Fault finally gets into a meeting with the corpus researching wizard, who is more than happy to chat and casually mentions that all the women in the tower are “daughters” he magically grew in a test tube from bits of his own flesh. This has no impact on the plot but really helps to turn the wizard into a memorable character instead of just another checkbox to tick on your path through the main plot. I mean who is really going to forget about a mad biologist wizard who lives in a tower with a bunch of his own gender-swapped clone daughters?
The wizard then goes on to talk about corpus. It defies all common knowledge of how both mundane and magical diseases work leading some to believe it is divine in origin. It also has the interesting side effect of making the infected completely immune to other diseases, including aging, which would be pretty handy if corpus itself wasn’t a death sentence.
Anyways, the wizard admits he has invented a potential cure but that it has killed all the patients he tried it on. Fault’s feeling pretty confident with her 100 endurance and asks to try it anyways.
The worse the disease the more acceptable the side effects
The wizard is happy to have another test subject but, being the bored eccentric he is, asks us to first prove we deserve a cure by going into his patient ward and retrieving a pair of boots from the last of the dwarves. It’s almost ludicrously casual. That lost race of dwarves? Guy has one of them living in his basement. No big deal.
Wizards are crazy.
Anyways, navigating the patient ward is pretty easy when you’re a high-speed martial artist with the ability to materialize nearly weightless armor out of thin air. Fault then has a pleasant chat with a diseased dwarf whose mere existence probably counts as the archaeological find of the century. He hands over the boots he was repairing for his host and now it’s time to play guinea pig.
Fault returns to the wizard, quaffs the potion and then proceeds to NOT DROP DEAD. The wizard is pretty excited that his cure finally worked, although it turns out he might have been fibbing a bit about that whole “cure” thing. Truth is the potion merely suppresses the disease’s symptoms. So while Fault is in no danger of dying or infecting others she is still technically infected with corpus.
This is actually better than being cured since even suppressed corpus results in complete immunity to disease. That means no more worrying about the many random diseases Fault seemed to always get when she took more than five steps out of town.
This is another example of Morrowind carefully cultivating negative experiences in order to later give the player a massive positive experience. Being immune to diseases feels AWESOME but only because the game made sure not being immune to diseases was AWFUL for the first ten hours of the game.
Speaking of diseases, here’s what the second trial of the neverine was supposed to be:
Neither blight nor age can harm him. The Curse-of-Flesh before him flies.
Looks like plan “Get the neverine prophecies to come true” is well on track!