A Solitary God In A Dark Multiverse - 178 A God Of Disease Enters A Hospital

I teleported myself to the entrance of the hospital. I found myself standing between two sets of electric, sliding glass doors. Both of them abruptly opened, confused by my sudden appearance. I chuckled and stepped through the door that led into the hospital. As I did so, I activated my “Divine presence” power, and I was surprised to receive an abrupt notification.

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[Alert: Divine Presence

Divine presence is a potent passive power that allows you to use a wealth of powerful area of effect abilities. Whenever you use this power you need to select which of the abilities you’d like to use. You can exempt creatures as you wish from these effects. Here are a few that might be handy based on a contextual analysis of your circumstances.

Positive Effects:

Art u0026 Creation effect: Everything around you becomes more beautiful. This includes but isn’t limited to people. Colors become more vibrant, and even the drabbest of decorations become more festive and lively. People are inspired to create things, life, and objects alike. This effect also causes people who are in its area to hear pleasant and soothing music that is unique to each of them. This music relaxes them and helps them stay calm.

Bliss u0026 Patience effect: Everything around you becomes joyful in your presence. This a purer and less addictive version of a peace-domain power you have. This power also prevents conflicts from breaking out and may indeed cause conflicting parties to begin to inch towards peace if exposed to this effect long enough.

Healing effect: Everything around you begins to heal. The longer you’re around something or someone the more it begins to heal. Pain vanishes in your presence and even if it’s supposedly chronic pain those who were soothed by this effect won’t feel it for at least a month. Broken objects become mended, or if the worst possible states become easier to fix.

Life effect: Life blossoms around you. Depending on your surroundings this may take on different effects but in a hospital, it means that no miscarriages happen, no one dies, and those who very recently died may come back from the dead.

Love effect: Relationships heal in your presence, and if those in your presence love someone the love they feel for those they love is amplified. All manners of love are affected by this power.

Nature effect: Plants grow in your presence, and even the wildest and most savage animals become peaceful and well-behaved while near you. Animals and plants flock towards you, and even technology itself begins to strain nature less as a result of this effect.

Negative effects:

Death effect: Life around you begins to die at an accelerated rate. Even small, superficial wounds become worse and diseases become fatal if left untreated.

Disease effect: Diseases, infections, illnesses, and disorders are bolstered by your presence and become more contagious, and more long-lasting. Diseases and other sorts of negative conditions in this effect also cause those infected by them to begin to fall under your influence. Diseases and other negative conditions unfamiliar to you that are affected by this effect are added to the repertoire of diseases you can use and have mastered.

Pain effect: Your proximity induces pain so intense it would normally cause creatures to fall unconscious but instead keeps them conscious and unaware of the source of their horrific pain.

Reanimation effect: This effect causes dead things in the effect to reanimate as undead under your control.]

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I chuckled as I read through the potent effects at my disposal. Each of them was pretty spectacular in their own way, and I sensed the potent potential radiating out of each. That said, for now I was keeping it simple. I selected the “Art u0026 Creation effect”, the “Life effect”, and the “Disease effect”. When I did so I shivered as I felt the power truly begin to activate and I realized how wide the power’s reach was.

This power stretched all the way around me, affecting an area perhaps a kilometer in width. I could sense hundreds of people abruptly fall under its effects, and in doing so I felt hundreds of diseases and illnesses begin to become “mine” in so far as diseases could be “mine”. And what’s more, all of the diseases and other negative conditions that fell under my control were automatically added to the diseases I could unleash at will. That simplified me completing my mission: acquiring more diseases with which I could affect the world.

I released a pleased sigh as my eyes filled with the notifications alerting me to the diseases, illnesses, viruses and other things now under my control. Some of the ones that stuck out to me included things like “Chlamydia”, “Staph infections”, and “Pneumonia”.

I stepped out into a large entry-area filled with overworked workers, including doctors, dashing back and forth, which was coupled with a reception area for patients who had filled out the necessary paperwork but hadn’t yet met with doctors or nurses. I had a basic understanding of how the process worked, thanks to the memories I had absorbed from the Finigan family, and their admittedly lacking understanding of how fancy hospitals operated, and I also knew that no one would stop me thanks to my “Aura of normalcy” power.

I began to take my time wandering around the place, ignoring the doctors, nurses, workers, and even patients around me. I was mostly in this place to look about and to gather diseases through my powers. Thanks to my detection-based abilities I knew that most patients weren’t on the first floor, as a means to prevent them from spreading their diseases to people on the first floor who by and large were people who had been hurt and were seeking treatments for things like cuts, broken bones, and in some cases seeking help to not die from being stabbed by a bladed weapon or shot with bullets.

I was also largely ignored by the people around me, despite my apparently supernatural and absolute beauty. I suspected this was a consequence of the “Aura of normalcy”, which I was using to have freedom of movement throughout the hospital. I had a number of abilities that I could use to move freely, but I had to admit: I did like “Aura of normalcy”, it was nice to have freedom of movement without going to the trouble of being invisible. It was also nice to be able to move undisturbed independent of whichever form I was in at the time I used my powers.

I was in a human form at the moment, one completely free of any supernatural adornments, but so far I could tell that under normal circumstances my forms were plenty attractive, more than enough to draw unwanted attention my way. So I was happy to not at all be bothered by anyway around me. Especially after my interactions in the government office that I had spent part of today in. I had been noticed plenty while I was there, and it had been inconvenient.

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As I walked through the hospital’s first floor, I dipped my head into various rooms where injured people were awaiting treatment or being treated. My power worked brilliantly and I was able to observe various people undergoing assorted treatments. People were hooked to “I.V.” machines, fluids, often anesthetic fluids, being transmitted directly to their veins.

I also got to watch doctors and nurses stitch up wounds. They skillfully worked together to numb the areas near the wounds that were being stitched and then used a number of different materials to begin to close open wounds and to aid the process by which humans recovered from the sort of nasty injuries that left their bodies opened and exposed to bacteria, as well as had them with their life-fluids seeping out of them.

That said I wasn’t just a passive viewer of the events at the hospital today.

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About halfway through my visit to the hospital, I came across a room near the back of the hospital. There was a team of doctors and nurses who were performing surgery on a brutally injured man who had survived, technically anyway, a gunshot to the head. The man was deeply anesthetized, and a surgical staff of three doctors and two nurses were frantically working to stabilize him.

I had silently snuck into the surgical suite and I allowed myself to watch them for about ten minutes before I began to intervene. What I did, for me anyway, was comically simple. I merely rose my hand and channeled potent, pure, healing energy into the man. The doctors who were performing the surgery were dumbfounded as they felt the healing energy seep past them and then enter the wounded man.

Before their very eyes, the man’s damaged brain began to heal. Hematomas vanished, damaged brain tissue began to repair itself, and even the part of the skull that had been damaged began to repair itself.

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“What… What is this?” One of the nurses asked. In her hands was a sterilized scalpel, one she had been in the process of handing to the lead surgeon. Her eyes were glued to the rapidly healing skull and exposed brain of the man they had been given the unenviable task of performing a thorough surgery on.

The entire surgical staff watched in wonder as the man’s head was healed. It was a slow process, taking a few minutes, but by the time it was done the figure responsible for it was long gone. When it was finished, the healed man remained unconscious, still thoroughly anesthetized, but a quick examination of him revealed that he was well and truly healed. It turned out that that would be only the first clearly supernatural thing to happen in the hospital that day, but it was nothing short of an utter miracle.

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A few minutes after I intervened in the surgery I found myself on the second floor of the hospital. The second floor of the hospital was much busier, and also far noisier. My divine senses enabled me to perfectly hear every conversation within the hospital anyway, but the fact of the matter was that the majority of the ambient noise I heard on the first floor came from the second.

This place was an assault on the senses. I could smell all manners of medicine, of nauseous bodily fluids and substances, and of cleaning agents. I could hear the wails of the sick, crying coming from the newly bereaved, and those who were accepting that they were going to die.

The first part of it that I explored was where patients sat. Upon entering the second floor there was a check-in and reception area much like there was for the people on the first floor. Many people, all human, sat here and waited to be called upon by any of the various nurses flitting about the assorted rooms throughout the main area of the second floor.

Some humans looked at me, but as they did their eyes glazed over and they quickly looked away, distracted by whatever else surrounded me. I was technically detectable, but it was quite difficult to look at me and actually keep one’s eye on me.

It was the second part of the second floor that I explored that actually truly mattered. Because it was in the second part of the second floor where I was actually active. And in the second part of the second floor, when I was active I changed lives, simply by doing the one sort of kind thing I actually liked to do: heal people. And on the second floor I opted to dramatically change tactics. Just for the fun of it.

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During his eventful trip to the second floor of the Saint Rose hospital, the dynamic and maybe even a bit whimsical god opted to have fun by being as braggadocious as possible. The first time he entered a room containing a sickly person, he coincidentally entered one that had the patient’s entire family within it. As he slipped inside he closed the door leading in and out of the room behind him. It had been open when he entered, and closing it hid him from the view of anyone not in the room.

As soon as the door was shut the whimsical god opted to deactivate his “aura of normalcy”. After all he wanted worshipers and using his full suite of powers allowed him to make many different sorts of people become his worshipers, especially since as he deactivated his “aura of normalcy” power he fully activated “Absolute beauty” and “Mesmerizing presence”. He also struck members of the family with a chilling usage of “paralysis”, keeping them glued to their seats as they watched him, a total strange, walk towards their unconscious son, boyfriend, and brother.

The family of the patient who was presently occupying the room were seated in various chairs scattered throughout the room and they, almost as one, turned to face the intruder. The moment they did that they were instantly transfixed by the god’s sublime and sanity-searing beauty and didn’t even notice that the god had, in a literal sense, paralyzed them.

The person who was assigned to the room at the moment was sleeping in a high-tech hospital bed. He was an auburn-haired television personality who was fairly well-liked and was suffering from an aggressive and cancerous brain tumor, something his family had only just been made aware of minutes ago.

His family, consisting of his kind boyfriend, the patient’s mother, and his older brother, were all gathered in the room and made the understandable mistake of turning to see whoever had just entered their private room. They had been expecting a nurse, a doctor, or some sort of hospital worker, not a god of both healing and disease.

The god felt his beauty sear their minds and he grinned even as he wordlessly sauntered over to the unconscious man in the hospital bed. As he did he assessed the man, using his powers to learn a great deal about him. One of the things he learned though was that brain cancer wasn’t contagious and that knowledge was responsible for him sighing in annoyance. It was the only sound the mysterious and alienly handsome entity made as he almost glided towards the hospital bed and the patient sleeping atop it.

As he reached the bed that safely cradled the television personality, James Buchanan, Althos reached out and took the man’s hand. The unconscious hand was warm and reacted, even while still unconscious, to the god by squeezing the deity’s fingers. This caused the god to smile even more brightly than before. And then he opened his mouth and spoke.

“James Buchanan… You shouldn’t be here. Be healed.” He said, commanding the unconscious mortal’s body to fight this off. That wasn’t how mortals treated cancer patients, but Althos himself didn’t care about that and neither did his powers. The god’s potent “Holy voice” washed over the mortal and his sleeping form began to radiate a bright, golden aura as a consequence of being told to fight off the sickness.

It was shortly after the man’s sleeping form began to glow rather gloriously that the mortal’s body did as the god commanded, beginning to successfully battle the malignant tumor that was growing on the man’s brain. No one knew it yet, as the man himself was asleep, and his family had no immediate way of discerning the status of his health, but this miracle was every bit as miraculous as what Althos had done downstairs. Althos silently watched as James’ eyes abruptly began to open, until the man was looking at him, eye to eye and man to man.