051 - Naegleria Fowleri

Unnatural Phenomenon: Naegleria Fowleri

The infamous brain-eating amoeba, an evocative and grisly critter that normally feasts on bacteria but has an unfortunate sweet-tooth for human grey matter. Found in warm, poorly or unchlorinated water sources like swimming holes or neti pots it enters the nasal cavity of its victims and - attracted by the chemicals nerve cells use to communicate with each other - climbs into the brain via the olfactory nerve. It’s fortunately rare, less than a thousand cases have been reported globally. Unfortunately it’s also highly lethal with a 97% mortality rate. An average of five days after exposure symptoms appear: headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, stiffness, then become more serious as hallucinations, ataxia and seizures take the stage. Sufferers typically don’t last more than a week or two.

What does this horrifying and utterly mundane condition have to do with the unnatural? In the case that this rare and grim fate befalls an equally rare (and sometimes grim) type of person something unusual happens. Adepts don’t die of it, in a manner of speaking. It’s only happened once and the woman afflicted is locked up in a Lubbock psychiatric hospital for stabbing a bunch of people on account of she couldn't handle the changes, but she's still kind of alive. When N. fowleri chows down on the twisted, charged-addled material of a willworker’s brain the pale waste product left behind is an almost carbon copy of the original grey matter.

It’s not a material copy, a coroner or a surgeon digging around in the brain pan would be left scratching their heads at the smooth, white undifferentiated mass, but it’s functionally close. You can think with it just like you would your old brain. The replacement process isn’t much fun though, in addition to all the symptoms a normal person goes through adepts develop transient behavioural tics since the new wiring doesn’t line up perfectly with the slow erosion of the old brain. Temporary foot fetishes would be common if it happened enough. This all resolves itself after a full conversion with some side effects.

The new material reacts to trauma differently than a normal human brain, it keeps ingrained behaviours but can’t adapt to new ones. This is specific to trauma. You can still form new memories and take an art class, but being shot at by a sniper either will or won’t mentally effect you depending entirely on who you were before you got pod-personed. In game terms your shock gauges are locked in place. You still make stress checks and suffer the immediate effects of failing a roll but you can’t gain or lose notches no matter how many ordeals or therapy sessions you go through. If you’ve got an associated disorder you’re stuck with that as well.

Full conversions can’t do magick either. Sorry, the you that is you now isn’t really human anymore. That may or may not bother you until you die depending on what your self gauge was looking like beforehand. Given an adept’s obsession, finding themselves cut off from their one-and-only goes down poorly and won’t stop going down poorly because they can’t get used to it. There is a way that skirts this problem, notice how I said full conversions?

Theoretically if an adept was infected with N. fowleri and were to somehow halt the process part way through they could get a measure of both worlds. For every 20% of your grey matter replaced one random gauge is frozen forever, disorders and all. You also get a cumulative -20% shift to all magick, be it gutter magick, avatar powers or adept reality-bending. If it isn’t mundane, you get penalized. Plus you’re stuck with whatever transient tic the sloppy interface between old and new brain puts on you. There are hospital treatments that could manage something like this, but you’d draw a ton of heat as a medical marvel to emerge seemingly unscathed.