Sunday, September 9, 2012

Bodily Fluids

Question: Which Health boon would a character use to control blood, semen, or saliva?

I'm sure this question sprang out of our discussion of what Water can and can't do the other day, but that doesn't make it any less valid a question!

Semen, or rather its viability, is already effectively controlled by Blessing of Health/Curse of Frailty and Virility/Muliebrity, both of which directly decide whether or not someone's tiny aquanauts are capable of actually fulfilling their intended purpose. They also control feminine fertility in the form of eggs and ovulation (or, to use mythic wording, "the waters of the womb"), a less-often-mentioned-in-myth but no less important half of the equation.

Blood (and, indeed, all bodily fluids, depending on what you're doing) is routinely controlled by a number of Health boons; Heal/Infect, Restore/Wither and Plague/Cure can stop bloodflow, replace lost blood and turn wounds to mere bruises if used positively, while their negative applications can inflict blood-borne diseases and degeneration just as easily. Scions choose what kinds of diseases and unpleasantness they cure or inflict with Health boons, so there's nothing stopping them from directly targeting and manipulating blood in the course of doing so. Intoxicate/Detoxify directly purges or poisons a target's bloodstream, while Control Aging literally stops (or accelerates) the normal degeneration of blood cells that occurs when a person ages. And, of course, Genesis wholesale creates those bodily fluids from nothing, along with the rest of a human body.

If you want to get perfectly, entirely hands-on, Human Clay is the boon I suspect you're looking for, which would allow you to shape, change and rebuild not only organs and vessels but your subject's bodily fluids themselves if you wanted to. Every facet of the body is under your direct control with this boon, including its fluids; your imagination is really your only limit (and if you have other boons that work with it, like Hybrid Chimera or Impossible Hybrid, the possibilities become almost endless).

The entire purpose of Health is to control, shape, heal or harm the human (and, by extension, divine) body. That includes its bodily fluids, which are for the most part of the realm of that body, not the amorphous and symbolically different realm of the waters. It lacks powers specifically aimed at targeting bodily fluids, but it hardly needs them; by the time a Scion is Legend 4 and has access to Heal/Infect, he can already pretty much stunt anything he wants to when it comes to affecting the flow of those fluids in the pursuits of hale heartiness or abject decrepitude.

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