What are some interesting ailments you’ve invented? Probably with spoilers for the grosser details.
I have a couple. The first is my take on vampires.
Vampirism
Vampirism in Ortharen is caused by a parasite called Esor crorum, commonly known as dracula (singular draculum). They spread through contact with blood and can infect most animals.
Dracula stop you from producing red blood cells but allows you to use blood you ingest, so if you don’t drink the blood of unafflicted creatures you’ll suffocate without a way to move oxygen around your body. Most blood will work for most vampires, but blood of your species and a compatible blood type works best.
This condition also stops you producing melanin and makes you more sensitive to bright lights, but that’s less important than the blood thing.
Vampires are very resilient to other diseases because dracula will ruthlessly attack any other bugs you might catch. But not stuff you already had when you became a vampire, probably because it recognizes those as part of your body.
A living vampire can kill their dracula by eating lots of alliums with other immune boosting foods, but they still won’t be able to produce new red blood cells and they’ll need regular transfusions or they’ll suffocate and die.
Then there’s one about eyes.
Snolpirsi
This one is mostly like a common cold, but if you leave your eyes open for too long they’ll crust over. If that happens and then you blink, they’ll shatter and you’ll go blind. You can usually recover from this with eye drops, but most people prefer to avoid having to deal with that and wear blindfolds to make sure their eyes stay shut.
Snolpirsi is common enough that plenty of people learn tactile writing systems so they have something to do while they wait to feel better.
The idea for this one comes from how i thought blinking worked when i was little. I don’t remember why i thought that could happen.
There’s alien tail syndrome, where the nerve cord connecting a yinrih’s main brain in the head and the caudal ganglion at the base of the tail is partially severed, causing the tail to act on its own. A yinrih’s tail is longer than the body including the head, lacks bones, making it very flexible, and is strong enough to support a yinrih’s weight. An erratic tail poses a hazard to the owner and those around him, so amputation is usually the only recourse. Taillessness is a non-trivial disability when you live in a world designed by and for people with a prehensile tail.
There’s also smooth eye, which is where the organic nanoantennas that normally coat the surface of a yinrih’s eyes fail to form in utero, rendering the kit blind. Blindness is less disabling for yinrih than it is for humans. Humans rely almost entirely on vision to navigate the world, but yinrih perception is divided more evenly among the senses, with hearing and especially olfaction being very keen. Touch is also prevalent. Even sighted yinrih will brush small objects against their whiskers while sniffing it in order to gain tactile and olfactory information about it, and a tactile labels are used on containers and controls in order to allow manipulation with the rear paws without looking. While sighted yinrih don’t use tactile writing for long texts, the means to produce it are far more widely available and consequently cheaper than braille materials on Earth.
While not a malady from the yinrih’s perspective, all yinrih are technically face blind. They use odor as the primary means of recognizing individuals, with gross physical features like fur pattern and body shape as a secondary indicator. This explains why yinrih have such domestic-looking fur patterns that vary widely even within a single litter, each kit is born visually distinct from his litter mates to aid identification by parents.
Magical burnout, where some event overloads the “circuits” of how magic flows through their body. It can range from a permanent loss of ability to use magic, and/or frying the mind/brain, down to just being painful for a few weeks or months.
There’s magically altered substances. Regular drugs changed to be more intense and/or nore addictive. The worst spells and curses used can get almost literal hooks into you, where even the effort to treat it causes harm beyond the pain itself.
Technically not a medical condition, but both vampires and were-creatures are filled with a symbiotic viroid that transforms every cell in their body, and serves to channel magic energy into the various abilities they have.
There’s also been magical plagues created, one of which wiped out a species of cryptids related to bigfoot.
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