How do all the Med Cats get along? Aside from uh, well I doubt Runningbird is too excited to talk to any of them.
This ask has been sitting in my inbox for over
I remember that it was sent while I was doing those "ask a character and have them respond in drawing form" because that's what I was gonna do with this ask, and that's why it was taking so damn long to answer
but I'm in my second year of university now, so chances are I'm not gonna have the chance to draw the answer as I've been hoping to do since *checks notes* MAY OF 2022.
So let's just answer it now, shall we?
(I SUSPECT that the person who sent this is someone still following the blog 00 so hopefully they can see their question go answered at last!)
The Medicine cat Community in The Place of No Stars
Many would at first think that no one helped anyone but themself in the Dark Forest, and they're partly right.
Why do medicine cats get together?
Well, that could be for many reasons. They genuinely enjoy the company, they're with someone they can relate to, they enjoyed healing in life and still do, they want to be special, or maybe they just like to help with herbs so that they can stave off their own boredom.
Individually, it's the same as in life--everyone with proper med cat training knows everything that a medicine cat should know.
In groups, particularly in the med cat community, tasks are more divided by skill.
Fleathistle, for example, is a wonderful healer, but even more than that he's great at growing plants. He's responsible for at least 80% of the herbs that grew and can be useful in the Dark Forest. He, with the help of his mate and close friends, created the 'Dark Garden,' where a field-full of different herbs and medicines grow, many of which unheard of in life, as Fleathistle experimented with them, creating some herbs from scratch.
Now, Fleathistle is still a medicine cat. If you need healing, you can go to him as much as you can go to anyone. But if you need particular herbs, it's better to go to him above anyone else. (This is in a similar sense of 'all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads' if that makes sense?)
Myrtlewing is another case of 'the best one to go to in a certain situation.'
True, Myrtlewing would also be the scariest one to go to, as in life he experimented with his patients, putting their lives and health at grave risk for his own curiosity and entertainment, but it's due to these experiments and others he performed on cats that makes him so useful.
Myrtlewing would tear cats open and apart and test out how to keep them alive for as long as he wished in spite of their horrible injuries. Because of this, if a cat were to receive a horrible injury, he's the best healer to go to because of his knowledge of how to keep the cat alive.
In simpler terms, he's the "surgeon" of the group, the only one able to heal a cat's torn up insides--though he's nowhere near as talented as human surgeons.
He's the one to go to if someone is in grave trouble and / or if someone has a particularly horrible injury.
Shiverrose's talents as a healer lies most notably in how she cures sickness.
Like all medicine cats, she's great at healing wounds, but illness is where her skills really show.
She has great memory and fantastic critical thinking skills, which allows her to come to a diagnostic conclusion much quicker than other medicine cats.
She only needs to hear a list of your symptoms to figure out in a matter of seconds what is wrong with you and what may be best to heal you with (she may also go to Fleathistle for the second part, as he knows more about the Dark herbs than anyone else).
She would probably be just as good with wounds if such injuries were troubling to figure out too. It's tricky to figure out why someone may have a dry throat and bellyache, it's rather easy to see why their leg was broken.
There are also those who were medicine cats in life but no longer wish to heal, and therefore do not count as part of this Medicine Cat Club.
Sageleaf, for example, would very much like for everyone to leave her alone forever, thank you.
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