Level: Death 3, Lurk 3
Display: Auditory and material
Manifesting Time: 10 minutes
Range: Touch
Target: One dead creature
Duration: 1 minute/level
Saving Throw: Will negates; see text
Power Resistance: No
Power Points: 5
A death knell rings mournfully and a brackish ectoplasm seeps from your fingers, dripping on the corpse you seek to query. The fluid is quickly absorbed into the corpse’s rotting form, and it groans.
You grant the semblance of life and intellect to a corpse, allowing it to answer several questions that you put to it. You may ask five questions. Unasked questions are wasted if the duration expires. The corpse’s knowledge is limited to what the creature knew during life, including the languages it spoke (if any). Answers are usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive. If the creature’s alignment was different from yours, the corpse gets a Will save to resist the power as if it were alive.
If the corpse has been subject to speak with dead within the past week, the new spell fails. You can manifest this power with a corpse that has been deceased for any amount of time, but the body must be mostly intact to be able to respond. A damaged corpse may be able to give partial answers or partially correct answers, but it must at least have a mouth in order to speak at all.
This power does not let you actually speak to the person (whose soul has departed). It instead draws on the imprinted knowledge stored in the corpse. The partially animated body retains the imprint of the soul that once inhabited it, and thus it can speak with all the knowledge that the creature had while alive. The corpse, however, cannot learn new information. Indeed, it can’t even remember being questioned.
This power does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.
Augment: For every 4 additional power points you spend, you can ask one additional question.
Source: Complete Psionic, page 99. Imported the descriptive text from the referenced speak with dead spell and altered it for use as a psionic power.