Saiven: sen(sai·tor)
if a bit of Vera gets inside something living (even a teeny tiny bit) - person, animal, plant, alien, bigfoot, whatever - that thing is pretty much fucked.
why it’s called that
bc of which way round it goes.
you’d expect the victim’s body to reject the foreign material. that’s the normal way that works.
that is not what happens. the piece of Vera rejects the victim.
and then the victim’s body starts losing the argument about which of its own parts belong together.
how you get it
it has to get in, past unbroken skin.
- swallowing it
- injection
- a filament pushed in through a puncture
- into an open wound
- onto badly damaged tissue
- the mouth especially, but eyes and nose count too - basically anywhere wet that skin isn’t covering. monsterfuckers beware.
- a doctor accidentally driving detached material deeper while treating you
touching Vera is perfectly fine. you can shake her hand or whatever, no risk of super-duper ultra lead poisoning, unless your hand is actively bleeding or something i guess.
a small accidental exposure is still a critical emergency, it’s just not automatically fatal. immediately excising the wound is the key to not dying.
swallowed, injected, or intentionally put in deep is where your fate is pretty much sealed.
it’s not a poison exactly
there’s no toxin recipe. her actual chemistry shifts around depending on what she’s absorbed lately, where she’s been, what state she’s in.
the constant isn’t chemical, it’s the relationship. something that is still Vera is now inside a living thing that cannot do anything with it.
it doesn’t dissolve. doesn’t get digested. doesn’t get metabolized. doesn’t break down into ordinary contamination or turn into waste. doesn’t stop being Vera.
and she can’t switch it off. doesn’t need her to be angry, doesn’t need intent, isn’t a curse, doesn’t need her paying attention or even being on the same continent. once it’s in you it’s just doing that.
who’s fine
anything that isn’t alive. if there’s no living system in there trying to regulate and hold its own parts together, there’s nothing for this to attack.
fancy abilities do not save you. regenerator, immortal, shapeshifter, weird exotic biology, notoriously hard to kill - none of that matters if you’ve still got a living body that has to keep itself integrated.
a regenerator can adapt to, like, however the material got into them in the first place. get harder to inject, wall off and shed the contaminated bits, throw it up fast. what it can’t do is learn to safely keep it. regrowing around a piece that’s still in there fixes nothing, and in fact can make it worse.
what it does to you
early: metallic taste, fever, stomach hell, weakness, throwing up, pain where it went in.
a rose-to-violet ring around a puncture that fades within a few hours.
bloodwork that comes back pointing at four unrelated industrial poisons at once.
bad: blood cells coming apart, bleeding that won’t stop, bruising everywhere, blood vessels swelling up, kidneys and liver going, lungs filling with fluid, organs failing one after another.
the signature is where it hurts. the damage collects wherever your body is already joined to itself.
the wrapping around your muscles. the walls of your blood vessels. the casing around an organ. old scars. a bone that healed after a break. transplants, implants, anywhere you’ve been cut open before.
basically anywhere two things were already stuck together.
and people report that a hand, or their tongue, or an organ doesn’t feel like theirs anymore.
that’s a real symptom, not them losing it. it’s literally what’s happening in there.
the fix
get all of it out. physically. that’s it.
there’s no antidote. nothing neutralizes it, nothing metabolizes it, nothing converts it into something you can safely keep.
and here’s the horrible part. surgery makes new seams. every cut they make, every layer they open up, every vessel they clamp, every organ they shift gives whatever’s still in you somewhere fresh to attack.
so cutting to get it out can kill you faster than leaving it in.
a serious internal exposure needs, at minimum: a genuinely excellent surgical team, prolonged life support, knowing exactly where every single piece is, and extremely high-tech equipment capable of holding the patient’s structure together the whole time (like, low-level reality warping levels of high-tech).
and that stabilization is not a cure. it doesn’t make the material compatible with anything. it holds the seams and shit shut until the surgeons can finish cutting every last bit of it out.
if you survive
getting the material out stops further damage. it does not undo damage already done.
getting it out might cost you tissue, organs, implants, blood vessels, whole limbs. the surgery can cripple or kill you all by itself.
survivors keep things: missing tissue, organ damage, chronic pain, changed senses, trouble with speech or moving, a lasting fear of coming apart, and usually a lot of trauma about being touched or handled by doctors.
handling the material
- don’t touch it with broken skin. barriers, tools, sealed containers.
- water is not decontamination. it spreads the stuff around, carries it into drains and into wounds, and it hurts Vera if the material’s still connected to her.
- don’t put contaminated tools back into normal service.
- don’t assume a sample’s inert bc it stopped moving.
- don’t burn it just bc she’s fireproof. heat doesn’t stop it being Vera.
- if Vera’s there and able to, let her handle recovering it. it’s hazardous waste and a piece of an injured person at the same time.
and the one that beats all the others: containing the material never comes before treating the person. don’t turn a bedside into a forensics project while somebody’s dying on it.
what it isn’t
not an infection. not contagious - you can’t catch it off a victim. unless you like. eat the part of them that has the material in it, i guess??? idk why anyone would do that tho.
not heavy metal poisoning. not your immune system turning on you. not a transplant going wrong.
not a judgment, not a guilt detector, not something that only gets people who had it coming.
not proof of ancestry or compatibility or being chosen.
it does not turn anyone into Vera, and it’s not evidence she can clone or reproduce or whatever. Vera is Vera.