Angel Hernandez (February 2019)

As it happens, diagnosing serious illness is a trivial thing when one can see spirits and where they gather. Though the irony that it used a power capable of saving countless lives only to ravage and manipulate them was not lost in Dagon, it was also the kind of creature capable of taking pleasure in the perversity of it. So it was when Dagon observed weak but tenacious spirits of sickness and cancer congregating in and around a modest home one night as it traveled through Washington. The young man living there alone did not yet realize how sick he was. Seeing an opportunity, Dagon resolved to keep it that way, visiting the young man periodically in the night, draining his will and resolve through both its own efforts and the careful application of meddling spirits. The end result being that Angel Hernandez scarcely noticed the worsening symptoms, and felt no motivation to seek care.

That was months ago, and now the time had come to pull the trigger. The accumulation of banes suggested that the sickness was far enough along that its discovery would no longer yield any hope for effective treatment. The time had come to get Angel to a hospital for the final blow. This was easily achieved with the sudden cessation of the previously omnipresent will-eroding tactics, and the low-tech but indisputably effective application of ipecac syrup to the young man's food - the only issue being timing, as Dagon had surmised that the desired effect would be amplified if Angel could be induced to vomit while on the phone with his mother, who would vehemently insist that he go to the hospital. This, admittedly, took a few nights of trying, though the end result proved satisfactory, as by that point Angel had been violently throwing up for the better part of a week and, thus, required little persuading.

The emergency room visit was largely uneventful, and would likely have been a much longer game than Dagon intended, had the vampire not employed its leverage within the area's hospitals to have certain "precautionary" tests performed that might otherwise have been set aside for a later date. So it was that, a scant few days after his initial visit, Angel was called back in to his general practitioner's office - and, to his horror, referred to oncology. The cancer in his stomach was, of course, quite advanced. Perhaps if they had caught it sooner... but a specialist would be able to give him a better idea of what kind of future he could expect.

All that remained then was for Dagon to make the necessary calls to ensure that the next physician Angel saw was one with similar loyalties to its own.