~ ☕ Death Before Decaf ☕ ~

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.

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…

In my opinion you need a whole heap of medical knowledge to magically heal damage, with more knowledge for more complicated healing.

You need to know what’s on the inside, what’s normal, what’s not, and when to stop. Healing a little skin graze is easy because you can see what you’re doing, but healing an internal injury is one heck of a task if you don’t know what a liver, diaphragm and stomach are supposed to look like or what a pancreas does anyway.

A body doesn’t just ‘know’ the way it’s supposed to be or grow. Each individual cell adapts to the cells next to it. In a growing embryo they basically figure themselves out, After trauma, they do their best with what they’ve got, but bodies can be tricked into healing the wrong way. If you cut off somebody’s hand just above the wrists and fixed the broken ends of those bones together, they would absolutely heal.

If you’re speeding up healing (cell growth) then some tissue types will heal better than others. Bone can heal to 100% of its previous strength, even in the real world, it just takes weeks or months. Skin reaches almost 100%. Tendons only reach 70% of their original strength.Teeth never heal.

So to get the most convenient type of magical healing represented in fiction, you need to be able to reverse the growth process (to bring cells back to an earlier stage so you have stem cells to regrow teeth, nerves etc) and speed up healing (so it doesn’t take 9 months to 2 years to do so).

If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you will end up with dysfuction or dysplasia at best (organs, limbs and tissue that doesn’t work. For example, skin that isn’t waterproof or too elastic, liver that doesn’t connect to the bile duct) or straight up tumors.

Tumors and cancers are immortal cells with unrestricted growth. That’s how they come about.

a guy challenged abe to a duel once. lincoln very much did not want to duel this cat.

so lincoln agreed, on the condition he got to choose the weapon. maybe that was how it generally went in 19th century dueling culture, i have no idea.

the guy said “sure”

lincoln said, “ok. broadswords.”

so that poor would-be opponent shows up on the day of the would-be duel, and abe is outside, doing, like, some quick sword warmups.

now, back in lincoln’s day, he was, as any american schoolchild can tell you, the tallest fucking dude on the entire fucking planet, so please try to even imagine the majestic reach of this stovepiped giant’s condor-like wingspan.

(wingspan plus broadsword.)

abe’s enemy takes one look at this, does some quick mental calculations on his own arm length (mortal, human), turns around and goes home.

the best part is that, as i remember it, lincoln of course had no fucking idea how to swordfight. it was the 1800s. we had guns. he’d just been, like, waving this giant sword around haphazardly, whacking at tree limbs, making his arms look as big as possible because he knew this joker could see him, and he knew that guy didn’t know that lincoln didn’t know what the hell to do with a broadsword.

but you are in fact telling me that an early nineteenth century American gentleman could be challenged to a duel and, in accordance with the culture of the time, technically he could be like “fuck it let’s have a pillow fight” and the other guy would have to accept

oh my god why did anybody ever kill anybody

what a profound and tragic failure of imagination

“the terms of the duel are a dance-off. bring your sickest moves, cad”

“meet me outside town, exactly 500 years from today. hope you like fighting a fucking skeleton”

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

"Are they going to start beating us in hockey as well now??" - Swedish commentators

Norway has had an amazing run in this years hockey WC and taken their first medal ever!!

Suddenly everyone here is watching hockey 🤔🤔🤔 not norwegians being super fans of anything as soon as we are good at it