Infernal Healing

and also she's done playing chase now pet her ears, no not like that Her Human does it better, she hisses and jumps back out of Khalida's lap to climb up Omar instead.

"Breathe, kiddo, you got this," Omar says on his way out, resting a gentle hand on her shoulder for just a moment as he goes by.

And Noor did help so it's not like she can even be mad at him, except a little bit for being right again.  She smooths out the scrap of paper and considers Infernal Healing. 

It'll be most useful here, of course, with a sudden drastic cleric shortage in an active warzone, even more so in the other forts along the way where they haven't even got Inexplicable Iomedaen Commander.  It's not going to be nearly as much use if when they go back to Sothis where there's some temple or other in hollering range practically everywhere except right on the edge of the desert, and getting devil's blood without too many questions is going to be tricky, but... first circle arcane healing.  And it's not like it's not practical, it trades off with Secluded Grimoire which would be a bit of a wrench but having healing out in the desert turns a spiraling disaster into a recoverable one, they could sell the wand (or most of its remaining charges, more sensibly) and have a bit more breathing room... and first circle arcane healing, she wants to get her head around that spell like water in the desert.

Khalida rolls out of bed, digs her ink bottle and her good pen out of their special padded pockets in the middle of her satchel, and gets to work.

Omar presumably told Tariq that she's in a Mood or working or both, because the guys don't come back until well after she's finished getting it pinned down onto the pages and is sprawled out on the bed, eyes half-closed and head pillowed on her arms, just taking some time to herself to contemplate the finished (empty) spellform before she gets back up to start on Abundant Ammunition.

Tariq flops down next to her, shaking the bed, and heaves a sigh.  "I can't wait until we get out of this godsforsaken frozen wasteland and back home where we belong and things make fucking sense."

A bit later in the evening, if any Chelish soldiers are passing close enough to the guest quarters, they might hear something that sounds suspiciously like a screaming argument.  On the even slimmer chance that they speak vernacular Osiriani or are curious enough to burn a Comprehend Languages, they could catch something like this:

"-not staying one more minute because you've gone all prissy about-"

   "Oh sure you'd say that, it's your own damn fault I need to in the first place-"

"Like hell it is, you were no cloistered maiden when we found you-"

      "Will both of you just stop-"

"You're not in charge of this party-"

   "You're not my fucking father!"

"Heyyyyy everything okay in there?" calls Txell from outside their door.

The yelling abruptly stops.

There's a rather awkward silence.

"Yes, all's well!"  Even through the door, she sounds both still steaming mad and very embarrassed. 

"'kay, kindly don't blow anything up or neglect your eight hours!"

The door cracks open and Khalida pokes her head out, hair loose and a bit pink about the face.  

"Right, yes," in a more normal volume, "I apologize if we woke anyone."

"I thank you for scout," Omar calls from out of view behind the door.  

"Didn't wake anyone, I just took a half-shift internal patrol to stretch my legs. Sleep well when you sleep."

"And you as well."  She nods and retreats behind the door again.

Omar clears his pack off the top bunk so Khalida can sleep alone.  She curls up under both her coat and the extra blanket, shivering, and sulks.

It takes her a while to get to sleep, but she's not up nearly so late as the night before, and as the guys clear out to go to breakfast she's sitting down with her spellbook again, sleep-haze and lingering crankiness banished by the prospect of new spells!  She flies through the practiced motions of her usual cantrips, and then flips all the way back to the newest page, she has to try out Infernal Healing even if another Endure Elements might be more helpful in expectation, set up the unfamiliar scaffold and then like this and loop around to there...

Khalida had picked up notes on Protection From Evil and Protection From Good last year, during a particularly good string of jobs.  It hadn't been quite a good enough stretch that she could justify the expense of inking them- it's very rare that they wind up fighting something other than a human or a beast, and even rarer that they know they're going to in advance- but she's been studying them in spare moments often enough that she can see past the different notation systems and realize the spellform is the same, except for one particular aspect that's similar but exactly inverted.  And as she's midway through setting up Infernal Healing, immersed in the glowing perfect shapes in her mind's eye until she practically forgets where she is, she starts noticing that this spellform has a particular subset that's very much like the invertible bit in Protection From Whichever... and that the framework around it is symmetric in a way that really ought to support it in either orientation... and if she pushes, just so, it should just snap into place the other way round...

If someone had asked her what she was thinking in that moment, Khalida would protest that of course she knows spell experimentation is dangerous, it's not like she was going to cast it, she just wanted to see if it worked and then she was going to take it down and assemble it the right way round for real.  This is, while not untrue, also not an accurate representation of her state of mind.  In point of fact, like many wizards, especially young ones, especially ones whose Cunning outstrips their Wisdom by almost half, she's not thinking past the present moment at all, consumed by the question of whether she could to the extent that she hasn't even noticed the question of whether she should is also at issue, and the battle with temptation is not so much lost as forfeited before it begins.

There's also another relevant fact she hasn't noticed, which is that spellforms are stable as constructed.  While not physical objects, they have some similar properties, like analogues to compression and tension and strain.  As it happens, the other configuration she noticed is actually a stable one, but the path from one stable spellform to another, half-charged half-assembled rather than built from scratch, is not.

She pushes, and the invertible subset resists for a moment, then gives a little, and then snaps... and in the process, puts reaction forces on the nearby structure in a way it was never meant to hold.  The release of tension travels outward, reaches an area of slack she hadn't knotted and folded and attached yet, that whips around loose, and then the whole structure shakes itself to pieces and the energy goes... everywhere else.

First-circle spells don't actually hold that much energy.  If one considers evocations, the most direct way of just releasing it into the world, centuries of wizards optimizing everything have gotten Burning Hands to the point where Khalida could, in theory, just barely, drop a carthorse in one shot if she was as lucky as she could possibly get.  But that's because a lot of the energy available dissipates harmlessly into the environment (or if not harmlessly, at least lights objects on fire rather than horses).  Shocking Grasp ekes out more power at the cost of essentially zero range, bringing her odds of killing the hypothetical horse up to one in three.

And second-circle adventurers are in fact quite a bit tougher than carthorses.

In theory.

On average.

A second circle wizard, on the other hand?  A profession notorious for spending all their time cloistered in towers and libraries, and fighting at range from the rear echelons with plenty of armored men between them and the foe?

A second circle wizard who'd never walked more than a mile at a time before the age of fifteen?

Who might well have inherited a degenerative fatigue disorder?

What saves her, as it happens, are two things.

First, that she hadn't actually finished channeling energy into the spellform when she made Decisions and Choices, so it's only holding a bit more than half of what it could be.

And second, that it's a healing spell.  Most of the released energy is force or raw magic or something weirder, but a certain fraction of it is still positive.

So she's in fact still conscious when the force of the explosion throws her backwards and cracks her head into the opposite wall.

And, nowhere and everywhere all at once, something happens that is not suited to description by human language, but might be summarized something like:

Aha, there you are.



DIBS.

Khalida, to her future immense frustration and regret, does not experience this happening.

One of the internal patrols twigs to the noise, summons backup, and is on the scene in a moment, bursting through the door.

They can find:

-one wizard, unmoving and lying at a slightly concerning angle and a bit scorched

-one large crack in the opposite wall that was probably not there yesterday

-one blanket that is currently on fire

-assorted other clothes and bedding and papers, not actively on fire, flung in various directions 

-one spellbook, off in the far corner of the room, open facedown and a bit crumpled

Ugh. Somebody stomps out the blanket. Somebody else checks her pulse.

Weak and thready but existing.

Two guys pick her up together and haul her to the mess and ring for the commander; there's a rope that leads to a bell in his office, previously used mostly for non-medical emergencies but now equally applicable to medical ones. There's a general shout as everyone who can be spared from their current occupations swarms in to benefit from the emergency early channel.

Commander Artigas sweeps in, Stabilizes her, and gives it another couple moments for people to form up around his position before he channels.