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

[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.]

[ Robert gets to see the fucking thing move, that's not ideal, they don't want the thing trying to squirm away mid-surgery. ]

Still going by the assumption that thing will behave the same way things from my world behave, but it looks removable. But I think we should try killing it first.

How do you propose killing it, exactly?

[She moves over to him to peer over his shoulder, hoping got get a look at the pictures for herself.]]

I'm not keen to repeat the ice-pick incident.

Still working on it. Having colleagues would help a lot.

[ He could give it a shot of something, but he'd have to get through her eye to get to it and he has no guarantee that wouldn't make it uppity. ]

What do you know about it? What does it eat? Does it sleep? How smart is it?

Little enough, I'm afraid. It eats brains, and the only reason it hasn't eaten mine is the stasis it's being held in. It doesn't sleep, as far as I can tell. I've no idea how intelligent it is.

[Mind flayers are highly intelligent, but their tadpoles, from what she's seen, appear to be mindless things focused only on consumption.]

I doubt you can speak with it or reason with it, if that's your aim.

Oh no, the thing could be begging for its life and the lives of its children in every language and I'd still want it dead.

[ She wants it gone, parasites don't get a say. It's very simple for him. ]

I'm worried about it being smart enough to understand what's happening and wanting to fight back. As long as it stays where it is, the most we're risking is your eye.

[She lets out a short bark of a laugh at his reassurance of how very dead he'd like the parasite to be.]

Oh, I like you. You know just what to say to warm a girl's heart.

[For a moment, she pauses, considering.]

It does squirm about when it's interfered with. But even if it tries to fight back, if you think you can get the damn thing out, I'm willing to shoulder some level of risk. I've woken every day for nearly a year now knowing it could be the day I finally die in agony thanks to this little monster. I want it dead and gone.

You think it can wait a month for the mission to be over?

[ They're on a tight schedule and both of them need to worry about surviving at the moment. ]

Between me and the helpful robots, we could probably handle it— but, it would be safer if I had two working hands or one other surgeon helping.

[ Both would be ideal, but if he'll make do. ]

My patience is thin, but not so thin I want corners cut or care tossed aside.

[For the first time in a long time, she feels a flicker of hope that she might finally be free of the tadpole. But she quickly suppresses it. Hope can be a cruel trap to fall into.]

Take what time you need to ensure that when it's done, it's done well. I'm willing to shoulder some risk, as I said, but I'd like it minimised however possible. I rather enjoy having my brain intact.

[ He points at the picture. ]

It being right by your eye means we don't have to open your skull. If I had to do it tomorrow I'd do it through the eye, but in a world where everything goes the way I want it to, we kill it before removing it.

How does that work?

[She peers curiously at the picture. It is odd, seeing the inside of her own head like this and hearing him talk about cutting open skulls. Nothing remotely like these pictures exist in her world, and surgery is a fairly rudimentary art.]

Typically in my world, anybody opening other people's skulls would raise a fair few alarm bells of the 'mad cultist' variety. How would you go through my eye without plucking the eye out, and how do you... put skulls back together without magic?

text; un: romano

cw parasite description

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cw: description of brain parasite

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