Plaguedoctor's Pearl Speargun

Plaguedoctor's Pearl Speargun rests on the rail of a weathered dock, its brass frame catching the gull-light as if it were a tiny, reluctant sun. The barrel is slender and pale, like sea-shell bone, etched with fine, medical sigils that creep along its length in a careful, almost clinical script. A single pearl, milky and perfect, sits at its midsection, as if someone pressed a moon into the gun’s heartbeat. The grip is leather-wrapped, scarred from years of use, and the grip’s edge bears a faint glove-imprinted emblem—an old plague-doctor mask that seems to watch you, patient and unreadable. When you lift it, the pearl glows with a muted inner light, not bright enough to blind, but enough to suggest that some uncanny, life-sustaining force rests just beneath the lacquered surface. Its color shifts in the light—amber when the sun is harsh, milky blue when dusk folds over the harbor—giving the impression that the weapon holds a small, living tide within. The appearance is a careful marriage of opulence and repurposed medical lore. The pearl, rumored to be harvested from a shipwrecked coterie of healers who never quite escaped their own history, serves as a focal lens for the weapon’s cry. The metalwork bears a texture like hammered copper chased with enamel—hushed greens and golds that catch the eye and then retreat, as if the gun itself wants you to look away and listen instead. There are threads of old resin holding the barrel’s runes together, suggesting a craftsmanship born of necessity rather than ceremony. Lorekeepers speak of a plague doctor who carried this tool not to wound, but to heal from a distance—the idea that a single precise shot could sever the spread of disease by striking at its source, or at least halt an outbreak long enough for a village to rally. Whether that tale is true or only a rumor whispered in tavern kitchens matters less than the way it makes you feel—as if you’re shouldering a responsibility that travels with you, even when you sheath the weapon. In operation, the Plaguedoctor's Pearl Speargun feels like a story in your hands. It rewards patience and positioning: a deliberate, articulate weapon that lets you press from Cover, fire a measured harpoon, and then shift to another vantage as if the shoreline itself were a set of stepping stones. Its shots cut through ambush shadows, applying a sense of medical precision to the chaos of battle, and its pearl seems to glow brighter as the tempo of the fight quickens, as though the device feeds on the tension of a skirmish. In skirmishes and raiding runs, the pearl’s aura becomes a signal—a reminder that every shot is part of a larger ritual of containment and relief, a small contribution to keeping the tide of combat from washing over a village. Market chatter often drifts to Saddlebag Exchange when travelers compare prices. The whispers speak of limited runs, of shipments delayed by storms and quarrels at harbor gates, and of a demand that never quite catches up with supply. Buyers trade notes on condition, on the feel of the grip, on the way the pearl’s glow shifts with the wearer’s breath—details Saddlebag Exchange knots into a price and a promise: a rare instrument, both weapon and relic, as much a part of the world’s ongoing story as the ships that bring new cures and new plagues alike. Carrying the Pearl Speargun feels like carrying a small tally of the sea’s history—a story pressed into brass, inked into scent of salt and resin, waiting for the moment when it can speak again.