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)

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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?

When you open the skull, you close it after. There's ways to reattach it, make sure it heals properly. What I want to do is less invasive, it's called transorbital surgery, you do it through the eye socket with specialized tools. I'll walk you through the whole thing once I'm sure that's what we're doing.

[ There's a lot of unknowns still. He needs to know how she works, how the drugs he knows will affect her, if she has a blood type. ]

I don't know enough yet. I can't put you in an OR without knowing how you'll react to the kind of medications I know. The medicine I'd use on a human might do nothing to you or it might be poison.

[It seems fantastical to her, that someone with no magic whatsoever could reattach cut-off skull pieces.]

I am half human. And as far as I'm aware, there aren't any medicines that behave differently between humans and high elves.

[She does, at least, have medical knowledge, though hers is limited to what exists in her world: herbal poultices and salves, and potions and elixirs made of herbs, mushrooms, and alchemical ingredients such as nothic eyes and wyvern stingers.]

But, best to be cautious.

I'll want to run some tests anyway. If you have a higher tolerance you could wake up in the middle of surgery, and I have it in good authority that's really alarming.

[ Especially if they have something through her eye at the time. Fun anecdote for him, absolutely terrifying experience for the patient. ]

[She spreads her hands in a gesture of assent.]

Run your tests, then. You have nothing if not a willing patient on your hands. Though I would like to know how your medicine differs from the ones I'm familiar with.

[She may be a willing patient – very willing, given how long and how desperately she's been trying to get the tadpole out of her head – but still one who believes in a healthy amount of skepticism, and that means learning what, exactly, he plans on using on her.]

Edited 2025-04-08 20:41 (UTC)

Deal. I love hearing myself talk, I can run you through what I know.

[ She just signed up for very very dull lectures on early 2000's Earth medicine. Robert knows a lot, with a strong focus on surgery. And since at the moment he has nothing better to do, he'll get more CT scans and run basic blood panels including typing, which he figures won't work. Why would half elves have blood types?

Assuming she doesn't stop his lecturing ten minutes in, she'll come out of it knowing every step of the surgery he's planning to, it involves endoscopy through the eye socket. Robert's plan is to kill the worm and remove it in pieces, but given he doesn't understand the stupid worm, he can't really assess the risk, nor even know if stabbing it with a sharp tool would kill it. ]

Anyway, if you're fine with it I'll ask around, see if we got any other doctors who can bring more to the table.

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text; un: romano

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cw: description of brain parasite

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