Today I keep making hermits into rain world characters and going wildly off-canon, with Joe and Cleo this time! Clear text from the art is in the image description.
A story of theirs is below the cut.
An ancient known as Carried Longing, Eight Odes to Animocity has met an unfortunate fate long before the last being of their race delved into the Depths to ascend. They've been striken with infection which slowly ate at them from the inside, with no cure in sight. They fought it for a long, long while, until their body eventually gave out.
Before Carried Longing have lost their ability to wake up again in the next cycle due to the festering chronic disease (think of Hunter's demise for an example of such a fate), however, fellow ancients have transported their body to a near medical facility, where they have been put in a state akin to a medically induced coma with all biological processes slowed to a near halt, until the cure arrives and they can ascend.
This facility is located within an iterator can. The one operating it is known as Words Of Echoed Hills, or just Hills for short, an iterator designed and trained to work in a medical field who possesses an impressive amount of information on the topic and means to implement it. They keep ancients and their pets in check, helping the former stay healthy enough to be able to move on from a mortal realm, and are no strangers to seeing beings in dire situations like Longing's.
Hills is tasked with keeping Carried Longing stable, looking for a cure, and she carries out this duty till the last ancient of the city on top of her can leaves to find the Depths, and even then some. It takes a while, it gets boring at times, but Hills find solace and meaning in music, literature and art of their deceased creators while they tirelessly work. They make heartfelt songs, they engrave poems onto the data pearls in their chamber, and they gain newfound appreciation for life and the living of the world around them through art.
Soon enough, WOEH starts to carefully experiment with local flora and fauna to pick apart their genetics and maybe, possibly find something to help the ancient in his care. They succeed! The solution is viable, yet unorthdox in application, but no one is here to stop the iterator. Hills gets to work quickly, clearing Longing's internal organs of hostile bacteria, stitching loose skin and replacing borderline rotten tissues with new material, genetically enchanced by local fauna. This process is long and tedious, but ultimately results in Carried Longing's full reanimation.
At first she doesn't remember much besides her name and is barely able to move due to severe muscular atrophy, but with Hills' helpful guidance they re-learn how to live, breathe and walk again. Their skin is rough and patchy in places, akin to that of a lizard. They keep the stitches on. Their memory is still blurry at times. Finding out she might be THE last one of her kind and not feeling much of a connection to her past self, she shortens her own name to Cleo, from first 4 words of the previous title, somewhat out of spite for her peers who, as far as she's concerned, left her to rot in place. Perhaps, this newfound spite becomes a reason for Cleo to choose to live instead of following other ancients' path. She's grateful for a second chance given to her by Hills.
An ancient and an iterator bond over their love for arts and overwhelming loneliness of their slowly dying world. Hills keeps Cleo's health in check as a dutiful medical operator and fills her in on all the things she's missed in her coma, and Cleo tends to his superstructure to the best of her abilities. They thrive, together, despite all. And later, they meet others.
