#fine we are getting uninfected snails.

[eternityhistoria]

“If there are snails that are not infected, I would like to try my hand at them, or in fact, trying french cuisine.” Jaye places a hand under his chin, his head nodding with his co-worker, & thinking, “Isn’t ‘Fugu’ that deadly pufferfish that has no cure to it?” ...Maybe the doctor shouldn’t know about this Fugu ; Knowing full well that they might even try it.

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Magical Beings

Note: I mean magical beings in the sense that every being in a discrete group is magical. For example, a human or a wooly mammoth or fig tree can all be mages, but it doesn’t mean all humans, wooly mammoths, or fig trees are mages. All of these beings are mages. The World was once populated with magical beings, but after they all mysteriously died while turning human, there have been very few magical beings on The World. However, disease, soul experiments, and mass prayer have caused humans to become magical beings again.

Revenants

There are about a hundred million revenants on The World. 

We already know about revenants. A plague turns vertebrates into necromancers after they die, who come back to life as a walking corpse. Revenants have no physical senses. Revenants feel the emotions they felt as they died the strongest. The longer you had the plague, the saner you will be after death. Revenant souls regenerate quickly and grow continuously, becoming huge enough to allow them to perform powerful magic without consequence.

We have taken a very revenant-centric view of The World so far, but there is so much other shit going on.

Ambient Creatures

There are countless trillions of Ambient Creatures on The World. 

The World was once covered with Ambient Magic strong enough to support large creatures through magic alone, but they have shrunk almost to disappearing. Some believe the loss of Ambient Magic coincides with the mass extinction of magical creatures, but there’s no proof of this. There are still a few patches of Ambient Magic scattered throughout The World, but they collectively take up less than 100 square miles and are too weak to support anything but small and simple creatures.

In the last few hundred thousand years, some previously nonmagical animals have evolved to take advantage of Ambient Magic. All beings with souls can absorb and make use of Ambient Magic, which only amounts to feeling slightly more emotionally stable. However, this is enough to sustain some beings, like the flatworms, which eat nothing and lazily float about, needle snails, which eat and behave like normal snails but have the ability to shape iron sand into spikes using Industrial Magic, and lambent butterflies, which use Light Magic to flash and turn invisible, but revenants don’t see using light anyway so it literally does not matter. When removed from Ambient Magic, ambient creatures will lose all magic ability, and in some cases, die quickly. There are many species that are indistinguishable from nonmagical species, but when they are placed in Ambient Magic, start performing powers. Some of these species are found nowhere near Ambient Magic. How did they get there? Maybe it’s the Ambient Magic that moved.

Parts of Ambient Creatures can be used to make powerful magic items because they evolved to store a specific type of magic.

In Veilheim, the Ambient Creatures in the Magical Grove outside the city are seen as further proof that invertebrates are Perfect Forms. 

Vampires

There are about fifteen thousand vampires on The World. 

120 years ago, Dr. Hanna Ferse, an infamous Gore Mage from Hapsburg, was able to reverse engineer the original plague-transmitting neuroleprosy bacteria into something she hoped would save humanity from plague. It sort of worked. Vampirism renders its bearers immune to plague, but vampirism is arguably worse than the plague. Instead of turning the dead into necromancers, it turns the living into gore mages. Given that vampirism still draws upon The Necromancer’s magic, this has terrifying implications as to The Necromancer’s true power. While being a vampire prevents plague, being a plaguebearer also prevents vampirism. Vampirism only infects humans. Interestingly, mages, wizards, and other people with unusually large souls are immune to vampirism.

Vampirism is transmitted by bodily fluids, has a ten hour incubation, then in one hour turns bearers into vampires while they are still alive. If bearers don’t deprive themselves of water and eat salt past the point it’s physically painful, they will die. Their bodies have been modified to function best when very salty, but they still have the same survival instincts as humans. A healthy vampire suffers from constant thirst, but if they drink too much of anything with a lower salinity than blood, they will get sick and die. Vampires can also die in all the ways a human can die, such as starvation and bleeding. Vampires are also very dense and quickly sink in all bodies of water. Being in contact with freshwater for too long will cause mass cell death and their skin to slough off. Vampires also get very stiff and develop a grainy pallor as more of their bodies are replaced with salt. Many vampires get strokes and kidney stones and go blind because of high blood pressure, and also their blood is so thick with salt crystals it starts cutting into surrounding tissue. Being a vampire sucks because you need to turn into a cured ham or else you die. Hampires.

Why haven’t vampires overrun and destroyed The World like revenants did? The most obvious reason is that they are weak and fragile compared to revenants, but the most important reason is incubation time. Living a normal life for a few years, a plaguebearer can infect many people, who in turn infect many people, and none of them know they have the plague. Entire continents can unknowingly become saturated with plaguebearers. Meanwhile, an accidental bearer of vampirism only has 10 hours to unknowingly infect someone before suddenly dying. The plague can also be carried by all vertebrates, living or dead, while vampirism bacteria can only survive in living humans. 

Vampires stop aging and are sterile. Vampires also have ever-growing souls like revenants, but not as fast. You’d think newfound Gore Magic abilities would help vampires alleviate their salty pain, but no. If a sane newly dead revenant screws up Death Magic and burns half their soul to pull their arms off, the revenant can sit around and contemplate their mistakes until their soul regenerates and they can put their arms back. If a newly turned vampire screws up Gore Magic, they die. Few vampires are lucky and privileged enough to survive more than a few months and master Gore Magic enough to elevate themselves above basic humanity, usually by guidance from other vampires and/or incidental medical knowledge. 

Despite all this, Dr. Ferse used freedom from plague and promise of magic powers to convince some Hapsburg nobility to become vampires, who then used their practiced good health, magic, and plague immunity to advocate for the widespread use of vampirism to combat the plague. Gehenna heard about this and was initially interested, but then saw what agonies vampirism rendered unto the poor and uneducated general populace, who were used as snacks and test subjects by the nobility, and decided stopping a painful infectious disease with another painful infectious disease is stupid as hell.

After Dr. Ferse and many others were killed in an eradication campaign, the few surviving noble vampires were able to leverage old family allegiances and secure their survival after proving they could use Gore Magic and their own bacteria to sense and drink all infectious fluids from a plaguebearer during incubation. The plaguebearer dies in the process, but their body is no longer infectious. This doesn’t work for plaguebearers once they show symptoms. 

Vampires were allowed to live as long as they kept their own numbers low and contributed their skills towards eradicating the plague. Nowadays, Gehenna views vampires like cats. They carry disease too, but they also reduce the numbers of other disease carriers, so it’s more convenient to let them live.

Although vampire killing and gorging sprees are ultimately good for the people of Beringia, many still fear vampires for obvious reasons. Sometimes vampires are driven mad by pain and thirst and start attacking indiscriminately. Some vampires lie about plague outbreaks to kill and eat uninfected people. Other vampires powertrip and infect people without caring for consequences. Other vampires look terrifying, with bloodshot eyes, salt-crusted ulcers, and gouty crystals bursting from their joints. Also most vampires are rich aristocratic Hapsburgers with their perverse decadent foreigner ways. Hamburgers.

Controversy rages throughout Beringia over whether the fine stranger who arrives in the middle of a plague outbreak and sleeps all day while mysterious piles of corpses show up overnight in the street or the white-clad masked soldiers who arrive in the middle of a plague outbreak and start shooting and burning people are more cool and sexy.

Compared to revenants, who have been on The World for 700 years, vampires are very young and are always discovering new things about themselves. Some vampires can shapeshift to hide their salty deformities, become unrecognisable, or mimic other people. Some vampires are immune to all disease, not just plague. One amazing thing that may be enough to justify salt hell is when they die, as long as their heart is intact, vampires will come back to life on Dark World Day. Before this was discovered, some dead vampires were buried and had to starve to death over and over. Dr. Ferse was found like this.

Hapsburg has a regular court and royal family, and also a Vampire Court established 80 years ago to deal with vampire internal affairs. Dr. Ferse was the first Vampire Queen after her revival, but was ousted 5 years later by the second and current Vampire Queen Hecata, who believed that Dr. Ferse’s aggressive promotion of vampirism and callous treatment of the common folk are what led to the persecution of all vampires. Dr. Ferse is still around, but no longer has serious political influence and instead secretly publishes a lot of forbidden Gore Magic literature for secret students of forbidden magic and miscellaneous edgelords. You may assume that Pontiff Rubedo modelled himself on Dr. Ferse’s teachings to become a murderous freak, but he hasn’t actually read any of her books. While he may be indirectly inspired by vampires, that’s just how he is.

The Hapsburg Vampire Court used to be a puppet state, but as the regular Hapsburg Court steadily declines from inbreeding-induced insanity, deformity, and genetic disease, the balance of power is shifting towards vampires. Although vampirism is still an upper class disease, the Hapsburg Vampire Court leveraged their newfound power to responsibly infect and educate a lot of regular Hapsburgers to form the Hapsburg Vampire Navy. Not only is vampirism useful for fighting plaguebearing pirates, vampire sailors don’t need to carry drinking water or alcohol or most types of food, because they trained to use Gore Magic to prevent vitamin deficiencies and can drink seawater. 

The Hapsburg Vampire Navy provides an alternate method of oversea transport from Gehenna’s well-armed and well-regulated sea travel monopoly. Hapsburg became very wealthy from increased trade and leasing ports to landlocked countries at huge prices, and is the first and only country to reclaim its coastline from Gehenna.

Relations between Hapsburg and Gehenna are not good. Aside from the back-and-forth coastline control, Gehenna still needs to marry into Hapsburg royalty despite them being the biggest source of unprecedented and spectacular new genetic diseases and they are really annoying to deal with in general. Vampires are still treated with suspicion at best and like rabid animals at worst, largely due to propaganda spread by Gehenna 100 years ago they have since put super half-assed efforts in dispelling. 

Despite mutual bad blood, when Gehenna announced their expedition into plagueridden Surenia to stop the source of new revenants, Hapsburg volunteered half of their Vampire Navy under the thinly veiled threat that the age of vampire dominion would begin if Gehenna failed. Gehenna used most of the Hapsburg Vampire Navy attachment to make up for the loss of troops in Beringia, and anchored some of them near Surenia to euthanise and purify returning plaguebearers. After a lot of arguing, only one vampire was allowed to set foot in Surenia. 

Vratis Constantin was a peasant in northwestern Fire Escape, the sole survivor of a village that got attacked by Vampire Queen Hecate in one of her thirst rampages. Going off dubious vampire legends, Vratis became a local hero by killing ancient revenants that emerge from the soft peaty Fire Escape ground. Through sheer willpower and blind ignorance, Vratis became nigh-indestructible from Gore Magic and also learned how to use Light Magic because of misinterpreted stories of immortal vampires materialising from shadow (they were actually dying and instantly reviving on Dark World Day).  

Upon hearing of a Vampire Court in Hapsburg, Vratis left to join his people. His presence was a shock, since it offended the noble vampires that some Fire Escapee asshole was not only able to survive, but also surpass many of them with no assistance. Queen Hecata defended him, since he was a magical curiosity and technically an heir to the throne since the Queen infected him. Queen Hecata stuck a noble title on him and treated Lord Constantin like a son, and he waged war against rival vampire families on her behalf. 

The rest of the court hoped Lord Constantin would get overwhelmed by court politics and get killed and/or disgraced. Instead, he developed a ruthless and bombastic outward persona to prevent others from reading his intentions while building a network of informants from servants, and was single-mindedly and unquestioningly loyal to the Queen. This presented a potential succession crisis, since most of the court would refuse to serve a foreign King, but Queen Hecata didn’t have any reason to disinherit him and all “accidents” and deliberately unwinnable battles haven’t worked yet.

Queen Hecata disinherits him, but promises the Hapsburg Vampire Court will recognise his new title as Vampire King of Veilheim if he succeeds. Lord Constantin knows he was sent to Surenia to die, but still believes he can get back in the court’s good graces by succeeding where Dr. Ferse failed. He hopes to liberate the people of Veilheim by giving them vampirism to fight back against their evil necromancer overlord and his mindless revenant slave army. After a life of alienation and watching himself turn into a heartless bloodless undying monstrosity, Lord Constantin believes he finally found a kindred spirit in Prince Train Noise, a faceless voiceless syphilitic monstrosity. Prince Train Noise hates Lord Constantin because he became disgusting and alienated himself on purpose.

Living Saints

There are about six thousand Living Saints on The World.

If a soulless object like a statue of a saint is prayed to long enough, it begins accumulating tiny scraps of souls from its worshippers. Some worshippers begin to hear the whispers of ancient prayers being repeated back to them. With sufficient emotion matching the general vibe of the souls in the statue, some of the soul fragments can leave the statue and die to perform miracles. This motivates people to continue praying and the statue continues to accumulate souls.

If many people are praying to help others, the statue will become selfless and benevolent. If many people are praying to help themselves, the statue will become selfish and perform the bare minimum of miracles to keep them praying. If people are praying out of desperation, the statue becomes terrified and helpless. Mass prayer is a gamble. You could generate the emotion to perform great miracles, or you could fill the statue with your own fears and doubts and render it powerless. Very rarely, the souls in the statue become self aware and realise with every miracle, they come closer to death and with every prayer, they lose more and more of themselves in a sea of pleading voices.

When someone dies in a church with an unhappy saint, all the souls in the statue enters their body and revives them as a Living Saint. 

Living Saints have gigantic souls and the same incredible magical power they had as a statue, but because the soul fragments are not in their original bodies, their souls can’t regenerate. Living Saints are physically human and eat and breathe and age like normal. Living Saints are most powerful and self-assured when they first rise and steadily grow weaker and less assertive until they run out of soul to sustain a human body and die. In that sense, they are the opposite of revenants. Sometimes the soul of the original person is still there, and once all the other souls are used up, the Living Saint returns to being a normal human. Praying to Living Saints doesn’t do anything because beings have defences to stop other souls from getting into them. These defences only drop during death, which is how the Living Saint came to be in the first place. 

Historically, there have been very few Living Saints, but as Beringia turned to centralised religion to cope with mass death and plague hell, and then later to cope with oppressive and terrifying regimes that formed to combat mass death and plague hell, Living Saints are becoming more common, to the point where some giant cathedrals have entire choirs of Living Saints. Fortunately, attempts to engineer the creation of Living Saints by killing people in churches rarely work, because you can’t be sure if the Saint is unhappy enough to leave, the time between consciousness and death is too short for all the souls to move in, and also the injuries or poisons sometimes end up killing the Saint again.

As per their original function, Living Saints are unquestioningly obedient towards clergy and people they vibe with. Regardless of how charitable they are, Living Saints love attention and being surrounded by people. They are also famously good listeners. Living Saints tend not to have a set personality and instead behave like the owner of whatever piece of soul is being consumed to keep them alive at the moment. Many churches glorify their Living Saints, and most Saints are happy to be there, but as you may expect from souls desperate enough to possess a dead body, some Living Saints are not only unhappy with being statues, but also unhappy with being worshipped or serving the clergy or even religion as a whole. Naturally, the church tries to suppress Living Saints when they do this. Most Saints are too powerful to fight directly, and can only be defeated by the opposite of prayer. A lot of people curse the Living Saint for days on end until enough of their souls die, then the Saint either becomes obedient or dies completely. 

250 years ago, a mass Living Saint rebellion led by Saint Korz, patron saint of war (oops), caused the formation of Hasc, an independent democratic republic of Living Saints and Living Saint equalists located in The Holy Pentacle in the middle of the four most religious countries in Beringia: Sacra, Benedicta, Suspensia, and Termina. Gehenna used to be the fifth country in The Holy Pentacle before it left to do its own thing. The original Saint Korz is long dead, but worship of Saint Korz is so widespread in Beringia that there’s always at least one Saint Korz who survived their journeys to Hasc, so Hasc is always well-defended. The current Saint Korz are an elderly Alexandrian woman who got elected as Minister of War and a 7-year-old Bourbon boy who goes to school and isn’t even remotely involved with the military. 

The church would prefer if Hasc was routed and all the Living Saints there returned to holy service, but nobody can do anything because Gehenna, the bulwark against plague, wholehearted and aggressively supports Hasc and its endeavors for Living Saint liberation. Why? Living Saints are a new source of heritable mages that aren’t already super inbred by centuries of royal marriage. Becoming a Living Saint doesn’t make a person have more magic potential, but a Living Saint can only form in someone with huge innate magic potential. By modern times, every legitimate Gehenna royal is descended from at least three different Living Saints. 

There is much debate in non-Hasc non-Gehenna society on whether marrying and having children with Living Saints is admirable or abhorrent. Some believe that because Saints are holy, the children of Saints are also holy. Others believe that Gehenna is contaminating their royal bloodline by marrying whatever random peasants and vagrants and students who died in a church. Some Saint marriages are in direct contradiction to canon, especially if they were a martyred virgin of legend or actual historical celibate monk. There is also an issue with personhood, since it can be argued that a Living Saint isn’t a real human with an intact soul.

Imagine being a villager praying to your local saint every day, but then one day, she leaves by possessing the body of a girl who fell off the church roof while playing. Everyone is very sad from the combined blows of the girl’s death, losing the epicenter of your community, your prayers going unanswered, and feeling like you are unworthy of the saint and it’s your fault she left. You keep praying to the silent statue, but it isn’t the same. Years later, news comes in that the Living Saint is alive and well and fucking the Pope.

Living Saints are basically unheard of in Surenia. The more a society accepts magic, the less likely for Living Saints to form. Mages can sense the fragments of human souls in religious items, and worshippers who are aware of this tend to lose faith, or treat prayer as purely transactional instead of genuinely believing they are communing with a higher consciousness. A statue being prayed to like a person is more likely to become a person, and vice versa. 

For example, a saint statue in Albany is fed with prayers like:

saint marta please please please make osten propose to me I can’t wait any longer                               hello saint marta I am seven years old and prayer book said today is the day to pray for a good husband I would like a good husband but not too soon maybe when I am ten years old                        my husband is angry with me again            may we have enough money for both a lavish wedding, a new house, and taxes by the end of the year           sweetheart is out there somewhere I will find him and finally be happy                      I ask this of you even though this task is impossible even for god my husband has the plague he’s all alone in the plague house everyone else sees him as dead he can’t die he can’t die he can’t die he can’t die if I am the last person he remembers will I die next                          I tried throwing darts at books I tried growing onions in a grid but I still don’t know the name of my true love saint marta at least reveal the first letter to me I need to know                  how do I make him stop drinking I am so scared                  daughter moved to a new town to be married and I miss her so much may saint marta protect her                    i am now old and ungainly husband says he loves me but I need peace of mind saint marta give me a sign                               is it a sin to abandon my children I need to leave I can’t stay here anymore                              saint marta our marriage is blessed thank you please take these almonds.                    i am frightened of strangers i am frightened of dancing i will never find someone to love me on my own saint marta help me                                                

The souls in this statue are thus very likely to develop into a real consciousness that is highly motivated to leave. 

Meanwhile deity statues in Veilheim are fed with:

MAY ALL WHO USE MY POWER FLOAT AS HIGH AS THEY DESIRE                                                                                               

i am not very magical but if i pray more maybe Floating Goddess will be biased i will float more         

Floating Goddess stores a combination of Death, Gore, and Industrial Magic. Those of us who are more prosthetic than flesh and bone may have difficulties floating so I will give the Floating Goddess more Industrial Magic.

who the fuck put the bathroom on the top floor of a building only accessible by Floating Goddess

The souls in this statue know they are here to serve as fuel for others’ prayers so they won’t leave.

Due to divergent cultural developments, sane revenants are magical beings that are only common in Surenia and Living Saints are magical beings that are only common outside of Surenia.

Living Saints can’t get vampirism because this loser knockoff disease can’t deal with many souls at once.

Interesting things happen when Living Saints get the plague. After the normal giant bruise upon infection, the plague has to recognise every piece of soul, raising the incubation time from five years to so long that the Living Saint dies before plague symptoms start to show. In this time, the Living Saint could have infected countless people. Because there is no soul left, although the body is a plaguebearer, it will not come back as a revenant. If the original soul is there, then the incubation period starts from the beginning and the person is affected by the plague as normal. Once they die, their soul immediately balloons to its original size as the Living Saint. 

Usually after death, a revenant takes several hours to several weeks before moving, but a Dead Saint’s soul is so huge that upon death, the body is flung about erratically and torn to pieces under its own necromancy, as well as causing indiscriminate damage to its surroundings with its secondary genre of magic. A Dead Saint will uncontrollably destroy everything nearby with magic until its body is reduced to paste, spreading infectious fluids everywhere in the process. Woe betide you if a Dead Saint breaks free and starts splattering down the street.

This is a huge controversy between Gehenna and the church. Gehenna believes all plaguebearers should be killed and burned, while the church believes killing a Living Saint is an unforgivable sin. It can be argued that a plaguebearing Living Saint can live in a way that doesn’t infect anyone, but there is always the risk of a Dead Saint. Ultimately, the church justifies its own cursing of rebellious Living Saints and mercy towards plaguebearing Living Saints because the plague unrelentingly damns people no matter what and the ultimate sin is disobeying the church, while Gehenna supports Living Saint liberation and burns all plaguebearers because the plague is a bacteria that you get as consequence of your own negligence, and disobeying the church is the most practical thing to do at this point.

Life in Veilheim seems so simple in comparison. Succumb to plague and let the city take care of you. Die happy and achieve eternal life as a revenant.