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--- sessions:worldbuilding:2025-05-24 [2025/08/23 17:44] – shyriath
+++ sessions:worldbuilding:2025-05-24 [2026/01/17 18:32] (current) – shyriath
@@ Line 71: / Line 71: @@
 To Puugwol, he said: "How long did it take before she attacked her caretaker?" It would, after all, be useful to have a rough idea of the time horizon during which they could still expect their patient to be reasonably coherent. Not that he was likely to be very cooperative with his coherence, but to at least maintain the hypothetical //option// was clearly better than the alternative.}}
-{{wsat>shyriath|Puugwol considered this. "I am not entirely certain about the timing of her injury," she conceded at last, "since it happened before she was brought before us. But the entire process was less than a turn. Of course," she added, "only so much can be extrapolated from one other case. It may be different in this case."
+{{wst>shyriath|Puugwol considered this. "I am not entirely certain about the timing of her injury," she conceded at last, "since it happened before she was brought before us. But the entire process was less than a turn. Of course," she added, "only so much can be extrapolated from one other case. It may be different in this case."
 "At the very least," Shyriath interjected bitterly through his hands, "I have experience in treating illnesses of the mind. It may provide me //some// defense, since nothing you have said suggests it will be forthcoming from anyone else." He lifted his face, glaring. "I suspect that your employer, knowing both my past and my fate, derives considerable satisfaction from the irony she's arranged."}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss had lost interest in the topic of Shyriath's hallucinations - the prisoner was clearly not going to talk about them, his emotions about the state had been made clear, and Puugwol had gestured at something vaguely like a timer for their work to be with anything other than a howling, writhing wreck.
+The adult body really was a poor canvas, though, and it would be tricky to read anything useful out of the battered old creature's metabolism. But the best first thing they could try struck him as Puugwol's other-shifting ability applied to the muscles of, say, one of Shyriath's arms, while Einriss monitored the biochemical details that might allow the trick to be repeated with chemical assistance, or in a clutch of eggs.
+"It might prove to be tricky with the chains," he mused to Puugwol with zero transition, "but maybe we could get one of his arms out past the bars, and tie the wrist so he can't pull it back in, then see what we can do about strengthening the muscle fibres." Possibly to the point where he could, in fact, forcibly pull his arm back in, but by that point they might have some interesting data.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Puugwol nodded happily, but Shyriath had already begun dragging himself toward the back of the cage, as far out of reach as he could get. "If you think I'm going to cooperate with this-" he began, but found himself shocked into silence when a hand snapped around his tail.
+Puugwol had braced herself against the bars, and with a look of enthusiastic concentration, had //stretched// her arm out to a disconcerting length and grabbed their test subject; she then began retracting her arm again, reeling Shyriath in like a reluctant fish. "Now, now," she said, in what was presumably meant to be a soothing tone, "we have no desire to cause permanent damage, and the results may be interesting for all of us."
+A wild look came into Shyriath's eyes. Old and skinny as he was, he still outweighed Puugwol by at least half again, even without the shackles; but slowly, surely, he was pulled backwards, her grip not loosening. With a sudden, awkward lunge, he spun around and bit down on the length of the outstretched arm with all the force he could muster.
+Shyriath's backward slide stopped, but the grip still did not waver. There had been no crackle of bone, no cry of pain, but Puugwol's jaw clenched, and her voice came through it rather strained: "Einriss, would you be so good as to help me pull?"}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss didn't even bother with verbal acknowledgement, instead pushing arms through the bars and - rather fearlessly, given what had just happened to Puugwol and that his body was not nearly as malleable - clutching at part of the tail that was just barely accessible and pulling on it as if it were a strange sort of leash or the harness of a beast of burden.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|The doubling of forced pulled Shyriath, still coiled around with his jaw clamped on Puugwol's arm, up against the bars. The shifter's other hand lashed out and grasped Shyriath's wrist, yanking it out through the bars and holding it out straight.}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss's own grip abruptly shifted its attention, eagerly grabbing the prize. Trying to coordinate the movement with Puugwol by body language alone, he twisted the arm at the elbow, intending to snag it against the bars, as though Shyriath were trying to hug as many of them as he could get away with.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Shyriath released Puugwol's arm, and desperately tried to thrust his head between the bars to strike at them directly. But as he did so, he felt his neck begin to bend against its will, curving into a tight half-circle under the influence of Puugwol's shifting; in an attempt to face to correct way, he whipped his head around, only to misjudge the distance and slamming the side of his head into the bars with a //clang//.
+Puugwol used the moment of dazed confusion to release Shyriath's tail, reach through the bars with her profusely bleeding arm, and wrap it around Shyriath's neck to keep his head firmly pressed against the bars where his teeth couldn't do any further damage. She shifted the grip of her other hand on Shyriath's bent arm to reinforce the position Einriss had imposed.
+"Think... he is immobilized..." she wheezed.}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|At this point, the posture was doing most of the work for them - the wrist was a good point to apply only slight pressure to keep the arm against the bars, since the fulcrum was close to the elbow that way, and the arm couldn't easily be yanked to the side despite the bend because there was almost no wiggle room left between the bars. With Shyriath not in any good position to do any biting, it was a stable arrangement for as long as they didn't get bored of it. And so Einriss kept both hands on the wrist for now, but let most of his attention shift to Puugwol. "Do you need that patched up?" he asked, with sincere concern.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|"Stanching the blood flow... would be helpful," Puugwol managed, sounding a bit faint. "I can begin to speed up the healing process once we have him tied in place-"
+"You fools," Shyriath moaned, from up against the bars. "The Oracle will end the world to get what she wants, and you're helping her."
+"Oh, be quiet," she muttered.}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss let go of the wrist, reasonably sure that physics was in their favour even if he wasn't leaning his weight against it. They weren't exactly overflowing with rope - it wasn't usually what they needed in their particular workshop - but they did have some, since some plants certainly grew better when they could droop from the ceiling, and medium-sized animals could use a hogtie if they were still alive. He was back with it shortly and started to bind the wrist to the bars, leaving some in Puugwol's but not in Shyriath's reach in case she wanted to tie his neck to the bars, too, and prevent him from simply gnawing the rope back off.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Once the wrist was secured, Puugwol released it and quickly secured Shyriath's neck. Then she backed away from the bars, leaned heavily against a table, and concentrated on trying to stay upright. "Perhaps," she murmured, "I should have considered re-optimizing for more robustness before we began taking in subjects."}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss followed Puugwol to the table and grasped at her wrist with one hand, and at the elbow with the other, trying to help her knit the wound back together. The biology was mildly confusing, still in the process of reverting back to baseline, but nothing he couldn't help with. Knitting wounds together wasn't his primary skill - or he would hardly have been engineering crops as his primary occupation - but he could easily give basic first aid, and it happened to be precisely what Puugwol most needed.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Slowly - though much faster than was natural - the wounds shrank and began to scab over. Puugwol began to feel hungry, which was usually the case when one was subjected to healing from Life magic, but she ignored the sensation for the moment; despite the depth and bleeding of the wounds, there was relatively little biomass to restore and so the energy required was proportionally small.
+"Thank you," she said, as the blood stopped flowing; there was still some unsteadiness in her voice, but it was firmer than before. "The last time I had this much trouble with a subject was that creature I tried bringing in from outside on this world, but it relied more on agility than biting."}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|"Do you need a break?" Einriss asked. It would mean leaving Shyriath in a highly uncomfortable posture, but given that he had brought that upon himself, Einriss's already highly selective empathy hardly even took note. "We do need you for the muscle enhancement, if you spend energy you don't have..." he trailed off.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Puugwol stopped leaning on the table and took a few deep breaths. Perhaps she //should//- ah, but no, this might actually be better.
+"I will need very badly to eat once we are done," she said thoughtfully, "but some slight deficit of energy may prove helpful later. The first of the //bilaak-tesh// is ready for consumption, so I shall be seeking counsel from my gods." She turned back toward the cage, and carefully felt Shyriath's arm, his futile struggling against the ropes notwithstanding. "Some shamans say that mild exhaustion makes the process more efficacious."}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss visibly took a moment to process the proffered rationale, but ultimately offered no commentary on it. Instead, he nodded, and turned his attention toward their captive again, awkwardly tied to the bars as he was. The posture looked ridiculous, but the arm was well-exposed.
+From what Einriss imagined the process would be like on the receiving end, it would simply tickle intensely as the flesh restructured itself. Of course, Shyriath wouldn't be able to scratch that itch, but presumably it would fade quickly. Either way, he would find out in the one way he trusted: By sensing the process as it happened. It wasn't as though Shyriath was likely to give an honest answer about what the sensation was like, if indeed he wanted to answer at all.
+//Then let's do this// didn't need saying, and so he didn't say it. Instead, he walked back to Shyriath and gave his neck a soft pat that was, presumably, meant to be at least vaguely reassuring.}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Shyriath did not appear to be reassured at all. In fact, his writhing increased as he felt his arm being reshaped, the muscle fibers increasing in thickeness or converting from one type to another; he whined pitifully. "This will not help you in the end," he whispered desperately. "You cannot trust the Oracle with your work, she will bring only ruin-"
+"Hush," Puugwol interrupted. "I am trying to concentrate." She was taking long, slow breaths. While the changes being made were not in themselves intense, she was making the change in a far more smooth and controlled way than she usually did, so that Einriss' observations at the biochemical level would be easier; the control it required was slightly taxing.}}
+{{wst>pinkgothic|Einriss had settled two fingers against the back of Shyriath's hand, partly pressing down on a knuckle as his muscles underwent the reshaping. His own concentration didn't mind the talking - the analysis used very different parts of his mind than the verbal exchange, which he was ignoring and likely would continue to ignore until his name was spoken or an interesting keyword made it past his filters.
+The changes formed a confusing flurry of chemical signals, but it was confusing in the same way the shape of a fractal was confusing - there was a self-similarity to the instructions, and Einriss had spent a lifetime learning to untangle the information and retaining it as a minimal biochemical information package. Indeed, he was already on the next step: Where the necessary proteins would come from during crucial development phases before the answer became 'food'.
+The information, he reckoned, should generalise to almost any hexapod, so they could experiment on one of the more fast-lived ones to see if they could affect their musculature from birth that way.
+Verbally, he finally said: "Hmm, I think I see a few ways this kind of growth can be applied early in an organism's life. It's less clear if it will work on Chosen, but the easiest trade-off to accept would be to allow a higher resting metabolic rate, and an earlier emergence from eggs, which we should be able to support. That said, since we'll have similar trade-offs to make in future, we may want to keep that one as a last resort. Let's explore this further, shall we?"}}
+{{wst>shyriath|Puugwol nodded, but paused her work to rest for a moment and to examine Shyriath's arm. "But before we proceed, we may want to get more rope," she suggested. "His arm is getting thicker, and the rope will affect his circulation if it is not loosened during the process - but I would rather not do so without much more of it to prevent him from causing further mischief."}}