This is a practice, in your world?

⟪ 'modifications', he calls them, as though he is speaking of a sword with a harpoon-like blade, or a horse-drawn carriage with storage for an extra wheel. ⟫

There are procedures in mine, where holes are drilled into the skull to relief an internal pressure – it rarely has the desired effect. To know something of the nature was done to me, and here I am, alive, capable still of speech, thought, movement, is... unnerving. Brilliant, too, but unnerving all the same.