hi sweet pea. thank you seven million years for your patience as i answer this a month and 20 days later. first of all Let's check out KCD. together. i still can't play games so i'm back to my usual of hogging playthroughs like they're my personal jesters amusing me. fool, fool, more moving pictures. show me the pebble at once. anyways let's focus on the important peterstakh matters. the importanrstakhers.

my first Dis Claimer is that i still haven't been able to go through all of P3. my first mitigation to that is It prolly doesn't matter since they literally haven't spoken to each other in any of the previous games so i am doubtful they'll start doing so now. except if my tasty peterstakh cellar stocks are being reheated in-game like was reheated my sigil placement on burakh 🤨 i fully jest.

okay so i'm going to put it under a read more because i just realized it's seven million years long. okay. happy peterstakh dimanche everyone

MARK IMMORTELL canonically. he has a cane canonically, now whether or not the game wants us to believe he uses it for real or it's an accessory... for real to me. in my mind's eye he has sciatica. it acts up on and off so sometimes he'll be prancing around like a goat swaying his cane like he's trying to hit people with it, sometimes he uses it for real, and sometimes he has a fanciful little wheelchair when the pain's too bad to stand on his two legs. in which case he still holds his cane for hitting people purposes. his cane is a constant thing.

Yulia... she also mentions Leg Problem in P2 so Joy the cane be upon ye. i think her deal is a repetitive strain injury of tendinitis in the knee & ankle, and she never got enough rest for it to heal properly, never did physical therapy, so now, like other types of tendinitis, it flares up from use & some movements/postures. as the rainy & cold season approach, she gets more and more sedentary because the weather makes tendinitis worse by stiffening the tendons, so it gets in vicious cycles of Stiff tendons from the cold -> even less easy to do some stretches to help with the pain -> tendons get stiffer from no stretchin -> even less easy to do some stretches... her cane is an on and off thing, but becomes regular as fall & winter roll around

Notkin as he grows up. in p1 & 2 his spoken dialog mentions (a) bad leg(s); considering his mom died in childbirth (likely His birth) in my mind's eye his bad leg(s) is attributed to having been pulled out of there Fucked Uply. mom didn't make it through a complicated birth and baby got a leg messed up when they hurried to get him outta here. adolescence and getting taller gets him apophysitis (a bone + cartilage inflammation/strain injury often seen in teens because the bones grow faster than the muscles around them) in his knee and he never gets to have the rest needed for it to heal properly so as an adult, while the pain is mostly gone, it flares up sometimes. he's way past giving a fuck what anyone might think about seeing him limp with a cane in hand so he periodically, but quite often uses one. also might use it to hit people.

Khan occasionally once he gets into his mind that it's not a big deal & if he needs it he needs it. he already has a messed up knee as a kid (p2 model bandage) but i'm still deciding how extensive of a wound that is. more than what that is i think this guy gets inflammatory arthritis as a plague residual symptom, and while most of it is concentrated in his hands, fingers and wrists, it sometimes, rarely, attacks his ankles & knees, which is when he gets on his legs wobbly like a newborn foal. while his coping mechanism for it is to lie down and suffer through gritted teeth because he still has in mind that showing pain is showing weakness and is undignified of a man of his rank (the imaginary kingdom he once had) he eventually, from being yelled at "hey moron CATCH" and thrown a cane at, gets into his mind that he should use one for such moments and not even his Mortal Enemy* will care. his own would be a fanciful thing, black-lacquered wood, silver rings, a silver dog's head at the end of the handle. too proud and proper to hit people with it but he can't say he doesn't think about it.

Yessiree I do.

Dankovsky is better at it because he's had more practice — regardless of if the Capital is Moscow or St-Petersburg (depending on when one thinks Pathologic takes place [pre- or post-1917 revolution]), he grew up here and both of these cities from what I'm gathering have a history of popular ice skating spots. He'd go with his mama and kept going until her legs became too bad to ice skate. As a grown man he's sometimes slipped away from his lab to melancholically ice skate to clear his mind. This much is true.

Burakh also got to experience ice skating a bit, but less: the Gorkhon river, because it is full of animal blood and guts and lard and the machinery rust and oil from the Termitary, doesn't freeze over very well, and his dad had multiple times told him to not wander on the ice because it was unstable. At most, and he and his friends needed to wait until the tributaries of the gorkhon to the south froze over, and even then it was sloshy ice. When he was sent to the Capital to study, he did indulge in ice skating at the same rinks Dankovsky is familiar with.

sticky considers dankovsky a Medical Role Model in the way he only half does burakh, not as a values thing but as a percentage thing. burakh's practice hinges in both his Capital knowledge and the steppe ways of his father and his communities whereas dankovsky is pure unfiltered Capital (and westbound) knowledge. dankovsky brings last year's Medical Knowledge Treatise (not the current year's, people need those) to sticky who's obsessed with the slightly gross anatomical lithographs in it (i know this because i've written it). i think he doesn't like. think much. of rubin. beyond "under/after a burakh but not the heir", they have very little in common. rubin has a whole airport worth of baggage wrt heritage and heirness, it's particularly more visible in P2 since he and burakh have actually very few interactions in P1; whereas in p1 he was put forward to be formally adopted as a foster son, that is not a thing in p2, it's actually way funnier (as in painful and cruel), instead he says of isidor [to artemy] "your father", "your father", until he stops and says "father", "father", putting himself as a burakh heir. it's less about being on a same plane as artemy, a brother to him, it's about being him. when the game dev docs call him "artemy's doppeldanger", that's very much this. Anyways i don't think Sticky cares much about him. they have little in common, sticky doesn't have a tenth of the Heritage bagage Rubin has, and while rubin shoulders burakh in his practice and sticky can be #inspired, he neither has the novelty of dankovsky's Capital Endeavors nor the utmost respect sticky owes burakh for literally saving his life. he's also over 2m tall (6'9"), generally grumpy, and vaguely scary. and still sneers and barks at burakh even years after The Event because he still has the heritage en travers de la gorge + grieving and coping. bad.

gonna be real i think i could invent whole cloth a russian homosexual only child male from late imperial/early to mid-soviet era whose father has expectations of him [regardless of what these expectations entail] and he and these two could bond over this. the concept of Parent Has Expectation Of You (especially father has of son & mother has of daughter) is pretty universal as far as like Human Experience goes.

I think both Burakh and Dankovsky have this Classic flavor of relationship with their fathers which is There Is Love, but dad is not very expansive about it, not very vocal about it (until it is too late, cf. Burakh), and love mostly shows itself as expectations. papakovsky had a certain distance created between he and his son because he caught on early enough that son was gay and [i've talked about this numerous times to tldr] distance installed itself as dad saw the son's homosexuality as a reflection on him, but he evently Stopped Being That Way around dankovsky's adulthood. burakh didn't have this with isidor because Didn't Know He Was Gay until it clicked like day 9. so the distance was not about this. but his whole narrative is about dealing with inheritance and with distance and To Me a coming-of-age narrative at like 26. cf. ATA if i stay real.

oh my god you do well to come back i had forgor💀 to reply again. you get a two for one deal.

as far as artemy's mother: she's [here]. i need to redraw her one day but she's one of the three p2 mothers i've drawn (her, stamatina, and dankovskaya). clay type of woman. even if she was a capital/western transplant to the town (as most of the non-Kin people used to be before they started popping out kids. orphans mostly. who didn't start off as orphan due to the Being born thing) i think she really quickly adopted the whole mother earth customs even without fully believe in them because Makes More Sense than sky father being father of everything and woman being born of man's rib, due to the She Can See Kids Are Born From Her. her clay (pottery) work kinda existed in this continuun of Creating Stuff, so was gardening. i think she did a lot of the plates & bowls & cups & whatnot that can still be found in the burakh's lair, all these little cups for mixing tinctures... i think she might even have made a first alambic prototype with a clay body, something like this.

i think she was weakened quite a bit by ersher's birth, and the second birth killed her.

i will not lie to you i don't think much about ersher because i love this ambiguity of it. i love that we know nothing about him except his bonds (burakh's brother, likely burakh's parents' son due to the Family thing), we don't know what he died of, at what age, and if artemy ever knew him. "My older brother. He died young." (artemy's quote) does not even tell us if he even knew ersher. it is implied they must've have at the very least cohabitated for a while, but maybe artemy just knows him from being told about him, but holds him dear enough that he calls him "older brother".

considering kids around 15yo are ruling the town, forming gangs and discussion politically-motivated loveless alliance marriages, i take "young" to mean "under 14", even younger than that. to me, ersher died around 10. i like the number 10, because it is the one who keeps coming back in p1 (10 years since the last outbreak). equally for that numerology grind, i think he and artemy have 5 years difference, for 5 is the number that comes back in p2 (last outbreak). so ersher died at 10 when artemy was 5. i'm not sure what i want him to have died of (.......... very strange formulation but you know what i mean). on one hand, i could see the steppe swallowing him. just straight up doing that. the steppe refuses to eat the elder burakh (cannot be buried, beginning of P2) because he has unfinished business at the surface, swallows the eldest son, refuses to eat the youngest because he must stay on the surface, he is the tether at the surface. i need to check the geology of that part of the eurasian steppe but this ^ would be inspired by something that happens in a land i love, where basically it's a mountain of sometimes-hollow limestone, covered with soft ground, and sometimes a hiker can fall through that soft ground into a big hollow, and never be found, or be found at hunting season when the hunting dogs sniff out the corpse. scary stuff. my other thought is he died... of something "stupid". something that now is very preventable, even easy to help with, but wasn't for a long, long while. cold. flu. some kind of vitamin deficiency. poisoning. tetanus (not "stupid", very dramatic and scary, the vaccine is from 1939). actually i might go with the tetanus thing: it's a really nasty, scary disease (like the pest), but not transmissible. it can happen from getting a wound infected. i think he was handling his father's tool, maybe to learn to butcher; got a cut; got infected; died.

i think artemy was not shielded from seeing this, even if his mother really insisted he be. i think he doesn't remember much, if anything of it; seeing illness does not trigger memory of his brother, but he has this. apple seed of grief inside of him. lodged somewhere all bitter and dark. i think it made him be a little morose as a person, which he still is, but it has been so long it has become his "baseline". i think artemy has very, very little memories of his brother; basically his brain is blank from 5yo and back, most of his core memories come from 7 & up, where he truly bonded with the friends he still has (still tries to keep). i think ersher's death devastated his mom, who was already weakened from the birth, and grief + weakness during the second birth killed her. now i could get into how isidor has made plenty of selfish choices which are are not yes no if you see it that was if you don't see it that way Selfish and he tries to justify and he doesn't and he knows and he doesn't... and what it could have meant for him to try to have a second kid when his wife was like that... because she's not the virgin mary that thang did not pop up like that... there is stuff to say there isn't. she wanted artemy too she did. she just didn't make it to see him.

ersher in my mind didn't get to like. be much of a person due to the Dead At 10 thing, but he was more jolly that artemy has ever been (also i think bc the second son was raised in more morose of an atmosphere, with a dad having already lost a son & his wife). he was a brunette ☝ in my mind mom's blonde & isidor was brown-haired (even if Bald), artemy got mom's blonde & ersher had dad's brown. i think he had his hair longer, And i think stakh, who knew him just a bit longer because barely older than artemy, because he has his whole. gestures. cain and abel if they (tried to) slayed (each other)/wants to be isidor's son sooo bad started growing out his brown hair for that. his problems and issues notice how i keep making it about him. stakh always at the scene of the crime.

if you knew if you knew if you knewwwww i think about it saur myuch... i always go back and forth about what i want Their Living Arrangements to be but in their big age i think dankovsky either lives full-time or is around most of the time at burakh's house [now his too] because the bed is big and high and comfortable [and burakh's always been vaguely aware there are chances he might have been conceived in it but that made them laugh at 30 and it will make them heartily chuckle at 55] and they can both get inside it with their creaky bones. i think they still often see The Horrors flashing before their eyes i think it never goes away but even in their older age they find how to comfort each other. the blanky.

they're normal about each other's hands [see: "gentle hands of a surgeon", see: whatever the fuck that paragraph was about the hands in fic of mine] and as they age and the skin becomes thinner and the veins more apparent they're both oh so reverent about all the specks and the nicks and the small chemical burns and the decades-old scratches and cuts. kind kisses on the age spots that have appeared on the back of the hands, on the arms.

they've been navigating pain and trauma for decades together they found then and they still find now how to care for the other, and the weird way old phantom stitches itch at night... still... and again...

dankovsky has always indulged in fancy robes but as he ages he doubles down... more silk for the man... burakh pretends he does not understand his fancies but by god he will pet that soft fabric as he would skin. i think they've laid off cigarettes and booze; burakh still indulges in a twyre pipe from time to time, but dankovsky has doubled down on being a Tea Enjoyer, and thoroughly puled burakh in...