#[ hissing and spitting like a feral cat at the fanon that she doesn’t eat.

[etruatcaelum]

On Salem’s Immortality.

She is not invulnerable. Prior to becoming grimm, she wasn’t ageless or immune to sickness, either. Strictly speaking, she doesn’t have to breathe, or eat, or sleep—it won’t kill her to go without—but she does still suffer the physiological toll of suffocation, starvation, and sleep deprivation.

It’s just that Salem can’t die.

Her ascension altered the natural rhythm of her physiological needs but did not eliminate them. Nowadays, she more often sleeps for a solid month or two in the wintertime and she can go a few weeks without food or water before she really starts to feel it, although she still finds it uncomfortable not to eat and drink daily. She also—like all grimm—needs aura and atrum to stay healthy, although unlike most grimm she does not need to harvest aura from other beings because she has her own.

Being grimm additionally gives her a few physical quirks: her flesh cannot be frozen solid or boiled (although she can burn); if she doesn’t move for a long period, her flesh softens (although her aura prevents her from fully liquifying the way an ordinary grimm would, she just ends up the consistency of rotting fruit); and she is effectively immune to intense pressure if it is built up gradually (meaning, if she were hit by a train she would explode but if she sank herself to the bottom of the sea, she could just roam around on the ocean floor).

She… does not take care of herself particularly well. Physical discomfort and pain do not remotely faze her anymore and deathlessness insulates her from the consequences of not attending to her physiological needs; Salem often simply does not notice feelings of hunger, thirst, or tiredness until they become severe, and when such feelings do register she seldom does more than the bare minimum to ameliorate them.

This asceticism has a significant impact on her moods; the longer she foregoes these things the more tense and irritable she becomes.

Her regeneration is a conscious affair: when her inner circle describe it as Salem “putting herself back together,” that isn’t a figure of speech. That is just how it works. (Her ability to consciously reassemble her body even if her brain is destroyed—and function without her head in general, for that matter—is a grimm thing that merits its own post.)

Short of complete annihilation of her physical body, there is no degree of damage that can be done to her that she can’t repair in mere seconds (she has had a lot of practice), but in the event someone is really determined to kill her she likes to… play dead for random intervals, both to give herself a break and because it establishes a cycle of tentative hope and spiking despair that breaks down resolve more thoroughly than simply outlasting her opponents.

The best way to incapacitate her is with poisons that inhibit conscious control of aura, i.e. most potent neurotoxins. These do affect her and severely degrade her regenerative capability until the toxins naturally break down, so dosing her with them before pulping her can put her down for relatively long periods.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. ) #THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. ) #[ hissing and spitting like a feral cat at the fanon that she doesn’t eat. #folks. her depression cottage had a KITCHEN HRGXBDF ]