Necrotic Prosthesis
In the northern continent of Serpé, constant warfare between the various factions is rampant. With warfare, casualties of war will always come hand in hand. Due to this daily combat, each faction stopped collecting the bodies to send home centuries ago, as the cost became too great to sustain.
It wasn't long, however, until each faction started to run into the same issue. They just didn't have enough reinforcements to send into battle. Even when the Western Serpéans created laws that stated every man and woman must do their civic duty and produce at least 5 children each or else be placed within the Ohne Hoffnung Unit, a virtual death sentence, it still wasn't enough to solve the issue. The Northern Serpéans eventually built the first Kinderfabrik, where all women between the ages of 18 and 40 had to work, receiving payment for every child that they give birth to. When the age of consent was reduced from 18 years old to 14 in Central Serpé, they finally thought that they may have solved it, but still, soldiers would return from the battlefield crippled or as amputees.
Each of the factions tried and failed to come up with their own solution to solving the problem. It wasn't until Doctor Gloria Frostlaus, an East Serpéan scientist of no great renown, discovered something that would change the face of war across the continent. In her desperate attempts to gain recognition and get her name into the history books, Doctor Frostlaus began to resort to less savoury practices. The stigma around most scientific practices had been lost long ago, yet desecrating the bodies of fallen soldiers was still seen as a form of taboo. Frostlaus was convinced, however, that the bodies that littered the battlefields all across the continent could still be used, recycled.
This resulted in Frostlaus calling for volunteers amongst the wounded veterans who were now left to rot working hard, menial labour in order to maintain the infrastructure of their faction. Frostlaus naturally found herself inundated with volunteers who wished to return to what they saw as the glory of the battlefield.
The Doctor worked through many of the volunteers, most of the early veterans dying during the experiments. Each death helped to refine Gloria's procedure, however, until 10 years after beginning her experiments she was finally successful. Her subject was a young woman who had lost her arm to an explosion in battle. Gloria, using one of the leftover bodies from her failed experiments, removed the arm from the first body that she came across and began the work of attaching it to the young woman. After a week of hard, painful and gruesome work, the young woman left with Doctor Gloria to present to the First General of East Serpé her new, fully functioning arm.
The procedure was immediately rolled out across the region, with every young soldier with a crippled or missing limb being ordered to attend Doctor Frostlaus' new laboratory, dubbed the Friedhof. Over time, and with the aid of her new lab assistants, Frostlaus was able to refine the process to the point that she was able to complete several replacements a day.
The news spread like wildfire across the continent and it wasn't long before Doctor Gloria found herself receiving secret correspondence from the other factions, all wanting to know how she had done it. In her greed and lust for attention and recognition, Gloria provided each faction with copies of her notes and instructions on how the procedure was performed.
Today Friedhof's can be found in every major fort across the continent, with hundreds of soldiers returning to the battlefield every day with their brand new limbs. The procedure has even grown and developed to the point that Necrotic Prosthetics are provided for chest and head injuries as well. It is increasingly uncommon to find a soldier above the age of 20 without a necrotic prosthetic.
The increased usage of Necrotic Prosthesis has given rise to issues with Rejection Syndrome, however. It was found that with the need to provide a new limb as quickly as possible to the soldiers in their care, appropriate limbs were not being used for most patients. As such, their bodies were attempting to fight the foreign entity, causing soldiers to experience fevers and extreme pain. First Generals across all of the factions decided that, when presented with the facts regarding Rejection Syndrome, as the pain is not debilitating and the soldiers are still able to use their new limbs the process would continue as it is.
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