Magic Under Construction: TOMU #478
Jan. 5th, 2011 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 1/5/2011, 12:15 AM
Status: 'bout done (3:15 AM)
Word Count: ~2800
Time Writing: 2 Hours
Progress at two hour mark:
I headed straight for the healing center after class... I figured that if I ended up missing lunch with everyone, Ian would probably realize where I'd gone and he would be able to tell everyone not to worry. It seemed likely to me that he'd be there, since he'd been making such an effort to be closer to the group.
Well, to me, really... but it was the group that included me.
Realistically I probably would have lost nothing by going to lunch like normal and then going to the healing center during my long afternoon break, but I had the somewhat irrational urge to get things taken care of as soon as possible, as though I might suddenly find myself eight and a half months' pregnant if I let it slide another minute.
Also, and on a slightly more reasonable level of irrationality, I didn't want to face Amaranth while I was contemplating this sort of thing. While I was sure she would understand and accept my decision on the matter, I couldn't help but feeling there would be some aspect of sorrow and disappointment in that acceptance.
Or maybe she'd tell me that I was being silly and of course I wasn't pregnant.
Or that I was being silly for worrying about what she or anybody else might think when it was too soon to even tell.
It was hard to know what she would have said or how she would have reacted, and that was the problem... it was the unknown that worried me. I was being haunted by could be and might be, by potentialities and possibilities.
The best way to think of what I was doing, I told myself, was shrinking the number of possibilities. When I found out if I was pregnant... or in danger of being so... that would eliminate one set of possibilities right from the start.
I just hoped it was the right set.
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. I said it with more calmness than I expected, even as I stumbled over the words. I was surprised to find there was no feeling of rising heat in my cheeks, no sense of embarrassment. I was jittery as all get-out, but not embarrassed. "And so... um... I wanted to get, you know... checked out."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to be... careful... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... well, you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be. Not from anything that might have been inside you at the time."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And on the upside, in some cases your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"What happens to my soul?"
"It floats around," Roger said. "You can move around a bit, maybe, depending on your willpower. You won't be out long enough to mange more than that."
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done, to you or anybody else."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might be more than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses, if you can keep body and soul together when you take it. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
It would have been absurd to be sitting there listening to a man talk about giving me an anti-vampire buffing potion that has loss of soul as a side effect for my health under just about any circumstances, but when we were talking about the possibility that I might be pregnancy... and the possibility that I might be ending that pregnancy... well... it seemed kind of crass.
Or it seemed like it should have been crass, but really... it wasn't anything.
My nervousness had subsided, and there was nothing underneath it. It seemed like I should have felt either grimly determined, or remorseful, or something, but all I felt was the cold plastic back of the chair against the small of my back.
"Roger?" I said. It might have been the first time I called him by name. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I felt like what I was about to say required some sort of preface, and a bit of courtesy. I didn't want it to sound critical.
"Yes?"
"Do you really think... is this really the best way to handle this sort of thing?" I asked.
"Well, the fertility alteration is the simplest in terms of set-up and clean-up," he said. "But the Aviva dose isn't really all that much..."
"I don't mean the specific treatment," I said. "I mean... you. Your, I don't know, manner. The way we're talking about it."
"I'm just trying to answer your questions and give you all the information," he said. "How do you think we're talking about it?"
"So... casually," I said. "Matter-of-factly. Shouldn't there be some kind of, I don't know, reverence or... respect?"
"Do you feel like I'm not respecting you?"
"I'm not talking about respect for me," I said. "I mean... the subject. The situation."
"When people come to me talking about sex and pregnancy, I try to follow their leads," he said. "You seem pretty together..."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously," he said. "A little nervous about the subject, but you're not dancing around or expecting me to talk you into what you want to do anyway. And you also seemed to... forgive me if I'm stripping away the veneer of plausible deniability for you... but you seemed to want to act under the assumption that you're not pregnant, so... what is there to be reverential about?"
"I guess when you put it that way, it makes sense," I said.
"If you're sure that there's no chance you'll want to bring a hypothetical fetus to term, this is really no big deal," he said. "And it also wouldn't be a big deal to find out, if you wanted to know, or to wait if you're not one hundred percent sure."
"And if I am sure?"
"Then I give you a disease-curing potion, followed by the other potion, and you sit here for ten minutes, and you walk out," he said.
"It works in ten minutes?"
"If it's going to do anything funny, it'll happen in the first ten minutes, generally," he said.
"What would it do that's 'funny'?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I can't think of anything, unless you're on something already that's going to mess up your life stats in some other way," he said. "We just have a ten minute watch on anyone who takes a durational potion, so we can watch for interactions."
"We're talking about the fertility debuffer, not the anti-life one, right?" I asked. I had thought that was implicit, but the talk of "life stats" worried me.
"Yeah," he said. "But properties having to do with the processes of life are pretty intricately connected. If you were taking something to boost healing, it could interfere with this potion. If you use potions to help you sleep or something else that's impeding your vitality somehow, you could experience exhaustion or torpor. You put on your form that you're not taking anything, but... a lot of people say that. It's nothing personal."
"How soon would we know that it worked?" I asked.
"When we fail to find out that it doesn't, in the course of time," he said. "If you come back in a week or two to get checked out, you should be able to find out for sure. Though... if you'll forgive an inference about your personal life... I think you would find out around that time anyway."
"Yeah, probably," I said. "I couldn't come back in a week and get another dose, just to be sure?"
"I'm afraid not. The dose lasts for two weeks, which should cover the long shot odds of a delayed pregnancy. You should avoid taking any other potions without supervision during it, because there is that possibility for interactions. It'll be noted in your file that you're under its effects, in case you're back in here again before then, for whatever reason... if you want to be completely sure of the results, I'd go with the Aviva."
"I don't think so," I said. "I'm just not sure about its other results."
Progress at hour and a half mark:
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. []Add blushiness here.[] "And so... um..."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to get... taken care of... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
It would have been absurd to be sitting there listening to a man talk about giving me an anti-vampire buffing potion that has loss of soul as a side effect for my health under just about any circumstances, but when we were talking about the possibility that I might be pregnancy... and the possibility that I might be ending that pregnancy... well... it seemed kind of crass.
Or it seemed like it should have been crass, but really... it wasn't anything.
My nervousness had subsided, and there was nothing underneath it. It seemed like I should have felt either grimly determined, or remorseful, or something, but all I felt was the cold plastic back of the chair against the small of my back.
"Roger?" I said. It might have been the first time I called him by name. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I felt like what I was about to say required some sort of preface, and a bit of courtesy. I didn't want it to sound critical.
"Yes?"
"Do you really think... is this really the best way to handle this sort of thing?" I asked.
"Well, the fertility alteration is the simplest in terms of set-up and clean-up," he said. "But the Aviva dose isn't really all that much..."
"I don't mean the specific treatment," I said. "I mean... you. Your, I don't know, manner. The way we're talking about it."
"I'm just trying to answer your questions and give you all the information," he said. "How do you think we're talking about it?"
"So... casually," I said. "Matter-of-factly. Shouldn't there be some kind of, I don't know, reverence or... respect?"
"Do you feel like I'm not respecting you?"
"Not respect for me," I said. "I mean... the subject. The situation."
"When people come to me talking about sex and pregnancy, I try to follow their leads," he said. "You seem pretty together..."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously," he said. "A little nervous about the subject, but you're not dancing around or expecting me to talk you into what you want to do anyway. And you also seemed to... forgive me if I'm stripping away the veneer of plausible deniability for you... but you seemed to want to act under the assumption that you're not pregnant, so... what is there to be reverential about?"
"I guess when you put it that way, it makes sense," I said.
"If you're sure that there's no chance you'll want to bring a hypothetical fetus to term, this is really no big deal," he said. "And it also wouldn't be a big deal to find out, if you wanted to know, or to wait if you're not one hundred percent sure."
"And if I am sure?"
"Then I give you a potion, you sit here for ten minutes, and you walk out," he said.
"It works in ten minutes?"
"If it's going to do anything funny, it'll happen in the first ten minutes, generally," he said.
"What would it do that's 'funny'?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I can't think of anything, unless you're on something already that's going to mess up your life stats in some other way," he said. "We just have a ten minute watch on anyone who takes a durational potion, so we can watch for interactions."
"We're talking about the fertility debuffer, not the anti-life one, right?" I asked. I had thought that was implicit, but the talk of "life stats" worried me.
"Yeah," he said. "But properties having to do with the processes of life are pretty intricately connected. If you were taking something to boost healing, it could interfere with this potion. If you use potions to help you sleep or something else that's impeding your vitality somehow, you could experience exhaustion or torpor. You put on your form that you're not taking anything, but... a lot of people say that. It's nothing personal."
[]
"The dose lasts for two weeks, which should cover the long shot odds of a delayed pregnancy. You should avoid taking any other potions without supervision during it, because there is that possibility for interactions. It'll be noted in your file that you're under its effects, in case you're back in here again before then."
Progress at hour mark:
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. []Add blushiness here.[] "And so... um..."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to get... taken care of... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
Progress at half hour mark:
"So... are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?" he asked.
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
Status: 'bout done (3:15 AM)
Word Count: ~2800
Time Writing: 2 Hours
Progress at two hour mark:
I headed straight for the healing center after class... I figured that if I ended up missing lunch with everyone, Ian would probably realize where I'd gone and he would be able to tell everyone not to worry. It seemed likely to me that he'd be there, since he'd been making such an effort to be closer to the group.
Well, to me, really... but it was the group that included me.
Realistically I probably would have lost nothing by going to lunch like normal and then going to the healing center during my long afternoon break, but I had the somewhat irrational urge to get things taken care of as soon as possible, as though I might suddenly find myself eight and a half months' pregnant if I let it slide another minute.
Also, and on a slightly more reasonable level of irrationality, I didn't want to face Amaranth while I was contemplating this sort of thing. While I was sure she would understand and accept my decision on the matter, I couldn't help but feeling there would be some aspect of sorrow and disappointment in that acceptance.
Or maybe she'd tell me that I was being silly and of course I wasn't pregnant.
Or that I was being silly for worrying about what she or anybody else might think when it was too soon to even tell.
It was hard to know what she would have said or how she would have reacted, and that was the problem... it was the unknown that worried me. I was being haunted by could be and might be, by potentialities and possibilities.
The best way to think of what I was doing, I told myself, was shrinking the number of possibilities. When I found out if I was pregnant... or in danger of being so... that would eliminate one set of possibilities right from the start.
I just hoped it was the right set.
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. I said it with more calmness than I expected, even as I stumbled over the words. I was surprised to find there was no feeling of rising heat in my cheeks, no sense of embarrassment. I was jittery as all get-out, but not embarrassed. "And so... um... I wanted to get, you know... checked out."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to be... careful... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... well, you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be. Not from anything that might have been inside you at the time."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And on the upside, in some cases your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"What happens to my soul?"
"It floats around," Roger said. "You can move around a bit, maybe, depending on your willpower. You won't be out long enough to mange more than that."
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done, to you or anybody else."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might be more than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses, if you can keep body and soul together when you take it. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
It would have been absurd to be sitting there listening to a man talk about giving me an anti-vampire buffing potion that has loss of soul as a side effect for my health under just about any circumstances, but when we were talking about the possibility that I might be pregnancy... and the possibility that I might be ending that pregnancy... well... it seemed kind of crass.
Or it seemed like it should have been crass, but really... it wasn't anything.
My nervousness had subsided, and there was nothing underneath it. It seemed like I should have felt either grimly determined, or remorseful, or something, but all I felt was the cold plastic back of the chair against the small of my back.
"Roger?" I said. It might have been the first time I called him by name. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I felt like what I was about to say required some sort of preface, and a bit of courtesy. I didn't want it to sound critical.
"Yes?"
"Do you really think... is this really the best way to handle this sort of thing?" I asked.
"Well, the fertility alteration is the simplest in terms of set-up and clean-up," he said. "But the Aviva dose isn't really all that much..."
"I don't mean the specific treatment," I said. "I mean... you. Your, I don't know, manner. The way we're talking about it."
"I'm just trying to answer your questions and give you all the information," he said. "How do you think we're talking about it?"
"So... casually," I said. "Matter-of-factly. Shouldn't there be some kind of, I don't know, reverence or... respect?"
"Do you feel like I'm not respecting you?"
"I'm not talking about respect for me," I said. "I mean... the subject. The situation."
"When people come to me talking about sex and pregnancy, I try to follow their leads," he said. "You seem pretty together..."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously," he said. "A little nervous about the subject, but you're not dancing around or expecting me to talk you into what you want to do anyway. And you also seemed to... forgive me if I'm stripping away the veneer of plausible deniability for you... but you seemed to want to act under the assumption that you're not pregnant, so... what is there to be reverential about?"
"I guess when you put it that way, it makes sense," I said.
"If you're sure that there's no chance you'll want to bring a hypothetical fetus to term, this is really no big deal," he said. "And it also wouldn't be a big deal to find out, if you wanted to know, or to wait if you're not one hundred percent sure."
"And if I am sure?"
"Then I give you a disease-curing potion, followed by the other potion, and you sit here for ten minutes, and you walk out," he said.
"It works in ten minutes?"
"If it's going to do anything funny, it'll happen in the first ten minutes, generally," he said.
"What would it do that's 'funny'?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I can't think of anything, unless you're on something already that's going to mess up your life stats in some other way," he said. "We just have a ten minute watch on anyone who takes a durational potion, so we can watch for interactions."
"We're talking about the fertility debuffer, not the anti-life one, right?" I asked. I had thought that was implicit, but the talk of "life stats" worried me.
"Yeah," he said. "But properties having to do with the processes of life are pretty intricately connected. If you were taking something to boost healing, it could interfere with this potion. If you use potions to help you sleep or something else that's impeding your vitality somehow, you could experience exhaustion or torpor. You put on your form that you're not taking anything, but... a lot of people say that. It's nothing personal."
"How soon would we know that it worked?" I asked.
"When we fail to find out that it doesn't, in the course of time," he said. "If you come back in a week or two to get checked out, you should be able to find out for sure. Though... if you'll forgive an inference about your personal life... I think you would find out around that time anyway."
"Yeah, probably," I said. "I couldn't come back in a week and get another dose, just to be sure?"
"I'm afraid not. The dose lasts for two weeks, which should cover the long shot odds of a delayed pregnancy. You should avoid taking any other potions without supervision during it, because there is that possibility for interactions. It'll be noted in your file that you're under its effects, in case you're back in here again before then, for whatever reason... if you want to be completely sure of the results, I'd go with the Aviva."
"I don't think so," I said. "I'm just not sure about its other results."
Progress at hour and a half mark:
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. []Add blushiness here.[] "And so... um..."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to get... taken care of... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
It would have been absurd to be sitting there listening to a man talk about giving me an anti-vampire buffing potion that has loss of soul as a side effect for my health under just about any circumstances, but when we were talking about the possibility that I might be pregnancy... and the possibility that I might be ending that pregnancy... well... it seemed kind of crass.
Or it seemed like it should have been crass, but really... it wasn't anything.
My nervousness had subsided, and there was nothing underneath it. It seemed like I should have felt either grimly determined, or remorseful, or something, but all I felt was the cold plastic back of the chair against the small of my back.
"Roger?" I said. It might have been the first time I called him by name. It sounded weird coming out of my mouth, but I felt like what I was about to say required some sort of preface, and a bit of courtesy. I didn't want it to sound critical.
"Yes?"
"Do you really think... is this really the best way to handle this sort of thing?" I asked.
"Well, the fertility alteration is the simplest in terms of set-up and clean-up," he said. "But the Aviva dose isn't really all that much..."
"I don't mean the specific treatment," I said. "I mean... you. Your, I don't know, manner. The way we're talking about it."
"I'm just trying to answer your questions and give you all the information," he said. "How do you think we're talking about it?"
"So... casually," I said. "Matter-of-factly. Shouldn't there be some kind of, I don't know, reverence or... respect?"
"Do you feel like I'm not respecting you?"
"Not respect for me," I said. "I mean... the subject. The situation."
"When people come to me talking about sex and pregnancy, I try to follow their leads," he said. "You seem pretty together..."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously," he said. "A little nervous about the subject, but you're not dancing around or expecting me to talk you into what you want to do anyway. And you also seemed to... forgive me if I'm stripping away the veneer of plausible deniability for you... but you seemed to want to act under the assumption that you're not pregnant, so... what is there to be reverential about?"
"I guess when you put it that way, it makes sense," I said.
"If you're sure that there's no chance you'll want to bring a hypothetical fetus to term, this is really no big deal," he said. "And it also wouldn't be a big deal to find out, if you wanted to know, or to wait if you're not one hundred percent sure."
"And if I am sure?"
"Then I give you a potion, you sit here for ten minutes, and you walk out," he said.
"It works in ten minutes?"
"If it's going to do anything funny, it'll happen in the first ten minutes, generally," he said.
"What would it do that's 'funny'?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I can't think of anything, unless you're on something already that's going to mess up your life stats in some other way," he said. "We just have a ten minute watch on anyone who takes a durational potion, so we can watch for interactions."
"We're talking about the fertility debuffer, not the anti-life one, right?" I asked. I had thought that was implicit, but the talk of "life stats" worried me.
"Yeah," he said. "But properties having to do with the processes of life are pretty intricately connected. If you were taking something to boost healing, it could interfere with this potion. If you use potions to help you sleep or something else that's impeding your vitality somehow, you could experience exhaustion or torpor. You put on your form that you're not taking anything, but... a lot of people say that. It's nothing personal."
[]
"The dose lasts for two weeks, which should cover the long shot odds of a delayed pregnancy. You should avoid taking any other potions without supervision during it, because there is that possibility for interactions. It'll be noted in your file that you're under its effects, in case you're back in here again before then."
Progress at hour mark:
There were a couple of people in the waiting area of the healing center when I got there. They were both girls. That fact made me deeply uncomfortable for some reason. I felt like as women they were more likely to be able to discern why I was there and infer things about me for it.
I told myself that this was silly, that they could be there for a similar reason as me, for all that I knew... but that just made me feel naive and small. The both looked so calm and composed.. If they were there for reasons having to do with anything sexual, they were certainly more at ease with themselves about it.
Then I spotted a guy who'd been reading a pamphlet on the wall and I didn't really feel any better about his presence. I wondered what would be worse... getting a male healer to talk to, or a female one? It seemed to me like neither would be any better than the other, but whichever one I ended up with would be worse.
Then there was the high likelihood that I would be stuck with a Khersian, or a member of a subsidiary faith. As I filled out the form I wondered if "no clerics, please" would be a horrible faux pas.
I decided to sort of hedge things a little bit by emphasizing my need for arcane treatment and my sensitivity to divine power as much as I possibly could in the small space allotted for special needs and considerations.
I also balked at describing my reason for coming there. It seemed like a bigger and more complicated thing than the form was intended to capture. I mean, it wasn't like "broken foot" or "sword through arm" or something that could be summed up in a short phrase or sentence. I thought I might be pregnant... okay, that was a short sentence, but it still didn't really convey the magnitude of the situation at all.
I did my best with the form and then handed it back to the receptionist without making eye contact. I thought I might have heard a short, sharp intake of breath as she glanced at it, but she didn't question my lack of details... she just took it and began processing it.
A few minutes or several years later, a male voice called out, "Ms. Mackenzie?" I looked up to see Roger beckoning me to come back.
Evidently my preferred form of address had been circulated among the healing center staff... considering the amount of trouble we'd given each other, I wasn't too surprised that they were being careful around me.
Or... alternatively... maybe it was simply Roger being respectful of other people's choices and beliefs. I had to admit that he was one of the more decent people on the center's staff. He'd never been less than fair to me. If he was brusque sometimes, well... I'd probably given him reason to not want to linger in my presence longer than was necessary to do his job, and I couldn't say that he didn't do his job.
On the balance, Roger was probably not the worst person for me to talk to about sensitive subjects.
"I notice for the 'nature of injury or complaint' blank, you put 'confidential - please ask'," he said once he led me into one of the actual rooms with a door, which he closed behind us. "So... confidentially... what is the nature of the injury or complaint?"
"Um... my boyfriend and I had, you know... we forgot to wear a ring," I said. []Add blushiness here.[] "And so... um..."
"Have you noticed any symptoms?"
"No," I said. "But I'd like to get... taken care of... anyway. And also... I'm worried that I might be..."
I waited to see if he would fill in the blank, out loud or otherwise, but he just sat there impassively waiting for me to finish.
"Pregnant," I said.
"Okay," Roger said. "Now, are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?"
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."
Progress at half hour mark:
"So... are you looking to confirm whether or not you're pregnant, or are you looking to confirm that you're not?" he asked.
"Don't we have to do the one before we could do anything about the other?" I asked.
"Not necessarily," he said. "Some of the more, uh, drastic measures aren't something you would want to go through 'just in case', but they wouldn't begin to be necessary if you're only a couple of days along."
"So... you're telling me that you could do something for me that would just take care of it now, and I wouldn't even have to know if I was ever... or if I would have been..."
He nodded.
"That's what I'm telling you," he said. "Obviously the number of options are going to be constrained a little because we have to rule out the divine treatments..."
"Are there even divine treatments for this?"
"Yeah, actually, there are," he said. "There are a few different deities who could be invoked. The most reliable method is Khaelean."
"Seriously?" I said. I would have expected Mother Khaele to stay away from that sort of thing. "Aren't Khaeleans more concerned with, you know, fertility?"
"Yeah, that's why they're good with this stuff," he said. "One of the rites of rabbits does the trick."
"Rites of rabbits?" I repeated.
"Yeah, it's a big fertility thing," he said. "There are two main ones that we might recommend. One tells you if you're pregnant, and another one ends the pregnancy peacefully. It's one of the better ways to end things if you're far enough along for there to be issues, as I understand it. We don't do that one here, though. We just refer people to a practitioner who performs it."
"So... what would you recommend for me?" I asked. "Given that I can't have divine energy, and I want to... get things done, definitively, and I don't really want to know one way or the other?"
"Well, we do have this thing that they used to call the 'draught of living death'," he said. "That's kind of a dark and melodramatic title, what it really is is an anti-life potion."
"And that's not dark or melodramatic?" I said.
"Well, the brand name for it is 'Aviva'," he said. "If you like the sound of that better."
"What exactly does it do?"
"It's a very short-lived anti-life effect," he said. "Basically, as I understand it, 'anti-life' is to the living what 'undeath' is to the dead. You take on some aspects of death while still being alive, basically. The commonly available commercial version only lasts for a few minutes. During that time, your body is inimical to life, so any foreign living matter is destroyed pretty quickly. So whether you're pregnant yet or not... you're not pregnant, and you're not going to be."
"But I'm a living zombie in the meantime," I said.
"It doesn't last long," he said. "And in some cases, your soul leaves your body for the duration, so..."
"Wait, that's an upside?"
"It means you don't have to experience the effects of the anti-life yourself," he said.
"And what does my body do while I'm out of it?" I asked.
"Shamble, mostly," he said. He shrugged. "Moan. We'd draw a containment circle around it... you... so that there isn't any harm done."
I had an inkling that my body, absent a soul, might b emore than they were used to dealing with, but I didn't really want to find out one way or the other.
"What are the other options?" I asked.
"Well, nothing that would work with as much certainty as the living death potion at this early stage," he said. "We can give you a potion that temporarily lowers your fertility. That usually prevents pregnancy and has a high chance of ending one in the early stages. If you came back later, we'd have more options that can directly target the pregnancy. The anti-life elixir is really the only non-divine method that's one hundred percent guaranteed to work when you're not showing."
"But it has a chance of turning me into a soulless abomination," I said.
"Briefly," he said. "And I just want to stress that this wouldn't prevent it from working in the intended fashion."
"Who even came up with the idea of using a living death potion for birth control?" I asked.
"Alchemists, I guess," he said. "They had to find a bigger market for it than adventurers, vampire slayers, and zombie hunters... the stuff protects you from energy drains and certain kinds of undead senses. Not that those applications are likely to come up during the few minutes the dose lasts for."