The Exorcist Doctor [Stubbing January 19th]

Stories

### Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Screw The Confession A Kiss Is No Big

A healthy man has a thousand dreams. A sick man only has one.

– Preachings of Saintess Severin, the Mercybound

“What, exactly, did they feed this guy to crystallise his internal organs?”

The surgical chamber was a dark, bloody place. Toxic mist seeped through the slats of the boarded-up window and hung in the stale air, but despite the gloom, the stench, and the dread, Gael remained hunched over the bloody operating table like a crooked gargoyle.

His patient’s chest was already cut open and packed with shrunken, brittle organs. He only had a minute left to save the man, and he was supposed to have given up five minutes ago, but damn if he was gonna give up now.

“Ventricular access secured!” he barked, his gloved hands moving with manic precision as he threaded dirty glass tubes into the man’s heart, connecting it to a coiled apparatus wheezing at his side. “Cara, adjust the ether pump!” His fingers twisted a valve on the machine, sending a plume of hissing steam into the air. “If the flow stops again, we’ll lose him completely!”

Blood trickled off the edges of the table. Cara moved to his side without hesitation, her hands steady as she tightened the clamp. “This is insane!” she snapped. “The heart tissue’s already way past necrotic! The elixir won’t take, and you know it—”

"It will take,” he growled back. “We only have to ensure the bonding reaction begins before complete metabolic collapse! The ethervein stimulant will keep his circulatory system active for another thirty seconds, just enough time to finish the infusion!”

Cara’s face tightened as she held onto the hissing clamp, gritting her teeth. “Thirty seconds ain’t enough! This is reckless even for you, and you know it! Call the operation off!”

“Nay! Recklessness is the foundation of scientific progress!” He pulled out a hexagon-bottomed glass vial from his coat, opened its contents into a hollowed bone spike, and raised it above the chest cavity. “The symbiote elixir will bond with him, and once it takes hold, we shall rewrite all of known human biology! Suction now!”

His assistant grimaced as she leaned over, kicked the suction bell off the ground, and stabbed it into the man’s open chest with her free hand. Thick, viscous blackblood gurgled into the tube, the machine groaning as it struggled to keep up. The ethervein machine began pumping stabilisation liquid into the man’s necrotic heart.

His thirty seconds began now.

“This is mad,” Cara muttered, looking worriedly at the bubbles popping under the man’s skin. “Vitals ain’t looking good. We’re losing him, Gael.”

“And what’s life without a bit of ups and downs?” he mumbled, plunging the bone spike into the man’s lungs and depressing the trigger. The iridescent green liquid shot out in a fine mist, spreading through the exposed cavity like a living fog.

For a few seconds, there was only silence save for the faint crackle of the elixir reacting with dead tissue.

Gael reached for a bottle of alcohol on the surgical tray slowly.

Then, the man started convulsing violently. The ethervein machine screamed as the readings spiked into chaos. Cara jumped back out of fright as the man practically jolted off his table, but Gael cackled, took a swig of alcohol, and then smashed the empty bottle onto the man’s head, knocking him back down.

“Yes, yes—come on! Bond, you damn artifice!” he shouted, his voice thick with fervour as he held his bone spike still, watching the mist burn through his gloves, his skin, his flesh underneath. “The elixir will work! Trust me, Cara! It will bond in five, four, three, two—”

But then the convulsions stopped as abruptly as they’d begun.

The metal cap popped off the ethervein machine with a loud bang , and steam started hissing out, the old construct finally falling dead.

Silence fell over the surgical chamber, heavy and final.

“... Shit.”

Gael flung the bone spike away. Cara exhaled a heavy breath and dropped her suction bell as well, her jaw tight.

“It’s over,” she mumbled. “He’s gone.”

“Not gone,” he muttered, his voice edged with defiance. He leaned forward, shaking the inert shoulder. “Reanimate, you ungrateful husk. You were Cormac Loudain, aged thirty-two, second son of the Loudain Household, Beetle Afflicted Frontrunner for the Rot Merchants, and if you still hear me, know that I gave you life! Me! Do you know how much I—”

“He’s gone,” she repeated, more firmly this time. She reached out, catching his wrist before he could grab another tool. “Enough, Gael. Sit down. We’ve been at this for—”

“Ambushed by foul machinations!” He jerked his arm free, muttering curses under his breath as he paced the room, kicking a stool into the walls. An awful pain shot through his toes as he groaned, hopping around with his foot in his hands. “It’s the… tools. They’re crude. Primitive . My blood reacted just fine with the elixir to keep it alive while it was in the spike, but once it was actually dripping into the guy's chest, a proper lifeweaver array could’ve stabilised it much better than the shitty ethervein machine—”

“Stop.” Cara cut him off and strode to the boarded-up window, her boots crunching over broken glass. She grabbed the wooden planks and yanked them off the window frames, nails and all, and pale, hazy sunlight immediately flooded into the room.

Reality stood stark in the illumination.

The man on the operating table hadn’t been alive to begin with.

His skin was waxy and rubbery, and his chest cavity had been hollowed for weeks and stuffed with cheap organs taken from god knows where. He was unmoving, lifeless, and unmistakably dead. After all, Gael had bought him from the Mortuary Sanctum for fifty Marks, and that was supposed to be their food allowance for the rest of the week.

Nobody but their coffers suffered with the failure of this experiment.

“... We’re broke now,” Cara said flatly, sighing and crossing her arms as she sat down by the chair next to the window. Gael took the chair next to the operating table, still running his hands through his hair. “You spent the last of our Marks on a corpse. Again. You said he'd still have a curse eating at his body, and that you’d make the symbiote elixir work—”

“—and it would’ve worked if we had a live patient to test it on—”

“But it didn’t, because who the hell would want to be on the receiving end of that? ” Cara finished, looking him stern in the eye. Somehow, his older sister—dressed in her tattered pharmacist’s robes with a black gas mask strapped over her jaw—still managed to look more menacing than ever. “Every failure brings us closer and closer to the poorhouse. How many times does this make? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

He kicked a glass shard out the window, clicking his tongue. “Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-five, bitch,” she corrected, kicking a glass shard back at him. He slapped it away with his cane. “This ain't working out,” she said. “Running a clinic takes time, equipment, money, and manpower—everything we’re lacking, especially if you’re going to blow our food allowances on corpses without at least telling me about it first.”

“It can work,” he muttered, readjusting, tightening his raven mask over his eyes, “and if we can just get it to work once… we’ll win. We’ll run the best clinic in the city. We’ll revolutionise medicine in all of Bharncair.”

A tense silence fell over the room again as Cara continued staring at him with his face in his hands, eyes soft with worry.

“... Maybe it’s time to be more realistic,” she offered gently, leaning forward in her chair. “Look. We’ve been running the clinic for years and we’ve barely had a single returning patient. The ethervein pipes are leaking, the roof’s about to collapse, and we can’t even get proper planks to board up the windows and make the surgical chamber—the surgical chamber —as sterile as it can be. It ain’t getting easier with the Vile growing thicker and thicker every day, either.”

“So what?”

“So maybe… it’s time we give up and look for another job.”

Again with the ‘other job’.

Gael narrowed his eyes, clenching his throat.

“You remember the old clinic dad used to run up in the upper city?” he mumbled. “That little botanical garden he had for the kids? The faces of the patients he cured? The clarity of mind he brought to suffering spirits?”

She smiled wistfully, propping up her jaw in her hands. “I do remember. You know, I didn’t think dad’s patients’ faces would be the first thing you remember about his old clinic—”

“—also, the sheer chests of coins his patients brought in. Just stop and imagine how loaded we’ll be—”

“—okay, now that’s more like you—”

“And I ain’t betraying what he stood for,” he finished, looking sternly back at Cara, and he was certain—without a shadow of doubt—that his eyes burned bright behind his raven mask. “We’re close, sis. Scientific triumph is… it's right beyond the veil of the Vile, and I know it. You know it. It ain't about how efficient we are with our tests—the symbiote elixir only needs to work once , and we'll find ourselves in a world of pure bioarcane.”

Cara was rationally correct, but damnit, she hadn’t been serving as his right hand for the better part of the past decade because she didn’t believe in what they were doing. She’d been even more fervent than him about finishing their pops’ unfinished concoction before their old clinic went tits up, so any half-learned child of a stubborn old man like their dad would look scientific failure in the eyes, puff their chest out, and say, ‘just one more try’.

And for how different Cara was from him—the properly educated, moral, rational her to the mud-raised, vile, irrational him—they had shared the same father.

Those cheeks of hers were propped up by shaking hands, and that was how he knew she was thinking the same thing as him.

C’mon, sis.

It's pops’ legacy.

Just one more try.

One more.

“... Fine.” She sighed, standing to her feet with a heavy groan as she threw her braid over her shoulder, tightening her bloody gloves. “One more try. We can afford to keep the clinic open for one more month provided we sell some of our junk at Juno’s market… if we even have anything worthwhile to pawn off, that is.”

She gestured broadly at the barren, dilapidated clinic outside the room. Gael waved her concerns away as he bounced onto his feet, letting her take care of the corpse disposal and cleanup.

“We don’t need your makeup set,” he said cheerily, heading straight for her bedroom. “If we’re selling anything, we’re selling those first—”

“Your collection of bonesaws. Get rid of half of them.”

“Alrighty.” He pivoted without argument, turning towards the glass shelves by the walls of the room. “What’s Juno's mood like these past few weeks? Good? Bad?”

“Her third right-hand man just got petrified by a basilisk mosquito. I’d say she’s pretty miffed.”

“No negotiations, then. I’ll be right back in an hour or two—”

“And don’t rob the Mortuary Sanctum for another corpse,” she warned, pointing a scalpel at him. “The Repossessors won’t let you off if they catch you again. I hear that Lorcawn bastard managed to snag a few systems for his boys, and now he’s overthrown the old boss to become the new Palm. He’s much less forgiving than Old Murlown, so he’ll actually send you to the pale if he catches you stealing from them, and he’ll take all of your limbs so you don’t even get to roll around in your grave.”

“Sure, sure—”

“And take off that shitty raven mask while you’re outside, will you?” she grumbled, grabbing him by the shoulder as he slid half of his bonesaws into a wooden box. “It’s scary, that thing. The… beak. Switch it out for something else. You ain't even wearing the lower mist-filtering part of it, so what's the point—”

“The mask stays on during trips to the market.” He wiped her hand off, grinning and showing her his beaming white teeth as he turned around, heading for the door. “Jealous of my immunity?”

“Whatever,” she muttered, giving him a shove out the door. “But I bet half the reason why nobody ever comes to visit the clinic is because of that mask. You’re piss-scary as hell for a doctor, so either you take it off or you marry a beautiful lady who’ll soften the place up.”

“Ah, so that's why you wanna keep your makeup kit. You ain't pretty enough for the both of us.”

He chuckled, plucking his top hat off the coat stand right as she kicked him out the door with an irritated click of her tongue. The kick itself didn’t hurt, but he was drunk, drugged up, and drowsy. He immediately lost his footing and tumbled down the stairs, down into the prayer hall, and then crashed right into the side of the stone altar.

The cracked, crooked stone head of Saintess Severin leered down at him from atop the altar, eerie as ever. The empty long benches across the dark prayer hall also stared at him, mocking his fall.

Fuck you want, broken Saint? Wanna fight?

… Well, no way in hell either of Cara's options was going to happen anytime soon. As if any lady in the city would be willing to take an unlicensed, unregistered doctor squatting in an abandoned church for a man.

Priorities, Gael, he thought, patting dust off his shoulder as he staggered onto his feet. A cure for death doesn’t wait for a confession of love.

First, gather the funds.

Then, complete the symbiote elixir and revolutionize all of medicine.

Bharncair, the City of Plagues, was like a wound that refused to heal—a sprawling, shadow-choked city of towers and spires festering in its own sickness.

The people called it the ‘Vile’: a noxious green fog that hung low and thick across the city, smothering the sky and pressing down on the crooked roofs like a suffocating weight. The upper class dogs living in Vharnveil may get to walk and laugh outside without gas masks stealing their breaths, but for those of them down in the pipes, the sight of that golden citadel floating above the center of the city was nothing but a stark reminder of what could be a better life.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

One without the Vile shoving itself down their throats every hour of the day.

The slum district in the deepest, darkest, outermost edges of the city was worse. It always was. The narrow alleys twisted like the guts of some dying beast, and the air reeked of rot and sulfur. Shanties leaned into each other like drunkards at a wake, their walls cobbled together with splintered wood, rusting metal, and overgrown shrubs. Even the bioarcanic street lamps were waning and flickering, the fleshy bulbs about to breathe their last.

A sight for sore eyes as usual.

With his full box of silver coins, Gael trudged across cobblestones slick with dirty gold acid, humming a cheery beat to himself. He’d gotten what he wanted from Juno, the old hag at the black market: a hundred and fifty Marks for twelve blood-signed collector's edition bonesaws wasn’t bad at all.

Let’s see… He rummaged his free hand through the box, combing the coins with mad glee on his face. Sixty-five Marks for two meals a day for the both of us will last us a month, which leaves us with eighty-five Marks for experimental prep.

Thirty goes to refilling the ethervein stimulants, five for a bundle of twelve bonespikes, and fifty for… one male corpse, aged eighteen to twenty-two, toxicological death by sepsis?

He tilted his head back in deep thought as he passed by the old tanneries, closed bakeries, and the tailor shop that’d been turned into a hideout for rats and whatever unlucky fool thought they could find shelter inside. Between the poison mist, the never-ending acid rain, and the shadows of Nightspawns lurking behind every gloom and corner of the slums—those magic-blooded wretches—the simple fact was, nobody liked being out on the streets at night.

It was just him and himself out here, and honestly, he preferred it this way. He’d rather not scrap with anyone with a box of coins in his arms.