Late One Night at Iosefka's Clinic by Abhorrent Beast

Section One: Long Ago…

The first thing we know for sure about Yharnam’s history is that the Healing Church begins blood ministration in Yharnam. Later on, the Church begins forging blood contracts with Yharnamites under Ludwig in order to draft more hunters. Finally, probably much later, well into the more modern era, Iosefka’s Clinic opens.

The Clinic is used by the Healing Church for blood ministration, as we see the player receive a transfusion from the Blood Minister, and that is where we wake up. The room seems to be small, and in its own wing of the clinic. The room only has one transfusion gurney, whereas the others have quite a few. The chair is a bit of an oddity, and when combined with the note left on it, seems to imply that it was the Minister’s personal room, and his role was more that of a tenant than a landlord, so to speak. He, and by proxy, the Church did not control the clinic, but simply worked in it.

As Iosefka’s clinic gained notoriety, she surely must have needed extra help to deal with the influx of patients. At one point, probably a few years ago, a promising young woman came in for a position as a nurse. She had prior medical experience, was well mannered, and quite educated, especially on the Scourge of the Beast. She was, of course, accepted. This nurse is none other than Fauxefka, the Fake.

Allow me to explain. Firstly, we see that even Arianna and the Contrarian (my personal name for the Sceptical Man) know of the location even though they are well within Cathedral Ward, and thus, the Clinic is quite well-known even to commoners. The clinic, once explored, is quite expansive. Even in the first moments of the game, we see that the room with the Scourge Beast in it has several gurneys in it, and there is no way that Iosefka could have managed it on her own. Additionally, the info of the Harrowed set reads “Certain Church hunters obfuscate their identities and slip into the nooks and crannies of the city.” Evidently, the Church has a fondness for using undercover spies posing as civilians to promote their agenda more covertly. Furthermore, the simple name of the Orphanage itself, which spawned the Choir, indicates the Church saw the advantage in using the vulnerable to experiment on. If orphans were fair game, why not the sick? If the Church cloaked their agents as beggars, why not a nurse? The Fake clearly has medical experience, as she is, after all, an agent of the church, and both white and black church garb reference those who wear them as doctors (though the black are responsible for quarantine and the occasional purging, while white are researchers.)

This must have happened a while ago, as, judging by both the condition and the sheer quantity of corpses seen in the secret entrance behind the clinic, the Fake’s experiments on the sick have been over quite a long period of time. Iosefka herself was unlikely to have done this, as we see coffins all around Yharnam, so they aren’t exactly in short supply, and besides, she seems like a good person with the best of intentions. After all, she does say that “This night is long, but morning always comes. Someone of your caliber won’t fail us, I’m certain…. So please, be careful out there.”

Section Two: The Night Begins…

At the very beginning of the game, the player character enters Yharnam to receive the healing blood. We get a hit of that sweet sweet vein juice and pass out. Sometime after, a Scourge Beast breaks through the window of the clinic. This is clearly not unheard of, as in Upper Cathedral Ward, we see a wolf perform a cheapass jumpscare by smashing through a window. These monsters are quite tenacious, even smashing head first through a barred wood door like its nothing to get at prey in Old Yharnam. We see this broken window when we enter through the shortcut.

Next, we get to the awakening scene where we are taken by the messengers. There are a few things I would like to establish about this scene. The first is that the wolf in the dream is real, the second is that the blood pool is not, and the third is that the fire that engulfs it is actually from a thrown molotov. We wake up, and our half-awake mind sees the wolf as rising out from a pool of blood. The wolf coming out of a pool of blood is a hallucination, as upon waking no evidence of the blood remains. However, the beast is actually covered in blood, for a variety of possible reasons. One, that the beast is a bloodthirsty monster the size of a horse that is ravenous for the flesh of the living. Put it in a clinic full of defenseless patients, nurses, and an old man in a wheelchair, well… the beast is going to be pretty red. Another explanation is quite simple. If you look around the clinic, the walls are lined with shelves and shelves of blood vials. If it bumps into even one of those (and they aren't exactly graceful) it would be covered in blood.

More importantly, the wolf in the cutscene is quite clearly real. The first enemy we encounter in the game, only a little distance from where we wake, is a scourge beast. It kills us pretty easily, even in later playthroughs, despite our experience fighting monsters, as taking on such a beast unarmed is suicide. Oddly enough, the wolf is missing a large chunk of its health. We see in the cutscene that the monster is struck by a fireball from off camera, but our view of the projectile is obscured. There is heated debate over whether the wolf burst into flames on touching the hunter as a symbol of our immunity to beasthood, or whether someone unseen threw a molotov at just the right time to save us. I would like to rebut the former notion by saying that past hunters who have dreamed are by no means immune to beasthood, and the use of beast blood pellets and the Beast’s Embrace rune show otherwise even for ourselves. Furthermore, the damage the first beast has taken is exactly the same as if it had been hit by a molotov.

There is the odd fact that the door between our room and the rest of the clinic is closed, as well as the door to the wolf. This could support the argument that the thing that broke the window, the beast we see in our vision, and the beast we encounter in the beginning cannot be one and the same, as it could not have come so far from the window and through several locked doors. However, both the door to the outside and the following gate are closed, so either way someone must have closed something behind it.

After the attack, Iosefka and the remaining staff panic, closing the clinic. Iosefka is terrified, and refuses to let you in even though she wishes she could. If you check in on her early enough in the game, you can actually speak to the real Iosefka, who is markedly different than the Fake. The Fake’s desperate drive for ascendancy reaches fever pitch as things go south, and her methods of transformation near completion. She takes over the clinic by force and finishes her experiments on Iosefka and the remaining staff. The celestial corpse on the table still has a human hand, and frankly we have no idea who it is. The completed celestial is a different story. It carries Iosefka’s Blood Vial, which it drops on death. This is about as close as the game ever comes to flat out telling us anything. This celestial is a transformed version of the good doctor herself. The Fake even seeks more patients to transfigure, asking the unsuspecting hunter to send any remaining humans to her clinic, then transforms them into celestials.