In Dying Light 2: Stay Human, you’ll often find groups of survivors huddled around a campfire telling stories. I’ve shared several of these so far, but I just keep finding new ones. Today, I found one where a guy claims to have found a cure for THV.
Here’s a video of the story:
And you didn’t think I was going to let this one go without transcribing it, did you? Because I’m here to give you a full written account of this encounter. You’re welcome!
When I first got to the area, a teenage girl was saying, “Let him talk!”
One guy says, “I’ve heard enough of this crap.”
Another guy says, “You’d better not be here stirring up people’s hopes.”
Then the actual storyteller chimes in: “I understand. I really do. but I’m telling the truth. I found a cure for THV.”
The girl says: “We’re listening.”
The man continues: “I’m looking for astragalus frigidus and uncaria tomentosa.”
“What are those?”
“Plants.” And he’s right. Astragalus frigidus is more commonly known as Arctic milkvetch or American milk-vetch, and uncaria tomentosa is more commonly called cat’s claw. Yeah, I looked it up.
“What are you going to do with them?”
And now, the guy breaks into his story proper: “Before the fall, I was a doctor. I specialized in alternative medicine.”
One of the guys at the fire says, “I’ll take any medicine these days.”
“When I came to Villedor, they didn’t even have any AM practitioners. I made a lot of money. This was in 2020. Then, in ’22, the THV pandemic hit us. Most people thought it would last a few months, a year tops. We had seen pandemics before, right? ‘We’ll learn to live with it. This ain’t the first pandemic. It’ll be back to normal soon.’ Remember thinking that?”
The girl chimes in, “I hadn’t been born yet.”
“And then they locked down Berlin, deployed the army in Paris, New York, one city after another. Satellites went dark. The internet went offline. That was the worst for a lot of people, huh? Until the power went out everywhere. But Villedor held on behind its walls and I kept my doors open, seeing everyone I could, doing my best, even when all other cures failed.”
A skeptical man in the crowd says, “And what was that?”
The storyteller responds: “What was what?”
“Your best. What was it you actually did?”
“Traditional remedies inspired by Indian shamans and Siberian folk healers, ancient recipes found in Babylon and Assyria, healing the body and the mind. I never gave up hope. I realized everyone working on a cure was making a fundamental mistake: They were entirely focused on biology and chemistry.”
The skeptic says, “You mean science.”
The faith healer is undeterred. “They were ignoring the bounty of nature. With my vast knowledge of botany, I decided to look for the answer in the plant world.”
“Wait,” says the skeptic. “Now you’re a botanist?”
“After getting seeds from the now-destroyed seed bank building in Elysium, and after four years of intense work, I made a cure for THV.”
“You made a cure?” says the teenage girl (who I think had probably smoked something right before I arrived).
“Okay, yeah, sure,” says the skeptic. “If that’s true, where are all the people you cured?” It’s a fair question.
“I was only able to cure four patients before my lab was raided and destroyed by bandits. They killed all my patients right in front of me, destroyed my work.”
“So let me get this straight,” says the skeptic. “You, an alternative-medicine doctor, made a plant-based cure in a lab that was then raided by bandits, who then killed all your patients, but left you alive and didn’t snatch you or your miracle cure?”
“You don’t have to believe me.”
“Oh, I don’t.”
“I believe you,” says the teenage girl.
The “botanist” continues, “Which is why I spend all my time wandering the city, hoping to find, somewhere, astragalus frigidus, uncaria tomentosa, and the other plants I need to re-create the cure.”
“I truly hope you find them one day,” says the girl. Ah, youth.
Being an Assyrian and hearing that it made me say “oh wow, didn’t expect that”
So whats the point of this?