### What you are The pursuit of excellence is the duty of all citizens of Polis, the one place in all the world where specialization is truly possible. Life outside of the city is subject to a kind of impersonal hostility. You spend your day working to earn the right to spend another day working. Inside the shelter of the city's walls that pressure disappears; you always know when your next meal will be. Survival stops being something that needs to be earned, and the freedom from this pressure has allowed people the chance to truly *grow*, for maybe the first time in the history of the species. If you are lucky enough to have been born to such an opportunity, you owe it to the city to grow into something great. You chose your path early in life, convinced that the body was a puzzle that could keep you occupied forever. While other children played at games of chance and mimicry you huddled inside, surrounded by piles of books, trying to diagram the muscles in your hand. Your obsessions were noticed, and your parents were never ones to let talent wilt. Tutors were hired, apprenticeships arranged, and your childhood quickly faded into a marathon of lectures, readings, and dissections. You aren't sure when your apprenticeship became a collaboration, but you do firmly remember when you began to leave your mentor behind. They began turning to you with questions instead of answers, rewriting lectures around your observations, altering techniques they swore by for forty years after you found a better way. Eventually, you left them behind to open up your own practice, and that's when your real work began. Within months you had identified three ailments no one had ever recognized as distinct, and you cured two of them outright. Your journals were copied and recopied until every healing hall kept them chained to lecterns like sacred texts. The city learned to expect discoveries from you the same way it expected the bells to ring: reliable, inevitable, part of the rhythm of life in Polis. ### What you want The city learned to expect miracles of you - you learned a somewhat different lesson: there is no malady short of the natural end of a life that cannot be cured. Every ailment is a puzzle, and there is no such thing as a puzzle without a solution. You haven't announced it yet, but you have proven this principle already: in your ward is a man who you successfully brought back from death. He was crushed beneath a pillar at a construction site; you painstakingly reassembled his chest, repaired his heart, wrapped dried leather around his body to form a new skin, and awoke his spirit with a specially prepared elixir. This child was not yet ready to die, and that means that you can call him back, demonstrating fully your mastery. When it is announced that this tragedy has been averted by your skills and expertise the next part of your career will begin, and you will build a world where people do not die until they are finished with this world. ### What you fear You do not understand this death. You've read the reports and listened to the descriptions, and it doesn't match anything you've ever heard of before. The boy just...stopped. So far as you understand there isn't anything wrong with his body or his health, he just *isn't alive* anymore. You believe firmly that your thesis is correct, that there is no ailment that cannot be understood and corrected, but that doesn't mean that *you* will be the one to prove it. That fear has always been with you - that this will be the question you can't answer, the moment your brilliance fails you and you stop climbing, relegated to just another practitioner instead of The Physician. That fear is especially sharp today. If you fail here, you'll know forever that your limit was reached, and will have to wait and watch someone better achieve your destiny. ### Character Notes Relations - [[Priest]] - You’ve always oscillated between fascination and frustration with the faith. Their fixation on riddles and omens suggests a genuine desire to grasp the workings of the world, yet their revelations never seem to resolve into anything concrete. They delight in paradoxes of their own making, as though cleverness were the same as clarity, and often forget that the world is a physical place that requires answers, not metaphors. - [[Politician]] - Their influence over the world is mildly irritating to you. You have studied your entire life to master the smallest of things; meanwhile with a single policy issued even the elements rush to obey. You pretend this does not impress you, but it does. They can order rivers and crowds, while you labor to coax muscle and bone. Still, today they are firmly in your domain - a death cannot be said to be anyone's concern but yours. - [[Parent]] - Their anger is a force all of its own. You would like to help them, because a child's death offends, but you suspect they realize that this is a professional exercise for you. You need them to withdraw, to master their grief and allow you to work. Questions for the player to consider - Is your focused countenance a mask to protect yourself, or is it the natural posture of someone who treats suffering as a puzzle to be solved? - How much of your confidence is genuine, and how much is a habit born of succeeding? If you fail, will you find fault in yourself, or in the world? - What about failure worries you more: that the deaths that will follow for the people of the city, or for your reputation as the one who should have prevented it?