#11 Illness: Wait, unfamiliar pathogens are BAD?
Originally posted here on November 15, 2021.
Alright, host has gotten some breathing room between essays and exams for a few days. That means it's time for me to co-front and talk about myself-as-Gordon some more!
Awesome. Everyone's favorite time of the day, I'm sure. :p
Illnesses from my source were pretty similar to illnesses here, since it's the same Earth... up until portals to the borderworld opened up, anyway, and we got a bunch of goddamn aliens rolling in.
TW for disease symptoms and some parasitic shit. Yikes.
So, Xen. Xen is the "borderworld," aka "alien dimension that connects all other dimensions and has to be used for any kind of teleportation technology to function." As a result, it's basically an alien planet, except instead of a planet, it's a bunch of fucked up floating islands in space. Obviously, it's covered in a lot of really weird organisms--headcrabs, weird fleshy stalks that stab you, bullsquids, houndeyes, hundreds of weird plant species, some of which spray spores or what-have-you, whatever you can think of, basically. The place is a mess.
It's also not very kind to the human immune system. Since I didn't get snatched up at the end of what was the story of Half-Life by the G-man, and therefore HL2 didn't happen, I ended up returning to Earth to help clean up the mess that had been caused by the portals being ripped open, first at the facility, then across the world.
Well. No, I didn't. I returned, helped out for about two or three days, and then immediately got terribly ill because I'd breathed in who knows what alien pathogens. I nearly died to that! Really heroic there, Gordon. Dumbass. As it stood, though, I was just the first of many--with all of the Xen creatures that had come through, and with portals still occasionally opening across the world (but not with any kind of regularity outside of portal storms, and YOU'RE WELCOME for that), diseases and shit were still getting in.
I don't remember most of them--I'm mostly running off of "it feels right" noemata here--but I'm certain I was coughing up some kind of brown powder or mist, and I think I crackled when I moved during the worst of it, like some kind of crust had built up in my abdomen that I broke when I sat up. Gross. I really don't know how I survived that.
Additionally, I can't get out of this without talking about headcrabs. They're not a disease, of course--they're parasites, in a way. They latch onto a host's head and hijack the nervous system for... some purpose I can barely discern. Food, I think? I don't know. Regardless, they became a constant danger and annoyance. They're not too bad if you have a helmet, but an unsuspecting human can be grabbed and taken over in seconds, and that's it. You're done. Worse than any disease I can imagine.