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brain cells: nonexistent

@marshmallowfluffball

"may you, the beauty of this world, always shine" Akari | aroace | 21+ | maybe a writer | YGO/CFV/GI/HI3/HSR/ORV + insane number of other webnovels

i leave tumblr for a week and get followed by EIGHT p*rnbots...new personal record probably 

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

shit just got creepy

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Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

…what makes me so different?

Evil biology facts that fill me with Fear :)

hey, I heard y’all like evil biology facts like knowledge about horse blood types.

well! today I was researching alternative biochemistries extraterrestrial life could use and. man. I think Earth life is fucked up enough for me thanks

  • biological dark matter. WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY BLOOD HAS DNA IN IT FROM NO KNOWN SOURCE. YOU CAN’T JUST SAY THAT COME BACK HERE
  • One specific cave that has been sealed for 5.5 million years and has developed an ecosystem completely dependent on chemosynthetic bacteria.
  • Was anybody going to tell me that bacteria have decided iron is yummy and are eating the Titanic, or was I supposed to just read that myself
  • Terrible Berry (yes, that’s what the genus name means). This whole thing is so fucked up. These scientists were testing whether radiation could be used to kill pathogens in food, so they dosed a tin of meat with enough radiation to kill any known living organism (as one does) but guess what, it still fucking spoiled because of THIS BASTARD FUCKER.
  • (seriously, why is it like this? WHY has a bacterium evolved to chill in radioactive waste like it’s a soothing Jacuzzi tub? What does it know that we don’t know?)
  • (ANSWERS. I WANT ANSWERS, YOU CHERNOBYL ASS BITCH.)
  • Cursed worm, which has no mouth or digestive system and depends entirely on five (5) different species of bacteria, which consume hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen monoxide, and carbon monoxide, for food. How do you, a worm, even...figure out how to do...all that?
  • Bone worms. At least they like their bones already dead. I still could have gone without knowing this was a thing.
  • “Oh, parasitic plant, that sounds c—WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING”
  • I am like half convinced this is made up. Seriously, bacteria grow their own electrical wires and we just let them?

To clarify

Evil (affectionate and admiring)

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They took the unkillable bacterium and put a Disney song inside of it.

“In 2003, U.S. scientists demonstrated D. radiodurans could be used as a means of information storage that might survive a nuclear catastrophe. They translated the song "It's a Small World" into a series of DNA segments 150 base pairs long, inserted these into the bacteria, and were able to retrieve them without errors 100 bacterial generations later.”

*opens worldbuilding notebook* *takes further notes*

As someone who's entire history in biological research was about studying bacterial nanowires, seeing them on a list like this punched me in the face. They seem pretty normal to me and that worm is fucked up.

I think the most unintentionally pretentious part of me is I genuinely forget that most people do not have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and folklore. I literally just assume most people know at least the name of every Greek god. My mom and I were watching the Banshees of Inisherin and at the start, she asked "Do you know what a banshee is?" and I was so stunned because it would never occur to me to ask that question because I would never assume the average person doesn't know what a banshee is. The average person knows what a banshee is right. You know what a banshee is right. You know the names of the greek gods right. You know that norse myth where loki fucked the horse right. Right. RIGHT