[Global Event] Heal Thyself....

[Vluharqih]

CREDIT

Alex had been buried in the back, hastily applying a tourniquet as she sewed a massive gasp on a soldier's leg close. She hadn't seen or heard the Immortal enter at first, though the change in the sound of the tent was unmistakable.

The sounds of pain and suffering were still there, but suddenly they were overshadowed by sounds of awe. Alex brushed the thought from her mind and brought her attention back to the present. The cut was deep, nearly severing the leg. The man would be bedridden for months at best, and he'd be lucky if he could ever walk again. Alex knew the basics of reattaching the muscles, but they had run out of the thinner thread breaks ago. They were using the coarse, thick stuff now, and the scars it was going to leave were nasty.

As she finished off, she lifted one end of the makeshift stretcher, backing carefully out of the tent as another nurse carried the other end. She brushed past a woman, and she wouldn't have taken notice save for two facts. First, the woman's arm looked to be decomposing, a black spot covering the back of her arm, which was never a good sign. But when Alex looked up to find her face, she nearly dropped the stretcher.

It was that Immortal, the one which had walked among the people back in Ne'haer. Catching herself, Alex heard the muttered curse from the nurse at the other end and finished carrying the recovering man outside, setting him down carefully. There wasn't enough space inside to hold all the injured, so they had started large fires, carefully filling the space with patients.

The work done for the moment, Alex took another deep, drink from her flask. The energy burned its way to her core, and she felt a burst of energy. The tiredness flagging at her muscles disappeared and she leaned backwards, breathing in deeply as she stretched.

She turned and went back inside, looking for the Immortal. The fame her name would get if she healed an Immortal would be incredible, though it came with a bit of risk, she supposed.

Alex sidestepped a rushing nurse, her eyes looking around at the bloody mess that was the inside of the tent. Where did she go?

[Pegasus]

Moseke looked at Tei with a smile and nodded, her face a picture of distracted as she looked around, as though a little bit lost. She was indeed sweating profusely and Tei noticed that there were high spots of colour on the Immortal's cheeks. "That's a pretty name. Pleasure to meet you," she said and there was no doubting the swaying or shaking. She ignored Rita, almost as though she couldn't see her, or didn't want to hear her, or... whatever it was, it was strange, certainly. When, however, Tei asked her if she was well, the Immortal looked at her with confusion on her face. "Who's that? No, no I'm not well. I feel...."

Quite how the Immortal felt was going to be lost to the vagaries of time, unfortunately, as she turned around. Stumbling, ever so slightly, Moseke moved to next to Lei'lira and the pregnant woman and she vomited. Over the woman in labour and Lei'lira, the hand which Moseke reached out to steady herself was burning up to the touch as she expelled the body fluid and it landed on and between the two women. The pregnant woman cried out in pain as another contraction hit her ~ was the sweat on her brow because of that? Surely......

Jachiel became aware of it as he was, in that moment, moving from one patient to another and he narrowly avoided being splashed himself. Moseke, unable to hold on sufficiently, fell to her knees in front of him, in fact, as the vomiting continued. Rita had been trying to speak to her, trying to treat her wound, but by the time she turned back around the Immortal was on her knees on the floor and the stench of vomit was wafting around them. It was this scene that Alex walked in on. The Immortal Moseke on the floor, projectile vomiting ~ for those who noticed such things, there was blood in there, too.

In that moment, both Jachiel and Tei felt a sudden bout of dizziness, Rita noticed a blister, filled with pus and noxious looking, on her arm and Lei'lira started to shiver. Alex, who had thus far not become diseased, was able to notice that the patients around the area where Moseke had first walked in were shivering or convulsing.

Off Topic

Rule 1 now changes slightly in that you are now more than ok to interact with each other ~ within usual guidelines etc.
Congratulations! You are all (with the exception of "Alex") diseased. The effects of this will become apparent in my next post, but please assume that you very quickly feel absolutely awful, shivering temperature raised, nauseous etc. Endurance, discipline or resistance will help combat it ~ but it won't stop you feeling it.
Please do not interact with any medical NPCs in your next post ~ all will become clear!
Feel free to interact with patients - but the ones near you are all diseased also and, since they were ill to begin with, this is not good.

[Vluharqih]

CREDIT

When her eyes finally met the huddled form of the Immortal, Alex felt a tinge of disappointment. Whatever hope she had of healing the Immortal was lost when she saw the gaggle of other medics surrounding her.

Her shoulders slumped, as she internally cursed her luck. A chance to see, up close and personal, what was wrong with an Immortal? What could make one of them sick? Learning about that would definitely fall under "interesting" for the Cauldron.

Alex turned to her left, pushing up the drooping sleeves of the three sizes too large jacket, looking at the nearest patient.


"Hi there, my name is Alex, what's wrong with you?" Alex said in a rushed but clinical tone, cutting out any pleasantries. She had no energy or time, and the patient likely didn't either after having waited Aelig knows how long.

When the woman began convulsing, Alex was at a loss. She had rarely seen seizures, and they were more often than not a result of poison, in her line of work. This seemed random and spontaneous and given how long most people had been waiting, this was something new. As Alex moved to hold her still, to protect her head, she caught sight of another man, just one bed down shivering uncontrollably. His teeth were chattering so hard, they seemed to drown out even the screams.

Groaning to herself, Alex shoved a strap of leather between the seizing woman's teeth and leaped over the prone body. She grabbed the blanket the shivering man was sitting on and wrapped it around his shaking body. His skin felt warm, not cold as she had expected, and he was covered in sweat.

A scream came from the other side of the main entrance, and Alex's head snapped up to see three more soldiers on the ground, seizing.

What the hell is going on?

The sweaty, shivering man seemed to be the best condition, and she left him to rush to the other side. She didn't see the blood pouring from the newly opened wound and didn't seem him list sideways before collapsing. She did, however, turn around in time to see the spew of projectile vomit that erupted out of him. Her mouth dropped open as she looked down either side of the aisle, suddenly connecting the dots.

It wasn't every patient but without fail, the newly sick were clustered along the main aisle. Alex's eyes followed the path of vomit, shaking and seizing to end at the Immortal, hunched over.

Aelig's Balls.

She rushed to the side, and shivered convulsively as she cleaned off her hands. She lifted the hem of her overly large jacket to cover her mouth as she rushed back to the entrance.


"I need your attention! Everyone! Anyone who has been in contact with that Immortal needs to come here. Excuse me!" She shouted, but no one seemed to pay any attention. Alex breathed deeply, and walked quickly towards the Immortal, stopping a dozen paces away.

She shouted again, repeating herself and there was a sudden drop in the noise as her voice rang through the tent. She looked around, and shouted it once more.

Belatedly, Alex realized what she had just done. Luckily she hadn't mentioned why, but it wouldn't take anyone long to figure it out. Something was wrong with that Immortal, and it was infecting everyone.

Regardless of the reason, people were going to panic, and her rush to action had caused that.

[Pegasus]

And then, a winged horse flew in.....

Vluh's post will have consequences to what the rest of you see / hear / can do. Fundamentally, OOC rules change below. Thanks!

Off Topic

Rule 1 now changes slightly in that you are now more than ok to interact with each other ~ within usual guidelines etc.
Congratulations! You are all (with the exception of "Alex") diseased. The effects of this will become apparent in my next post, but please assume that you very quickly feel absolutely awful, shivering temperature raised, nauseous etc. Endurance, discipline or resistance will help combat it ~ but it won't stop you feeling it.
The medical personnel will now be either hitting a state of panic themselves, or they will be trying to stop the panic. They do not and will not have time to talk.
Patients who can, will be trying to run.
Patients who can't run, will be in a state of panic.
There is a building state of hysteria.
Please do not assume that your pc is able to stop this hysteria ~ if you are trying to, explain how and leave the result to me.
Vluh - please don't post again until after my next post, this does not count as a mod post
Feel free to interact with patients - but the ones near you are all diseased also and, since they were ill to begin with, this is not good.

[Lei'lira]

Eww...that's disgusting! Lei'luna complained as Lei'lira tried to clean herself off.

The pregnant woman beside her began convulsing violently. Lei'lira's eyes widened in shock. She had no idea what might be causing the woman's distress, or what she might do to help. And when she looked around for a healer, there were none available to help. But Lei'lira soon had worse things to deal with. Her skin began to burn where Moseke's vomit had touched it. She looked at the afflicted areas, and was horrified to see that in some places, her skin was reddened, and cracking; in others, it was black, and smelled as though it was rotting. Searing agony erupted in her suddenly swollen joints, and extremities. At the same time, she was nearly overwhelmed by dizziness. She felt sick to her stomach, and she began to shake, alternately burning, and freezing as a dangerously high fever claimed her. Her vision swam, making her even more dizzy than she had been mere trills before.

Lei'lira stumbled off to one side, and collapsed in a corner, curling up on herself as best she could. She barely noticed when the patient laying next to the pregnant woman began screaming incoherently. He leaped off of the bed, reopening several of his wounds as he grabbed two daggers that he'd had concealed upon him. He babbled something about poison as he coated each of the daggers in a pool of Moseke's vomit. Still screaming in hysterical fear and rage, he plunged both daggers deep into the pregnant woman's swollen belly.

The woman and her unborn child died quickly, her convulsions ceasing as she bled out. This didn't seem to satisfy the man. He continued to scream incoherently as he began to attack anything and everything within sight. People, beds, shelves, jars of medicines...even the walls themselves were a target of his fevered delusions.

From the relative safety of her corner, Lei'lira wondered how many others would die at the hysterical man's hands...and if that might not be a better fate than succumbing to whatever illness seemed to have spread throughout the shelter. That thought faded from her fevered mind, taking the rest of the world with it. Everything turned white, and her mother appeared, seeming to float through the shelter until she came to a stop a few feet away from Lei'lira.

"This is all your fault, you worthless child. Had I known how things would turn out, I would have left you a lot sooner. All you ever do is get everyone around you killed. But you can put an end to it. Be useful for once in your worthless life. Kill yourself now, while you still have the chance to save the others around you. Maybe then, you will have begun to repay the debt of all the damage you have caused!"

Lei'lira whimpered, lost in a fevered nightmare.

[Tei'serin Nji'ryn]

The healing shelter was in chaos, and Tei'serin had no idea what to do about it. She soon forgot her pleasure at the thought that Moseke liked her name when a sudden bout of dizziness overwhelmed her. Why was she feeling so dizzy? She had been neglecting her own needs in favor of doing what little she could to help the injured, but not so much so that she was in danger of collapse. Someone called for anyone who had come into contact with Moseke to go see her, and that was when Tei'serin made the connection; a potentially dangerous illness was spreading throughout the shelter.

Moseke had looked sick because she was sick. And now others were ill as well...herself included. People were panicking. The healers who should have been taking control were panicking as well. Many of the patients who were able to walk were fleeing as quickly as they could. Others were dying, their own conditions made far worse by this unknown illness. One of the patients near Tei'serin, a woman with several broken bones, began convulsing violently. She died as Tei'serin watched in horror, choking on black blood that spilled out of her mouth. Some of that blood sprayed onto another nearby patient as the dying woman coughed. He screamed in agony, and Tei'serin could see his skin turning black where the blood hit it. The blackness began to spread out, consuming the healthy skin around it. To her, it looked as though he was rotting away. Within a few bits, he too was dead.

Tei'serin stumbled back in horror. She felt horrible. Her head was a tight band of agony, and she was so cold that she thought she might freeze to death. One of her abilities allowed her to draw toxins out of the body through the skin. An illness was a "toxin" of sorts, or at least it seemed that was to Tei'serin. So she tried to use it, hoping to heal herself so that she could try to help the others somehow. Her mark began to shimmer with a greenish glow as tendrils of glowing energy surrounded her. She could feel it start to work. But a wave of intense dizziness and nausea shattered her concentration.

When she lost her concentration, any good her ability might have done was lost. She felt a thousand times worse, trembling in the grip of a dangerously high fever as the toxins were released back into her body once more.

"Burn, burn, burn. Everything must burn!"

Tei'serin looked up to see that one of the patients had managed to get hold of some flint and steel. She struck the two together repeatedly, allowing the resulting sparks to fall on a pile of cloth she'd placed beside a case filled with supplies.

"The flames will devour the evil curse that plagues us, and the worthy will rise once more from the ashes of the fallen!"

The feverish woman cackled as the sparks grew into a small blaze. Tei'serin's eyes widened in horror. She rushed over, and tried to put the fire out before it could spread, but she was dizzy, and weak with fever. Her efforts only caused her to get burned. And when the woman saw her attempting to put out the fire, she screamed incoherently in rage, and attacked Tei'serin. The woman backhanded her viciously with enough force to send her crashing into the wall head first. Blood trickled down the side of her face as she slumped to the ground, dazed by both the head injury, and the high fever she was suffering from.

[Jachiel]

The smell of the narrowly missing vomit curdled Jachiel's own guts, but he hadn't eaten in long enough that there wasn't much to come up. He swallowed hard, and tried to breathe as shallowly as possible. Kneeling beside another patient, he put the initial wash of dizziness down to exhaustion and hunger, and waited a moment for it to pass. It faded a moment, as he fumbled through another tourniquet knot with suddenly clumsy fingers, then returned even stronger. "Ah, seven preserve me," he growled under his breath, half in exasperation, half in resignation. Someone yelled for attention behind him and he started to turn. Off balance, unsteady, and light-headed, he failed to catch himself when another person blundered into him, and fell hard on his bad arm.

He started to roll in order to get a hand and a knee under his body and push himself up, and the world and his guts kept right on rolling. Panicky feet hammered into him as three more people trampled across him and each other in their attempt to flee. Sound pounded his ears like the pounding that swelled inside his head; screaming and yelling, retching and whimpering, all merging into audible chaos. He lay still for a moment, swearing at immortals rather than by them, then a man screamed past waving knives and lashing out with them at anything that moved. Jachiel gritted his teeth, staggered to his feet, and flung himself at the man's back, trying to knock him flat. This was, he decided, as they both crashed to the floor, not the best of ideas, even without the fever whirlwinding in his mind and body.

[Rita Fenyo]

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Rita

It took less than a few heartbeats for things to go from bad to worse. The immortal had fallen, vomit was covering a number of patients surrounding her crumpled form and whatever was afflicting her was spreading quickly. Rita dropped everything as pandemonium began, she had to act quickly before things got even worse than they were now. Without a doubt, she was also infected.
"Damn, damn, damn! Think." People made for the exit panicked, Rita rushed forward without hesitation and struck them down with half her stave, sealing off the flap. "Quarantine now! No one leaves this tent." Pulling herself up to full height, fever starting to take hold. "Seal all the exits now!" Commanding to those that were still sane enough to assists in the hope that they could stop this outbreak before it spreads, even if it killed her. A desperate man charged her with a scalpel, she was sluggish to react with the blade making short work of cutting open her shirt and down her hip. Bile forming in her mouth, striking the back of the neck and watching him fall unmoving. "Anyone else! If you leave this spreads more people die. I will kill if I have too" She tasted blood and realized she had bit her own lip trying to fight back the pain. In the confined space of the tent it had spread like wildfire and without a doubt everyone was infected. The ithecals seemed to last a little longer than the other races but they succumbed too. What is happening? why such drastic differences in reaction to the plague? they either curl up and Die or go mad... I have to last as long as I can. Fever taking quickly, edges of her vision blurring up unable to contain the vomit any longer. A twisted man approaching from the side trying to charge her with a blade.
"Back off" Smashing a trolley of tools that had been knocked towards her in the panic. There was no man. Shivering and weak she slapped herself, harder than she had intended too. "Head in the game Rita... It's... getting to you." Gritting her teeth trying desperately to stay up. The increasing heat and smell of smoke confused her, perhaps the fever was making her imagine a fire. The man with the two daggers attacking the pregnant woman might be another healer helping deliver the child. The fire is real Rita, it will kill us all.
"Good, then I die stopping it from escaping." She said to the voice in her head. In her fevered mind, Rita could not tell reality from fiction, so she remained by the entrance threatening anything that tried to escape. If someone got out there was no telling what would happen if it spread to Idalos.

[/style]

Template made by Aelius for Rita

[Pegasus]

It was chaos.

Utter and unadulterated chaos. People around them died in pain or in fear or, for many, in both. Then, one by one, they felt it hit them and they too started to feel the effects of the disease which Moseke had brought in with her. It had to be the worst nightmare of a healer, to fall to the very disease which they sought to cure, but as chaos and panic hit, they each (with the exception of Alex) felt it.

Around them, the medical staff also fell, some to the disease and others to the panic though around a third of them tried to help those around them, to bring order to the madness. It wasn't enough. At it's worse, Moseke reached out a hand into the nothingness, those who recognised such heard the frothing rattle of death and the Immortal fell back onto the floor and breathed no more.

For a split second, there was silence. Then, there was a moment. Just one, a split second where the Immortal who created what they were seeing lost concentration, shifted focus or maybe just turned it off with the others. But they blinked and the illusion which they had been under disappeared. The blood and the vomit and the death were all real, but the woman who lay dead on the floor was not Moseke, she was a nurse they all recognised. Those who had been gripped in feverish delusion felt reality hit them once again, which was not always a blessing.

Symptoms were gone, but those who had died or killed were still dead or killers. There was a brief respite of time then, where they could regroup. But those who were in panic still were and they were running as they had been. It would wear off, of course. The illusion which Aelig had created to send the healers into disorder had worked, beautifully.

And as so often happened at times like this, where the impossible has occurred and the improbable was before their eyes, there was a brief moment where they could, if they chose to, make a difference albeit a small one.

Off Topic

All illusions are now lifted, any injuries sustained from behaviour during the illusions are very real, but you are not ill or symptomatic in any way.
Patients are still in a state of panic.
Medical personnel are about one-third in numbers ~ some of them are in panic and others have been injured.
Feel free to interact with each other!

[Jachiel]

The illusion had gone. The chaos remained. Jachiel saw the dawning horror in the man he'd knocked to the floor and snarled, "You don't get to cry yet, bright-eyes. You want to make up for what you did, you fardling well get up and help patch people back together!" The man stared blankly for a moment. Then his hands dropped the knives to the floor and he nodded choppily. Jachiel gave him a long look, trying to judge if he meant it, then let him up and climbed stiffly to his own feet. The blows and bruises he'd taken were real enough, he supposed, as long as this wasn't yet another illusion. Anger at having been taken in gave him strength as he looked around. Someone was holding the entrance against the panicking crowd. Flames danced freely against the tent wall. Healers were down all over the tent. Living or dead, he couldn't tell from here.

Growing up on a farm, he'd learnt early on that animals responded to tone of voice rather than words, whether that was praise or scolding. He'd learned to scold them young, and that tone had only been honed in the military. This was a mostly military crowd - he hoped. He planted his hand on his hip, let his bad arm hang openly, and turned to the crowd. "Just what do you think you're doing?" he demanded in a voice that could have stripped paint from a shield on the far side of a parade ground. He lifted his chin and straightened his own back as if he had every right to order them around. "Get some steel in those spines, clod hoppers! There's work to be done. You!" He singled out the nearest person who seemed to be coming out of their panic. "Get that fire out. Mud, snow, whatever's to hand. Cut the tent wall and kick it out through the hole if you have to. You, and you, help them. If you're fit enough to run around like headless chickens, you're fit enough to help. Now move!"