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Finally, she relents, at least a little bit, and consents to let him smile. If Loren hadn’t been seriously depressed, he might’ve smiled at Phoebe’s words; as it stood, he just nodded gratefully. ” Yes ma’am.” Then his eyes drifted over to the dragon, whose name was apparently pim. ”I would never cross Pim like that.” He placed his hand over his heart as if making a solemn oath. Hopefully both the dragon and the woman will appreciate that.
The Launceleyn listens to the healer with the most sympathetic ear her can muster. To his surprise, it was easy, a whole lot easier than speaking had been. When she explained the problems to him, he was silent for a brief moment. ”What’s the missing connection? And what conditions are those.” Then he took a deep breath, and extends an offer he knew he might come to regret. ”I can go in there if you think it’s worth the risk.” Curing the blight took precedence over everything else, it seemed, given the scope of who and what it threatened. His own life paled in comparison to that. But he’d only chance it if he knew it really was worth it.
Well, her dislike of the Ascended was clear enough, though at least she’d spoken to one and not just been blinded by her prejudice. As he ignored her glares and put on his shirt, he wondered whether pressing her further on the point would yield anything but more anger. She hadn’t kicked him out, yet, or forced him to seek out Ronin, so Loren decided to test his luck. ”I’m sorry to hear that. But didn’t you say you were missing a connection? So, even if logic is not necessarily on their side, what about the information you have? What does it actually tell you?” If he’d known the words for science and data and experimentation, he’d have used them, but this was a sphere he was fairly ignorant in, despite his limited medical training. No, his knowledge lay more in the realm of the arcane and of lore than in the body and the real world.
Pim rumbled at the oath Loren gave but still kept a close eye on him. He wasn't about to be so trustful with someone Phoebe had just been screaming at. Phoebe was content enough with it. He'd been warned.
"I don't exactly know what is in the Spire but Remi and some others went in there to kill some poisonous plants if that's any indication." she said with a sigh. Dangerous. "What I am missing is what the blight is and proof of its source. And at this point I feel like I can't figure out one without the other." she said with a sigh, rubbing roughly at her eyes. "But everything points to the Spire."
Phoebe glanced over at him again as he twisted her words around, frowning a bit. "It tells me that the Voice send an Ascended into the Greatwood and suddenly there is a blight. It tells me that a goddess dive bombed the Spire and then was blighted. It tells me that the blight, like Ascended fluid, is formless under my microlens. The variable difference is that it assimilates healthy cells to it, rather than destroying them. It also explodes violently when confronted with every natural remedy I know of." she said with a sigh. "Moreover, the Voice was trapped for warring with the Old Gods before. People who do things like that don't just stop their attempt at conquest because they were locked away for three hundred years."
Neither Pim nor Phoebe had attacked Loren yet, so he’d still label this confusion as trending in the right direction. Then, of course, she explained that she was missing, well, any shred of evidence or proof; though he raised an eyebrow at that, as well as the comment about poisonous plants, Loren, wisely said nothing, perhaps the first smart thing he’d done this entire conversation. ”So you think the Spire holds the secrets to the origin of the blight, and with that last piece of information you can make a cure?” It seemed flimsy, but they might be down to such slim chances soon. Not quite yet, though, so Loren was safe from the Spire for now.
Again Loren ignored the dark expressions Phoebe sent his way; her bark was way worse than her so far non-existent bite. Even Pim had so far proven a relatively docile guardian, no matter how fiercely he bristled. The pieces of information she laid out didn’t quite fit into the mold she was trying to force them into, but they painted an interesting whole nonetheless. ”Wait a minute.” He frowned and looked down at the ground as he let his thoughts percolate: he was operating under relatively incomplete information, which meant they moved almost glacially slow. For instance, he didn’t know who The Voice was, nor did he know its relationship to the Ascended, through form the way Phoebe was speaking it was a powerful being that had a special relationship to that race.
But a pretty scary picture started forming in his head. ”So we know the blight can affect even goddesses if they’re exposed to it. And we know the blight only appeared after The Voice did?” He hated how uncertain his own voice sounded, but there was no helping it. ”The Voice was exposed to the Ascended, and you say the Ascended brought it to the Greatwood?” And there was some connection between Ascended fluid, not that he really knew what that was, and the blight. The technical explanation went way over his head.
Even though he knew he was just reiterating what she’d said, he was trying to put the timeline together in his mind. ”And The Voice was trapped for an indeterminate amount of time, and we don’t really know what happened during that time.” Finally he looked up, very much hoping she’d yell at him again and tell him he was an idiot. ”What if The Voice is the source, but not because it’s deliberately spreading the blight. What if The Voice was the first victim?” Of course, she knew far more about it than he did, so he might’ve been completely off base.
”Not secrets. I think the origin is in the Spire.” she corrected, rubbing her eyes. ”All of the circumstantial evidence points there.” she added. But she fell silent as Loren tried to think through whatever was going on in his mind. And she did hear him out but by the end of it she was just staring at him with a dead expression, a slow blink her only movement. Suddenly she felt sympathy for Ludo who had been faced with her own ignorance during LongNight, as she was now faced with Loren’s.
”Frey, give my strength. Or patience. Or a shot of whiskey. Perhaps all of the above.” she thought.
”No.” she said bluntly, expression unchanging. ”The Voice, over three hundred years ago, was a magic user who somehow became powerful enough to be on equal footing with the Old Gods. She is the goddess of the Ascended that she creates, using some sort of technology that is beyond our comprehension. She went to war against the Old Gods, and they trapped her in the Spire where she has been for the last 300 years. She is no victim of an illness. But she has a history of causing havoc in Caido and sending Ascended into the Greatwood, home of the Fae who despise her, seems pretty in-line with her mode of operation.” she said, spelling the history out for him as bluntly as possible.
”We are talking about someone who was powerful enough to reach across dimensions and pull people from their homelands to Caido for the purpose of releasing her. I am fairly certain developing a blight is something she could manage in her sleep.”
Alright, well at least Loren thought they were making progress. Phoebe probably wouldn’t agree with him. ”You think? And you admit the evidence is circumstantial?” The tone of his voice was as gentle as he could manage, and he held up a hand to placate what he had no doubt was going to be another angry response from the healer. Hopefully Pim didn’t bite it off. ”I’m not saying there’s not a good reason to go into the Spire to investigate further, if only because of all the other dangerous things that have already emerged from there. But if people are going to be risking their lives, I’d like to be sure they know exactly what they’re looking for.” If all she had was half-baked idea, Loren, at least, was not going to venture into what remained of the Spire.
Loren scratched his head, puzzled at Phoebe’s continued insistence that The Voice absolutely had to have created this blight. There just wasn’t enough evidence behind that theory for him to believe it. Still, at least the history lesson was useful. ”But...what I said is possible, isn't it? As you said, the blight has already shown capable of overcoming a goddess. So even a being comparable to them in power and scope might not be safe from it. In fact, if The Voice is connected to the Ascended, and the blight does act so similarly to Ascended fluid it might even be more susceptible to the blight.” That seemed just as, if not more plausible than her supposition that The Voice had created the blight deliberately to get back at the gods. If that was the case, then they’d have to make quite a few leaps in logic that Loren, at least, wasn’t seeing.
”You asked me what I thought!” she snapped at him. She wasn’t going to have her words turned on her when he had asked the question in that very manner. ”Yes it is circumstantial, but I don’t know how much more obvious a goddess divebombing the Spire and contracting the blight from being in contact with it could possibly be!” she shouted, clearly aggravated now. Did people suddenly not have brains that could make connections between events?
And then he continued on this path about some sob story of the Voice being a victim and she groaned, rubbing her temples. ”No. Absolutely not. Ascended are not vulnerable to any poison of illness. In fact, when put in contact with the blight, Ascended fluid completely destroys it. However, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t spread it from their hands or feet or clothing or something else on their person, it just means they won’t get ill from it.”
08-30-2019, 05:52 PM (This post was last modified: 08-30-2019, 05:53 PM by Loren.)
LOREN
When Phoebe snapped at him Loren realized he might’ve gone a bit too far this time. ”You’re right, I did. I’m sorry.” Hopefully that would appease her, but if not he was perfectly capable of groveling a bit more: he’d left his pride behind when he disappeared, it seemed. ”Well, was the goddess alone at the Spire or was someone else there? If there were other people, or beings, maybe interacting with one of them caused the blight to spread?” It wasn’t obvious at all to the summoner that the goddess simply approaching the Spire had infected her, especially given that there was still so much they didn’t know. There were too many variables in the experiment, so to speak, not that he knew that type of language.
Phoebe was stubborn and angry, but Loren was just as, if not more persistent, and had a lot of experience lately dealing with mad people. It helped that she wasn’t mad at him specifically. ”Right, but the blight hardly acts much like a normal disease, does it? At least, from everything I’ve heard that seems to be the case. Few diseases impact plants, animals, and people in the same manner, and none I know impact goddesses. And just because the Ascended are immune doesn’t mean The Voice is.” At least, he didn’t know that for sure and he would be curious to find out if the healer had that information and how.
Loren decided to try to switch up his argument a bit, since Phoebe seemed totally blind to her bias here. ”Let’s consider something. What if The Voice was tinkering with Ascended fluid in the Spire during those 300 years, trying to improve it. What if it made a mistake, in its arrogance, and created something that even it could not control, and it was consumed by it?” That allowed for the malevolence of The Voice—which the healer seemed adamant about—while still suggesting that it might not be solely responsible for the outbreak. He tilted his head at the healer’s last comment. ”How does it spread anyway?” No one seemed totally sure about that, so her firm stance that contaminants on the Ascended were to blame seemed quite a leap.
Phoebe sighed and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, as if it would somehow release the anger and frustration as Loren continued to riddle her with suppositions and defenses and half baked ideas based on incomplete knowledge. It was mind numbing and infuriating all at once and she didn't quite know how to process it all; her emotions as of late being wild and overwhelming, taking over and acting of their own volition as if guided by their own newly developed sentience. "Why?" she huffed athim, turning her head to glare at him as trembling hands fell to her side. "Why are you so insistent on looking for a way to prove their innocence? Or the innocence of the Voice?" she snapped at him, brows furrowing.
"The blight is spread directly into the body through an open wound, or by consuming it." she said with a sigh. She pinched the bridge of her nose, lips pursed together. "But the illness can be carried still on fabrics and things. And the Voice created the Ascended so who knows what she could imbue them with temporarily to accomplish what she wants."
Again, Loren manages to stay calm in the face of Phoebe’s anger. It helps that he knows her heart is in the right place, based off everything she’s said and everything he’s heard here, even if she is expressing it in the worst possible way. Besides, he had come here, to her space, and picked apart her theories. Luckily, he had a response to her question, though he paused for a moment before speaking. ”Because I know what it feels like to be blamed for something I wasn’t responsible for and had no control over. I’ve been hurt because people made assumptions about me, about others, and about what was important and what was truth.” The Launceleyns had tortured him since he was a child for supposedly having weak magic when the truth was he just needed time, or a different teacher, or space, or all three. So the summoner wasn’t going to sit idly by while someone cast unfounded aspersions without solid proof.
Her information is quite useful and the Launceleyn tilts his head, a spark of excitement flaring in his eyes. ”Really? That’s fantastic news. I mean, obviously not fantastic, but no one else I’ve spoken to had any clue how it was transmitted. I was going to test it on animals, er, well, summoned animals, not real ones, to see if blood was to blame. We should let everyone know, so at least we can try to prevent any more cases from cropping up.” At least Jigano and Remi seemed stumped by that, and Loren had been planning to run those experiments. He supposed now he didn’t have to. As the conversation swung back to the Ascended, his enthusiasm dimmed, but wasn’t entirely snuffed out. ”Everyone wears clothes that could carry the illness on them. And you’re right, we don’t know. That’s the truth of the matter, we still don’t have enough information. But if you’ll let me, I’d very much like to help you find out.” The summoner glances at all those supplies she was packing up and feels the corner of his mouth quirk up. ”And I’d still like to help you carry those boxes.” Hopefully she wouldn’t kick him out after all this.
Her nose wrinkled and she huffed, glaring down at the boxes. "Even if it isn't their fault and they are just being used by the Voice, that doesn't mean I can trust them either. They are still being used as implements to spread a deadly disease. My job is to keep people healthy and if all of the signs point towards the Ascended being used by the Voice to spread the blight, then I will pursue that until I find something that verifies it false. And frankly, save for one, none of them have come to offer assistance in this effort, so I am not inclined to believe that they are terribly interested in anything except what their goddess wants." she said as calmly as she could muster.
She turned a glare on him, growing angry again. "Are you serious? What idiots have you spoken to? Everyone in this place is an idiot, the Medical College has been researching the blight for nearly a whole season!" she snapped. It offended and hurt her deeply. She was the Dean of the Medical College and this was a disease and apparently others were out researching it without collaborating with her or her guild? In her anger, she grabbed an empty vial and suddenly turned, throwing it as hard as she could at the wall, causing it to shatter into a million little shards. "I can guarantee if this was a monster issue people would seek out the Monster Hunters but gods forbid we seek out the Medical College for help with a disease!" she shouted in frustration, hands shaking.
Pim trilled at her, and she glanced at the pink dragon. Slowly, she breathed in through her nose, then back out her mouth, trying to calm herself down. "Then grab something." she grumbled at him.
Sighing, Loren ran a hand through his hair. Phoebe’s comments about being used, and being instruments, about seeking proof to prove her theories false was worrisome. His voice, when he spoke next, was as gentle and patient as he could make it. ”They’re people, Phoebe, just like you and me. And they’re scared. We’re all scared, but the worst thing we can do is let that fear drive us further apart. You say all the signs point to the Ascended being unwitting pawns, but by your own admission you have no real proof of that, only circumstantial evidence. Shouldn’t we believe that they are trying to do the best they can, believe in their innocence, until we have incontrovertible proof to the contrary? We can do that and still keep people safe from the blight, keep it from spreading.” It was an appeal to her better nature, one the Launceleyn didn’t know if she had. Still, she was a healer, so he hoped she did.
He flinched as she threw the vial and it shattered against the wall. Giving her a concerned look, he walked over and knelt by the shards. Using his telekinesis, he gathered every piece he could find, then created a small box to store them in. This was still an infirmary, and he didn’t want people getting hurt. ”I spoke to Remi and Jigano. For what it’s worth, I believe they were both speaking more from personal experience than from any actual experimentation.” Loren’s tone was low and soothing. The bard was blighted and the alchemist was married to someone with the blight, so obviously they’d both come into contact with it. ”I’d be happy to share what little they told me, if you feel it would be helpful.” It was small, in the grand scheme of things, but it was something.
Placing the box on a shelf, where no one would accidentally cut themselves on the contents, the librarian nodded when she asked him to grab a box. Picking one up, he grunted at the weight, then turned his head to glance at the healer. ”I’m going to summon something to help, if that’s alright with you.” Without waiting for an answer—partially because he felt he’d been more than patient with her and partially because he could already feel the strain in his arms and had no interest in carrying all these supplies by hand—he called upon a golem. It appeared in the middle of the infirmary, then lumbered over to the nearest set of boxes and lifted one onto each shoulder. That done, both the summoner and his golem turned to look at the healer expectantly: Loren didn’t know where they were taking the boxes, so Phoebe would have to lead the way.
”Yes, they are, but they might be spreading a disease that is killing people and entire landscapes.” she said bluntly. ”I would rather believe that and take extra precaution to prevent further spread and be wrong than the other way around. The blight can’t make the Ascended ill but they might be infecting others. I simply won’t risk it just because it might hurt their feelings. Lives are at stake.” she said, not budging on it at all. To her, it wasn’t personal. It was business. If the Ascended wanted to help figure out if they were or weren’t, then they could start lining up to help. As of yet, she hadn’t seen it happen.
Phoebe simply glared for a moment than shook her head at his offer. ”Anything Remi knows I probably already know. And Jigano thinks he knows everything and is the savior of the universe so of course he is off trying to fix it all on his own.” she said, rolling her eyes and wrinkling her nose.
She blinked in surprise as a golem suddenly appeared in her infirmary, watching it pick up the boxes with ease. Well then. That was definitely useful. Phoebe picked up a smaller box, one she could manage before silently turning and heading out. Pim waited until the golem and man followed, walking behind them to keep an easier eye on the pair.
09-04-2019, 02:49 PM (This post was last modified: 09-04-2019, 02:50 PM by Loren.)
LOREN
Phoebe wasn’t going to budge on this point, it seemed. Unfortunately for her, neither was Loren. ”Might be, not are.” Again, he was just repeating her own words back at her, though she had reacted poorly every time he had. ”Look, I’m all for taking extra precautions, but there’s a difference between that and spreading rumors that might contribute to tensions that already exist between the Ascended and everyone else.” Do no unnecessary harm: it was a mantra many healers followed (though not Loren), and from where the Launceleyn was standing, Phoebe’s obsession with blaming the Ascended was doing harm.
Tilting his head, Loren frowned at the healer. ”Maybe so. But, personal dislike aside, it seems like we should be accepting all the help we can get, no matter the source.” It had actually been the Launceleyn who’d mistreated the bard in their first meeting, so the summoner had a slightly skewed perspective on the white-haired man. However, he wasn't going to press this particular point too much.
She set off, with Loren and golem in tow. The summoner couldn’t devote too much of his attention to making small talk, what with carrying heavy objects and the summoning, but the silence felt awkward, so he needed to say something. Pim was bringing up the rear, so the Launceleyn gave the dragon a small smile as they emerged from the infirmary. ”So you’re involved with the Medical College? That’s pretty remarkable. What does it entail?” He’d heard about the college, of course, but knew nothing about it; he figured getting her to talk about that was infinitely preferable to the blight, and would require him mostly to listen.
Phoebe sighed, exhaustion beginning to overcome her. This man was relentless and it was wearing on her. ”Fine. I’ll be more careful with my words, as much as I can with the blight affecting my mood. But it doesn’t change the fact that I won’t let the Ascended have these supplies.” she said. If they were infected and spreading the blight for the Voice, they would only contaminate them, and then the blight would spread further. It wasn’t a risk she would take, and she didn’t care who she offended by it.
”I am happy to accept help but I just wouldn’t trust Jigano much. Remi knows when he doesn’t fully understand something or isn’t and expert and admits it. Jigano thinks he knows all.” she said with a shrug. As far as reliable sources of information, she would rather put her faith in the person who was cautious about things they didn’t study with rigor and regularity, rather than those who assumed they knew everything simply because they existed; and moreover that their thoughts were always right.
But silence fell over them and they walked towards the clinic. Pim returned Loren’s smile with a little grumble, still eyeing him and the golem (mostly the golem) warily. Phoebe glanced over at Loren as he spoke again, raising a brow. ”Well, it entails setting the direction of the place. As of late our focus of research has been on the blight, but overall our goal is to better understand how the body works so we can develop better treatments and medicines and methods. That way we won’t be so reliant on magical healers – it puts the ability in the hands of any who wish to learn.” she said. ”I’d like us to start offering classes but as of yet we have no one interested in being a student.”
