Everywhere you go to help, you kill the ones you’re helping. It takes time for them to put it together; it takes you a little less time to think that maybe it’s following you, this pestilence that brings pustles to rupture through every layer of skin, this sickness that leaves them looking like distant gunshot victims— peppered with boreholes and no exit wounds, begging you to save them or to kill them.
they still see you as an angel, though. An angel of death now, sure, but an angel. You were the one to bring sparking rocks that thought with lighting, you were the one to explain how to harness the sun and put it to good use, you were the one to explain how to wash wounds and save people that were too far gone to save. They ask you why you have foresaken them when you try to change their dressings, volunteering in the outskirts of the town you first came to, and you sob because /you don’t know and you wish you did, this wasn’t something you chose, it wasn’t/
it started with the innkeeper. She and her husband ran the place, and he’d laugh louder than everyone else combined when he’d slide you an extra ale, free on the house in thanks for helping with the weeding out back. That wink of his plays in your head every time you shut your eyes. So does the memory of him weeping over the body of his wife, already covered in welts, still /here/ when there was nothing left of her. He lasted four more days and you cradled his children when they cried at his funeral until it was their caskets you were helping lower into the ground. And then.
you lost Agatha. Fourteen years old, wry and strong as hell, orphaned but still kicking as you helped her run the family farm (because for a year, you’d settled here. These were your people, and you had helped them, right? Helped them with technology and medical practices, right? Right?). Fourteen years old and the hundred and thirty-second grave. Thick dark hair coiled densely on her head washed one last time to rid it of the sweat and the blood that had made it limp. You did the washing yourself, this teenager you’d started to view as your sister, or your daughter, tossing jokes back and forth over hay bales and racing the horses out back when things were done for the day and the sun was just starting to set—
—you lived there but you adventured nearby. You had to. You learned three weeks in that your goal was to slay the dragon hiding in the mountains (pretty standard for this sort of thing, per your experience), and the easiest place to gain experience was, of course, going to be the goblin-infested cave holding prisoners. So you’d come in with your sword and cut down anyone who fought back until one had explained the situation, the brainwashing, the spider spinning the web with living things, and you’d teamed up with the only free mind to save the prisoners and exonerate the goblins as a race. You’d succeeded, you’d made friends. The plucky one who’d tore your sword out of your hands and pleaded with you to hesitate had grinned open-mouth, wider than anyone you’d ever seen in any of your other worlds, big ears and green skin decorated with ceremonial blue and white war paint. You’d celebrated with them. You’d painted your own face with them. You’d stayed with them when they whimpered and begged for a quick death, and you’d raised the same sword they convinced you not to use just to strike them down all the same (months later, the same end, a blow everyone else who’d only known the goblins as violent had warned was supposed to come).
They still see you as an angel, a savior. When you show up to try and see if the spider’s blood did this, they rejoice, and then mourn their dead with you when you realize that patient zero was from the same town you were. When you all had realized this had already spread too damn far to stop it from going anywhere else.
You don’t know why that’s the case. You loved all of them and you love this /world/ for giving you a /home/ and a /life/ and while your quest log has lone gone dark, you’d stopped caring about “100%ing” and “achievements” a long long time ago. So god, why, why this now, why, /why/—
—his eyes, god. His eyes. The next one you cut open in the morgue to try and solve this stares listlessly at you like there’s still life in there somewhere, suffering. Eighty more fell ill and died a week later, and when you pack up to take your findings somewhere else, to try and /stop this/ somewhere else, the lab assistant that gets assigned to you at the next quarantined town hugs you tight and then is shivering on the floor forty eight hours later, covered in those fuckin red bumps. You cry so hard that night that town has to force you to drink water so you don’t pass out, because even now even as you’re realizing /its coming from you/ you /know/ that even the best scientists in this world don’t hold a candle to the basic everyday knowledge you have just from being a human from the twenty first century and god, god, you would do fucking anything for Wikipedia right now, for someone else who wasn’t just going to die because you got close to them even though you’re feeling /fine/—
—next town, next town, except this time you’re in a goddamn hazmat suit and sending a carrier pigeon two day’s ride ahead of you so the townspeople have a chance to set up a quarantined lab for you ahead of your arrival. It’s a mile outside of the town’s borders and staffed solely by an automaton brought to life by the wizard that had mentored you, and that’s how you learn that apparently this disease can lie dormant for months after initial contact, /years/ in the right conditions, and that wizened old bastard’s magic was exactly that. Another night of sobbing in the ivory tower you’ve been building with necromantic spells out of polished bone, because you have so many of them in your wake that it would be a waste not to put them to good use (so many had volunteered to be organ donors after death, once you and the wizardry had invented a spell to keep organs alive from the recently dead, after they put hope in a failed theory that an organ transplant could save those worst afflicted, and bones were an organ, right?). That man loved you in his own weird way, all raw fish scales and transmutation spells for emulating microwave ramen when you got homesick enough to ask for it, and you’d do anything just to trade punches and ideas and stupid jokes about the concept of a werther’s original when he was already old enough to have been Mr. Werther himself. The months you’d spent in his tower were home like that first town and the in were home like your room in the goblin dorms were home and now—
—you dust yourself off, you peel yourself off the ground. The mail gets delivered via hawk the next day, and you read the news: another thirty thousand dead this month. You’re not a microbiologist and you’re barely a magic user but you can’t keep wasting time crying over the horrors you brought with you. All you can do is keep the memories of everyone unfortunate enough to know you in your head, and then maybe one day, when you get the chance, you can make it right. And when that day comes, you’ll ride past the ghost towns made mass graves in your wake, sword in hand, war paint on your face and ale in your wineskin and fishscales on your armor on a horse from a farm long gone, gut that dragon until it’s innards dissapear with you in a flash of light back to where you came from, and spare this world of you for good.
535,436 XP, your quest log reads. It goes up by five in the next minute, and thirteen in the minutes after that. One for each person your arrival has killed, by blade or by illness. You force yourself to your feet and shuffle to your lab.
