levin sickness

[Anonymoose]

I feel like the way they've talked about the illness in the story so far foreshadows a cure being discovered in the course of the story. My big question is - if the mysterious woman from the stinger is the real Sphene, the one who died of levin sickness shortly after ascending the throne, does she still have it, or would she still be just as susceptible to the conditions? At first I was inclined towards a macabre joke that "we're gonna have to have that forgotten funeral again", but given all the other clues I think it might be more poetic if real!Sphene's return only highlights that the Sphene created by Preservation, and the one now seemingly controlled by same, were not her; if so, helping cure her (and the others) in time for her to lead them into a regulator-less future would be a neat ending to that arc.

inb4 Wuk gets sentimental as hells that she gets to be her bff after all.

[Cleretic]

I'd also put forward that it's entirely possible that a porxie can't cure levin sickness. Like, we're here basically just assuming that it resembles light corruption or tempering enough to be fixed in the same way, but we're only assuming that because of a vague, off-the-cuff description sounding like it lines up.

I agree with SannaR that, even if it's the same thing to enough of a degree that the porxie could fix it, the problem is environmental to the point where a cure wouldn't do anything; using a porxie to cure tempering could work because we can kill a primal, but we can't kill Alexandria's baseline living conditions, the sickness will just return. And even then, I actually suspect we wouldn't be that lucky; we know that porxies can't help once physical changes happen, and while we don't know if that's 'it's too late in general' or 'it can't fix the physical changes', I'd put forward that symptoms like full-body paralysis might well count as 'physical changes'.

EDIT: I should say that I do think there will be a story on some level tackling the treatment of levin sickness, but it might be just that: a treatment. We're not gonna cure it, we're just gonna figure out a way to make it happen less or cause less pain. And honestly, it's probably a Tural thing; I can definitely see a story about Tural opening, like, a rehabilitation clinic where people with non-terminal levin sickness can recover.

inb4 Wuk gets sentimental as hells that she gets to be her bff after all.

And then an even more sentimental farewell as it turns out that, no, it's not gonna work out that way.

In an expansion with this high a bodycount, in a story with this much focus on grieving and memorializing the dead, in an entire game as stuck on discussing the human response to the creeping inevitability of death as a whole? Hell no is someone gonna just come back from the dead and that situation's gonna be and remain happy.

Also, there's a fairly solid chance that 'Real Sphene' actually doesn't remember or know Wuk Lamat and might not even like her as much, but that all feels like a sideline discussion.