Ashan 92nd, 718
Pain wreathed its way up and down the body of the half-breed. It was mild at best, nothing even close to deadly, but it was still a good start. She suppressed the urge to throw up she clutched one of the Poinsettia flowers scattered around her. After scrounging up a book on gardening and field craft she’d gotten a couple good ideas for starting a garden with medical herbs. Somewhere along the way she got curious and decided to head into town to buy a book on plants that were poisonous. Curiosity was a dangerous thing in the hands of the half-breed and her mind couldn’t help but filter back to childhood where she’d sometimes wake up abysmally sick in the middle of the night.
Food poisoning, her father would say. Just enough to be painful while remaining non-lethal. It was only ever her that had to suffer these episodes so most of the other people in the house enjoyed laughing it off like the half-breed was faking the excruciating pain. When she started delving into plants she wondered just what plants exactly could cause such adverse chemical reactions as to make someone violently ill. It was interesting to the half-breed how someone could so violently wish harm on another person that they would administer non-lethal poisons just for the sake of watching them suffer, but funnily enough, there were a ton in the book that wasn’t technically ‘lethal’ until taken in extremely high doses. Poinsettia flowers being just one of those.
What was interesting to the half-breed was what she managed to stumble across while looking through the non-lethal toxins. Mithridatism. The process of building up an immunity to poison through carefully taking small enough doses of poison for it to be non-lethal, subjecting the body to it to make sure the body didn’t react to it. The woman was curious. It made sense in the long run, building up immunity through exposure. Get sick to a certain virus enough times and the body learns how to fight it without raising the big huff that the immunity system usually undergoes when trying to combat something unfamiliar. It made sense that the same could be applied to poisons.
Curiosity, such a dangerous and horrible thing in the hands of the half-breed. Truly, she was going to accidentally kill herself one of these days if an enemy didn’t handle it for her. With the knowledge of this immunity building process, she couldn’t help but be curious. Perhaps she already had some form of immunity? Or was it something you had to be exposed to constantly to keep that immunity? She didn’t know much about Mithridatism, only what the book had told her. And the book itself couldn’t even be completely trusted. And yet, she wanted to try if only to satisfy a completely sick form of curiosity that had slowly been building ever since she learned what the process was.
She didn’t want to start with something too deadly since she didn’t want to actually kill herself. She wanted something small. That was why she’d decided to settle on the Poinsettia. It was a small, beautifully red flower with long rounded petals that glinted in the scarlets synonymous with blood and sunset. It was graceful and beautiful and at the end of the trial, it was deadly if too much was ingested. But it was also the perfect starting point for building up immunity. She wasn’t sure if this would work, but her logic was that she could start with lesser poisons. Once she started building up resistance she could move on to more death inducing poisons until even the strongest could only give her a stomach ache.
She almost wanted to laugh as she wondered if her blessings would have given her poison resistance in any safer ways. Ethelynda’s perhaps, considering the snake goddess was, in fact, a goddess of snakes. There was nothing more spoken in the same breath as poison than snakes. Well, maybe Nightshade berries. The half-breed couldn’t suppress the small giggle that bubbled up at that thought. How beautifully and sickeningly ironic. She wondered if she should try some of the flowers she’d dried and stored away a couple arcs ago in case the need ever came up. Emergencies happened. She smashed that thought quickly. It would be better to wait until she knew a little more about the topic before she tried to choke down one of the most dangerous plants she knew of.
One of the things the book mentioned as she skimmed through it was the fact that the size and age of a person greatly changed the potency of effects. It made sense. A smaller person would end up with a higher concentration of the poison, and a younger person wouldn’t have as developed an immune system. The same could be said of the reverse. Well, perhaps not the age. Once someone got old enough their immune system started to shut down and they became less resistant to the toxins.
The half-breed had to take this into careful account. While she was a full-grown woman that stood at roughly 5’6 she had less than average body mass because her race and her forgetfulness to actually eat. She was a little shocked she hadn’t starved herself by accident before. The half-breed could feel her entire body shiver with the wreathing stomach pains. She felt like she was going to throw up and she was shivering slightly.
It was easy to swallow a poisonous plant and not think about the consequences. It was easy to know the consequences and just completely ignore them. It was another thing entirely to try and ignore said consequences after they’d already come. Part of building up resistance was learning how to function while under the effects of poison, correct? Or was that just having a high tolerance for pain… Would it stop hurting after she built up enough of a resistance or would the really lethal stuff just not kill her anymore? It was hard trying to not regret her life choices when she realized just how little she actually knew about this process. What else was she besides the woman always flying on a wing and a prayer though?
She huffed quietly taking short deep breaths and she tried to force away any sensation to vomit. Her mouth watered and had a slightly metallic taste and she could feel the churning just a little below her chest. Trying to ignore the precursors and the pain she tried to distract herself. It was hard to focus on anything else, feeling the way that she did. She wondered if there would be any long lasting damage done by constant exposure to toxins. In small enough amounts, the half-breed wasn’t sure. She knew that a lot of people who worked with poisons often eventually built up an immunity. Her mind trailed back to Alex. The Yludih had worked with poisons a lot and the half-breed was fairly certain she’d build up a small resistance in addition to her medical knowledge. The crystal woman had shown up again an arc ago and then disappeared off the face of Idalos without a trace.
The question of long-lasting damage was one to keep in mind, caution was always best thought of first, but what kind of long-lasting damage could it lead to? She was aware there were poisons that caused organ failure and internal bleeding, the really nasty ones she would be touching for a long time. She didn’t see any more lasting damage than the effects of getting stabbed a couple hundred times learning how to use a sword. In essence, the process seemed similar enough. The exposure led to acclimation that eventually led to the ability to do even stronger things. Like breaking your fist on someone’s face when you first start fist fighting and slowly building your strength and technique up until you can break a wall with your palm.
When explained like that, the methodology seemed to make a simple kind of sense. The practice had yet to be proven in the same light. There was, of course, some slight hesitance on the part of the half-breed. She didn’t want to spend her afternoons bent over in crippling pain while she tried to eat flowers. There was something distinctly upsetting about the idea. The person who invented Mithridatism supposedly fed poison to ducks so he could measure the exact amount that was lethal and then drank the blood of the ducks who lived. That didn’t sound much more pleasant… The only other option was jumping straight into the more lethal toxins that needed smaller doses to kill you, but again, the half-breed was hesitant to try such a thing.
Dying at the current moment wouldn't exactly be… ideal so to speak. In fact, it would be rather unpleasant and she didn’t feel like exposing the people of Etzos to her death for the present moment. She still needed to be active in the city to help take down the racist bigotry on the inside and the radical banditry on the outside. Not to mention if she died Lakewatch would have quite literally no go-between in the city and that would be entirely too cruel to them.
The half-breed couldn’t suppress the groan as a fresh wave of the pain attack her. It was slowly starting to ebb, it had likely been a couple breaks of lying on the ground crying be now. She’d try another dose the next trail she supposed…
