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Content information for Remedy (A story of Aligare)


Despite being a rather cozy story where the characters only seek to do right by each other, Remedy deals with some challenging topics and large emotions. Contents include:

• Living with multiple disabilities. Peregrine is an older adult korvi (a bipedal feathered dragon) with hearing loss caused by his mining work. He can hear some pitches of sounds, and can sometimes read lips (indicated in the story with underlined dialogue instead of more conventional quotation marks). He is treated respectfully by all on-screen characters, although minor difficulties still arise. Recovering his hearing is hypothetically possible, but it will require lifestyle changes, treatments with healing magic, and years of time.
• Peregrine's flight muscles are also deconditioned from infrequent use, a problem he is forced to tackle when his community needs flighted delivery runs. He receives support treatments in the form of massage and medicated ointment.
• Parent death. Main characters Tillian and Rose both lose a biological parent (to old age and a heart attack, respectively). They both experience pressure to carry on in that parent's stead and they react very differently. Also, a side character loses a parent onscreen due to:
• In-depth depiction of a respiratory illness pandemic in a low-tech society, with many deaths mentioned or implied. Magic is used to manage symptoms and stimulate the body's natural healing processes. Curing the plague is not an available option for these characters: they can only try to reduce the harm from this generational event.
• All on-screen characters respect and obey the local pandemic protocols, including quarantine. The illness affects aemet people and one species of fantasy animal. Korvi and ferrin people are immune to it, therefore able to act as a go-between for populations of aemet people. Assisting vulnerable neighbours is considered high priority (“the only right thing to do”) in this society.
• Aemet characters have airsense, which gives them an echolocation-like awareness of the air all around them. This makes them highly empathetic to other people's respiratory distress, since they can feel and visualize another person's breathing from several paces away.
• Ferrin are also called upon to monitor sick people's airways, by listening carefully for sounds of distress. Some of them are young.
• Folklore stories are used to teach pandemic protocols. The illness is described in-world as a "demon" with motivations of its own, said to have defeated a great healer in a vaguely violent-sounding battle of wills. The symptoms of this sickness are inspired by real-world diphtheria — although the reader is free to interpret whether it's a "real" bacterial illness, or a legendary magical entity like the characters believe it to be.
• Scenes of medical drama, including life-saving interventions with healing magic. The interventions don't always work.
• Depiction of a childhood genetic illness with respiratory symptoms. The acute symptoms only appear in childhood, and those who survive are generally healthy as adults, except for:
• Minor mention of reduced fertility. It plays no significant role in the story events, but is mentioned as a potential problem if those afflicted want to have blood children in the future. Not doing so is a respected life choice in Aligare society, since adoption and found families are commonplace.
• No overt romance or sexuality. There's some mild flirting, tops.
• No blood.
Violence is abhorrent to Aligare society.
• Minor mention of urine/body waste. It's taken care of off-screen.
• No pregnancy or birth depicted or discussed in detail. Tillian is briefly depicted in infancy: she's a ferrin, so her early developmental stages were more similar to a housecat than a human.
• One metaphorical mention of parasitic bugs.
• A scene of characters finding a dead animal. It's an insect-like creature. The characters don't get very close, they just react to the sight.
• Minor mention of killing animals for food. Plant-based meals are common here, but most characters are not strictly vegetarian/vegan.
• Positive depiction of an anti-social person. In Aligare, people who distance themselves because they don't like socializing are called hermits. Their wish to live a quiet life is generally respected by Aligare society: it's common knowledge that one should not drop by a hermit person's home unless there's a good reason to.
• Fantasy lifespan angst. Natural korvi lifespan is about 200 years, compared to an aemet's 50 years or a ferrin's 20. A korvi person who bonds strongly with a ferrin friend does so knowing that this can't last long.
• Queer themes. Lots of queer themes. No explicitly queer characters (although there's no way some of them are straight, honestly).

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