A Second Generation Whateley Academy Story
Last Orders
by
Astrodragon
(with help from the usual suspects)
Part Three
Sunday 29th January, Doyle Emergency Room
Given the current circumstances, the operating rooms in Doyle, already warned about what would be needed from the earlier alert, were ready and prepped for patients, surgical teams already dressed and masked.
Very luckily for Morgana, she was only a couple of minutes flying time from the theatre, given her critical state.
Falcon headed directly for Doyle, hoping he would be in time. The girl in his arms was unconscious, which given her injuries was probably a blessing, but judging from the sounds she had something suspiciously like a sucking chest wound, and that wasn’t going to be helping. He’d given a terse description of everything he could gather while on his way, and reckoned it was lucky he was only a few minutes flying time from Doyle. He wasn’t at all sure if she’d have survived the slower trip on a stretcher.
Falcon entered through the open roof entrance – Doyle was prepared for people flying directly in to the emergency room – and Ophelias eyes narrowed as she took in the unconscious girl’s condition and the worried look on Falcon’s face. Apart from her hand issue, Morgana looked like she had gone through a shredder.
“Okay, get her on the bed fast.” Morgana was barely breathing, blood still dripping from her wounds and the stump of her arm, as Falcon laid her carefully on the table. “Get something on those wounds, and tie up her arm properly, She’s leaking far too much blood and I don’t like the readings on her blood pressure. In fact I don’t like most of her readings.”
Two of the nurses had just – with difficulty, and using some special tools – cut the rest of her bloodstained costume off, before there was a loud and unpleasant noise from one of the monitors that some of the other nurses had been plumbing into the girl.
“She’s arresting!”
“On it!"
Dr Cody had an advantage over most of the baseline nurses, he was strong enough to perform CPR easily even on an exemplar. He was over the girl immediately, pumping her chest and breathing into her. To, sadly, no effect. But even as he worked, one of the nurses had dug the defibrillator paddles out and passed them to Ophelia.
Ophelia cursed as she saw the flat line on the screen, urgently motioning the staff away from the girl as she grabbed the defibrillator paddles. A quick glance at them showed they were set high enough for an exemplar, as She waited a moment for them to finish charging, before pushing them onto the girl's chest, motioning Cody aside.
“Clear!”
She only gave them a few seconds, Her staff were well trained and knew to get away, and time was of the essence now. She activated the shock paddles, and the girl's body arched on the table as the current surged through her. The monitor was still flatlining though. She scowled and turned the settings on the paddles up before recharging and trying again, waiting for the charging hum to finish, as Cody gave a few more chest compressions.
“Clear!”
Again, there was a pregnant pause, but no changes. Ophelia scowled. “Adrenaline.”
Cody nodded, stepping forward with a syringe with the size of needle no-one wanted to see being used on them, and rammed it home, hoping that the girls heart was where it should be for a human as he forced the plunger home before stepping clear of the patient again.
Ophelia turned the defibrillator up higher and gave another shock with the paddles, praying that this would be enough to work. She was pretty much at the max setting for the defibrillator.
The body spasmed violently again, and this time the electric shock achieved its intended result, after a momentary pause the monitor started to beep and Morgana’s heartbeat showed on the monitor again, settling into a more normal rhythm. Ophelia gave a sigh of relief as she resisted the urge to wipe the sweat off her forehead.
“Good, now let’s get her sorted, I want some blood and fluids in her, intubate her, then feed her oxygen before this happens again. Next time we might not be able to get her heart restarted.
The staff leapt to comply, it was obvious the girl was in a bad way, as Ophelia brought up the girl's medical records on the overhead monitor, and swore creatively.
“Great, she can’t accept a normal blood transfusion. How much of her blood do we have in storage?”
One of her assistants did a quick check. “About two litres. Apparently, the problem is she’s magically active, and so apparently is her blood.”
Ophelia didn’t pause in her exertions over her patient as she sighed. Whateley. “How the hell does she have magically active blood. Can anyone give her a transfusion?”
“Apparently, she can take blood from Thulia, but she’s been injured too. They’re bringing her in on the jeep. She might not be in any condition to donate for a while. She’s not as critical as Morgana, but she’s in a serious state. It says Morgana can take a modified O-type transfusion without an immune reaction, but as it’s not active it’s more like giving her plasma. She really needs whole blood.”
“Great. Well, the couple of litres we have stored for her should take care of her most dangerous wounds, with a bit of luck.” She didn’t think about the arm issue yet, which would need a lot more blood if she were to do surgery on it. She’d need to do a lot of the reconnection and reconstruction by hand before she could let the healers loose on that wound, even if the girl was strong enough to handle sufficient healing after the operation. That was a problem best left until Morgana was less likely to die on the table. First things first, starting with some internal injuries she’d managed to pick up.
“What happened to her hand?”
“That’s the good news. It was cut off fairly cleanly, and it’s being brought in. Grimes put it on ice, so it should keep for a while.”
A while, lovely, thought Ophelia. So damn precise. Still, as the girl wasn’t a higher-level regenerator it was better than nothing, and it sounded like a surgical reattachment might be practical later. One could but hope. “Ok, let’s carry on cleaning and suturing these wounds while we give her some of her blood and a saline drip. I don’t like her blood pressure. Let’s try and get it to something vaguely normal for her before we start to think about healing. That sucking chest wound first, I think, that isn’t going to be helping her internal injuries. Oh, and add all the trimmings to her drip. The last thing I want is her waking up on us.”
“Get another bed ready for Thulia, she mainly has a lot of minor and not so minor wounds and some internal injuries, with luck she has enough blood in stock to cope with them. The girls are the only people badly injured, but I want to get them stable before we let a healer loose on them, they don’t seem in a fit state for a major healing. We have a couple of security people who got shot, but nothing life-threatening, and one of the townsfolk got injured by some falling bits of drone and building, so they are bringing him in too.“ She turned to the nearest gopher. “Dawn-Renee, get down to the lab and get me a clean container for an arm. Fill it with a neutral solution, then bring it back here as fast as possible.”
The faun girl nodded and ran off.
Wyatt Cody grunted, “You’re going to put it in stasis?”
Ophelia shrugged. “It won’t hurt, and I don’t know how long it will be before we can try reattaching the limb. The operation will need a fair amount of blood, and we’ll have to wait till her body replaces that. Healing can only do so much, her body is pretty stressed already and she only has Exemplar-3 regen. If the arm is too far gone for a surgical reattachment, we’ll have to go for a different solution, and given the nature of her powers and physiognomy, there will be issues with other solutions.”
She cast a quick look at Wyatt. “I don’t suppose you have any special knowledge about dragons?”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, and in any case, Morgana isn’t a full dragon. Now if she was a bear...” He eyed the girl on the bed again. “At least dragons are supposed to be tough. That won’t hurt her case.”
Morgana opened her eyes slowly, her view of the ceiling indicating she was in Doyle – she’d spent enough time in here to recognise the patterns on the roof tiles. Her vision was fuzzy and it took her a minute to focus. It didn’t seem worth the effort, the ceiling didn’t look any better than the last time she’d stared at it. Her body felt odd and unresponsive, and judging by the way she felt disassociated from it – and her surroundings –she was on the good drugs. Which, remembering some of the things that had happened during the fight, seemed a great idea.
With what seemed like a huge effort she turned her head, to see several containers dripping a mix of liquids into a cannula set in her arm as well as enough monitoring equipment to make a tech junkie jealous. That was nice, she thought vaguely. But why were they putting everything into her right arm? She vaguely remembered they usually used her non-dominant arm. Finally, she made the massive effort she needed to turn her head around to look at her other arm. It was probably a good job that all the drugs she was on had her floating with the fairies, as she just noted with a feeling of vague regret that her left arm ended above the wrist. So she hadn’t imagined that, then. She knew she should have been panicking about that, but with all the drugs it just seemed weird, as if it was all happening to someone else. Her head flopped back on the pillow as she sighed deeply. She was pretty sure her limited regeneration wasn’t going to fix that. They were going to need a bigger band-aid...
It wasn’t long before Ophelia walked in, looking exhausted. Morgana guessed those monitors had blabbed the fact she’d woken up. She took a long look at Morgana and sighed.
“So, shall I give you the good and bad news?”
Morgana croaked something that might have been yes, which at least brought a half smile of Ophelia's lips.
“OK, might as well do it now while you’re on all those drugs. First, we’ve sewn you up from the worst of the damage you took and pumped all the blood we had stored from you back into you and added some plasma. We did what healing we could on the most concerning injuries, mainly the internal ones, but I didn’t want to authorise more until you were a lot more stable, you’re still very weak and short of blood. More healing at this point could be too much of a strain for you, and at least now you seem stable. While you were hurt rather badly, there’s only one injury you can’t manage to heal with time.”
“My arm...?”
Ophelia nodded. “We can’t just heal a missing limb easily, we’ll have to get a bit more inventive. Luckily, we have the hand. So once you’re stronger we will look at a surgical reattachment.”
“Thulia...?”
Ophelia patted her gently on the shoulder. “Thulia is fine – well, injured but in a stable condition. She doesn’t have any damage that can’t be healed, and we’re giving the two of you priority for healing. I don’t know what she can do to help you." She gave Morgana a keenly measuring look. “She didn’t tell us that much about her body, and yours, and at the time I didn’t want to pressure her into talking about things she was obviously reluctant to mention, so I’ll need to talk with her in depth tomorrow. There may be something she can do to help.” The doctor fiddled with one of the settings on her drip. “There’s nothing you can do now except worry, so I’ve given you something to help you sleep. We’ll talk again tomorrow.
Early Monday morning, the Headmaster's office.
Dr. Mazarin was scrolling through the urgent report list. After their transport had been thoroughly trashed by one of the Whateley teams, the remaining mercenaries made an escape attempt through the forest on foot. Given what was waiting for them in there, the combat team waited for the drones to arrive. Not that they were needed, it wasn’t that long before a heavily built were dragged two bound bodies out and dumped them in front of Sergeant Clauser. He nodded his thanks, and gestured to a couple of men to get them on their way to Whateley.
“The other men?”
The man grinned, showing his bloodstained fangs.
“Had unfortunate and permanent accidents.”
Dr. Mazarin smiled. He liked a cheerful video report in the mornings, and the two survivors of the were’s attention would be useful for questioning. Currently, they were imprisoned in one of the deeper rooms in the tunnel complex, and now he just had to argue about who would get to interrogate them. Currently, ARC was slightly in the lead in the competition.
He also noted that the team sent out to repair the landline from Dunwich to Whateley had found the break the enemy had made when they cut communications to Whateley, and had spliced in a replacement cable. They just had to finish testing and rebury the landline.
He was just starting on the next batch of reports when his secretary alerted him to his next meeting. He wasn’t sure about this one, but it should be interesting. Hopefully not in the Chinese sense.
Dr. Mazarin looked up as his secretary ushered two men into his office. Both were large, powerful-looking men, neither of them wearing particularly happy expressions, and he gestured to them to sit.
“Dr. Mazarin, these two gentlemen are here to talk about yesterday's incident in Dunwich.”
“Lord Mirdaz, Acolyte Grenstxaripotx, I’d normally say it was a pleasure to meet you, but under these circumstances...”
The larger of the two men looked upset and angry. His eyes weren’t actually glowing, but he was giving that impression; the vertical pupils of his eyes narrowed to slits as he spoke in a deep, growly voice.
“Headmaster, when I allowed my daughter to be placed at your school, I was assured that there were adequate provisions in place to protect her. Was I lied to?” His implication being he’d better not have been lied to, or someone was going to pay.
Mazarin coughed diplomatically. “Well, yes, we do have a well protected environment at the school. However, we cannot police the entire country, and sending escorts with every student would be an issue. If only because the students themselves would object. Constantly wrapping them in cotton wool would not be a good way of preparing them for life after Whateley.”
Acolyte Grenstxaripotx nodded. “We appreciate that. But, while a random occurrence or something caused by the children themselves could be overlooked, it appears that this was a targeted assassination attempt. On one of our children. We have been shown the imagery from the attack, and this was obviously a pre-planned attack aimed at the two girls. It was only due to the intervention of Morgana that Thulia is still alive, and that cost her an arm.”
Dr. Mazarin nodded. “I do understand, there is a considerable difference between random action, something that just happens in life, and a premeditated attempt at murder of some of our students. I assure you we take this VERY seriously, and are already moving assets to take punitive retaliatory action against the offending party.”
Lord Mirdaz didn’t look terribly impressed, although he was still managing to speak politely.
“Perhaps you’d like to show us what you have planned so that we can decide for ourselves it it is suitable?”
“Of course.” He turned to his bank of monitors, and led the pair through the actions already started, and a longer list of what would be taking effect over the next week. That assumed, of course, that the cult was still there by the end of the week, which looked rather problematical in view of the actions he’d just laid out in front of them. The two men watched closely, asking occasional questions.
Agent Grenstxaripotx gave the headmaster a look. “That does seem a fairly comprehensive campaign. However, there is something missing.” He turned to his companion. “Don’t you agree?”
Lord Mirdaz nodded and gave the acolyte a grim smile. “If not for the action of Morgana, at great cost to herself, my daughter would be dead. I will not allow such an action to not suffer a full and comprehensive retaliation.”
Dr. Mazarin managed to keep his face calm. “What did you have in mind?”
Grenstxaripotx gave him something resembling a smile. It wasn’t a very pleasant smile, and showed his fangs. “Given the insult and murderous aggression shown to us, the Dragons intend to take action. However, we are reasonable beings. We are prepared to coordinate with you and minimise collateral damage to humans.”
“I see. Did you have something specific in mind?” Mazarin was now worrying about what the dragons would consider ‘minimal damage’.
“Tracking down the members is something probably best done by humans, your resources are more suitable. However, once the members of this organisation have been reduced to hiding in their secret base, we thought it might be worth paying it some attention ourselves. Have we talked about volcanoes yet?”
Monday , Doyle Medical, Morgana’s room.
Morgana was roused from her half-dozing, drugged state by a knock on the door of her room, to see a nurse standing there.
“Morgana, I know you’re still drugged up to the eyeballs, but if you’re feeling up to it there are some people to see you.”
She managed a weak and half-hearted hand gesture, as the nurse opened the door fully to admit her sister and her uncle. She tried to sit up, but all that achieved was about an inch of movement before she fell back onto the bed again, already exhausted.
“Ceri, Tom, what are you doing here?”
Her sister grinned, patting her gently on the shoulder. “To see you, of course.” She frowned at the various stitches, staples and bandages adorning her sister, and the way she was plumbed in to the machinery. “Are you OK?”
Morgana shuddered slightly. “Not really. And how did you get here so fast?” She was still looking far too pale and gaunt from the strain the healing had put on her body for her relatives comfort.
Her uncle stopped his professional examination of her readouts to smile at her. “You can thank A.E.G.I.S and the dragons. When we heard what had happened yesterday to you and Thulia, they arranged to let us use one of their portals to get to New York, and A.E.G.I.S arranged a teleporter from there to here.”
That was a bit odd, Morgana had got the distinct impression from Thulia that the Order of the Flame was more hide-bound than helpful, maybe it was because Thulia was involved in this fracas?
“That was good of them.”
Ceri nodded. “They are seriously not amused by an attempt to assassinate Thulia, and so they are pulling some strings for the two of you.” She looked her sister over. “You look terrible.”
“Oh gee, thanks, sis.”
Ceri grinned. “I hear the two of you dealt with the team the Ba’alists sent after you?”
Morgana tried to nod, but it hurt to try. “I think so. They told me Thulia dealt with the boss. In a permanent manner. They haven’t let me see her yet.”
“I’m sure they will. She was injured as well, just not as badly as you.” She looked around the room, smiling when she saw the bubbling container with what looked like a hand and part of a forearm in it. “You were planning on auditioning for a bad Dr. Who episode while you’re here?”
Meanwhile, Tom had been examining her monitors and the medical history on them, only grunting occasionally. Even though he had his professional doctor face on, he didn’t look happy. “Hmmm. I think I’ll have a word with your doctor after we let you get some more rest. And your surgeon.”
Ceri stopped to admire a rather lovely red and gold plant on the table, as she peered at the label. Cattletonia 'Why Not'. “Pretty. Someone sent you flowers? Must be a secret admirer, Thulia is still in bed.
Morgana looked puzzled. “I don’t think I have anyone. If it was from Bianca it would probably be white. Does it say anything on the label? Any name or message?”
Ceri looked closer. No name or message. Just what looks like three bats on the tag.”
Morgana fell back into her pillows and tried to chuckle. Stopping immediately, it hurt too much.
“Sounds like Belfry. As in ‘bats in the belfry'. He’s a nice kid, but a bit odd. I’m surprised he sent flowers; he doesn’t interact well with many people. He’s a bit odd, even for a Brit.”
Monday, Doyle Medical, Dr. Tenents office.
“So, Doctor, what’s the situation of the girls?”
Ophelia thought for a moment before replying to Dr. Cody. “Well, both girls have a lot of minor and not-so-minor injuries. We’ve looked after the worst and given them some healing. But both girls lost a lot of blood, and we can’t replace that easily due to its unusual nature. However they are both out of danger, and given a week or two, plus some healing, they should be reasonably fine, at least physically. I’d like to get them back into circulation as soon as it’s feasible; the normal routine will probably do them both good. I don’t think either of them will profit from being in a bed looking at the ceiling.”
He gave her a look. “Apart from Morgana’s arm, of course.”
Ophelia sighed. “Yes, apart from that. We have a couple of options, either an artificial replacement or surgical reattachment of her hand. Miss Grimes managed to ice up the missing limb very quickly, so far it’s in good condition, and it’s certainly an option. The problem is that both girls lost a lot of blood, and we only had a couple of litres for each of them. Morgana can take a transfusion from Thulia, but she won’t be in any state to give blood for some days. While none of the shrapnel wounds to her legs was bad, there were a number of them and she lost quite a lot of blood, so that option is out for a surgical procedure in the near future.”
Tuesday morning, Doyle medical conference room.
“Ok, let's deal with our immediate serious issue, our two dragongirls. Unfortunately, we do have some urgent issues with Morgana to deal with.”
Dr. Tenent fiddled with her pad and the wall display lit up. “Normally, I’d let them recover for a few days before authorising more healing, neither of them is in danger any more, but we have a problem.” She pointed at some of the data on the screen. “While Miss Grimes gathered and froze the limb fast, and we put it into one of the arm containers we use for surgical parts, as you can see there is an unexpected issue here.”
Wyatt Cody frowned. “It’s deteriorating. Why is it deteriorating? It should be preserved in the jar!”
Ophelia shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t know, As you said, it should be preserved in the container, giving us longer to look at using it, and giving Morgana more time to recover from her ordeal. But it looks like we only have about a day or so. Otherwise, we’ll have to toss it and look for another solution.” She looked at the display unhappily. “While Thulia did an admirable job of mimicking a girl, when it comes down to the fine details neither of the girls are really as human as they look, so I suspect the issue is something to do with that. I did take a few cell samples from the arm, it might tell us more about what’s going on, but that isn’t going to help in the short term.”
Dr. Bellows frowned, clearly looking unhappy. “So, what medical options do we have?”
Ophelia sighed. “My preference would be for a surgical reattachment, we have the limb and it was a clean cut, so I won’t have to do that much tidying up. The problem there is the short time window, both girls are weak and we are out of stored blood which we’d need for the surgery. If that doesn’t prove viable, either we clean up the arm and leave it for a later solution while hoping it doesn’t deteriorate too far to use, or we replace it with an artificial limb. But there are major issues with that, she can manifest fire hot enough to melt or damage any replacement we use.”
Bellows frowned. “You’re the surgical expert, of course, but I do have some worries about her mental state if we can’t reattach. The girl has been through a series of major trauma in the last six months, and while I’ve been trying to alleviate it, she gets hit by another issue before I get a chance to calm her down properly from the last one. Missing an arm would be bad for her, especially as we wouldn’t have a timeframe for a solution.”
Wyatt Cody gave a bear-like grunt. “She seems to have been coping.”
Bellows shook his head. “Not really. I’m impressed by how resilient and tough she’s been at coping or at least appearing to cope, but there are limits. Each new trauma eats away at her reserves, and it’s going to push her over the edge if we can’t calm things down and give her some recovery time. Having Thulia here to support her has helped, but it’s not enough.” He gave Wyatt a look. “Unless you know more about dragons...”
Wyatt snorted. “Not really. We only have one local expert, and she’s recovering from her injuries in bed.”
Ophelia tapped her pad. “She’s awake now; her injuries weren’t as critical as Morgana's. Her legs are still in a bit of a mess from all that shrapnel, but it’s not life-threatening. If she’s up to it, I’ll have a little talk with her and see if she has options we haven’t considered.”
Tuesday morning, Doyle Medical, Dr. Tenents office.
Ophelia gave one of her professionally reassuring smiles at the girl in the wheelchair.
“Thulia, I’m glad to see they let you out of bed, I need to have a talk with you in private.”
She left out the girl's still-obvious injuries and how pale and gaunt she looked. Given the amount of blood she’d lost and the injuries to her legs, that was only to be expected. Fortunately, there had been no problems extracting the pieces of shrapnel from her legs, although it had left her legs in a mess and needing further healing. They’d done a test on some of the fragments to check for a toxic reaction from Thulia, but it seemed that all of them seemed normal enough, with no nasty hidden surprises. Which, given the nature of the attack, had been a worry for them.
The girls gave her a tired smile. “What can I do to help, Doctor?”
“Well, we do have an issue with healing Morgana, in particular her arm injury, which will involve surgery. I really need to know more about her and how her body really differs from human, so I can choose the best option for her.
Thulia worried her lip as she worked through the problem and various solutions. Finally coming to a conclusion.
“Doctor, some of the things I need to explain are, well, confidential. But as it’s for Morgana...”
Ophelia nodded. “Yes, I was pretty certain there were some things you weren’t explaining to me about the treatments you gave Morgana during her manifestation, but it didn’t seem vital to press the questions at the time.” She gave the dragongirl s considering look. “What I can do is keep anything you tell me medically confidential, that means only I will have the data.”
Thulia gave the matter some more thought, then nodded slowly. “I trust you to keep to that confidentiality, Doctor. Some of the things I need to explain could cause a lot of trouble if they got out. Especially the parts concerning BITs.”
Ophelia nodded. “I understand that, but I need to understand a lot more in order to help heal Morgana's arm.” She felt slightly guilty about using the admittedly real need for Morgana's healing to also satisfy some of the questions she'd had since Thulia arrived that she’d been desperately curious about, but it was all for Morgana's good, and she would keep it very strictly confidential.
“There are also things I don’t want Morgana to know herself yet, telling her too soon could cause problems, and I want to tell her at the appropriate time.”
Ophelia nodded encouragingly, wondering what Thulia was too embarrassed to tell her partner about. She suspected she’d have to come to her own conclusions about that, sometimes teenagers got embarrassed about the oddest things.
Thulia thought for a moment as she got her thoughts in order. “First, some background as to my experiment. Earth no longer has a properly self-supporting magical ecology, it came apart when the World Trees died back in ancient history. The Sidhe were at least partially dependent on it, and we thought they had all died out as a result, although it seems from the ones I’ve seen on campus or read about that our assumption was mistaken. Now The Plane of Fire does have a working ecology, which is one of the reasons we have a higher density of essence and why it is more prevalent. But ours is supported by a number of magical volcanoes, surrounding and feeding the Heart Of Fire. Now my experiment was to prove that it was possible to attach a non-native entity to use the network in the same way that dragons and some other entities that inhabit our plane do. We know it happened in the past, Dragons at least aren’t native to the plane, but we no longer have full records of the period. Knowing it was done in the past is helpful in knowing that it’s actually possible, but we have no real idea how it was done, and many previous attempts have ended... badly.”
Ophelia had a suspicion that badly really meant fatal or something even worse and made a note on her pad. She was tempted to put a ‘here be dragons’ warning on her notes as well, but heroically refrained. “Hence Morgana.”
“Exactly. But some of the assumptions I’d made concerning my test subject turned out to be wrong. There were risks of failure – not huge, but present – and I had assumed the subject provided would know what was happening and be a volunteer and would have been briefed and prepared for what was going to happen, not a kidnapped boy who knew nothing about what he was involved in. That mattered a lot to me, especially after I got to know Rob.”
“How did you manage to determine a suitable test subject, or would anyone have done?”
Thulia shook her head. “Oh no, not anyone! With a random subject, the chances of failure and death would have been very high. I had a working theory to predict a subject who would give a much higher chance of success.”
Ophelia looked puzzled. “How could you predict that? I thought you were working with a pre-manifestation mutant?”
“I was. In order to make the connection work, I needed to cheat a bit and work with a BIT as it manifested.”
This time, Ophelia looked more than a bit shocked. “Work with a BIT!? How is that possible or safe?”
Thulia gave a small smile, wincing as it pulled at some of the stitches along one of her cuts.
“With extreme difficulty. Basically, the only time it’s possible for the methods I used is to work while the mutant is manifesting and the BIT is unfolding, and all sorts of things are malleable to a certain extent and for a short time before they become fixed. Trying it with a manifested BIT would be extremely dangerous and have almost zero chance of success. Of course, I had to predict what the native BIT would encourage, but while the traces and hints are very subtle, my computer was able to tease them out and offer a reasonable chance of success.”
Ok, Ophelia knew Thulia was a gageteer, but...”Your computer?”
“Yes, I have a quantum computer array that I built. It’s quite powerful.”
Ophelia gave her a look. Quantum computer array. Quite powerful. She hoped she didn’t mention it to the rest of the Workshop, the girl wouldn’t get a moment's peace. She made a ‘carry-on’ gesture to the girl.
“Anyway, the traits I needed were Exemplar and Wizard. The Wiz trait to anchor to the Heart of Fire and limit the connection to something she could handle, and the Exemplar one to make the body strong enough to withstand the process – it's pretty strenuous to the body. But it turned out my prediction as to Rob’s BIT and how the manifestation and linkage process would go wasn’t quite accurate.”
“Is that why Rob ended up as Morgana?”
Thulia winced slightly. “Yes. I started off the procedure and it all seemed to be going well, but as the BIT evolved it didn’t keep pace with the physical changes I’d implemented. Simply put, his Exemplar trait wasn’t growing fast enough, and as a result there was more and more strain on the body. Enough that I was expecting a fatal burnout to be the result in a short time. So I had to resort to some quite drastic measures to avoid him dying on the table.” She left unspoken her theory that there had been an external influence she hadn’t been able to identify. She’d taken all the usual precautions to isolate the operating area, but still, there had been some oddities in her readings.
“What did you do to Rob?”
“ I deliberately induced a CTA trait by injecting him with my blood to meld my DNA with his.”
Ophelia stared. “You do realise how dangerous that was!?”
Thulia nodded sadly. “There was no choice, it was the only thing I could do in time that would stop him dying. Trying to stop the process at that point would just have killed him faster by pushing him into burnout.”
“So is that why there is this weirdness about Morgana’s blood?”
“Well, not exactly. The CTA turned Rob into someone like me, with the body and cellular constructs necessary to handle the energy.” She gave a deep sigh “and then it turned Rob into a girl, which was something I wasn’t expecting. ” She looked concerned. “It shouldn’t have done that, but there were a number of issues with Rob's transformation I wasn’t expecting, and the Cult infecting her with that demon later on didn’t exactly help her situation, I wasn’t able to keep as close an eye on her as I’d expected.
Ophelia decided to ask about the ‘cellular’ bit rather than try and dive any deeper down the rabbit hole of Morgana's body modifications and the problems therein. “You mentioned cellular changes?”
“Yes, doctor. I don’t have an additional physical organ to handle the energy I draw in, as many energisers do, instead, it’s handled by my cells in a distributed and coordinated fashion. Including my blood cells. Which is why a normal blood transfusion isn’t going to be effective as the blood cells won’t include those genetic parts, and so won’t be the magically-active blood Morgana needs,”
Ophelia took a break to mull through all the revelations. While it explained a lot more about how Morgana got to be, well, Morgana, she didn’t see how that would help the current situation.
“So as you’re still too weak to donate the amount of blood we’ll need for an operation, we’re no further into getting her a suitable blood supply?”
Thulia bit her lip. “I think there is a possible way. What I’d need to do is take compatible, but not active, blood, and energise it into activation. It wouldn’t be a long term solution, the effect will fade quite fast, but the blood should stay operational for long enough to cover her surgery and recovery. You see, there was a problem with the effect of Morgana's link. At the time I thought it was the effect of the demon she had in her, but after that was expelled, the problem was still there.”
“So she still has a problem?”
Thuila nodded to the doctor. “Oh yes. You’ve seen it in action, that hyper-fire effect she has. It’s not at all normal for a dragon. When it’s active it draws a lot more power than I’m comfortable with through her energy channels, and its clogging them up and distorting them and stopping them being used normally.” She smiled slightly. “I’m sorry, that’s a very simplified explanation but a full one would take far too long to explain.”
Ophelia frowned in thought. “Hang on, if it’s not normal for a dragon to have this capability, how do you heat up metals to their melting point? I’ve read your Power Testing file.”
“I cheat, of course.” The girl ignored Ophelias' long-suffering look. “A certain amount of access to fire is normal for a dragon due to our links to the Heart of Fire. In order to increase the heat, I add essence as an accelerant. It's greedy on the essence use, but there are times when it’s useful and it’s easier than casting the effect as a spell.”
Ophelia tapped her pad. “And how does this help Morgana?”
Thulia sighed. “I’ve been working on the problem of extracting the energy and resetting her link to a more normal configuration for some time. There is an element of risk, which I’ve been working on reducing, and I think I have a viable and reasonably safe solution. I was going to suggest it to Morgana when she visited my home, if something had gone wrong there are better and more suitable facilities there if she needed them, and it would have been far easier to monitor the ongoing process. But if I can extract the energy, and process it into a suitable supply of blood, I think I can make it compatible with her requirements. I’m not quite sure if the blood would be stable for that long, but then we’d be using it immediately, so it only needs to be stable for a few hours.”
“And what happens if it goes wrong?” Ophelia was already worried by Thulia use of the phrase ‘element of risk’, she was worried that Thulia’s idea of risk and the medical departments weren’t exactly in synchronisation.
Thulia bit her lip. “I can think of several points of failure. First, it doesn’t work, in which case Morgana is no better or worse off. Second, I extract the energy but her link remains as it is, which means she reverts back to an overloaded essence structure, but hopefully, we'll have a useful blood supply for her operation. That might cause her some stress, which is the last thing her body needs right now, and I’d still need to deal with the problem later on, but at least it should solve the immediate problem. Third, I extract the energy but it doesn’t change the blood as I want. Again, no better or worse for Morgana apart from stress due to trying. However, if it works as I hope it will energise the blood and allow her essence channels to clear themselves to normality.”
Ophelia looked thoughtful. “If it doesn’t work, what other options are there?”
Thulia looked visibly worried now. “I have two. One is to take her to the Heart Of Fire, the centre of the magic node support. That has enough power to fix her body by brute force of essence, but it’s chancy and very dangerous. It’s basically a magical rebuild of her body, hopefully handling her BIT at the same time. The Heart has its own agenda, and given Morgana's rather unique origin, there might well be side effects I can’t control. I don’t know how it would react to her. It’s my last resort, there could be unexpected side effects or physical changes, not to mention the sheer stress such a solution would put on her body. I don’t think it would kill her, but it might change her. The second would be to use a nanite-tank. We use them for serious damage, and it would fix her arm. But they aren’t fast – it would take three to four weeks – and they are expensive to use and limited in availability. I’d have to beg my father for the funds and to get access to one for Morgana. Basically, the tank would have to regrow her missing arm while she’s in the tank. Also, I’d have to do it at home where the facilities are, so she would be away from here for most of a month, which might cause some problems.”
Tuesday afternoon, Doyle Medical centre, an unused storage room.
Ophelia handed Thulia a small vial of Morgana’s blood as she gestured at the pile of blood bags piled in the centre of the room. “So what do you need to enchant the blood?”
“Not that much. Just space enough to cast a working circle around the blood, and a protective circle around that. It might be a good idea to have another mage run the protective circle, just in case there’s a problem and we have an energy release of Morgana’s excess power. Would Miss Grimes be available? She’s very skilled, and I trust her word to keep quiet about some of what we are doing.”
Ophelia nodded. “I’ll text her and see if she’s busy right now.”
Thulia straightened up from her spell diagram with a sigh. Despite her assurances, she was worried about how much of a strain this working would put on her in her current condition. But it was for Morgana, so that didn’t matter. She turned to look at Miss Grimes, who had been watching with interest.
“Now I just put a small vial of Morgana's blood with all those baggies, to act as a direct link to her, then I’ll seal the circle. If you could then put up the protective ring, just in case something goes wrong and we get an energy release?”
Grimes nodded, and once Thulia indicated she was all ready muttered some words as she waved her wand in a complex pattern, leaving the outer circle and its symbols glowing a faint red colour.
Thulia nodded her thanks, then concentrated as she linked the blood bags to Morgana’s blood. Dr. Tenent was monitoring Morgana's body on her pad. If anything went wrong, she could warn her to disengage the spell immediately. If she had to do that, there would likely be an energy release, but she had planned for that just in case. It probably wouldn’t cause her any damage.Taking a deep breath, she started to make magical gestures.
Nothing seemed to happen for a minute, then the pile of blood bags in the centre of the working started to glow a deep red. There was a fire-flicker around the spell circle she’d drawn, and she could feel power being drawn out of Morgana as well as herself, the spell-link they shared growing warm on her back. It was a shame she couldn’t have used that directly, but it was intended to share power between them, not to extract it into a spell circle. It would have taken her far too long to process and implement the changes necessary. And it wasn’t as if she had a lot of spare time right now. At least so far it was going as intended.
She kept a close eye on the blood bags. Once they had been suitably charged, she’d pull any excess energy from Morgana into herself through their link. At worst, she’d just change form to soak it up more easily. It took longer than she expected, but finally, the blood was fully charged. She sighed as she took in the rest of the power, then made some more gestures to break the spell circle she’d formed. It was just as well they already had the link, while infusing the blood wasn’t too hard, emptying Morgana's essence channels of the excess fire energy would have been very hard, especially as she wasn’t in a condition to help. She’d have to do a full test on them both later, of course, but that could wait. She was hoping the extraction had left Morgana's energy channels more normal. Being able to show her how to extrude her wings would at least help take her mind off of all this. Her lover had wanted to fly for a long time, once she’d found out about Thulia’s wings.
“There, the blood should be charged now. So now all we have to do is reattach Morgana's hand.”
Ophelia gave a twisted smile. “Yes, just that little thing to do. Bring the blood bags, I had her prepped for theatre while you were working with the blood, we just need to sedate her and get ready to infuse the blood as needed.”
Thulia nodded as she gathered the blood. “Is it OK if I watch? I’ve never seen human surgery before.”
Ophelia gave her a look. “You’ll need to scrub up and put a surgical gown on, in case of infection. And leave any questions until the end, we’ll be busy and don’t need any distractions.”
Thulia looked at Morgana as she readied herself to watch as she’d been told, sighing to herself. Lying there on the table she looked so helpless and fragile, tubes plugged into her and her arm held up on a support, her face covered by a breathing mask. Still, she had to have confidence in the surgical team, they seemed to know what they were doing. She brushed at her eyes angrily. Breaking down and crying wasn’t an option, if something went wrong magically she might have to intervene, and without the instrumentation in her lab she would have to watch everything very closely.
Ophelia walked up to the girl, and nodded to the anaesthetist. “Knock her out, then I’ll get started.”
One of the nurses took the detached hand out of its container, carefully wiping it dry before putting it on the support next to the rest of Morgana's arm. Ophelia looked up at the camera array on the ceiling. “Ok, cameras and recorders are on. Now, we are going to reattach the patient's severed arm. First I will tidy up the two ends, then make sure the bone joint is as clean as possible.” She pulled down the magnifying lenses over her eyes. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
She held her hand out to the surgical nurse, who placed a scalpel in it. Thulia twitched, as the doctor carefully tidied up the two ends. Cutting the skin back, Tenent made sure the important parts, the blood vessels, muscles and nerves, were clean and clamped off ready to be joined together again. The bone was a bit more difficult; she prodded it with her scalpel, sighed, and called for the laser cutter. Cutting and shaping the bones was a lot easier with that tool; soon, she was ready to connect them.
“Good. Now, we connect the bones and put a direct support around them. We can remove that later once the bones have set together properly. Normally I’d leave the support in her, but she keeps setting fire to herself, so we’ll take it out once the bone has joined properly and before she melts it by accident. She pressed the bones together, jiggling the arm slightly to get the best fit as the nurse wrapped a support around them to make sure they wouldn’t move. “Good. That looks like a good fit. Now to reattach all the other bits.”
That took her longer than the bone as she sutured together the vessels and nerves, but she seemed happy. Humming to herself, she attended to all the fiddly bits and kept up a running commentary for the cameras that was a bit too technically complicated for Thulia. While she was familiar with the structure of a human body, she’d never attempted this sort of delicate mechanical work on one. She’d always worked at a cellular level. She was quite impressed that the humans could do so much with crude mechanical tools and no magic.
“That all looks good. We’ll do a healing on them later to make sure they meld properly. There's no point in making the girl wait for the Exemplar trait to fix it for her.”
She stepped back to eye her work, Thulia noted that while all the important bits seemed to be joined, there was an obvious discrepancy in the skin and muscles, which had been cleaned up.
Ophelia nodded to the surgical nurse. “OK, wrap it up, make sure it's sterile until we do a healing. The nurse nodded, carefully wrapping the limb and covering the work with a bandage. Then she slid a metal and composite support over the joint to keep it secure – given Whateley, a hi-tech metal brace was considered stronger and far superior to an old-fashioned plaster cast.
Ophelia gave a look over it, and nodded in satisfaction. “There, now we can wheel her back into her room to wake up. Thulia, you can talk now.”
Thulia licked her lips as she gave Ophelia a pleading look. “Will she be OK?”
The doctor gave her a reassuring smile. “Oh yes, it all went pretty smoothly. Having such a clean cut helped, I didn’t have to trim and fit as much as usual. Her arm will have to fix the tissue damage, of course, but the BIT and some healing will fix that up easily. “
She looked at the four empty blood bags. “Good job you could sort the blood out, she wouldn’t have survived the surgery without it and I would have had to abort the surgery.”
“How long before she wakes up, Doctor?”
“An hour or two, you girls burn up our drugs pretty fast. I take it you’d like to sit with her?”
Thulia nodded, and Ophelia patted her on the shoulder. “Of course you can.”
“So, how did it really go, Doctor?”
Ophelia gave Dr Jones a smile. “Pretty well, actually. Whatever that thing was that cut her arm off, it made a very clean cut so matching up the bones wasn’t too hard. I had to trim the rest, of course, but we can heal all that later.”
“You aren’t going to heal the rest of her damage?”
Ophelia shook her head. “Not for a few days. She really isn’t as strong as she thinks she is, and I’d like her stronger and with more blood first. She’s out of danger, so there is no desperate urgency apart from handling her boredom.”
Tim Jones smiled. “She never did like lying in bed sick. Is there anything here I can do for her?”
“No, Doctor, it’s really now just some time and a few more healings.” Neither of them mentioned all the mental issues likely to be affecting Morgana after this.
Tuesday afternoon, Bad Seeds clubroom.
“So, Icejack, have you worked out what actually happened on Sunday?”
Peter gave a deep sigh as he glanced at his pad. “Mostly. There are a few things the admin is keeping very quiet about. That’s mainly to do with how they got certain information about the event. I have a pretty accurate estimate of the actual operation. I’m working on that information, but I’m having to be careful, they have it locked down very tightly indeed.”
Sister Secret looked somewhat concerned. “Is any of it likely to impact any of us?”
Peter gazed at the wall as he considered. “I don’t think so, at least not too badly. There will be some effects, since Whateley engaged the Protocols on the section of the cult that fomented the actual attack, so some of our parents may be involved, but that’s all firewalled from us. I don’t want to try investigating my parents, if they found out it wouldn’t go well. With some of the players the protocols involved against the cult, I’d rather not try and hack their systems. My biggest worry is that the Order seemed to know the girls were visiting Dunwich, that implies that they had an internal source of information, so of course they will be looking at us as one of the possible sources. So we need to stay pure and honest about this one. No playing fast and loose this time, it’s far too dangerous.”
“Okay, so stop teasing us and tell us what you’ve found out!”
Peter nodded and brought up more data on his pad.
“Okay. First it wasn’t a strike by the entire order. It was from a splinter group they have officially disowned as having nothing to do with them.” There was a concerted set of coughs and grins from the Bad Seeds “Which was actually a good thing, the girls barely survived as it was.
Second, Thulia and Morgana were lucky – the cult made a few bad errors which played to their advantage.”
That brought more interest from the group, knowing what someone did wrong helped to avoid that error themselves.
“First, they didn’t really know about Whateley. They thought it was just a school for mutants, with some security but not the sort of response Whateley can actually bring to bear at short notice, especially when it all went down so close to the school. They were given some information which they disregarded as being exaggerated. So they thought it wouldn’t be an issue to arrange an attack close to, although outside, the school. They certainly weren’t prepared for what actually dropped on them. Even if the girls hadn’t fought back they would have been in serious trouble shortly after they attacked. But they had planned on a lot more time for their attack – about 30 to 60 minutes – before heavy response would arrive. Time enough to grab the girls, even if they’d taken cover and they needed to dig them out. And if necessary take hostages to help them get out. Apparently, this part of the cult was based in the UK, but it does show the importance of acquiring and assessing local threats and conditions first.
The second big mistake they made was assuming Thulia was a demon, not a dragon. I’m still not sure how and why they concluded that, but it meant that they were geared up with some anti-demon precautions that, as it turned out, didn’t work too well against a dragon. I suspect they were trying to exorcise or banish her in some way. My copies of the video feed show something happening, but whatever it was it only worked partially if at all. Hence the unfortunate demise of their leader.”
“Any others?”
Sister Secret smirked. “Attacking two Whately students a few miles from Campus. Two students who are dragons.” She shook her head in mock sadness. “They REALLY displayed poor prey selection....”
There was a chorus of sniggers around the table, along with a muttered comment of ‘suicide by Whateley’.
“Well, they won’t be an issue in a little while. Not only have they pissed all over the people backing the Neutrality accords, it seems that ambushing and trying to assassinate Thulia has upset the dragons here as well.”
Tekwitch brightened up. “Dragons? We have more dragons here? Cool!”
Icejack nodded. “Apparently we do, though they keep a low profile. But they are very upset about what they see as a direct attack on one of their children. They are planning something. I have no idea what, but hopefully, it won’t involve too much collateral damage. I do have a copy of the video that was made of the action for you to review.” He looked down at Twitch. “Not you, it’s rather violent.”
Wednesday morning, Dr. Bellows' Office.
“The operation went well, then?”
Ophelia nodded. “Thanks to the extra blood Thulia provided, it went as well as could be expected. It was a clean cut, and we had the arm available. We did put an internal titanium support around the bone, and I’ve instructed Morgana not to use her fire until we’ve taken it out. I doubt if melting it would hurt her, but she’ll need some days before I’ll be happy that the bones are properly set together.”
“How about Thulia?”
“Her injuries weren’t as severe. The leg wounds are the worst, but nothing terribly dangerous, it was mainly muscle damage just messy. I just hope they won’t disfigure her, I don’t know how well a dragon heals. It will be interesting to monitor that, but in any case we’ll do what we can with healing the girl fully. We know that Morgana has fully recovered from some significant injuries before, with no scarring or disfigurement, so I’m hoping it will be the same for Thulia.I was worried about their well - they both ran then dry during the fight, and if they were human I might have had to arrange restarting them, which would have prevented them using magic for a while,but it seems dragons do it differently and they both just started refilling naturally.
“Now the girls are out of immediate danger, I’d like to review the psychological issues.”
“For both of them, or just Morgana?”
Bellows looked at Mrs. Horton and sighed. “For the time being, Morgana in particular. I don’t know if a true dragon can suffer from PTSD, its not like there is anything in the literature about them, but Thulia’s actions during the attack seemed more rage-driven than fear-based. If she starts showing symptoms I may need to try and consult with one of her people, the last thing we need on campus is a dragon with psychological issues, especially one as protective of her partner as Thulia.”
“Oh, what fun.”
Bellows grinned. “Thank you, Elyzia. Anyway, I’m far more worried about Morgana now I’ve had a chance to examine her. “He looked at Dr. Tenent. “Are there going to be any issues with regard to her arm?”
Ophelia sat back and looked thoughtful. “So far, it seems to have gone as well as could be expected. Thanks to the enhanced blood, the surgery itself went well. As I mentioned, we put in a titanium clamp to make sure the bones stay together until they are fully set. I should be able to take it out in about a week. It will probably hold without it, but I don’t want to take any risks.”
Wyatt Cody gave a snort, and she smiled. “Hey, it’s only titanium...”
Ophelia continued. “She’ll be using a sling for a week, mainly to avoid any additional strain on the arm and to remind her not to try and use it. Wearing a sling so obviously will, I hope, stop any of the campus idiots from annoying her. By then, she should have recovered enough for more healings, and as long as she’s sensible we can take the sling off. Having the sling will make it less likely anyone will try something silly against her. I’ll probably leave the bracer on for another week after that, just in case.”
“You’re worried about her arm?”
Ophelia gave Wyatt a look. “Actually, I’d be more worried about what Thulia and the rest of her team would do to someone that stupid. Come to that there are quite a few kids who’d take a dim view of someone picking on an obviously injured girl. I’ve had a busy few days, I don’t need additional work patching up morons.
Anyway, unless something goes wrong she will fully recover from the amputation, and with her BIT and our healers there should be no lasting effects. It’s mainly waiting for her to recover her strength and get over her blood loss. Since the arm will take a few weeks, I see no need to hurry and force the rest of her healing. I’m not too worried about her scarring, she reacted well to being healed after her torture from the cult and I see no reason why she should scar this time.”
Bellows made a few notes on his pad and nodded. “That’s good. Missing her arm for any length of time would have impacted her badly, especially with no definite timescale for resolving the issue. Permanent scarring could be an additional issue I’d rather not have to deal with. But I still have a lot of worries.”
He looked down at his pad. “First, PTSD. I was already dealing with that from her earlier incidents, and the attack certainly didn’t help. She got attacked by the MCO over Xmas, which meant she now isn’t sure going back home is safe, and she came back here assuming Whateley would be a safe haven for her. Now the attack showed it wasn’t, and while I don’t expect the cult to be in any condition to try again, she might not believe that, deep down.”
“So what are we going to do to help her?”
“First, more therapy sessions for her, showing that the threat has been dealt with by us and by Thulia. I intend to keep her informed of what actions are taken against the cult. Second, I will be prescribing some drugs, Venlafaxine for a short while, and some strong sleeping pills. I’d rather not have her on them for long, but I don’t know yet if she’ll be able to sleep without them, I expect not. She’ll need something for pain management for at least the first week as well. Now the other issue I have is Thulia. In the short term, their relationship will help, but I do worry about Morgana becoming too dependent on her.”
He smiled at Mrs. Horton. “If it wouldn’t cause all sorts of predictable problems, I’d suggest moving them into a double room in Poe together. “ She smiled back at him. “You know the administration would have kittens if we did that.”
He nodded. “I’m keeping that option as my final one in case I can’t help her any other way. I also need to talk with the rest of her team about the best way to help her, things to say, things not to say to her.”
He turned to Miss Grimes. “Elyzia, I understand why you didn’t want Thulia to equip her the way she wanted to, but perhaps if we relax the restrictions a little it will make her feel safer?”
Elyzia Grimes looked thoughtful. “It’s a balancing act, but I’ll take a look into it. Perhaps some temporary solutions till she constructs some for herself, its not as if she won’t be motivated. I also want to work with the martial arts people about Thulia increasing her protection as well. I’ll have a word with Cecilia about the combat uniforms the two have ordered, she’ll be here next week anyway to take orders for Valentine's Day outfits.”
“Finally, we don’t want her to go into a shell and feel unable to leave the campus. That wouldn’t be good for her either, but we do have to look at where she goes. I intend to keep her on campus for at least a few weeks – I don’t think persuading her to do that will be hard, given her injuries. We can also arrange for some subtle escorting once we do let her out of Whateley. Give her some safe experiences to ease her back into normality. Fortunately she isn’t the type to resort to things like self-harming as a PTSD reaction, especially with Thulia around. Otherwise, in these circumstances, I’d be seriously worried about a self-harming situation. But, again, there is still the possibility of her becoming too dependent on Thulia, it’s a balancing act.”
“Is there anything else we can do to help her?”
Bellows looked at Elyzia. “Possibly, There has been a fair success with using animals – the sufferer bonds with them, and they can be trained to nudge them out of a bad state. That’s normally been with dogs, but I’m not sure if a dog would be suitable under the circumstances. Hasn’t she been taking the familiars course?”
Grimes nodded. “Yes, she has, to learn what to do if and when she gets one. Getting her a familiar has possibilities, it will also involve her taking care of it which will be a useful and positive distraction for her. I’ll look into possible solutions; we’d need to find one suitable for her particular needs. Once she’s feeling better, I’ll consult with Thulia, she might have some helpful ideas. I’m not sure how much use dragons make of familiars.”
“Very well. Now while I realise they are both in a poor state physically, I’d like to get them back into circulation and into lessons as soon as possible, the contacts and routine will help calm them down. Just lying in a hospital bed would give them far too much time to agonise over what happened. By all means, leave them bandaged up, that should help stop them getting bothered. It will also help stop Morgana from fixating too much on Thulia, she’ll have other people to interact with. Right now I’m more worried about psychological issues than physical ones.”
Ophelia stirred. “I’ll need to give them a checkup every day for the first week at least, to confirm everything is going smoothly.” Her lip quirked. “The girls will love that.”
Wednesday evening, Whitman, Tanya and Thulia's room.
Tanya looked up from her homework at the knock on the door.
“Come in.”
She wasn’t sure who’d be called this late at night, so she was a bit surprised to see Toison and Thulia. The satyr girl was partly supporting Thulia, who looked exhausted.
Thulia gratefully slumped into a chair with a sigh of relief. Tanya gave Toison a questioning look as the girl set a rather pretty red and gold plant on the table.
“Its OK, Tanya, I was coming off a shift at Doyle, so they asked me to help Thulia get back. Her legs are still a bit weak and painful, so they didn’t want her coming on her own, even if they did acquire a runabout to bring us to the cottage.”
Tanya nodded, and gave Thulia a worried look. “They haven’t healed your legs yet.”
Thulia shook her head. She still had some bandages and sutures obvious on her face and arms, as she gently massaged one of her legs. “They did, but that was mainly to deal with the deeper damage the fragments caused, I still have scars and muscle damage, walking a long way is painful. They’ll get me back to Doyle in a few days to do another healing on then, that should help a lot. But just lying in bed in Doyle wasn’t really doing anything for me. While walking is still a bit of a strain, they thought it would be good for me to get back into lessons. Toison was kind enough to escort me here.”
“What about Morgana?”
Thulia sighed. “She’ll probably be let out tomorrow, if everything goes well. Her knee isn’t fully fixed yet, and they put a sling on her to make sure she didn’t do anything silly with her arm, but at least she has two arms now.”
Tanya nodded. “Thank you for bringing her, Toison.”
The Satyr-girl smiled. “Hey, it was no problem.” She passed over a small baggie she’d been carrying. “Medication. Make sure she takes it.”
Thulia looked at the bag and made a face. “As if they didn’t put enough stuff into me at Doyle, they gave me more stuff to take. It’s ok, Tanya, its just some painkillers and something to help me sleep.”
“And if anything happens, I’m just down the corridor.” Toison smiled as she opened the door to leave.” Take care of her, she’s been through a lot.”
Thursday breakfast, Crystal Hall, M3 table.
The team looked up from eating breakfast to greet Thulia as she arrived. She still had some bandages and visible sutures, particularly on her legs, and was limping, being supported by a solicitous Tanya as she found a seat at the table and laid her tray down with a tired sigh.
“Thulia, how are you doing? And where’s Morgana?”
Thulia gave Laura a rather weak-looking smile. The dragongirl still looked a bit gaunt and strained, despite being released from Doyle. “Not too badly. My legs are still a bit stiff after the damage, but healing well. You wouldn’t believe the number of pieces of shrapnel they pulled out of me. Morgana is still recovering from her surgery. They hope to let her out late today if she’s strong enough. The arm reattachment apparently went well.”
“They don’t want to keep her longer in Doyle?”
Thulia shook her head at Bianca. “Apparently, Bellows thinks getting her back into classes and relative normality will be good for her, as well as for me.” There were a couple of wry grins at the concept of ‘Whateley normality’. “Although we aren’t allowed to do anything in the Martial Arts classes yet, at least we can watch.”
Erica smiled. “And apparently Morgana’s a terrible patient anyway.”
Thulia looked dispirited at Erica's poor attempt at lifting the gloom. “Right now she isn’t in much of a state to be anything but a patient, good or bad. But she doesn’t like being in Doyle again. She says she’s been there far too much during her time at Whateley.”
Given that Morgana had probably been there as much as the rest of the team put together, that wasn’t so surprising.
Bianca was still looking worried. “So how did the surgery go, anyway? They haven’t told us anything.”
Thulia took a big bite of food before answering. “I think it went OK, Dr. Tenent seemed reasonably happy with the result, and she has both arms again. She got fitted with a brace to hold everything in place, hopefully in a day or so she’ll be strong enough for another healing. Her other injuries aren’t life-threatening, so they want to fix her arm first. She needs to recover a bit and produce some more blood before they heal the rest of her injuries, trying to do too much healing at once is a major strain on the body and now she’s stable they have time to do it efficiently without rushing it.” She smiled. “They are making her wear a sling to remind her not to do anything silly with her arm, just in case.”
The crew resumed attacking their breakfasts again before Thulia looked over at Laura.
“Laura, I do have a favour to ask of you.”
Laura smiled. “Sure, when is it?”
“The PFG you made for Morgana before the Combat Finals last year. I know you’re busy on your projects, but I really need one too. I ran dry on essence during the fight, a PFG would have been really useful.”
Laura looked slightly worried as she mentally ran through the list of projects she was currently working on, as Thulia continued. “Of course, I’ll pay for it. Also, if you can manage one we can make a magic item for you like we did for Pastel. That might help you.”
Laura protested. “You don’t need to do that, I’ll make you a PFG anyway!”
Thulia smiled. “Yes we do, we owe you, and it would help protect you as well. Just have a thought as to what you need and we’ll see if we can make it for you.”
Thursday, Dojo meeting room, late morning.
“So, while we still want to talk to both of the girls, I wanted to have a preliminary talk about how they did.”
Ito looked thoughtful. “Well, if nothing else they seem to have grasped the lesson about using necessary force and violence, rather than taking things gently. That’s always one of the ones hardest to teach students, especially ones with ambitions to be heroes.”
Ms. Dennon chuckled. “I’m not sure if they would have been quite so violent if it hadn’t been the Ba’alists, but Thulia in particular seems to hate them, her concept of mercy towards them is totally absent. I approve.”
Tolman coughed gently. “Regardless of the level of violence they displayed, we do have a number of other matters to consider. First, while they did act reasonably well when they realised they were under attack, they still fell for the kill box the enemy had set up.”
Dennon nodded. “That's true, but given their level of experience I’m not surprised they got caught in it. It was a well-designed box, and really their only two options were to hole up somewhere and wait for us, or to escape the town. Given that they really don’t know much about Dunwich, they probably didn’t consider digging in, and there is also the issue of them being able to find them anyway. That wouldn’t have gone well with anyone they had been sheltering with, although I doubt if they knew how strong some of the Dunwich bunkers actually are.”
“We do need to train them more about what to do in these sorts of circumstances. I agree there are limits, but giving them some options would be helpful.” Tolman looked at her notes. “Now I understand they were limited as to the equipment they had available – most people don’t go out heavily armed just to go shopping – but I think we need to have some serious talks about what they usually carry with them. Even if Grimes is worried about Thulia making too much for Morgana, Thulia herself needs to be better prepared,”
“Well, at least they are ordering better combat outfits from Cecilia. Those will help, even if they won't be wearing them all the time. Obviously, they will be making magic items, I’ll have a word with Grimes to talk about that with them once they are more recovered.”
“I think we also need to consider the sims runs they are doing. While S&R is a useful track, I think we need more combat, either by adding to the S&R scenarios or with a separate scenario just for them. I don’t think the Combat Track is really appropriate, while it would give them scenarios that would prepare them, we don’t want to make them think that everything outside the school is a potential combat. After Sunday, Bellows thinks they are paranoid enough without our encouraging those ideas.”
Ito nodded. “Very well, so we will put some ideas together and discuss them properly with the girls when they are in a bit better shape.”
