He's not happy, as he sketches out the signs and sigils. He generally isn't, these days.
He ran out of better options with the last of the cows.
He finishes the circle.
"Bon appetit," he says belatedly. "Okay. So this is Massachusetts but it is not the Massachusetts I'm familiar with, do you by any chance have a guess about how to explain to someone who's heard of Massachusetts but doesn't expect anyone to be invisible the inferential gap implied?"
"...I'm tempted to say 'there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,' but I have no idea what you are or what you meant by angel so perhaps there are simply different things. We don't know everything--Grandfather had books about things shrouded from the common knowledge of mankind, but they're old and in poor repair and in some cases incomplete. We know there are--places, besides Earth, places where things not made of ordinary matter dwell, things like the Hounds of Tindaloo and the Adumbral Hornets--the latter is what I was trying to summon when I got you--or like our father, Yog-Sothoth. We know bits of the language that beings like Yog-Sothoth and its kindred use. We know that Yog-Sothoth and other things like it are bound from fully entering this dimension and if they did it would mean the end of life on Earth as we know it. We know about an ancient civilization that used to dwell at the South Pole before its own created slave-race rose up and destroyed them. We know about an aquatic sapient race that inhabits the oceans to this day, or at least to the day the Necronomicon was written, around the eighth century."
"...okay. I'm a demon. Angels also exist. So do fairies. All three of us live in our own separate worlds but can be summoned to Earth-as-I've-historically-understood-it by humans drawing on the floor, and then negotiated with for our services. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. Uh, also it's the year 2159."
"It may be that nobody could have done any better but the time for emergency measures was the first year there were only as many new calves as you'd eaten cows in the last twelve months." Sigh. "I am going to... look up a ten minute presentation on American history, go through the highlights up until 1928, and see if there are any discrepancies that don't directly have to do with extradimensional hornets or deities, sound good?"
"Alright. Even if we don't find anything, you might want to compare it against a history book from our world, or someone who knows more about history than we do--relatively few of Grandfather's books were on history, and most of them were old, so anything between 1860 and 1913 I honestly couldn't swear to."
"That's a good idea. This is just an overview against common knowledge." He produces an item made of metal and plastic and glass about the size of a small leek and turns it on, projecting a rectangle of light into the air. He looks at the light and it moves around while he nibbles his lip thoughtfully and finally pulls up what he wants. "Here goes An Abbreviated American History."
It's very abbreviated, and Cam only continues for the first two-thirds of the content, since after that it's past the current date. There are pictures.
"No, I could conjure books but they'd be way less convenient. Also the nature of the brain surgery is I have another little device in my brain, so in my case, I just materialized it where it needed to be; it only needs actual scalpels if you don't have a demon. However, it does rely on specific brain architecture enough that I don't think I should try giving either of you one like this because I do not know if you may have oddly shaped brains."
Nod. "It's the most comprehensive one, and also the one with the most pieces missing. I still have unhealed wounds from when I broke into the Miskatonic University library trying to access the complete version--our version doesn't have the ritual to summon Hornets, we had just run out of cows, and I was desperate. If there's anything else in there that could help us--manage what we are--I don't know if we'll stop growing at eighteen like full humans but if we don't that's going to be a problem at some point no matter how many cows are available to eat--"
Lots and lots of really disturbing information.
The section Wilbur seems to be focusing on has a lot to say about Yog-Sothoth. Including instructions for a ritual that will summon him completely to this world and wipe out all life. Wilbur has skipped that and is intensely studying a set of pages that have more to do with his biological properties, insofar as a creature like Yog-Sothoth can be said to have a biology as humans would describe the field.
"Yes, I figured since it was so surprising when I mentioned it. However, as a note of caution, I don't think the person who compiled this was terribly concerned with ethics, what with there being world-destruction rituals and sketchy telepathy and whatnot, so I don't think we can be positive they'd mention if there was some terrible side effect to going through this long ritual."
"--We can limit the damage, probably. There are wards--" he flips to a different section "--here, see, they don't last long before needing to be re-done but I can use them to keep Lucy in the house--it's why there weren't more casualties when--when we found out what happens when she gets so hungry her higher brain functions stop functioning. I don't know if they'd work on an ordinary human but someone who was resurrected might not count and even if they did the wards could be modified."
The Mi-Go come from Yuggoth, which is not explicitly stated to be another planet but yeah it's another planet. Or planetoid. Or moon. It's a rock in space of some description, almost certainly. They fly through space. They do unspecified but ominously referred to things to people if bothered. Avoid.
You can use either a basically intact corpse or the "essential saltes," which may be concocted using the ashes of the deceased. The spells are different depending on whether or not the body has to be reconstituted. In the latter case it's possible to banish the resurrectee back to the dead without infliction of further violence through use of a counter-spell.
There are incantations. The incantations invoke Yog-Sothoth.
"There's a ritual to summon Yog-Sothoth incompletely and temporarily, in Grandfather's copy of the Necronomicon. Mother used it. She wanted...she wanted children who would have more power than an unattractive albino and her widower father, neither with any formal education, living on cattle proceeds and a dwindled family fortune and despised by their neighbors, could aspire to. Instead she got...us." There is a soft rustling sound, as of snakeskin on snakeskin. "She loved us very much."
"Huh. I guess. Well. I don't think you want to live on a space station forever - it'd make you permanently dependent on stuff I make, and teaching you to maintain it all would be a big project - but we don't have to come back here in particular when we're done up there."
The description is a little flowery and roundabout but basically it gives you mastery over the kinds of beings that don't exist fully within this plane of reality. How complete the control is depends on the power of the being in question--the wielder of the name could strip all free will from some lesser beings, but only make greater ones go away and leave you alone.
"Okay. The question is can you summon more daeva; and if you can, why hasn't anyone else. It's not hard. I suppose maybe other people have; 'valid daeva-summoning circle' is a conjurable parameter, but is all magic you accomplish locally by drawing on the floor likely to be harmless at small scale?"
"If you're indestructible and can make arbitrary objects it's probably not a disaster but if you end up with one while on a planet kill it before it can get loose. If you show me a picture of a circle to summon a demon or an angel or a fairy I can tell you whether I think it would be dangerously dual-purpose."
"Those are also bad but I have to fix them with vaccines, which is a social engineering problem as opposed to a unilaterally releasing clouds of mosquitoes over the Earth problem. Malaria is arguably worst, though, just in terms of body count - some less conservative estimates suggest it is responsible for as many as half of human deaths to date."
Not being a discrete object, she doesn't eat it as neatly as she ate the cows, but the mess that exists until she's managed to scrape all the sauce off herself and lick it off her tentacles is much less gory, at least.
"That," she sighs afterwards, "was the most delicious thing ever."
"I'm glad you liked it! I'm gonna make a little robot to wash the tub out so future dinners can go there without cross-contamination. Even if not getting sick also applies to food poisoning it seems the way to go." He sets a Scrubbaâ„¢ on the rim of the tub. It scrubbas its way down.
"Okay... if you use a fresh body," Cam says, "- I'm basing this on stuff I'm assuming the author worked from, not just the Book of Ignorance here - they can wind up with brain damage. A demonically-created live body is not physically brain damaged, and certainly isn't worse at being alive than an actual corpse, but that at least tells me I should probably start with a dead one. I can probably get away with making it without whatever killed Mr. Franklin..." He looks that up. "Pleurisy. So he won't have to deal with an emergency lung transplant first thing, that's good."
"Okay. And even if you know science and history now the way they teach those in the future is completely different so I may as well start you at ground level on those. Now, let's figure out a computer you can use. What've you got in the way of manipulating appendages?"
The computer projects a screen like Cam's. "There you go! Okay, it's a tutorial intended for brand-new daeva - daeva appear spontaneously as adults with no memories, so stuff gets nice and basic for them, won't assume any specific background in computers but in this case does assume you can read English since we get our summoners' languages when summoned and that's a popular way to start off with knowing how to talk and read. Poke around with that and it'll lead you to the educational material when you've got the hang of the interface."
If you do the ritual perfectly then even if the resulting resurrected person craves human flesh they can do without and are likely to be perturbed by it.
Since they've never heard of scientific rigor the notes on axes of quality are sorta sparse but the gist of it is that if you fuck up, instead of failing gracefully by doing nothing it will probably fail ungracefully by creating a revenant that will try to eat you.
"Physical objects. Including ones you used to have but that were destroyed, or you can suggest something it would be cool if you had an object that did it and I can see if I know of anything like that, like the spaceship." He points at the spaceship. "Except I won't give you a spaceship because you don't know how to pilot one."
"If you want something more genuinely futuristic next time I can arrange weird edible chemistry experiments and fusion cuisine, but my food preferences were formed only about seventy years later than you guys in a lower middle class environment. I guess I'm acquainted with more foreign food than you'd be likely to have run into, Chinese takeout probably isn't a thing yet here."
"I don't know if they still do but when I was small enough to fit through doors I used to go run around outside at night when Mother and Grandfather were sleeping and I ate lots of things that Mother freaked out when she found out about. Especially the mushrooms."
"I'm sure there are demons - and angels and maybe even particularly determined fairies - who play around with eating poison as a hobby, and I've tried antifreeze once myself, and like literally everything someone could be interested in there are probably surprising depths to the pastime. The standard demon eatery has mostly food a regular human could eat though."
"Oh good. Here, have dessert." He can make a little ice platform for a big cheesecake in her foodtub so it doesn't touch the salmon residue, which the Scrubbaâ„¢ hasn't gotten to yet.
And he picks up his research on how they will be retrieving the late Mr. Franklin again.
"It is not! This is an orbital habitat above the Atlantic Ocean I made for doing magic experiments on. I suspected you'd be okay with being the subject of a resurrection experiment based on your writings on the topic. It's delightful to meet you; I'm Cam, that's Wilbur, and the invisible party over there is Lucy."
"I am working alone. Well, Wilbur and Lucy are consulting. I have magical powers because I am from another dimension; arbitrary is pretty arbitrary with limits like 'it'd take me a few weeks to make a planet' and 'not antimatter' - antimatter being stuff that is the opposite of matter and mutually annihilates it if they come into contact. Their dad is some kind of monstery god thing."
"Uh, took a long time to get around to ending slavery, and though it has happened by this year it takes a long time to calm down remaining racism. In my world there was this big war against among other participants Japan and the United States decided to round up its Japanese residents and put them in concentration camps, and also dropped two very destructive weapons on Japan about it, and there's not really a plausible story where this was connected to any of the genuinely bad things Japan was up to in the Pacific theater, that seems to have been a coincidence. Lots of invading random Middle Eastern countries and propping up dictatorships in South America for economic reasons. By 2157 things have settled down a whole lot, though, and I bet this world can skip a lot of crap."
"Treatment of Native Americans was awful for an embarrassingly long time, the Vietnam War was real bad... perhaps you would like to hear about some non-atrocities, like the invention of the airplane, that was a couple Americans, and also you're credited with discovering electricity and boy howdy does that take off, lots and lots of inventions happen in America actually."
"The magic system this Earth is working with is very spooky and includes a lot of warnings about ending the world and hostile alien life forms. Plus there was a carefully minimized but perhaps not eliminated risk that you would awaken craving human flesh - it's not actually a serious problem if you do since I can make human flesh but imagine if you'd run off to eat somebody before I explained that?"
"Well, I don't want to go nuts and start resurrecting a thousand people a day, but we could stand to have a bigger sample size since you appear to be fine. It'll be more efficient to cut down on causes of death - material scarcity and diseases and so on. I already triggered the process that will lead to the extinction of the malarial mosquito, everything else is going to need some social engineering probably."
"Yes. I can skip a lot of steps because I can travel anywhere in the world very fast and make arbitrary material objects, and it might be I can shortcut a lot of things if it turns out to be a good idea to teach everybody how to summon more daeva. But I can't just eradicate a carrier species for every ailment."
He looks pleased at that. "Well, there are two obvious routes around that--one is to frontload further experiments in resurrection and strategy about how to unveil it, and then capitalize on my existing reputation; the other is to catch up on the modern--that is to say, present, rather than my time or yours--political landscape and attempt to perform social engineering from a new identity--which I suspect would still be my forte, but I could be mistaken."
"You are probably way better at politics than me even without the advantage of being Ben Franklin," acknowledges Cam. "I think since you don't have any weird resurrection-related symptoms these kids' mom is next," he gestures at the location of Lucy, and at Wilbur, "but after that I'm happy to perform more, and in between I can provide whatever research material would be handy - lemme find you a booklist about the history of the nineteenth century -" He rummages in his computer. "Do you want these paper copy or on a device like this?"
"Lots of things have happened," Wilbur says. "I'll fill you in on the details later, but--Cam is from another dimension, he has the power to conjure arbitrary material objects as long as they're well-specified enough--he managed better copies of Grandfather's books, cobbled together a resurrection ritual and tested it on Benjamin Franklin."
"It does not have to be identical - I fixed Mr. Franklin's lungs and pulled your state from right before you were hurt - but I don't know the exact tolerances and in particular I'd worry that using a younger body would risk losing some memories of the later life, though there's nothing in the literature about it either way since the spell's authors didn't have my affordances."
"But the big ticket items lifesaving-wise in that vicinity are mostly going on in Europe and Russia and China. I think it can be done, but there's enough I want to destabilize before then - were you all aware Communism's a bad idea? It requires real delicate conditions to work at all and nobody right now has them - that there's no way to be sure everything'll be where it's expected by then."
"The oversimplified answer is we don't have the necessary ingredients, but that's not the real problem, since demons at least could make them - daeva are indestructible. I could go fly into the sun, and while I would have a hard time getting out again without harming the sun I wouldn't be more than moderately uncomfortable in the process. The way this works has to do with our concept of the boundaries of our bodies: I can cut my hair if I want, but you can't cut my hair if I don't want. If you decide out of an impulse to mad science to graft an appendage onto a consenting daeva subject who then agrees to be knocked unconscious so you don't have to worry about them deciding that actually they like the new appendage and want to keep it, the appendage dies, because it's not incorporated into the thing that's holding us together. Demon women who've tried just sticking a zygote where it would naively belong have had one of two things happen - they incorporate the zygote into their self-concept and it stops growing, or they don't and it dies."
"I can't vaccinate you against old age. Humans in my world still age and die. But it turns out resurrecting people in younger bodies works fine so there's that! Let me figure out the densest safe vaccine course for everything that's around now that has a modern-quality vaccine developed - some things I will not be able to manage vaccinations for just because they weren't going concerns by the time immunology was a major deal, or were handled in other ways -"
"Not as much as you'd think! For one thing, people are more reluctant to summon demons if they can make do without. We're harder to pay, because you can't pay us in any material objects, and people are often scared of us in ways that make negotiating even harder. It's still done, but not by everybody in their backyard. For another thing, by the early twenty-first century, when daeva became common knowledge, a lot of scarcity was driven by the cost of shipping, and fairies cut that down to almost nothing."
"The name and the being hard to pay. The fact that we're hard to pay plus the fact that summons are voluntary - exacerbated enormously by the fact that it's customary to summon demons without letting us talk for fear we'll convince somebody out of their soul - means that a disproportionate fraction of demons who show up to a random summons are there to have a laugh upsetting some human."
"Yeah. There seem to be a few things going on there - one is that a summon-acquired language is sort of a snapshot of a dialect in time. It can be used to participate in the language community as it develops, someone with summoning-acquired Portuguese is just as good at it as whoever summoned them in that regard as in anything else, but the summoner's Portuguese will adapt over time to the new vocabulary - they'll have all the new associations with words that change in meaning over their lifetime, they'll forget vocabulary that falls out of fashion, they'll feel awkward using sentence constructions that are no longer popular. The daeva can revert to Portuguese-as-spoken-at-time-of-summon any time. And there doesn't seem to be a limit to how many languages we can hold that way. I only know a handful of languages the long way but I've got dozens from summonses."
"Uncorrelated mixes of ethnic features. Here's her picture on one of her recommendation letters." He displays it. "So at a glance she looks black but the hair looks more like what you'd find on an Asian person, same with the eyes except they're green, the nose looks European to me, if for some reason I were just looking at her skeleton I think I'd guess Polynesian build? All blended up like that, matching human patterns only by coincidence."
"Maybe. I don't know how much she's going to care about the exact details of the baby, some folks of this type build up weirdly specific fantasies about the babies they imagine they will one day have if demon/human relations ever improve, maybe she wants a Vietnamese one in particular or something... or, more likely, she wants one whose birth mother was eating decently and not under a lot of stress during the pregnancy, because that affects lots of things..."
"I'll let her know. I think probably a majority of the demons who want to adopt are going to be naturally occurring - even if the ex-humans are more likely to be interested in children, there are way fewer of them and they're likely to have already had a shot at it while human - but some naturally-occurrings could probably pass better than this one."
"Hello again!" says Mrindeh.
"Hi!" says Cam. "There's signage for the bathrooms if you want to take your wings off before you go dirtside. Can you fly a shuttle?"
"Some kinds."
"Well, feel free to make your own and let yourself out the docking bay. You have my mail label."
"Thanks!" says Mrindeh, beaming.
"We know fish-people don't lay eggs, and there's no reason to think gorilla-people wouldn't work like normal mammals, but we weren't expecting the gorilla-people and there might be more kinds of people we weren't expecting and I don't know how the Mi-Go reproduce and that doesn't even get started on the Elder Things and other things the books talk about or hint at."
"No egg. This doesn't guarantee they can't be made, though. Even human zygotes can be made and turn out fine, the thing is just that there isn't a suitable environment for them to grow in Hell. If they grow from single cells of adults like sponges can or something and they don't need anything complicated to live in while they're doing that, they can be made."
"Oh, with Mrindeh able to just walk the streets and find an orphan to scoop up I don't think anybody's going to try to raise Mi-Go because they want a kid, not when we could easily find babies for a million like her, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't strike someone as interesting."
"I mean I ever drew stuff when I was little but it's hard when you're not much smaller than the room you live in and much bigger than the door and the neighbors would probably kill you if they knew you existed. And we didn't really have the stuff for anything other than pencil sketches or a good way to get it."
A while later, Wilbur says, "Is there a particular reason to stay off-planet now that the preliminary resurrection experiments have failed to end in disaster? Because I have ongoing correspondences with several other occultists, and that seems like a reasonable place to start if we want to test the waters on unveiling any of this, and if there's a way to send letters from space compatible with the current technology level I don't know it."
"Fairyland is no Hell but they do have high tech, so you'll want stuff that's still useful in that context - yes potted plants and food and even, like, authentic 1920s clothing, but not a telephone unless they're assessing it for its value as a... parallel dimension antique."
"I mean, I can get you a car that drives itself but they're all trained on modern infrastructure and most of them rely heavily on global positioning satellites that there aren't any of here so you will need to do at least some of the work and yeah it's hard if you don't like crashing into things at forty miles an hour."
"I will get you a graph of survival data at various speeds of collision. Pick your own inflection point and mind that mind that we don't know if the turning into a daeva thing works for people here at all, let alone for your species varietal, and we don't know if the resurrection spell will work on you either."
Yeah he's super going to err on the side of caution. He drives to the post office very slowly, posts his letters, and leaves.
He's very aware of the gazes of the people around him--there's no avoiding that when you're nine feet tall. The people seem more curious than hostile, here, but it's still not something he feels able to handle gracefully at the moment, so he makes a minimum of conversation and, subsequently, his escape.
"The big one is called Davidson's. They summon randoms and find out what they want and what they're good at and publish the results. If the first fairy you try is on summon at the moment, or busy, this takes longer than a random, but since you're new at summoning and a random could even well-bound try to trick or intimidate you, it's probably the better plan." He looks through Davidson's Fairy List.
"Yeah," agrees Cam, and before either can say anything else, the fairy appears. He's got green and black butterfly wings, black eyes, brown skin, and red hair, and he's wearing a weirdly elaborate wrap in black and gold that goes between the wings.
"Hello, sum - wait, are you not a demon?" says the fairy.
"I'm a demon," says Cam.
"- okay, where's the summoner."
"...ha, ha. This is a paper circle..." says the fairy.
"No, she's actually invisible," says Cam. "She wants to go to Antarctica and be invisible there for a change. Do you need me to put a ribbon on her or something so you can see where she is, to pick her up?"
"Uh. Probably."
"This is another universe where it's 1928 and there's a bunch of kinds of people who aren't human." She ties some ribbons around various parts of herself, including one that goes all the way around to show how much floor she takes up and one that shows how high she goes.
"I'll... see if I can pick you up," says the fairy dubiously. "Yell if I yank something wrong, I guess."
Being lifted in this way is not terribly comfortable, probably because he's mostly behaving like she's an ovoid defined by the circumference ribbons, but it doesn't hurt or anything.
Oh wow penguins.
The penguins don't like it if she comes too close but if she scoots far enough back she can watch them. After a little while she starts to get bored, moves farther off so as not to disturb the penguins, and starts rolling snow for the base of an enormous snowman.
The wind over the mountains makes an odd, almost piping noise.
She finishes the base of her snowman, then starts on the middle. There aren't any twigs or rocks or anything to embellish it, really, but she can pack the snow hard enough to make arms just out of snow, and she discovers to her delight that if she backs the base up against a cliff, she can scrabble up the cliff, her myriad tentacles easily latching to the tiniest imperfections in its surface, and place the middle piece atop easily.
Only after the head is finished, crudely carved with a face and placed atop the pile of packed snow, does she seek to explore her environs further, and it is only after some significant wandering about that she chances upon the cavern.
It's a deep hole, and dark, sheltered from the wind and the subsequent drifting of snow by some jagged rock formation that also initially hid it from view. As she leans in, curious to see if she can see anything in its umbral depths, she hears some noises which surprise her. The first is a faint piping similar to that produced by the wind, which after some consideration she concludes probably comes from some other opening to the underground cavern, one less sheltered from the elements. The other sound, which she could less readily explain, was what was unmistakably the squawking of what sounded to be an entire rookery of penguins, but yet not quite like the calls of the penguins she had politely observed from a distance earlier.
She hesitates, torn between the desire to investigate and the desire to stay where the fairy can find her, before making up her mind in a compromise of sorts. She carefully piles up snow in the shape of a large arrow pointing towards the opening in the ground, then carefully climbs down into the dark.
Aww.
...Their voices seemed to come from weirdly high up. Like, about six feet off the ground. Tall penguins.
She resolves to leave "Operation: Rescue Penguins?" for later, and instead pursues the piping noise. The piping noise leads her downwards, which is a little bit of a surprise, but she supposes there's probably another cliff around somewhere.
The tunnel is very long and twisty. Eventually it starts to lighten, slightly--or is that just her eyes adjusting?
And then the tunnel opens out into a glittering cavern, bioluminescent moss covering patches of it, and shining gelatinous creatures of every color moving around.
The gelatinous creatures appear to be the source of the piping noise, as it increases when they seem to notice her, or at least the ribbons tied around her. The nearest ones surge towards her, and she hesitates, unsure whether to stay or go.
The first one that reaches her slows and stops a few feet away, and probes at the ribbon wrapped around her tentacle, the nearest one to its position. She moves the tentacle to intercept, wrapping around the pseudopod that extended towards her. The creature makes a piping noise that sounds almost surprised, and she lets it go. It pokes at her again, and she pokes back with a tentacle not rendered de facto visible with ribbon. Another creature reaches her and pokes her, and she pokes back. The two creatures pipe at each other.
Probably they're people?
"Hi," Lucy tries.
The jelly-creatures pipe some more.
Lucy considers this, and points at herself with the beribboned tentacle. "Lucy," she says, enunciating clearly.
More piping. Then: "Lucy," the first jelly-creature says in an exact replica of her voice, pointing at itself.
"No, Lucy," Lucy repeats, pointing at herself, then points at the jelly-creature and makes a passable imitation of their piping.
"Lucy," the creature says, and points at her, then points at itself and makes a different piping noise. The second one points at itself and makes a third one.
"Are those your names?" Lucy wonders, then points at the first and makes the second's noise.
"No," the creature says, and trills, then repeats the noise it made.
This is so cool. Lucy is definitely bouncing now.
Lucy and the jelly-creatures manage to exchange several more snippets of language like this, which Lucy soaks up like a sponge. The jelly-creatures attempt to invite her back with them, but Lucy, awkwardly conscious of the time, makes her excuses and crawls back up the extensive rock tunnel, past the penguins, and back out to where the fairy can find her before the five hours are up.
"So demons can make any physical thing, which means cash is right out. But for everyday transactions you can make someone scan their fingerprint or their retina - and you watch them do it so you're sure it's actually their fingerprint or retina, not a disembodied thumb or eyeball - or their voiceprint, sometimes, and match up that pattern with a centralized database that someone's gone to the trouble of positively identifying everyone in, and you can be sure they're actually trying to make a payment and their centralized bank can hand it over. That's not foolproof, but it's inconvenient for a demon to help someone route around, and there's more secure options yet for really big ticket stuff."
"Completely? I'd expect a lot of things to carry over - disinfectants, maybe antibiotics if they didn't have weird side effects on you that are worse than for humans - certainly anything surgical would be different but I'd expect the least discrepancy in infectious disease related medicine."
"Cool - let me get you something abridged from the future so you'll have a little more data on what trends can push how far how fast -" Cam comes up with a history book for this purpose. "It's obviously written from an even farther future perspective so you'll have some moralizing that will sound weird, but should be serviceable."