etraya | text; un: romano

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text; un: romano

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Hello Etraya, a few of the newest arrivals are originally from wherever we told you we're from, but before coming here we were in Etraya's sister city, Solmara. Solmara has overthrown their AI and is ruled by a woman named Alrys. She sent us here on a recon mission to steal supplies, and while some of us were considering it, upon arrival we decided not to.

I can't speak for the others, but I know for a fact if Alrys got wind of what this place is like, she'd start a war. I'm not interested, not because I'm kind and noble (I'm not) but because making two whole cities miserable would be stupid.

Aurora has been informed of everything, but in the interest of transparency I'm letting the rest of you know too.

We will be answering questions but only if they're not stupid and you're super nice about it. Keep in mind we're probably gonna get tortured then killed then tortured again for snitching. 😃❤️🥳👍🚀🦈

PS: Any magical healers out there?

(The PS is not included on the things we will be answering questions about)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Shadowheart isn't difficult to hear coming, no matter how quietly she tries to move; the chainmail she wears is prone to clinking, and the spear strapped to her back is prone to clinking against the chainmail. She's going through the hospital, room by room, opening doors until she finds her patient.

When she finally finds a fellow who looks like he's been shot in the leg, she stops, glancing around the room for any potential hidden surprises.]

You're the one with the gun wounds?

[ Robert finds it hard to believe that he lives in a world where people in full armor just hang out.

He's lying down, his leg's bandaged. He's also missing an arm, but that predates the whole shooting thing. ]

That's me. Thank you for coming.

[ He really doesn't want to go on the mission while still injured. ]

You may be a spy, but you've got manners, I'll give you that.

[Seeing nothing that rings any alarm bells, she steps into the room and shuts the door behind her.

In truth, she's never worked with a gunshot wound before; she only knows what guns are and what they do because someone here showed her. Which means that, while she knows she can heal any wound, she isn't sure whether she'll need to cut out the bullets first.]

Are the bullets still in there?

Thankfully no, both bullets went through.

[ It would've been a pain to have to dig them out. He wonders if Connor aimed on purpose, but he hasn't asked, the robot is sad enough as it is. ]

They were clean shots, no serious damage— but it'll take too long to heal on its own.

[That's a relief, really. She won't have to deal with anything that she's never dealt with before.]

Good. A clean wound is an easy wound to heal.

[She lays a hand on his leg near the bandage and whispers the words of the spell. Her eyes begin to glow with a pale blue light that suddenly flares in her fingertips, and for a brief moment the holy symbol of the goddess Selûne – two stylised eyes surrounded by seven stars – burns itself into the air in that same blue light before fading as she channels the power of the spell into him. She draws on a little more power than she might otherwise need to, just to be certain that he'll heal fully.

Once the light has fully faded, she reaches to unwind the bandage.]

There. I'm going to check you're fully healed.

[ He's known about magic healing for a while, but he's never actually witnessed it before— the clinic he ran in Solmara didn't have any wizards. He doesn't want to be fascinated, but he can't help it.

The pain disappears, it's a bit off-putting as the throbbing has been constant for days now. ]

You're my new favorite person here.

[ The leg is fully healed. It's impressive, he's gonna be thinking about it forever. ]

Thank you.

Easily said.

[People say all sorts of things when you've just cured them of a serious or long-suffered ill.]

But I hope you'll remember that sentiment should the time come to return the favour.

As a non-magical doctor, I have no idea of how I could help a magical healer, but I'll keep it in mind.

[ His skills aren't much use when there's magic available. But he's not ungrateful, if the opportunity arises he'll step up. ]

You may be surprised.

[Ever since she was kidnapped by mind flayers, she's been searching for a cure for what they did for her. There's precious little in her world that can help her – short of destroying the thing controlling the tadpole they put in her head – but she's held out some faint glimmer of hope that there are technologies and medical practices from other worlds that could.]

Have you got any experience with parasites?

In general, yes. But I'd need more specifics.

[ There's many kinds of parasites, many ways to kill them, and without knowing more he can't even start to consider their options. ]

[If he doesn't have any magical abilities, and is from a world where magic doesn't exist, there isn't much chance that he'll be able to help. But she describes the tadpole to him anyway, out of that faint hope she's been holding onto.]

Imagine a sort of worm that crawls in through someone's eye socket and curls up there, snug and cosy, until one day it consumes its host's brain and transforms – painfully – its host's body into that of the same creature that created the worm in the first place.

[ That's shockingly easy to imagine for him, he's got a very vivid imagination. ]

How big and how aggressive is it? If we try getting it out will it jump out and kill whoever's in the room?

Big.

[She holds up her hands to demonstrate, indicating something between two and three inches long. It feels massive, when it gets agitated and starts writhing behind her eye, and perhaps her memory of its appearance is exaggerated by that and all the horrors of the day it crawled its way into her head, but that's the size she recalls.]

I've yet to see one attack. When a host dies, the parasite crawls out of their skull and goes slithering off to get up to gods know what elsewhere. [Trying to return to the Elder Brain, perhaps? Or trying to find someone unsuspecting to infect? She doesn't know enough about illithid tadpole behaviour to know, and frankly she cares more about killing the things that finding out where they go.]

What have you tried?

[ Normally he'd suggest opening her head and taking it out right off the bat, but she's been very nice to him, so he figures he can try a little tact before jumping into brain surgery— a thing he can't actually do without a second working arm and at least one other competent doctor. ]

Everything available to me in my world. Removing the thing was more or less the sole focus of my life for weeks before arriving in this place. My magic is useless against it. A healer who'd been studying them had no answers. A hag offered to remove them for the price of an eye, but ended up conceding that they were protected by magic she couldn't penetrate. A wandering bard offered to take an ice-pick to my companion's skull; that went as well as can be imagined. A githyanki crèche was exactly the sort of bad idea that should never have been entertained in the first place. We even found one of the creatures that created the parasites who'd turned on its kind, and it told us the parasites were held in a magical stasis which, if broken, would result in our immediate and agonising deaths. It tried to brew a potion to bypass the stasis and remove the parasites, but to no avail.

[She frowns.]

I'm not looking for a miracle. I'm well aware those are in short supply. But there is medicine in other worlds that doesn't exist in mine. [And at this point, there's quite a lot she's willing to try if it means no longer living with a looming death sentence in her head.]

[ He has no idea of what a githyanki crèche is, but the rest of it makes sense. ]

Would it be safe to assume that the thing is removable without magic?

[ The question here is whether he's allowed to bring a gun to a magic duel. Or well, a scalpel, in this case. ]

Because I have ideas, but I'd need to see if this hospital has the equipment and we'd probably need people who know my world's medicine— with our luck it'd probably be a super genius twelve year old.

Nothing is safe to assume, but at this point, there are few options I'm not willing to at least consider. Though letting a twelve year old poke around in my brain is one of the less appealing options.

[She's met twelve year olds. They are, to say the least, pretty annoying.]

Would you take the worm for yourself, were you to extract it?

[Before this goes any further, excited as she is to have met someone who has ideas, she does need to be certain that he wouldn't want to use the tadpole for anything nefarious, should he manage to get it out of her head.]

Edited (hit post too soon oops) 2025-03-20 19:26 (UTC)

What would I do with an evil magic worm? I'd kill it, then incinerate it at least twice to make sure it can't come back.

[ He's absolutely not interested in either owning or being owned by some magic parasite. ]

First step would be doing some imaging to figure out where exactly it is. From there we might have options— I'm working under the assumption your brain is more or less the same as a human's, which I now realize is neither a safe nor smart assumption to make, but the pictures will clear that up for me pretty quickly. Gotta figure out if the hospital has a CT scanner— a big machine that can take photographs of your head without us having to do anything to it.

Good.

[This is encouraging. And it's a long time since Shadowheart has felt encouraged. Not only does he seem genuinely uninterested in trying to use the tadpole for himself, he's got concrete things he can offer her, even if she doesn't entirely understand how a 'scanner' can take 'photographs' of her brain.]

I would assume my brain is the same as a human's. [Though it's never occurred to her to wonder before.] How long will you need to find out whether this scanner is here?

About five minutes now that I can walk. If there is one we can get the pictures right away, but we might have to wait until after the mission for anything more involved.

[ He gets to his feet and peeks out of the room, maybe he can ask one of the helper bots. ]

[She walks into the hallway and looks around as though she might see a machine labeled 'CT scanner' sitting right there. No such luck, of course; she didn't actually expect it to be that easy.]

Hoping to find one helpfully waiting nearby, or at least a convenient sign pointing to one, would be too much to ask, I suppose. [She looks to Romano.] Where to?

We ask a robot.

[ He does, and the robot does inform him they have a CT scanner and where it is. ]

The robot says we're in luck.

[ Navigating the hospital is second nature to Robert; everything seems to be where it should be, so he has no trouble finding the right room. The machine is more modern than what Robert's used to, and he's not officially trained on how to use it. But luckily they have helper robots who are. ]

You know, this is turning out to be a great day for me.

Surprisingly good for me, too. I've been trying for nearly a year to get this little monster out of my head, and you're the first person I've come across with a proper idea of how to do it.

[She circles around the machine warily, reminded uncomfortably of the githyanki zaith'isk that had nearly killed Lae'zel.]

All this does it take pictures of my head?

Yeah, just take off any jewelry— it can mess with the images.

[ Robert will show her where to lie down once that's handled. The process takes 20 minutes at the most, and since Robert's right there and they don't have any patients, they can get the results pretty much immediately.

The size and location of the parasite should be obvious unless magic is somehow hiding it from technology. Robert doesn't know shit about how magic works. ]

[It's with a certain amount of reluctance that Shadowheart lays down in the machine, only doing so after she's checked and double-checked that there aren't any restraints and she can get up out of it with relative ease. Once the pictures are taken, the parasite is easy to spot: a bulbous, worm-like creature, a little smaller than a human finger, with little tentacles and rows on rows of teeth, curled up behind her left eye around the optic nerve.

She can feel it twitching as the machine works, as though it can sense that she's plotting to get rid of it. But it quickly stills again once the work is done.]

Well? [she asks impatiently.]

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cw parasite description

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cw: description of brain parasite