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Yellow Rain Puff
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>HELL YEAH GET THE BRAIN DESTRUCTION
Yeah let’s totally do this and pffffffft no this is so stupid.
>... Yeah no. That guy? Complete lunatic
>... I have absolutely no faith in his skills but I still can't help but like the guy for some odd reason.
>Oh god is this guy for REAL?!
>He's clearly not all there (or, at least, not versed in mammalian surgery. We dont know how dreambug bodies work)
> hell, don't let him touch your head anymore, just in case.
> No amputations, no brain surgery, we'll handle this using god-powers.
“Yeah, no,” I say, backing away a little. “I don’t think I need anything. I’m happy with all of my parts staying where they are.”
He takes a step towards me and stops. “Oh. You have heard about it too, then? Is that why? Did you just come here to laugh?”
“Heard about what? Laugh? No, look—”
He flexes his forelimbs, clenching and unclenching. “The surgery with the Larkarden-Kilhren child. They were very angry I took off the entire arm when they had called me in to treat a broken wrist.”
I don’t really say anything because this guy is kind of like, obviously insane, and he’s basically admitting to it, so like—
“The broken wrist was only the most obvious of the damage the boy suffered in his fall. The radius bone—” he grabs my arm and runs his raptorial along the side of it “—this, here, was broken, and I suspect splintered internally. Having been left untreated for a week, I had expected and found an infection within the arm itself. Because of the inefficiency of tombdog medicine I knew I would be unable to acquire a counter to the infection, and deemed it necessary to amputate the forearm before the infection spread further up.”
“Uh…”
He takes a step back and sways a little. His voice takes a listing, meandering tone. “And then I tried to explain to them the very basics of infection but they thought it was made-up nonsense! I know your remnant has a reputation of being medically backwards—why I came here in the first place, mind you—but I had never expected such ignorance! The boy had excellent survivability, and so long as the site of amputation is well cared for he should be fine.”
Iaxio and I stare at him.
“I really am an excellent doctor, you know.”
Iaxio looks at me and shrugs.
“Well,” I say. “I mean, is our medicine really that… bad?”
“Your society’s nudity taboo has your native doctors refusing to look at another person’s body until they are dead!”
Well, I mean, that’s also true. Most of the best doctors in the remnant aren’t tombdogs to get around that exact reason—I mean being a doctor is like, one of the few things outsiders are really celebrated for. I mean. That doesn’t say anything about this guy’s medical skill, but he seems like, to not actually be entirely crazy. “Uh. Yeah, okay, sorry. I didn’t come here to laugh though, I really am having trouble with a dreambug invading me and stuff. I just. Don’t want to risk losing my dreams entirely, you know?”
I guess I can at least ask him important questions still. Even if he is a good doctor, and even if the ~brain destruction surgery~ went well, it still would mean I couldn’t talk to Maexiks, so like. I’ll just ask him some questions about dreambug powers for now.
> Can you ask him just like, what kind of things dreambugs can do, both in and out of dreams? Like, what are their dream powers and how do they work? Mention seeing the stars making a pattern and the lights off of their wings/eyespot dealios.
“So like, I’d at least be able to sleep better if I knew what this guy was doing to me. What can dreambugs do? What—I mean?”
Bringing things to wanting to be able to sleep better, and it being about a dreambug misusing his powers, at least gets the doctor bug to tell me the deets.
He puts his own spin on things but he tells me a lot. The future telling, he says, he thinks isn’t anything magical. Or at least, nothing to do with fate or destiny. He thinks the dreambug just looks into the minds of the people involved, and then day-dreams what might happen based on what everyone who will be involved would most likely do.
A dreambug can tell you’ll be ambushed on the road because he knows you plan to go down that road, and he’ll also see that there are people planning to ambush travelers on that road. Knowing how the ambush would go, though, is mostly guess-work on the dreambug’s part.
A person even just learning something new, or having an unexpected thought, is enough to throw a dreambug prophecy off entirely. Things out of the control of any person—things that don’t have thoughts to guess the futures off—can come out of nowhere and toss a future-telling off course too. He tells me to also not trust any predictions that involve something no one would imagine happening, because the dreambug is probably making it up.
When I ask him about telling the future to figure out where I am in the present, he says it’s a clever idea, but he doubts it could really work. Unless the dreambug was very skilled. I tell him the one I’m up against might be, and he says it might work, then.
All in all he doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of future-telling, though. He says he doesn’t bother using it to tell surgery successes, since he already knows what could go wrong in a surgery, and he can give those predictions without help.
I ask him what else dreambugs can do and it’s a lot.
The doctor himself can use his powers to force people to fall asleep and then arrange pleasant dreams for them so they don’t freak out during amputations and surgery and stuff. He says entering their dreams is sometimes necessary, and that’s basically what the Geofahn bug is probably doing to me.
He tells me there are dreambugs and then dreams of dreambugs, and then a dreambug’s dream, and these are all totally different things. Maexiks left a dream of herself with me, which is apparently not her, but is constantly updated from her waking self, and it relays back everything that it does to her, so it actually is her in every important way?
When Maexiks is asleep and I’m asleep then her actual dream enters my dream and that’s Maexiks for real. I ask him if Maexiks’ dream can tell the future or if she needs to be asleep at the same time to tell the future and he says he isn’t even sure.
He says the Geofahn dreambug can keep other dreambugs out of my dreams if he’s good enough, which apparently he is, but he has to set up an actual barrier that other dreambugs get stopped at. He says the constellation I saw was just an artifact of the dreambug using his power on me. I tell him what the Geofahn bug did with the fake Maexiks tricks, and the nightmares, and he tells me the Geofahn bug is probably pretty good at dreaming. He also says the Geofahn bug sounds rather immoral.
He says nightmares—dreambug ones—is a dreambug taking things that are bothering me and forcing them to take shape and go after me. He says “losing” to them is really dangerous and could give the dreambug control over my mind. I remember the night Maexiks showed me the other dreambug, she also warned me that a Geofahn dog I was dreaming about was a nightmare and it was good I didn’t let him see me—so I guess he’s been trying this stuff on me since the start.
I ask him if it’s possible for a dreambug to be entering my dreams a lot and slowly implanting thoughts in me, and teaching me the dreambug language. He says it is, but it’s really unethical. He says he learned the tombdog language through dreaming. He asks me to try to talk to him in the dreambug language and I do for a bit, and he says my mouth can’t do the noises well, but it’s a good effort and it’s nice to hear his own language again.
I ask him if the Geofahn bug can start leaving thoughts in me and he says he absolutely could do that. He tells me there isn’t much I can do about it directly, like.
I give him 5 points of currency in thanks for explaining it all to me, and now I’m like.
I don’t think I’m going to ask him to actually help out, though. Getting advice is nice enough. I have too many thoughts warning me against letting him get involved in any way.
Looking at the dim gray sky, it’s sometime in the afternoon. I’m kind of hungry. I guess I could see if McTrinkets is free for having some food, although the plan was more that I’d spend a whole day with her—but maybe spending a day and a half day extra is nice too. Or I could maybe talk to Iaxio about hanging out—we haven’t really had any friendship time in basically forever. I could check out House Doxedn and see what they’re up to? I dunno.
I suddenly have free time, I guess.
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