shellphones | [open] 🔥 a research project of sorts

Entry tags:

[open] 🔥 a research project of sorts

Type: Text
Sender ID: phoenixdominant (Joshua Rosfield)
To: Open
Subject: Research into medical conditions, sicknesses and diseases.
Warnings: Tba.

Hello, I am Joshua Rosfield. I fly under the corsair's banner with The Hideaway.

Of late, I have set myself to the task of compiling a reference, a compendium, if you will, of the many maladies, curses, afflictions, and fevers known to manifest upon this star. My concern lies not with ailments familiar to our home worlds, but rather with those that are native to this star alone. Born of its soil, sky, and magics.

This work will encompass all that is known. Recorded symptoms, confirmed cases, and such cures or countermeasures devised by learned minds or discovered through hard-won experience.

Here are a few of those examples that I've gathered:

The Drowning Sickness:

📌 A rare and insidious illness, marked first by the appearance of a deep black bruise upon the skin. Often on the hands, at the base of the neck, spine, or over the heart. The bruise is tender to the touch and slowly grows in size and intensity, becoming inflamed as the affliction progresses.

While waking symptoms are troubling, it is during sleep that the sickness reveals its true nature. Those afflicted are haunted by vivid, suffocating dreams. Visions of drowning in dark, endless seas. With each sleep, the dreams deepen. Patients note the sensation of lungs filling with water, of being pulled under by unseen hands, or of sinking into deep, endless water.

Upon waking, the sufferer experiences acute breathlessness, as though having truly emerged from drowning. Over time, rousing from sleep becomes increasingly difficult, and some fall into a slumber from which they never wake. Death comes quietly, the body showing signs of asphyxiation. Lungs filled not with water, but with nothing at all.

If untreated, it is always fatal. The interval from first bruise to death varies. Between three to nine nights, depending on the patient's strength and resistance.

📌 Treatment: While no universal cure is known, skilled healers have reported partial success through use of aetheric purgatives combined with dreambinding incantations. Removal or destruction of the bruise by mundane means (burning, lancing) has no effect and may hasten decline. Smelling salts or ingesting powerful angelic jellyfish have shown some success in staving off deeper stages of the dreams, though their effect is temporary, offering only reprieve rather than remedy. What appears to be definitive is surviving the drowning dream, itself.

The Crystal Affliction:

📌 A rare condition said to be contracted by those who venture too deep into the forgotten caverns and shadowed mountains of remote, uncharted isles. Victims first notice sharp, painful growths erupting upon the skin. Jagged shards of crystal or glass-like rock, as though the land itself seeks to reclaim their flesh.

Left untreated, the affliction progresses. The crystalline formations spread, encumbering movement, disrupting vital functions, and slowly petrifying the body from within. In time, the victim is left encased in a gleaming, translucent prison. A statue of living crystal, robbed of will and warmth.

Those in the later stages suffer from extreme lethargy, dulled senses, and an emotional emptiness that renders them pliable, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

📌 Treatment: Healers across all the Leviathans have developed a method to remove the crystalline growths through careful surgery, thanks to a local riftfarer’s extensive knowledge of crystal. The procedure is long and taxing, requiring potent sedatives or enchantments to ease the pain. Even so, few emerge unscarred and this procedure has yet to be mastered.

The Thornbind Curse:

📌 A highly contagious, creeping ailment marked by vine-like growths that first appear upon the hand. Over time, these thorned tendrils thicken and climb the body, binding tighter with each passing day. The afflicted are left with painful welts, bruises, and skin pierced by sharp thorns.

Evidently, the vines seem to grow faster in those weighed down by deep, unmet desires, as if the affliction feeds upon longing that is left to fester.

📌 Treatment: A medicinal cure was created that can be taken topically to cure the affliction completely. Trials have proved extremely successful. A full entry on the cure can be found here.

While there remains much yet to study regarding the myriad of ailments afflicting this realm, I pen these entries in hopes they may one day form the foundation of a true medical compendium, for the benefit of others.

On that note, my current inquiries lie with the nature of petrification in all its varied and vexing forms. I seek not only to understand its onset, but to uncover means by which to slow its advance, or better yet, reverse it. Should you possess notes, I would be most grateful for your shared insight.

And, as I am aware, this is hardly the most uplifting or interesting fare for one's morning coffee ... do share instead tales of your most recent voyages across the seas? I love a tale.

[And that concludes this giant nerd post.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Though the transmission arrived to him in text, Erichthonios has a preference for communication in which he can give voice to his thoughts. Thus, Joshua Rosfield is soon to be greeted by a recording featuring a robed man of swarthy complexion, radiant scarlet eyes, and vibrant orange hair.]

'Tis a collection worthy of one studying under the Words of Emmerololth. You have my thanks.

[He pauses, contemplating.]

These afflictions... are they common amongst those who live here? And this petrification, it sounds as though you speak of it as occurring to a living being. Is that so?

[He doesn't mind using the video function on the shellphone, he'll switch to that without much complaint. Likewise, Erichthonios will be met with a young man with strawberry-red hair and blue eyes.]

Please forgive me, I fear the name Emmerololth stirs only the faintest echo in my memory. Might I trouble you to remind me?

As for these afflictions ... they are all too common in these parts, afflicting both the landborn and those who, like us, hail from beyond the rift. It's for that very reason I strive to keep such knowledge close at hand. One never knows when it may save a life.

And you are correct. Petrifaction can indeed take hold of the living. I have uncovered a handful of treatments that may stave off its grasp for a time... but a true cure, I have yet to find.

Emmerololth is also known as the Mender, curator of medicinal and therapeutic practices, and one of the Convocation of Fourteen.

Although... I'm surprised you have heard the name at all.

[So few of their people are here, and none, to his knowledge, belong to the Words of Emmerololth. Though mayhap Hythlodaeus or Emet-Selch had mentioned the name at some point, despite their somewhat blending in with the local populace here by varying methods...]

I'm not a student of the Words of Emmerololth, but I do know something of aetherology. The gold needles the other fellow mentioned may work in part due to gold being an aetherial conductor that isn't prone to corrosion. That is to say, if the petrification is aetherial in nature, by way of imbalance or depletion, the gold needle would allow one to easily channel aether of the correct aspect into the affected tissues.

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