Current Events > What's a creepy or unsettling way to depict healing magic?

(+) Yeah! (+)

If I'm making a witch character who can heal, but her allies get skeeved out by it.

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Something something blood

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Make her like that girl in Scryed that needed to fuck others to heal them. They were often unconscious

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Blood magic

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Witch becomes spooky and decrepit hag the more she transfers her own life essence to heal others. Over time she recovers her appearance as her reserves recover.

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Make it so that its extremely painful to be healed. Like imagine their arm snapped off, the healer has to rejoin all the nerves and flesh and skin etc, and its excruciating

Show the open wounds slowly (and painfully despite the expedition) coming back together. Tendons and shit regrowing and re-attaching in live time instead of just a light or something washing over a wound and suddenly everything is better.

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She has to eat her healing potions, and then regurgitate them into the mouth of the person needing healing. Like a baby bird.

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She has to rub, suggestively, the wound shes healing.

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Something like, they need to drink her blood to be healed. Or maybe magic spiders that crawl all over you to heal you.

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Whatever she heals, happens to her. Taking their pain and transferring it to her instead sort of thing.
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She bites off the injured part of their body, chews it up in her mouth and then spits it back onto them and when it makes contact with their body again its magically healed
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Have it come at the cost of something obscenely bad, like healing someone shortens their lifespan. Or it can only be done as a result of past dark magic sacrificing kids or something, so a healer is giving life taken from someone else. Maybe you could even see an apparition of the sacrificed person in anguish as their life force is used to heal.

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Whatever category of wound she's healing takes a physical representation on her own body. It's not debilitating like an actual wound, but the manifestation looks real. Clears up after a little while.

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Hundreds of spiders stitching the wounds back together with their silk would be creepy.

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She has to magically graft tissue harvested from fetuses that she keeps preserved in glass vessels, and the grafted tissue looks like a patchwork of raw, bloody meat until it heals.

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Redo of Healer's method, where he basically relives the pain and by extent the person's life.

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She noclips her hands through their chest or back and holds on to their heart or spine or something. While she has it she can control them and she forces them to perform healing arm motion/incantations on themselves while their expression implies they're fully aware and are in agony.

Her energy isn't really attuned to heal a human which is different enough to a witch to get complicated, so it's much easier to force the human to heal themselves.

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She gains intimate knowledge of the workings of their body, and it's status. Then actively inserts her will over their flesh to force it to be mended. Kinda like she's reaching in and rejoining the flesh herself, but with a phantom limb.

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"Even the smallest scratch can prove mortal, lord Captain, but if you will allow me, I will heal this. I will need a blade. Silver would be best, but iron will serve. A brazier as well. I must needs light a fire. There will be pain. Terrible pain, such as you have never known. But when we are done, your hand will be returned to you."
They are all the same, these magic men. The mouse warned me of pain as well. "I am ironborn, priest. I laugh at pain. You will have what you require but if you fail, and my hand is not healed, I will cut your throat myself and give you to the sea."

Moqorro bowed, his dark eyes shining. "So be it."

The iron captain was not seen again that day, but as the hours passed the crew of his Iron Victory reported hearing the sound of wild laughter coming from the captain's cabin, laughter deep and dark and mad, and when Longwater Pyke and Wulfe One-Eye tried the cabin door they found it barred. Later singing was heard, a strange high wailing song in a tongue the maester said was High Valyrian. That was when the monkeys left the ship, screeching as they leapt into the water.

Come sunset, as the sea turned black as ink and the swollen sun tinted the sky a deep and bloody red, Victarion came back on deck. He was naked from the waist up, his left arm blood to the elbow. As his crew gathered, whispering and trading glances, he raised a charred and blackened hand. Wisps of dark smoke rose from his fingers as he pointed at the maester. "That one. Cut his throat and throw him in the sea, and the winds will favor us all the way to Meereen." Moqorro had seen that in his fires. He had seen the wench wed too, but what of it? She would not be the first woman Victarion Greyjoy had made a widow.

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After every use of a healing ability on an ally, just walk up and whisper into their ear "the pact has been sealed".

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She is a naturalist that uses the bits of nature around her to heal. Spear through the lung out the back? She will kill like 50 squirrels to get their lung tissue to patch up your lungs. The patient then gets really sick because its trying to reject squirrel lung but her healing powers can work with the immune system to slowly recognize the squirrel parts as their own. She can't regenerate but can alter the immune system slowly even change the squirrel parts to be yours.

So in order to do this she carries around a menagerie of animals. But she doesn't see them as deserving good treatment or compassion, just tools and materials. So she might be biting the heads of squirrels to kill them or ripping a snake in two from the jaws or tearing the leg off a living cat.

All in order to heal.

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Before healing someone, she must first drain the life out of someone else.

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