The 'Checkup' Spell

Oath given and received, Ahsch gave his commands of secrecy to his newest Thrall, apologized, and dismissed her. He ended up locking his office and remained there the rest of the night, ruminating on his decisions, and eventually fell into a fitful sleep in his chair. He barely even noticed that Mahat respected his implicit wish to be left alone.

On the seventh day of the week, he threw himself into his routine, ending up with nothing to do several hours before lunch. Unsurprisingly, Rwnil somehow knew, and decided to use the free time to hold the next lesson on bonds. She flatly ignored her pupil's obvious dark mood, proceeding as normal and introducing the concept of making specific changes to bonds. Midway through her lecture, Ahsch interrupted. "I'd think you'd be **** to teach this sort of thing to me at the moment, given the mood I'm in," he remarked.

She gave him a level glare. "The world and your enemies - whether they are already or not - don't give a damn about your mood, boy. If you can't work through these problems - and quickly - then you are not worthy of being a god."

He flinched, more at her cold tone than her words themselves, though the message was pointedly received. He'd been worried about Byrdrek and Fauna yesterday, and that situation was only going to get more dangerous as time progressed. Especially given the play he had made with Kirasiel. He had three more days until he was due to return to R'sath, and he had no illusions that there would be quite the situation waiting for him.

Rwnil wrapped up her lesson, leaving Ahsch with the task of altering the target of a bond of some unimportant item from himself to another. He shelved that, having reminded himself of his approaching deadline for other goals, and instead began working on the 'Checkup' spell.

He quickly realized that it would end up being two spells in one - a spell to take a scan of the target, which was then stored for later comparison; and the spell that would do that comparison to the target's current condition. Parameters would have to be set, since bodies were constantly changing - weight fluctuated by a few pounds throughout the day; blood pressure, heart rate, and respirations varied from moment to moment; he was willing to bet that hormone levels or even the exact structure of bones would change gradually over time due to natural wear and tear, and weren't worth being overly concerned about. Though, as he thought about it, 'natural wear and tear' could vary from person to person, and sometimes what was happening from that wear and tear wasn't natural. He also had to consider the differences between the various races, given that humans didn't have gills or wings or feathers, or scales, or any number of other organs that certain monster species would have.

I'm trying to make a one-size-fits-all solution for an insanely complex problem, he realized after an hour of planning. I already know that some monsters operate at temperatures that would be considered feverish or hypothermic for humans. And some monsters have heat and rut cycles, or shed or molt, or all sorts of things...

Ahsch leaned back in his chair, groaning at the nigh-impossibility of his task. To his mind, there were essentially two ways to go about making it work. He could either make spells suited to each species, which would account for all the various intricacies of their biology and allow for the sometimes vast differences in ranges of 'normal;' or he could try and shove all the conditionals and specifics into a singular spell. Either way, he ran into problems, either having too many spells to make and pass on, or having a singular, insanely bloated spell.

Wait a second, he frowned. The diagnostic spells work on every known species, and even just within, say, hormone levels, there's hundreds of different normal values and acceptable ranges and various conditions... but it still works... He thought about it for a moment. It shouldn't work, not if the problem he was having was a real problem, and not him overthinking things. And he was fairly certain he wasn't. Which left the question of how such comprehensive spells existed in the first place. He wasn't even aware of anything that they would miss within their specific domains, which was exceptionally bizarre given that they were centuries old, and he knew that at least a couple conditions had been discovered in the past century or so - and they were included, without any alteration to the diagnostic spells they would affect. At least not according to the books he was referencing, which were the latest edition.

Ahsch turned his attention back to the diagnostic spells themselves. How the fuck does that even work? he wondered. After comparing a few spells, he had his answer: all of the diagnostics were constructed in the same format, including a scan, a reference 'database,' a compare-and-contrast, and the 'report' to the caster. On the whole, the first, third, and fourth parts were essentially identical, only really changing in the target of the scan. Ahsch didn't find anything particularly special in those three segments. But in the 'database,' he was surprised to find something aside from simple references. After a few minutes of examination, he realized that in part, what he had found was a simple mechanism to organize the incoming scan and comparisons and pull out the appropriate conditions and abnormalities. But built in behind that was something else, something that made the newly-forming divine part of Ahsch almost 'tingle' in recognition.

Because that 'something else' was a link to a divine domain, one that Ahsch's bond-sense identified as a mish-mash of healing, medicine, and health. The implication was obvious after a minute of thought, and he sat there for a while, shocked at the revelation. Then he quickly returned to his spell.

He didn't care about diagnoses or accurate reports of specific abnormalities - enough information to point towards appropriate diagnostic spells would be enough. What his reference needed was the normal values and ranges for every species, with the intuition to recognize that even with a species-wide 'average,' there would be outliers who would be fine outside those ranges, and generate appropriate ranges for those individuals. It was an almost impossible task... unless it was tackled by the power of a divine domain, specifically, the domain of 'bodies.'

Ahsch knew that Object of Worship was affecting his capabilities, as he reviewed his spell a handful of hours later. There was no way he should have - could have - completed a new spell as complicated as this one as fast as he did. The inclusion of his domain of bodies did the trick, the divine understanding of how they worked and what could be considered 'normal' across the almost infinite range of possible bodies... it was the only way to properly form such a singular spell. Quite possibly, whichever god made the diagnostic spells could have made a comprehensive diagnostic. Ahsch could only wonder what prevented them from doing so.

Despite having access to those normal values, the 'Checkup' spell wasn't a proper diagnostic. It still needed a baseline to work off of, and evaluated the targets based on that - which made it essentially worthless for use on multiple targets, as it could only hold a single saved scan to use as that baseline. Which was hardly a problem, as Ahsch had already intended to have patients of the Order of Enochiel's healthcare group be taught the spell to use on themselves - if they could identify when there was a problem, it would cut down on extraneous visits, making the whole process more efficient and - hopefully - effective. The Priests would be the specialists, who would deem their patients healthy or not, and those patients would be in charge of monitoring themselves and coming in for a proper diagnostic checkup if something became abnormal. Hardly perfect, but then, nothing ever was.

Sharing his discovery and creation with the members of his 'inner circle' who knew about his Boons - that being Ariin, Mahat, Avery, and Butler (via his Lord) - Ahsch immediately had Ariin join him and began to teach his sister everything he'd learned. With the benefit of Daydreamweave being able to project mental images and even complete trains of thought (with enough focus), her education was quick, and they were almost halfway done by dinner. Ahsch expected that they'd be finished either before or shortly after lunch the next day, and then they would move on to the acolytes.