Quoted By:
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-b">Winner:</span></span> Prioritize on rescuing the maids. Call upon the Litany.
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">Louise's HP:</span></span> 83/103
<span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">Fortitude Save 9 + 12 = 21 vs DC 25 Poison. Minor Failure.
Will Save 14 + 10 - 2 = 22 vs DC 20 Berserking. Success!
General Combat Check 14 + 16 - 2 = 28</span></span>
As you force yourself back onto your feet, you feel the pain in your side fade. Not in the gently itching way of the LORD's blessing upon your healthy body as it stitches your wounds back together. Something mutes that feeling in your side, a prickling and numbing sensation.
Poison.
Rebecca must have coated her blade in poison. Not just any poison, either. The LORD's blessing upon your body heals all wounds, rebukes disease, and rejects all poisons that would leave you less than hale and hearty and of sound mind. You have not known sickness nor lasting injury since the day you slew the Apostate King. For you to get tipsy from alcohol takes enough to ruin a woman's liver three times over, or so Hilde has said. Only maladies born of curses or woven from malignant magics can pierce that protection.
This poison must be laden with some manner of curse, then, or otherwise crafted with heretical magics. You can feel it numb the wound that Rebecca left in your side. Heat spreads across your body like a wildfire consumes a forest after a three-year drought, dizzying and feverish and lighting up your entire body with a bright red flush as hot blood rushes through your veins. Your gut flips over upon itself as if you've eaten something rotten. Sweat pours out from every pore on your body, soaking through your clothes in vein attempt to cool you down. But for one more symptom, it would be a perfect match for the worst bout of influenza you suffered during your youth.
Your loins itch and leak. Not with the sweetness that racks your body when you comfort yourself at nights with thoughts of your ever-distant beloved. Not with the prayerful ecstasy you experience in deepest meditation on scripture and the LORD of Light's love for all His creation. It is a pain that your body is desperately trying to soothe, an itch like a mosquito bite that cries out to be scratched.
Glaring at the treacherous servant, your mind races through a list of those few toxins that can actually harm you. None of them have these symptoms. Perhaps if you drank enough harlot's joy, you might experience something similar, but that tonic supposedly empties the mind of every thought and feeling but pleasure. Here and now, you feel such exquisite pain that your knees shake as you force yourself to your feet. You've been through worse, but you can count the number of times on one hand.
Once you're on your feet, you scarcely have time to take a breath before Rebecca rushes you again.
