#yknow the issues of being spoiled rotten and neglected + having both an inferiority and superiority complex

[jabberwockprince]

Hello! I've been seeing your post about the Spina Venatores. They're so cool and I'm kinda interested about your girl Poultry, I'm wondering can you talk more about her?

YEAAA glad you like em!

Poultry is my beloved, stressed, constantly struggling, perfectionist girlgenius chicken! <3 ohh where do I start with her ... she's the only human in Spina Venatores, a girl who figured out how to mix mankind's logic and the arcane. her role in Spinas

i'll put the rest under a read more bc it got a bit long o7

she's the little girl mentioned in Darley Clatter's in-game Stories! Lilian! at least until bluepoch releases a Darley Clatter anecdote where they show the actual Lilian lmfao

they don't explicitly state that Lilian is a human afaik, but since her father is hiring an arcanist to get her the best horse in the world, I interpreted it as how humans will hire arcanists for frivolities like this

(screenshots taken from the wiki because I can't be bothered with opening the game rn lmfao)

either way, Poultry is that little girl; spoiled, bratty, precocious, too smart and observant for her age, eager to have adventures and have everything she asked for. she was so enamoured with her childhood friend Darley Clatter and arcanum as a whole that she asked her parents to make her into an arcanist despite being a pureblooded human--when she found out this is Literally Impossible, it sort of ruined her friendship with Darley Clatter due to resentment and jealousy, and she put all of her time and efforts into finding a way to BECOME an arcanist, to mix both humanity and arcanists into one, instead of having humans recreate arcane skills with machines and whatnot

and she ACTUALLY succeeded, she figured out the differences between human and arcanist physiology through experimenting with arcane creatures and critters, and then regular animals with arcamun similar to Pickles and whatnot--horrible horrible stuff going on, stuff that leads sometimes into creating homunculus and chimeras and things that should not be alive! which got her kicked out of her university!

now. I'm fully aware that, as far as we know in canon, it's impossible for pureblooded humans to become infected or to make use of arcanum the same way arcanists do--one needs the smallest amount of arcanist heritage, no matter how diluted through the ages, for that to happen (like Semmelweis). it's all biology and physiology and science stuff. so for Poultry, her theoretical process of becoming arcanist involved a lot of. well. forcing her body to naturally adapt to arcanist cells and produce them. which could only happen through unethical self experimentation, something she could only get in Manus Vindictae

Venison recruits her on a whim, convinces the higher ups that her knowledge and experiments could be weaponized against mankind, and in turn, they give her the resources needed to go through her dream of becoming an arcanist. and these resources are Spina Venatores! because everyone there has specific arcanums related to the human body--flesh, blood, bones, etc! and it fucking works! frankenstein's monster! her body can NOW slowly adapt to arcanum!

the DOWNSIDE is that the constant exposure to arcane creatures guts and blood of all sorts (one of Spina Venatores' jobs is to hunt down mythical beasts, aside from hunting down important targets) actually caused Poultry to become infected with the Beyond Disease--the Manus Mask she wears was explicitly given to her by the higher ups to fuel her extremely weak arcanum into something actually useful (think of Enigma's explanation about low tier vs high tier arcanists and batteries). but ALSO to slow down the Beyond Disease, because Manus is invested in seeing if they can genuinely turn a human into an arcanist with the intent of creating more cannon fodder to turn into Disciples and Followers (yknow, the monsters arcanists turn into when they wear the masks)

so unbeknownst to Poultry, she's become an experiment within Manus Vindictae!! and shes probably going to die very soon!!

a fun fact is that her arcanum is both related and powered by delusion and belief, becoming stronger the longer she believes herself to be arcanist like any other, but also hinting towards the Beyond creature that infected her being a fairy of sorts.