculosis eighteen months after her employer, no further work was possible.

The key crow dissipated about two years after this, having gradually shed its “feathers” and lost its mobility over time. While some drawings and sketches exist, the crow’s unique and intense magnetic field meant that it was impossible to photograph, as the delicate internals of cameras were destroyed and film corrputed by the process.

Indeed, until the rediscovery of the Professor’s work decades after his death, his theories of animagnetism were widely dismissed as a hoax or sensationalism.

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