Thorn: There are lots of ways to heal a body that can’t fix itself alone. On me, they used almost all of them.
The simplest is, using healing magic to make it better at fixing itself.
That worked for most of my skin and muscle. It’s why I now have a face. You already know it didn’t fully work for my sword arm. It took the most direct hit . . . They did as much as they could.
If a part is too broken to heal itself, even with magic help, you can use transformation magic to grow a new one instead.
That’s, um . . . that happened with my fingers. There wasn’t enough left to save . . . so the med-mages cut off what was left, and made them grow back.
For a finger, this is possible. But a whole arm is too big to grow back and make it like new.
Leif: . . . Thorn? Could you get a skin transplant?
Thorn: A what?
Leif: When you get new parts from another person?
It’s a last resort — at least, it is in Sønheim — And I don’t think it works for whole arms, either. But I know we do it for skin.
Thorn: Right! A skin graft. I didn’t need one to live, so they waited until I woke up, to ask if I wanted one. I thought about it . . .
But the real problem is the muscle underneath. It doesn’t work like it used to. And the med techs said that couldn’t be fixed. A “trans-plant” has side effects. It can cause problems. For me, more problems than it can fix.
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Erin, about your question with the allergies… it’s kinda…
People accuse me of being… I forgot the word… Look. Allergies are serious business, and I can perfectly understand why someone who was, for example, allergic to garlic, would be fine eating in an Italian place alone when it’s easier for the chefs to handle the allergy precautions and more likely for the wait staff to remember them than to eat in an Italian place as part of a party. For example.
Don’t make assumptions about allergies >.<
I assumed that was the point of the question? Are you the sort of person who makes an immediate assumption or, like you, assume there must be some personal reason why they said that. It is meant to be a test of character, after all.
I agree allergies are serious business, by the way! But for a heartsword question it makes sense because some people are going to assume the reasoning is personal rather than medical (and it being a lie isn’t impossible, after all).
I try not to add a ton of clarifications and explanations to the questions — but the idea here is that the person simply said “I can’t eat at that place,” not “I don’t feel comfortable eating at that place as part of a large group.”
The situation you’ve described would fall under the category of “they had a valid reason underneath, they just chose not to share it.”
It seems insensitive as the question feels like it’s encouraging an extremely common form of bad behavior, and this makes me, an allergy free individual, very uncomfortable because I’ve seen how other non allergic people treat allergic people.
Also, my spouse when learning English somehow learned ‘I dislike it’ as ‘I’m allergic to it’. That created a lot of awkwardness for a while. I didn’t figure it out until my spouse (at the time just a friend) started saying they were allergic to TV shows and artwork and stuff like that.
… non-vampire people can actually be allergic to garlic?
Yes, I’m allergic to garlic and onions, as confirmed by an allergy test.
Those must be super hard to avoid. I’m lucky in that most of my allergies are uncommon, though I am highly sensitive to a popular flavor additive.
It depends on where you live. Garlic isn’t used in all dishes, and you wouldn’t be putting it into homemade dishes willy-nilly since the flavour wouldn’t fit. I do agree about onions, those are much more common (once again it depends on the cuisine though, I can’t imagine it being used in Japanese cooking as much as in Eastern or Western European, for example). The good thing is that onion allergy usually extends only to raw onions, so processed onions as used in most foods would be perfectly fine to eat.
The heartsword question reminds me of an incident from high school.
A friend of mine went to a particular restaurant for the first time. The food seemed fine to them, as far as they could tell, and they finished their meal. But after they got home, they noticed they were having difficulty breathing and had a rash. Their parents took them to the hospital. At the hospital, it was determined that they were having a serious allergic reaction. They were held overnight, and missed school the next day.
Several days later, they were invited to go to that restaurant with a group, and they declined, with the reason given in that quiz.
This was one of those stupid high school drama things, because a lot of people chose to disbelieve the story. Most of them seemed to have the hardest problem with the “You never had x cuisine before? You’re a teenager, how could this be?” aspect of it. But the witness who had saw them at the restaurant at the beginning of the week couldn’t accept that an allergic reaction wouldn’t necessarily present itself immediately.
Nobody in the group of disbelievers considered it notable that 100% of the students with medical connections (close family or friends being doctors or nurses or planning on studying health or medicine in college) sided with the person who declined due to their newly discovered allergy. They all were upset with me for pointing it out to them, even though I did so one on one, so that they wouldn’t be embarrassed by it in front of others.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the school cafeteria served food in that particular cuisine on a regular basis, and the person had eaten the cafeteria’s “attempt” at cuisine. However, the cafeteria served a hypoallergenic variant which lacked the allergen the person had an issue with. Many students had already complained regarding the lack of that allergen, as it’s one of the more flavorful components of that particular dish. The school had given a formal response asserting that the substance was a known allergen to a number of the students, some of whom were sufficiently allergic that they wouldn’t be able to be in the cafeteria if it was made like the complaining students wanted.
I’ve kept this generic, because the cuisine really isn’t important to the story. However, I understand some people have problems with generic stories, so I’ll admit the cuisine was Italian, the cafeteria food item was pizza, the allergen was garlic.
All that said, I also know some people who’ve claimed a tomato allergy, while showing great fondness for ketchup.
Teenagers can be really unkind to each other when it involves social awkwardness and things they’ve never encountered before! Then again, adults can be quite unkind too.
I’ve heard the tomatoes and ketchup thing.
Depending on what they mean, it may have to do with the lack of tomato peels in the ketchup. Or so I’ve heard from people who have that issue.
Some people with allergies or sensitivities have difficulties with the peel or husks of plants specifically, but little to no trouble when these are removed.
Plants often produce protective toxins to protect storage organs and seeds, so that makes sense. Another factor can be how the cooking, processing, or storage of a food changes it.
And even if it’s not an allergy in the sense of a classic allergic response, allergy-adjacent issues like sensitivites can be quite serious for some people.
Ultimately it’s a person’s choice what to put in their body anyway, so it’s rather interesting how much drama and judgment can ensue around food and socialising.
Some Ed as for the tomato issue, I’m allergic to raw tomatoes, but can eat cooked omatoes because it changes the chemical composition of the tomatoes. It’s like I’ve known people who can’t drink milk due to an allergy, but they can eat things with milk cooked into it because of how cooking changes it.
On that subject: “Dairy Allergy” is not a more-severe sounding term for lactose intolerance. I once taught a child who had an allergy to red meat, quite a lot of grains, and dairy. He ate nothing but salads and other goodies his mom packed for the duration of the summer camp. He confirmed for us that this wasn’t just his mom being an ‘militant vegan’, as he had, the month before summer camp, had milk tossed on him by a bully because the bully thought it would be a harmless way to tease the kid for hyping up his ‘lactose intolerance’… and then the anaphylaxis kicked in.
Did you learn more about the bully story? Did the bully learn and apologize? What happened?
I didn’t. this was all back on 2006. I just know that the kid eventually ‘grew out’ of his red meat allergy, and was allowed to eat wheat in 2008.
same here, have the same problem with carrots, celery and potatoes, as well as some fruits that have to be peeled in order for me eat them, though my allergy is mild, not enough to cause any major issues
Poor Thorn… :c
Oh, neat. That would explain why I could still eat Nutella when whole hazelnuts made my throat itch. (I’m so glad I grew out of that allergy)
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