video | un: Mercy

[valcurie]

Hello there! ( the image that appears is of a smiling blonde woman, healthy and bright looking, dressed now in pristine weight to present herself, projecting poise and elegance and friendly invitation to hear her out. her German Swiss accent is quite strong, though, so hopefully no-one is overly attached to their w's. ) I hope everyone is doing well this evening. I am coming onto the network to reach out to anyone I might not have been able to yet. My name is Angela Ziegler, and I am a doctor from Earth. Human, as you can see. ( a light, pleasant laugh and an even more pleasant smile ) You may also know me as Mercy. It's my agent name from when I was in service to a global peacekeeping organisation known as Overwatch.

I'm from the 21st century, so the treatment that I can offer you is science based ( a slight pause here as if she's considering one last time how to phrase this ) rather than magic based, but I have a good deal of practical experience with general medicine so there's almost nothing I haven't seen or dealt with. My expertise is in applied biotics, and I also have experience with gene therapy, prosthetics, and cybernetics, if there is anyone here who may need more specialised care. My qualifications also include emergency and trauma response so, if you ever find yourself wounded and in need of immediate attention, please do not hesitate to contact me. Think of me as personal 999 for refugees!

If you do come to me for any kind of care, I promise to do the best I can help you, while upholding all the oaths I've taken as a doctor to do no harm and to protect my patients. I'm not charging anything at this time.

And, if you'd like to humour me and help me to understand our group a bit better, I have a set of questions: do you believe you have a soul? What makes you think you do or don't have one? And is such a belief common where you're from? ( she doesn't mention religion, because it isn't strictly speaking a religious idea. she's known plenty of atheists and nay-theists who thought there was something beyond intelligence that made people paramount to other species. whether they called this unique internal animating light a soul or not, it didn't really matter. )

Comments

voice;

[xxxxx]

Witches and wizards, yes. We keep to ourselves, for the most part, after all the, ah—burnings and Inquisitions so on. Those got very annoying.

[ Not that he was there. ]

Exactly how it all works is a little over my head. It's old magic. Love, time, souls—that's all Department of Mysteries business.

I think it is, anyway.

They've very mysterious.

[ Ba-dum tsss. ]

The spell I'm best acquainted with is the Fidelius Charm. It conceals information in someone's soul, so no one else can know it unless they freely choose to share it. If we used it to hide the location of your shoes in my soul, someone else could be looking right at them and not realise they were there. Fortunately it's too complex to use for petty pranks.

[valcurie]

( witches and wizards!! luckily he can't see her now, because she would never be thought of as a dignified and elegant doctor ever again. she's such a nerd for this stuff, her grin is about as wide as her face at the moment. though she does laugh, too, at his jokes that she does understand. she did tell that elf Inquisition was a pretty awful name for a group. for now though, their positions are reversed. a lot of what he's saying goes over her head.

though for some reason 'petty pranks' sticks with her and she considers that for a moment. )

You wouldn't happen to have personal experience with trying, would you? To use that for petty pranks. Though I imagine that's all well and good, otherwise no-one would ever find their keys, glasses, or phones ever again.

If I were to store something like--say, my deepest darkest secret, would it be possible to do that without you actually knowing it?

[xxxxx]

[ Nerd. But she's in like company. ]

No, you would have to tell me. I would have to be free to choose to share it. The choice matters, as well as the trust. But once the spell was done, the secret could only be divulged if I freely chose to share it. Veritaserum, torture, legilimency— [ Sorry for the lingo, but at least there's helpful context? ] —none of that would work. The information can't be taken out of your head against your will, because that's not where it is.

I'd never dream of using it for pranks. [ He could sound more convincing there if he wanted—it's even mostly true, James and Sirius were the ones who dreamed that big—but he doesn't try. The smile is audible. ] We mainly use it to protect places. Safe houses. I've never heard of anyone using it for hiding something more abstract than a location. I don't know that it would be impossible, with some adjustments, but it would certainly be easy to misuse and messy if it went wrong.

It's good to know you're the deep, dark secret type, though.

[ Joking! For the record. She doesn't sound the sort at all. ]

[valcurie]

Truly, it can't be pried from you against your will even by other magic? I'm honestly a bit surprised, given how--creative ( awful, she means ) people can get when there's something that they want. Especially if you're, what, some kind of resistance movement? With your safe houses.

( she laughs at that, recognising it for the joke that it is. she's had fun with a similar accusation recently, so why not again? she purses her lips into a prim smile, with something faintly menacing about the pleasantness she puts out. ) In my world there's a saying. It's always the nice ones. You never know which one might be the poisoned apple.