To:
Suffer Wayte-Archer IV
Aesyl Hall, Room 13γ
Aletheia University, College of Medical Magick
Kiddo,
Thanks for your letter! Your friends sound like great fun, and your lava pit immolation notes were a fascinating read. I only wish the Tigerfang Band were half as willing to help further the progress of medical science.
The Band have certainly been giving me plenty of work, although most of it is fairly boring stuff – spiked pits, decapitations, the occasional rolling boulder trap. Honestly, they’d save a fortune on trap-related deaths if they were willing to get over their paranoid prejudices and recruit a rogue. I can’t exactly complain, though, seeing as they’re footing your tuition and then some.
I did get one quite interesting job a couple of days ago. No signs of any struggle or even panic, no obvious injuries or indicators of common poisons, no traces at all of what might have killed them, except that each one of them had a slight discoloration at the tip of their left ring finger. What’s more, all of the standard corpse-available resurrections – Zheng’s Recall, Vital Reversal, Autoincarnation, you name it – were completely useless. The spells worked perfectly, but they instantly died again. I even performed Selomon’s Regrowth starting from a single toe – exact same result. I tried as many variations as I could, in the name of due diligence of course, and took detailed notes, but I have to admit I’m still stumped. I ended up doing corpse-unavailable resurrections, which brought them back fine, but thanks to the memory cutoff, I couldn’t get any information about exactly how they died. I’ll be sure to send you the full writeup and a finger once I’ve had time to copy down and organize everything, I’d love to hear what you make of it.
Good luck with your studies, and keep me posted on any new discoveries! Or just write to say hi, it’s always nice getting letters from you while I’m traveling.
Your loving dad,
Suffer Wayte-Archer III
P.S. Your granddad and I still aren’t on speaking terms, but I’m pretty sure he has samples of the original Langleigh’s Pox at the hospital. If you’re ever visiting, you should definitely get some for comparison!