>>5839625>>5839036>>5838981>>5838827>>5838825This solution wasn’t a solution at all—not if it made monster of innocent men and women, or inflicted the same sort of dysmorphic psychology and self-loathing that Izzy was already suffering from. You were loathe even to mention it to your lover, lest it worsen her own insecurities or erode her trust in you to resolve this issue without drastic action…
And at any rate, as things were, could you truly ay you ere worthy of the title of Head Chimericist? No, a part of you—prideful of your mystical aptitude—told you that you could do BETTER.
The question, of course, was HOW? You had extended your current understanding of Living Alchemy as far as you could, utilizing every source of information available and expanding upon it with your own intuition. But something, SOMETHING, was missing… A key ingredient in the recipe that made a perfected, healthy human body. As to what that secret ingredient WAS… Well, you had a few ideas.
It could be that you simply needed an abundance of untainted biological material. You would be hard-pressed to find a healthy, living, non-vanished member of the Yosef or Vaz noble lineages to create a bespoke formulation for Izirina Henzler, but the rest of these women… They had many living family members to draw from, parents and children, siblings. You would need special dispensation, however—something that would require royal edict, beyond the plague-specific authority afforded to the Archmage and, through her, to you.
(And was a cure which wouldn’t work for Izirina really what you wanted? What you needed?)
The Archmage had told you the dark truth behind her own earlier breakthroughs: a demonic benefactor and a natural-born human-lizard hybrid. Both of these entities bore their own dangers and difficulties. Summoning a demon and binding it was outside your skillset, and few if any Tower-sanctioned mages practiced that art in any but its most basic, defensive-offensive form: binding and banishing devilish entities from the Seven Hellish Realms, but not treating with them or using them. And as for the secretive, sophisticated, subterranean sect of lizardmen which the Archmage spoke of… Well, they sounded awful, and treacherous, and they had MADE this plague—would they help you cure it? Would they kill you if they found out you MEANT to do so?
(But Izirina was afflicted by these beings to begin with, and even if you fixed her body her SPIRIT was demon-tainted… So perhaps this was the surest way to mend HER, specifically?)