illness tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

foone:

Your throwing knife embeds itself in the wall behind the wizard’s head, and he pulls a gun. Too late to get out of sight, he pulls the trigger, and you pray that it hurts.

You pray there’s blood. That you need healing soon, that you’ll be weak in that arm for months.

Because the alternative is so much worse. The last thing you want to happen when you go up against an artificer is that they shoot you with bullets that don’t hurt. That means they have a gun that shoots something besides pain and death. Something worse.

You collect all the clues you can once the battle is over, the wizard breaking a pendant of escape and warping out of the continent. Various blueprints written in eldrich runes that hurt your mundane eyes to even look at, books that whisper in the night, prototypes labeled ominous things you worry about.

You make it back home, mission partially successful, fearful that the townspeople might attack you on sight. Worried that your loved ones might not remember you. You visit another, friendlier wizard, to have them examine your collected evidence. They pour over the items, getting excited about new branches of science, magic, and magical science. You angrily cut them off, saying you’re not here for their PhD thesis, just tell you what that fucking gun did?

The light goes out of their eyes, but they pull up a final blueprint. Says here it’s the Gun of Cold. Odd, you reply. It didn’t feel cold when they shot you with it. You sneeze.

They offer you a handkerchief. No, not that kind of cold. Simon in the village makes some good chicken soup. You’ll need it, magic can’t cure this you know, but you’ll be better in a week or two.

Tags:

#One Hundred and One Magical Pistols #storytime #guns #illness tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

genderfluid-druid:

genderfluid-druid:

hurr hurr I’m a human body hurr hurr I’m gonna solve all my problems using mucus

“i require more fluids” well what did you do with the fluids I already gave you. hmm? did you make more mucus with them? you made more mucus with them.

Tags:

#that one post with the thing #(saddened but unsurprised to look at the OP and learn that it was inspired by a COVID-19 infection) #(certainly I thought about this post when I had COVID) #((even if my mucus levels were relatively mild)) #covid19 #illness tw #unsanitary cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

xenosaurus:

I’m working on a concept for angels as a type of undead— human corpses animated by light.

They can’t see, having been blinded by the brightness of their transformation, and the illusion of wings comes from cuts down the length of their spine, allowing light to escape. Much like vampires, they maintain some semblance of their living personality, at least at first, and need to eat something special— in their case, the magic in the flesh of other undead creatures.

The setting I’m making them for sees them as a terrifying necessary evil in places where they’re plentiful, as they hunt worse threats, but they’re often misinterpreted as holy defenders in places where they’re scarce.

​

xenosaurus:

They definitely are NOT defenders of humanity, especially as they get older and their minds start to wear down. Older angels can rarely tell individual people apart, stop communicating entirely, and are known to kill people who have even been NEAR other undead because they smell like food.

Eventually, if they haven’t been hunted down by humans to make them stop, they start trying to hunt other angels and get killed that way.

​

xenosaurus:

Vampires in this setting are the whole package— hypnotic mind control, shape shifting, making thralls, superhuman strength, generally incredibly hard to kill. Light weakens but does not kill them, at least when it’s normal sunlight.

Humans struggle hard to deal with even a few of them, but angels pry those suckers from their lairs like shucking oysters and devour them.

​

xenosaurus:

Angels happen when someone is killed with light without their body being destroyed, which is very very hard to do by accident. The setting has a few powerful entities living outside society who use magic like that, and at one point, angels were people who pissed them off.

Of course, angels are very useful, especially when they’re young. There are some groups that send people out to bother entities of light on purpose, and eventually a ritual for making one without outside “help” was developed.

Human-created angels are usually either volunteers from cults that think of angels as holy creatures, or people nobody would miss being turned into vampire hunters against their will. You can tell the difference by how the cuts on their back are made— the cults use lines of carved runes, while sketchy alchemists make straight cuts on either side of the spine. Angels made by pissed off non-human entities usually claw at their backs until they tear the skin, so their “wings” are jagged.

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xenosaurus:

6e1a507021d56137d13e334b2c17abe0dea13db8

[ID: reply from @neojet280 reading “How long does it take for them to lose their mind after the turn into angels? Years? Decades? Centuries?]

Good question! Generally the Brain Weird starts to kick in after a decade or two, and you get to the point where they’re not really themselves anymore by 50 years. By 100 years in, they stop behaving like social creatures, and from there it depends on the individual how quickly they stop being safe to be around.

Mental decline in the undead is universal, but timeframes vary! Vampires remain functional for centuries and lose themselves around 500-600 years, while ghouls rarely maintain any personality by the end of the second year and revenants can only function without being puppeted for a decade or two.

​

xenosaurus:

The quick and dirty of the four types of undead:

Vampires— robust supernatural powers, keep their minds for centuries, created by other vampires via biting, feed on human blood (animal blood is not sufficient)

Angels— light magic, minds are lost by 150 years, created by killing a person with light, feed on the bodies of other undead

Ghouls— can keep going with huge pieces of their bodies missing, mindless by their second winter, spreads like a bacteria, feeds on any living flesh

Revenant— powers vary, become empty puppets by 15-20 years in, created by human magic to be undead slaves, draw energy from their summoner or can be fed the flesh of magical creatures

​

xenosaurus:

The plot of this is about a city that suffers a flood and finds itself abruptly overrun with ghouls. This leads to the local alchemist’s guild kidnapping people to make angels, which gets the vampires involved, which attracts the older angels, and so on.

​

xenosaurus:

I’m thinking about this setting again! Today’s world building bit:

Vampires do have a strong negative association with garlic, but not because of anything to do with the garlic itself. Vampire hunters have a potion they take that makes their blood highly toxic to vampires, and one of the side effects is sweat that reeks of garlic. As this isn’t commonly understood by the common people, rumors spread that vampire hunters were keeping garlic in their clothes to ward them off.

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xenosaurus:

I’m working on this again, so I gave it a name— a sunken pyre! monster hunters use funeral pyres to burn the bodies of people killed by ghouls or vampires before they can wake back up as the undead, and a failed job or out of control situation is often euphemistically referred to as a pyre getting rained on or otherwise trying to start a fire using damp wood.

A sunken pyre, being underwater, would be a VERY dire situation. The plot also starts with a literal flood, so, twofold!

​

xenosaurus:

As I work on the human characters, I’m also developing monster hunting organizations! First off— the ones with the dogs.

The Graveyard Houndsmen are a primarily rural brotherhood, formed to deal with ghoul outbreaks centuries ago. While not a strictly religious order, their work is highly ritualized and most of their traditions are safety rules turned into superstitions.

The Houndsmen adopt and breed dogs that have survived attacks by ghouls near graveyards, unknowingly breeding for resistance to the blight of the undead while believing the animals themselves to be supernatural— church grims. Because these dogs are often strays, the breeding lines vary wildly in traits.

The members of this order take vows of chastity and refuse to see doctors, as they are virtually all infected with the undying plague, the poorly-understood magical phenomenon that turns the dying into ghouls. The curse is in the blood and can be sexually transmitted or passed to a child that is conceived by them. (Some houndsmen exploit a loophole by having non-reproductive sex with each other, though. Don’t be a snitch, the head of the chapter doesn’t need to know.)

Because the order is a lifelong commitment, Houndsmen give up their family names, all using “Grim” as a surname. The majority of them are men, but women are not banned from the order unless they have living children.

​

xenosaurus:

The Houndsmen are well-loved by the communities they serve, in spite of being a bit odd and intense. Being entrusted with one of their hunting dogs that has been injured or grown too old to work is considered a huge honor, as it is believed that the grim’s spirit will protect the home of those who cared for it after its passing. There’s even a popular fairy tale about a child turning around their family’s fortunes by being kind to a stray dog that turns out to be a Houndsman’s companion!

The Houndsmen are rare in larger cities, where cremation of the dead is mandatory to avoid ghoul outbreaks. Their reputation is damaged somewhat by being seen by city folk as similar to the next monster hunting group I’m going to talk about— the Keepers of the Undying Light, a very ethically ambiguous order of alchemists that deal with vampires. They were the original creators of the ritual to make angels without outside help!

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xenosaurus:

The Keepers are a broad and diverse organization, most of which operates in secrecy. The alchemists rarely do much fighting themselves, instead working with angels, revenants, and hired help to accomplish their goals. While their public goals and general mission are positive, they have a corruption problem and tend towards “the end justifies the means” in their plans.

Keeper hunters are basically mercenaries, and the problems with their employers are more likely to fuck them over than anyone else. A LOT of them die on what they didn’t know were suicide missions, end up as revenant puppets, or are mutilated by alchemical experiments done on them under the guise of medical care.

​

xenosaurus:

The Houndsmen are obviously not a perfect organization, as they’re too broad for true oversight and they live and breathe superstition, but they’re too reliant on the good favor of the common people to get away with large scale abuses. Almost all of them are technically homeless, generally being cared for by communities another Houndsman has protected as they travel around for jobs. They really need their good reputation!

The main Houndsman in the story is Arlo Grim, a man on the edge of middle age who has been to a proper city maybe twice. He isn’t really prepared for the level of political intrigue the Keepers of the Undying Light bring to the table.

​

xenosaurus:

It’s time for plot, so, first, let’s talk about the Undying Plague.

The Undying Plague is a blood curse, a unique type of magic that functions like a bloodborne pathogen. It is particularly widespread due to its difficulty to detect before a cursed individual dies, as well as a general reluctance to destroy the undead it produces before they get violent.

For most people, the curse does nothing until your death, at which point it raises you as a ghoul. The longer you lived with the curse, the longer the resurrection takes, with ghouls that have more time to “cook” being stronger and more resilient, but with less remaining of their minds. The quickest resurrections are around 20 minutes, and the slowest take a few days.

Because ghouls get violent as their minds decay, which happens very quickly in most situations, it is very dangerous to have them around. However, because ghouls originally maintain their personalities and memories to some extent, once they’re awake their loved ones have a tendency to hide them. To avoid this, cities have strict laws regarding immediate cremation of the dead.

Most people with the Undying Plague don’t know it, and most would-be ghouls are burned before anyone realizes they were cursed. Generally, the only sign of a spreading outbreak (assuming it’s being spread by the living, and not by ghouls biting people) is cases of ‘rotting fever’, a deadly allergic reaction that afflicts people with especially high magical sensitivity when exposed to the curse. As getting the curse itself kills them, their revival is nearly instant, and the new undead decaying and losing their mind is mistaken for a living person with a disease.

​

xenosaurus:

So, what happens is this: 30 years ago, a pox went through the city of Larkhollow. While the fatality rate was low, the situation overwhelmed the city’s doctors and alchemists, causing over a dozen cases of rotting fever to be missed. The open sores of the pox and the poor sanitation in the poorer areas of the city left more than half of the city unknowingly cursed with the Undying Plague.

However, with a recent contagious disease in everyone’s memories, sanitation picked up, and cremation rules were enforced more strictly. The situation went unnoticed until the city’s dam broke 3 decades later.

The resulting flood killed many people, with a lot of bodies being lost in the water. The deceased had carried the curse for long enough to be nearly mindless as they woke up over the next few days, turning their attention to the survivors still trapped in the city.

Complicating the situation, Larkhollow played host to a collection of vampires whose lairs were no more resistant to the flooding than the above ground buildings. Suddenly exposed, they are in full survival mode, hiding among the human survivors and trying to avoid or sabotage the monster hunters suddenly all over the city.

​

xenosaurus:

All of this finally brings us around to the primary angel character, who was previously kept hidden by the local Keepers when she wasn’t vampire hunting. Her name is Lior, and she was an unmarried young woman raising her younger sister 30 years ago, when the Keepers used the pox as a cover to kidnap a number of test subjects to make new angels.

At the time of the flood, she is the only surviving angel in Larkhollow, as the older angels had been culled by the Keepers and the others who had been created beside her had either been taken to other cities or died during a conflict between Keeper factions 3 years prior.

Shortly after becoming the main defense for the city, Lior is recognized by her sister, Sadie, who never believed she’d wandered off to die of illness.

Tags:

#storytime #angels #aging cw #illness tw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

fox-bright:

My covid post from last year is going around again, as I sit here debating how and what to write about HPAI H5N1.

I’m tired.

Things to know:

  • HPAI H5N1, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1, is so far wildly lethal when humans get it. Somewhere between 53% and 56% of the humans who have been found to have it have died.
  • Those people mainly got it from interacting with sick birds. A couple have gotten it from interacting with sick mammals. The one of those that’s most important to US news right now is a worker at a milk cow farm who got sick very recently. That worker’s only symptom before getting on antiviral medication was pinkeye.
  • (Keep your cats indoors; cats are getting it from sick birds. Don’t have bird feeders this year. Do NOT interact with wild birds that are acting strangely; do not poke at dead wild birds.)
  • Humans are not yet giving it to humans. There are one or two cases where they might have done, in the last few years; those cases guttered out quickly, to the great good luck of our species, and did not spread.
  • Human-to-human transmission is the big concern.
  • We are not in any immediate danger of H2H transmission. When we’re in immediate danger, you’ll know.
  • When the flip happens, we will go from not being in immediate danger to being in immediate danger, very rapidly. This could happen this month, or in five months, or in five years, and we don’t know when.
  • By the time we are in immediate danger, it is too late to do the greater bulk of your preparation.
  • So it’s time to prepare now. This time we have is a blessing. We should not squander it. What would you have done differently in September, 2019, if you knew what was coming? Do that.
  • With some differences; a) flu can pass by fomite–that is, a sick person touches a doorknob, you touch a doorknob, you rub your face, you get sick–so you actually do need cleaning chemicals for this one. b) This one gets in through the eyeballs pretty easily in its current shape, so eye protection should be prepped for adding to masking in public spaces. c) this one is gonna call for fever reducers and we know how hard they were to get when covid hit; stock up. And stock up on pet food if you can keep it from going bad, because pet food gets its protein from cow and bird meat; there will be shortages.
  • With a lot of similarities; the flu is airborne so don’t stop masking, if we have a proper lockdown this time you’re going to wish you had flour and rice and canned fruit so keep stock of all your staples. If you have a nice big freezer, now is the time to get beef and chicken before the prices shoot to the ceiling. I’m also stocking up on powdered milk and powdered eggs for baking with.

We have made a lot, a LOT of mistakes with how we’ve handled covid. But one thing we didn’t do wrong was all of the community-building in the early days. Think about what worked then, and what didn’t really work. Now is the time to make sure community bonds are strong. As always, as in ANY potential disaster, there are two most-important questions?

Who can protect and support you?

Who can you support and protect?

Plan accordingly.

Tags:

#OP is from 2024-04-05 #in the past month‚ things have continued to spiral #the cold war has not yet gone hot‚ but it’s notably warmer than it was #personally‚ I would not be willing to bet money that good PPE will still be available for sale a month from now #it might be #it might not #don’t rely on it #(I rather suspect the only reason it’s still in stock is that the PPE supply chains bulked up somewhat after 2020) #(so that they’re not the very first thing to fail anymore the way they were then) #(in 2020‚ respirators were already impossible to obtain by late January) #also‚ take a moment to thank all those who fought for pasteurised milk to be the standard #PSA #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #HPAI #illness tw #apocalypse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once #I think I will rearrange my queue to place this post second instead of its default eleventh #and arrange the current ninth post to be first

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

zoethebitch:

d71ddb3d6903dbe011624e22ec046cba1f5721c1

Tags:

#environmental storytelling #journal entry found on skeleton etc etc #you know how the Wikipedia article on smallpox starts with ”smallpox was”? #the Wikipedia article on E3 2020 starts with ”The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2020 (E3 2020) would have been” #(it was not until I went and read it that I realised that an in-person E3 was never held again) #(and only one virtual one (in 2021)) #(I guess I’m not the intended audience for this photo) #covid19 #juxtaposition #illness tw #apocalypse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cheeseanonioncrisps:

A murder mystery film set in a medieval village. After an outbreak of plague, the villagers make the decision to shut their borders so as to protect the disease from spreading (see the real life case of the village of Eyam). As the disease decimates the population, however, some bodies start showing up that very obviously were not killed by plague.

Since nobody has been in or out since the outbreak began, the killer has to be somebody in the local community.

The village constable (who is essentially just Some Guy, because being a medieval constable was a bit like getting jury duty, if jury duty gave you the power to arrest people) struggles to investigate the crime without exposing himself to the disease, and to maintain order as the plague-stricken villagers begin to turn on each other.

The killer strikes repeatedly, seemingly taking advantage of the empty streets and forced isolation to strike without witnesses. As with any other murder mystery, the audience is given exactly the same information to solve the crime as the detective.

Except, that is, whenever another character is killed, at which point we cut to the present day where said character’s remains are being carefully examined by a team of modern archaeologists and historians who are also trying to figure out why so many of the people in this plague-pit died from blunt force trauma.

The archaeologists and historians, btw, are real experts who haven’t been allowed to read the script. The filmmakers just give them a model of the victim’s remains, along with some artefacts, and they have to treat it like a real case and give their real opinion on how they think this person died.

We then cut back to the past, where the constable is trying to do the same thing. Unlike the archaeologists, he doesn’t have the advantage of modern tech and medical knowledge to examine the body, but he does have a more complete crime scene (since certain clues obviously wouldn’t survive to be dug up in the modern day) and personal knowledge from having probably known the victim.

The audience then gets a more complete picture than either group, and an insight into both the strengths and limits of modern archaeology, explaining what we can and can’t learn from studying a person’s remains.

At the end of the film, after the killer is revealed and the main plot is resolved, we then get to see the archaeologists get shown the actual scenes where their ‘victims’ were killed, so they can see how well their conclusions match up with what ‘really’ happened.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #murder cw #illness tw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wizardarchetypes:

wizardarchetypes:

disturbed by how little ppl acknowledge the secondary health risks of vampire bites. if your vampire lover is drinking your blood you MUST be up to date on your tetanus shot. puncture wounds are at especially high risk for tetanus infections. just because your partner was born in 1312 doesn’t mean you have to die like it.

moreover they should be prepping the bite point with an alcohol wipe.

and while I’m at it, I’ve noticed a blithe disregard for health & safety when it comes to blood pacts. can’t believe I have to say this but you should absolutely NOT be cutting your palm open with the pocket knife from your belt holster (??????)

if you’re expecting to be in a blood pact/oath situation please just pick up some sterile finger lancets from the pharmacy. cannot stress this all enough.

Please y’all!! tetanus is NOT caused by rusty metal. It’s a bacteria found damn near everywhere, and wounds infected with saliva are especially high risk for tetanus infections.

it’s also a common misconception that vampire saliva is antiseptic. Vampires spread that myth on purpose. They also CAN cross running water. Make them bathe and brush their teeth!!!!

Tags:

#yes this #vampires #illness tw #unsanitary cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

homunculus-argument:

If plague doctors hadn’t been a real thing, and you made them up for a speculative history/fantasy story, people would complain that they’re implausibly advanced and way too cool.

Like you’re like “yeah there’s this super lethal illness and nobody actually knows how it spreads so just to be safe they’ve got these sick gothy fucking hazmat suits. No Greg shut up they totally had all the materials to make them, you can make fabric splatter-resistant by waxing and oiling it. And the mask is because of the- guys shut up, let me finish. The mask is- there’s scented- guys shut up. They didn’t have germ theory but they figured it has something to do with the air smelling- No shut up, you’re a fucking furry. The beak makes it cool. Jerks.”

Tags:

#history #clothing #illness tw #discourse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

robustcornhusk:

toasthaste:

oh the Reply All host* has a kind of spiritual successor podcast called Search Engine that’s ticking off most of the same boxes for me. It’s not explicitly about the internet but it’s about digging around trying to find answers for really specific questions, and it has a very similar vibe/editing/production.

Currently listening to “Why can’t we just turn the empty offices into apartments?” (Which thus far basically aligns with the stuff I thought I knew about the subject and has the same extremely-listenable quality that Reply All had)

Other eps of interest to me include “How sad are the monkeys in the zoo?” “How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?” and “Wait, should I not be drinking airplane coffee?”

Not a ton of eps out yet, like 15-20 maybe? Apparently they’re gonna do 40 and see how much support they get and if it’s enough then they’ll commit to 40 more and so on.

very tangential to “is it okay to drink the airplane coffee” -> lately i was reading about Germs On Planes and also Germs While Hiking -> apparently you sometimes get hiker-epidemics of norovirus on popular hiking trails, because there’s no running water to wash your hands with, and hand sanitizer DOES NOT KILL NOROVIRUS

which was news to me! maybe it’s not news to other people.

Tags:

#PSA #illness tw #vomit cw #unsanitary cw #norovirus is fucking terrifying #(she says as someone who probably has Long Norovirus) #((though she was never tested to confirm it was that and not some other stomach bug)) #(true‚ my new baseline is actually overall *better* than my old one) #(but those first two weeks fucking sucked and the next six weeks were not great either) #(and it was a few months after that to psychologically adjust to the permanent appetite reduction) #you ever read the Wikipedia article? #my main takeaway from reading it was that if you are ever eating in a restaurant #and someone‚ *anywhere* in the restaurant‚ vomits #abandon your food and leave immediately #(I don’t know what I’m going to do if I’m *working* in a restaurant and this happens) #(99.97% filtration might actually not be enough against fucking norovirus) #tag rambles #(I don’t queue tag rambles‚ so that I can keep track of which posts to put in the comment roundup) #(so you’re getting this one upfront) #(have fun)