Children of the First

So chapter 18 is finally here, all the way in from the Fiction Farm. For those of you who haven't heard via twitter or the blog, I recently finished out my last semester at Tulane University, and anxiously await my diploma. That means (hopefully) more time to write, which means more CotF: more chapters, more art(?), more stuff in general. Yay!

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“Oh good, you’re awake, I’ll get the Medico,” Pebbles said, then disappeared into the hall. I couldn’t figure out why I was lying on a terribly uncomfortable bed in the student health center… until I realized I was still in my scram clothes.

“I fell off a mountain, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, kin, you did. Bounced on the way down too.” Retis smiled a little.

“Oh good. I’d hate to think I half-assed it.”

Jarn was there looking like he’d just killed my drake or something. “Hey Shawn,” he said. “I’m real sorry ‘bout gettin’ you hurt, yeah.” He looked so pathetic I almost laughed.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, sitting up. “You didn’t do anything—aahow” My head was throbbing and I was starting to feel ill. The way the room was spinning didn’t help, so I flopped back onto the bed. “Ow!” I cried out. “Shit!”

Retis chuckled; I’d let my arm fall a little carelessly, smacking my wrist against the stiff, rubbed-coated cushions. “Gaia, that hurt.”

“Broken bones tend to do that, I’m told.” A slender, incredibly tall woman walked into the room, with Pebbles right behind her.

“I’m Medica Lily,” the woman said. “Please try not to hurt yourself any further until after I’ve treated you.” She dropped her chart by the sink in the corner and bent down to start opening drawers. From her face and ears, I would have said she was at least half-elven, but I couldn’t help wondering how she’d gotten so tall with elven blood. I mean, she was every bit as tall as Pebbles, which would be impressive by human standards.

“But after you treat me,” I said, propping myself up with the pillow-shaped rock someone had left on the bed. “Then I can go back to thumb-wrestling with Giants, right?”

She glared down at me.

I smiled. “Thumb-wrestling with Giants? No? They’re really big… I’d be wrestling their thumbs…” She kept glaring. “Nothing?” I laughed. “S, what? You can make jokes but I can’t?”

“Apparently not,” she replied. She did have an excellent deadpan. “But I wasn’t joking. If you hurt yourself like that in the middle of my session, it could prevent the treatment from working, alter the healing process, or even skew the spell’s baseline and you’d end up feeling that broken wrist for the rest of your life.”

“No moving. Gotcha.”

Maybe she’s part Giant, I thought. That would explain how she can be so tall and still look elven. She stepped up to the bed and, towering over me, stuck a small, oval gem to my forehead.

“This is a Pulse Stone,” she explained. “It changes color based on your vital signs, energy level, and mental state. White means you’re fine, black means you’re dead. Anything else means something in between.”

What if she is part Giant? That would mean… Oh shit. I felt my face get hot. She thought I was making fun of her.

“What does it mean when it has brown dots all over it?” Retis was staring at my forehead.

“Usually it would mean he’s embarrassed about something he said or did,” Medica Lily told him.

Retis stared at her for a second, “You’re kidding, right?” He burst out laughing, “You mean he feels like a shithead?”

Jarn chuckled a little, but Medica Lily just rolled her eyes. “Never heard that one before,” she muttered.

“So these things are pretty accurate then, huh?” I said, a little louder than necessary.

“It would certainly take more than a concussion and a broken wrist to fool one, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I’m saying: These things are surprisingly accurate, even if the patient is rather thick-headed.”

She looked confused and annoyed for a second, but then it dawned on her. “Oh! Yes, I see what you mean.” She smiled. “Thank you. This is going to hurt. A lot.”

I didn’t even have time to ask what she was talking about before she grabbed my forearm in one hand and my wrist in the other. She pinned my arm down and then pulled, twisted, and wrenched my wrist back into place

*kreh-chik*

“BLOODY SEPHIS FUCK-SHIT!”

“There, the bone’s all set. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Sephis, Lord of Below, if you heard that last bit, please smite this woman…”

“Oh relax, the binding doesn’t hurt. Oh, and don’t move your arm or I’ll have to re-set it.” She went back to the counter and picked up a teardrop-shaped amber amulet, which she then carefully hung around her neck.

“I didn’t realize Medicos used amulets.”

I spun my head around to see who had spoken and winced as Medica Lily grabbed my arm, holding it in place. “No. Moving.”

I nodded and turned more slowly. Apparently, Derrick was here too—he was the one who’d asked about the amulet—but I hadn’t even noticed him until just now.

“The amulet’s an energy brace,” she told him. “We still do the magic ourselves, but as busy as we are, we have to use braces.” She stepped around the bed to position herself behind my head. “If we tried to treat everyone with our own energy alone, we’d have a bunch of Medicos passing out from spellstroke, and no one wants that.”

I was lying on my back, watching her upside-down as she placed her hands on the amulet and closed her eyes—focusing the brace. It began to glow and she opened her eyes.

“Alright,” she said, “Let’s get you un-concussed, shall we?”

“What about my arm?”

“I’ll get to it,” she said, and laid a hand across my forehead just above the Pulse Stone. “Always start with the simplest injuries—that way you won’t have to worry about them complicating things later on.” With her free hand, she touched two fingers to my temple—my brain started to tingle a little as the pain subsided.

“What does it mean when the thing glows blue?” Retis whispered. When no one answered, he nudged Pebbles’ elbow. “Is blue bad? What does—“

“Retis, hush.”

Medica Lily opened her eyes a minute later. “You are concussed no more,” she declared. “Just so you know, …Retis, was it? Just so you know, Retis, talking doesn’t bother me, but questions do. I wouldn’t be able to answer them without breaking my concentration, anyway.”

“Sorry,” Retis mumbled.

“It’s alright. To answer your question: the blue means that he’s healing. If it flashes after the treatment it means the healing was inadequate or incomplete. If it doesn’t glow at all, it means I’m not doing anything other than poke at him.”

“Oh.” Retis looked embarrassed. “Okay, thanks.”

Medica Lily did pretty much the same thing to my arm, but it was more tingly than before and lasted muchlonger.

“Alright,” she said, opening her eyes. “Your wrist is bound; it should be feeling better than it was, but it’ll take a couple hours for the pain to fade completely.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, sitting up to inspect my arm. “I mean, you fixed it; it shouldn’t hurt anymore, right?”

“Not exactly—I bound it, I didn’t fix it. For all practical purposes your arm’s as good as new, but I didn’t technically heal it. You’ll have to come back once a week to have the binding reapplied until your arm heals on its own. You can do everything you normally do, except that you absolutely must avoid anything that could remove the effect—spells, wards, enchantments, that kind of thing.”

“I think I can do that,” I said cheerfully.

“I’d tell you not to break it again, but the binding’s strong enough that I doubt you could break that wrist if you tried… Don’t try. The rest of your bones are still plenty breakable.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind, thanks Medic.” I started to slide off the table but she stopped me.

“Hang on, I’ve got to take your Pulse Stone for the file.” She leaned down to remove the oval gem from my forehead. She barely touched it before I heard her gasp and she snatched her hand away.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?” I didn’t like the way she was looking at me—like she was expecting me to burst into flames at any moment.

She looked at me for another couple of seconds, then shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry, I thought I saw… I don’t know. It must have just been a reflection or something. Here, let me get that.” She removed the Pulse Stone and put it in a little bag attached to the chart she’d brought in with her.

“Alright, Shawn, make an appointment at the front desk… for your follow-up. Right, okay… see you next week.”

She seemed pretty distracted, which made me curious to know what she had seen in the stone, but not curious enough to make me want to stay in that room a second longer than I had to.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 2:18 am and is filed under Chapters, CotF Main Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.