:I can still see him: Jisa insists. :Maybe if I get in rapport with you, you can -: 

Shavri accepts the mental 'hand', and - doesn't feel any particular way - about the glimpse through her daughter's Othersenses of Leareth's mind to Mindhealing-Sight. There's something there, but it's a garden on fire and nearly all the plants are already gone. She takes Brightstar's offered rapport as well, and - focus inward, downward - 

It's the weirdest fucking way of using Healing-Sight that Shavri has ever experienced. She has her Sight focused on something, but she can't pull back her mental viewpoint or shift the scale. She can see this structure, and if she effortfully refocuses she can end up on that structure instead, and her Sight seems to be under the impression that none of the structures in Leareth's body are in any way related to each other. 

Blasting his shoulder joint with Healing-energy is not going to do anything useful, even if she could technically aim at it right now. If this is going to work at all, she needs to get herself focused on his heart and see if she can smack it around hard enough to get it beating, it doesn't even need to be an effective heartbeat that successfully moves blood, she just needs the energy-loop to exist at all so she can hook her Gift into it... 

...Okay. That sure is a heart that is not doing anything. Seen up close, there's still a little bit of life-force there - it's not completely dark, and Shavri can make out structure, which she's pretty sure doesn't work on dead flesh. (It's historically been inconvenient for research, actually, that Healers can't train Sight on dead bodies, and can't cut up their living patients to look at how things are put together, so it takes a lot of drawings and practice to correlate them.) 

Shavri throws a focused dart of Healing-energy, and - 

 
- it lands, and it drains away and it's gone. Some of these cells are technically in some sense still alive, but they're - in living patients there's something like a cup, something Healing-energy can land in and propagate on from. The others are cracked cups, with both Healing-energy and their own natural life-force slowly but constantly leaking away.

This is a cup with no bottom. She can throw Healing-energy at it, sure, and at a hyper-local level there's something still there that can use it as fuel, but - there's nothing that can hold it even for a moment, let alone distribute it, and so most is pointlessly wasted. Shavri can't get a Healing-link to every cell in Leareth's body independently. 

If she had something to replace the critical vital functions, routing around the damaged pathways entirely, so she could slow down and figure out what can still be repaired– ...but Healing-Gift doesn't work like that. 

She tries again anyway, but she doesn't think it's going to work. She's pretty sure that all she's figured out, here, is an extremely creepy way to make Healing-Sight work on a recently-dead corpse.

And then there’s a burst of unfamiliar magic, vast and strange and definitely not a Gate, and Shavri, with her hands still on Leareth’s chest, is alone with him, falling a couple of feet and landing hard on her knees on a stone floor. No, not exactly stone, weirdly uniform white...porcelain? 

She can't feel Jisa or Brightstar anymore. Or Blai, which means Leareth is doomed anyway. But she was in the middle of trying something, and she's going to keep trying, even though she just lost her tenuous Healing-Sight focus when she was startled and she has to start over. 

From the perspective of the staff of the trauma ICU at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada, most of whom were clustered at the nursing station arguing about the wisdom of involving the US government in their...situation...or the possible awkwardness of tabloid journalists poking around to investigate "faith Healers" - 

- there's a weird flash of light from near Pod Four, the furthest point from the entrance. There's a thud. 

Whoever gets there first will find: 

There's a man sprawled on his back on the floor. He's wearing dark clothes that look about as non-modern as Samora's but definitely aren't the same style. He isn't moving. There are no obvious injuries – his clothes are intact, his limbs are all in the right place, there's no blood – but he does not look particularly alive. 

(He will, however, read Evil.) 

There's also a small woman wearing disheveled green robes, her tightly-curled dark hair combed through with grey despite a face that looks at most early forties. She's currently kneeling by the man's head with both hands on his forehead, completely ignoring everything else in her surroundings. 

Samora has way too little context to participate in the argument and is mostly pacing, waiting for further information on how best to use her spells. When she hears the thud, she's nearby enough and curious enough to stick her head in.

Well that sure is some people who weren't in there a minute ago, and the Evil one on the ground looks to be in bad shape. She gets within ten feet of him and casts Stabilize.

...That's a cleric spell. Shavri recognizes it. 

It also doesn't do anything. It would've been too much to hope for, Shavri thinks, it's the least powerful one she's seen. 

:Don't waste any spells or channels, it doesn't work: she sends at - whoever that was, she's not particularly aiming her Mindspeech - and then goes back to trying to get her Sight on-target again. Brightstar was so much better at this. She's stuck on some confusing mess of structure that she thinks is...stomach-adjacent?? and having trouble figuring out how to refocus back on Leareth's heart. Why doesn't her Sight think that any of Leareth's parts are connected to his other parts??? Well, probably because he's dead, that's the obvious explanation for quite a lot of things, but Shavri is going to be stubborn anyway. 

The Mindspeech catches Samora and also Marian, who had just been talking to Samora about diamond dust and doesn't really have a lot to do right now and is if anything delighted for a distraction from the awkward and stressful argument. 

- what. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. 

"HEY GUYS I NEED HELP OVER HERE!" she yells, and spends about three-quarters of a second considering whether to run for the nearest wall-box-dispenser and put gloves on before she touches the mysterious unconscious man. She decides against and just flings herself down beside the - telepathic person in robes?? - to check for a pulse, which she's really not surprised when she fails to find. This person is extremely dead person colored. 

"CODE BLUE!" she shouts, and starts CPR. The floor is honestly a more ergonomic position for it than climbing on a patient's bed, and the telepathic person in robes isn't actually in her way. 

(Marian is mostly running on instinct and hasn't noticed any confusion about whether Samora would have tried any magic and whether it should have just worked.) 

Oh no, it's magic-resistant. Might be a curse? She didn't prep Remove Curse. What's Detect Magic showing? He's wearing some items but as far as she can tell they're all abjurations. There could be an abjuration that blocks healing, or at least she doesn't know it's impossible, but she's not confident enough to try taking his items off, especially not when Marian seems to know what she's doing and Samora would get in the way. 

Also, that woman just did a Still Silent Message while concentrating on another spell that's nothing she's ever seen before, which is pretty impressive. Probably impressive enough that she'd ping Evil if she was, especially if she did the teleport, so that's interesting.

Shavri had almost gotten her Sight on the right general area and she abruptly loses it and swears loudly in Valdemaran.

Oh, it’s because some new person just showed up and is getting in her way and disrupting her Sight.

:Can you stop that?: she snaps at the bizarrely-dressed young woman. 

“What? No!” 

About half of the total staff on the unit have now caught up.

“Marian,” Fraser says to her. “Marian, trade off, you’re our translator.”

Oh. Right. That makes sense.

Marian scrambles out of the way. She’s shaking slightly, which is just embarrassing even if that was REALLY startling.

“Samora, did you - do you have any idea -“

"She told me healing spells didn't work but not what the problem was. I only tried a Stabilize; it failed like it couldn't find a target. My best guess if he's not actually dead is that he's cursed or has a cursed item, but it's not much of a guess, I'm not a magic expert." Tris would have been able to figure it out if she was here.

…Marian relays that in English to Bella from Pod Four rather than figure out what to do with it. ‘Failed like it couldn’t even find a target’ seems doomier than ‘succeeded for less than a second’ or something but at least it sounds like there are still explanations for it.

Someone shoves the paper documentation flowsheet on its clipboard at her and Marian is briefly stymied by the fact that there is *not* a line included to put cleric healing attempts on. She tries to squeeze in an extra column all the way over by the margin and puts “stabilize” and an X next to the current time.

Fortunately there is an extremely standardized protocol for handling this in the complete absence of any cleric magic! 

Shavri loses her third try at getting any kind of Healing-Sight focus on Leareth and - all right, maybe this is the wrong thing to be tunnel-visioning on and she should, instead, try to figure out where she is and what everyone thinks they’re trying to do exactly and, just, what in general.

She looks up at the cleric and - oh, that’s the Iomedae holy symbol. She’s glad of it. It makes her feel less completely lost.

:Are we in Golarion?: she asks her. It doesn’t look at all like she had been picturing. 

"No, this is a place of healing on Earth. I came here by accident yesterday. Were you just on Golarion? Do you know how you got here?" She's speaking Celestial but it won't be hard for a Mindspeaker to grab her meaning, she's not trying to shield at all.

Clarice would like the mysterious woman in robes to stop touching the patient so they can get a reading off the defib pads. She's kind of assuming a language barrier and is in a hurry and resorting to trying to smack her hands out of the way. 

Shavri is spectacularly confused about every single element of what's happening right now but, okay, it's not like she was getting anywhere anyway, she'll back off. 

:...We were in Velgarth before this. There was a cleric of Iomedae from Golarion who ended up in Velgarth by accident a few weeks ago. I don't know how we got here, I was - kind of trying to focus - it might be the same way the cleric of Iomedae got to our world before.: Or the same way this cleric of Iomedae ended up here in 'Earth'???? Why are there so many accidents transporting people to different worlds!!!

The monitor screen shows asystole. Not even the kind with random useless blips, just a completely flat isoelectric line. 

...Yeah that's not especially surprising, this guy looks like he's been down a while. It's not a great sign but they'll give it a good effort anyway. "Resume compressions," Clarice says to Fraser. 

(Fraser is kind of regretting not escaping the unit when he had a chance, at this rate he's going to be stuck here for ages.) 

Shavri is so confused about what they're trying to do, but there's no way she can get Healing-Sight up again if they're jostling things around like that and they did not seem very amenable to stopping. 

:What kind of place of healing?: she asks the cleric, in case that will result in an explanation. 

"They have no magic at all but really good nonmagical healing for diseases! Nothing as good for injuries as positive energy, but still pretty great. What happened to your friend?"

'Friend'. Ha. ...Shavri's fine to leave it at that, though, it's a lot to explain and it mostly doesn't matter for this.

:A god exploded a country at him.: Wow that was not a very clear description at all. :I, er, I don't really understand it, but there was a country with a miraculous shield around it, and it exploded, and something starting there - some kind of attack - went a hundred miles and straight through ten feet of stone. Hit some other people too, they - it seemed like a channel helped a little, didn't actually fix it but they were alive and conscious when I, er, when the magical accident happened - but we couldn't get to him for almost half an hour. By the time we got to him the spells didn't work anymore.: 

Clarice takes about ten seconds to decide that she's not even bothering to try for an IV on this man right now. "IO kit?" she yells, and someone gently lobs it to her, and then she can skip right to drilling a giant needle into his shinbone. 

What the fuck. Why are they– oh they're putting...something...in him...but why in the world is that supposed to help??? 

:...My colleague has a mind-Gift that lets her see - if there's a mind - even if someone's unconscious, and she saw something: she sends, because that's pertinent information. :But that was - two minutes ago? He might already be gone.: 

Marian documents 9:47 am, rhythm: asostole, pulse: absent (no kidding), IO access established, 1 mg epinephrine. 

...Is Samora possibly continuing to have a telepathic conversation that Marian wasn't invited to. 

She clears her throat. "Samora, um, did you learn anything else about...?" 

"Good heavens! Which god? Uh, she said a god exploded a miraculous shield around a country and something came out of the explosion and went a hundred miles and through ten feet of stone and hit him."

Possibly she shouldn't be hoping he recovers, if he's Evil and a god personally tried to kill him? But maybe she's misunderstanding and he was collateral damage, or maybe an Evil god tried to kill him for Evil reasons she'd object to, and anyway this building is clearly committed to healing everyone who comes in so as long as she's in here that's what she's doing. 

What

That's a thing???????? 

Marian....will re-translate it to English for a hovering Dr Chadra in case he has the slightest idea how to translate that into, like, a diagnosis or a treatment plan. 

:Vkandis. Our world has different gods than Golarion.: And a lot of other differences but now really doesn't seem like the time to get into explaining all of that. 

Wow that's spectacularly unhelpful! 

"Ask about the initial presentation, were there symptoms before he collapsed? And how long since the arrest?" 

Marian is feeling kind of overwhelmed at simultaneously being the translator and the person who has to Write Down All The Things, but there is an argument that it saves a step over having to convey the things to someone else who's writing them down and also it should get Marian out of having to do literally anything else.

"Samora, the doctor wants to know if she can tell us what it looked like when he was first injured, were there specific symptoms before he collapsed? Also if she knows how long ago he stopped breathing or his heart stopped beating." 

Samora relays these questions! And adds "I think whatever you're doing is working, I can still see his aura."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Marian hadn't even considered that aspect of Samora's magical powers. What does that mean! How does it work, what can she– nevermind, later. It does leave Marian feeling like it's super fucking weird that Samora's magic can see him but not actually target him? But she's just going to report it to Dr Chadra and wait for answers on the other questions so she can report those too. 

:I don't know his initial symptoms, but the others - a lot of vomiting, disoriented, most of them lost consciousness before the channel but it got them back up. There's some kind of damage everywhere in their bodies and they can't hold life-force properly, either what their body produces naturally or my Healing-energy or the energy from a channel. Lesser Restoration might help somewhat, one of the mages got one and was able to Gate them to safety, but I don't think it fixed the underlying problem. ...I think the most lethal damage was to the blood vessels, especially in the brain, it was causing the tissue to swell and that's dangerous very quickly. I think probably that happened to him and eventually his body forgot to breathe, but I can't actually see very much with Healing-Sight right now.:

Right, and there was another question. :...He was already like when we got to him. I don't know how long it's been. If - if I had to guess, more than a couple of minutes, probably less than ten.: 

Shavri has never actually sat and watched with Healing-Sight after a patient's heart stopped in order to gauge how long it would take to go from a weak but still-coherent life-force to the faint scattered-and-disconnected remnants she's seeing now. 

...Slightly brighter remnants?? That's really weird! Where would he be getting any additional life-force, it wasn't her, she hasn't at any point been able to get a useful link and she would need several million separate links anyway, which she cannot do because Healing-Gift doesn't work that way at all. 

She blinks, re-focusing on what she can see with her actual eyes rather than Sight. :What are they doing?: she asks Samora. 

Right now, Dr. Harrison is preparing to intubate this guy! They know very little about the problem but they've already seen Samora fix someone who was literally brain-dead, it seems plausible that if they can get this guy back into some kind of spontaneous rhythm for, like, three seconds, then Samora might just be able to restore him to perfect health and that would be awesome. 

Ohhhhhhh Shavri thinks she gets the thing they're trying to do and that's actually brilliant! She wasn't going to be able to get anywhere with Healing on convincing Leareth's body to start breathing again, that requires a working energy-loop in the relevant pathways and there's no way, but - if they can just avoid it entirely, make him breathe without any involvement in the process, that solves at least one problem.

Unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem where she also can't get his heart to do anything, and their technique for trying to do that is...doing more than literally nothing, going off the very very slight brightening of the bits and pieces she can still make out with Healing-Sight, but it's not working incredibly effectively. 

9:48 am, patient intubated, still in asystole, pulse still absent, is she due for epi– no, but they're absolutely due to have someone relieve poor Fraser, he started at 9:46 am. "Switch on compressions," she calls out, and Lia takes over. 

(Marian briefly wondered if she should just ask Samora to ask the telepathic woman to include her too, since the telepathy clearly works on her and it seems dumb to be doing this much telephone about it, but on reflection, no, she absolutely cannot document an ongoing code and translate for their D&D cleric from another world and also be the contact point for their newly-arrived telepathic witch or whatever the heck she's supposed to be. That's too many things even if it feels like she's been Excluded From The Conversation and it's mildly upsetting Marian's brain can shut up about her stupid social-rejection feelings that should not even slightly apply here.) 

"Vomiting, confusion, falling unconscious. There's some kind of damage everywhere in their bodies, they can't hold positive energy or generate any life-force themselves, sort of like an ongoing life drain? Lesser Restoration helped at an earlier stage. She thinks the most dangerous problem is damage to the veins in his brain making his brain swell up and forget to breathe? She can usually see a lot of this stuff but not right now, not sure if that's because he got worse or she's having a different problem. She found him like this, probably somewhere between two and ten minutes after he went down."

Relaying! Keeping the Detect Evil going! Being ready to pounce with a Cure Moderate Wounds the second the psion-or-something says it's a good idea! Refusing to feel embarrassed about how useless she's being, because everyone is useless sometimes! Honestly she should probably be being even more useless, she's the worst person to be relaying what with how only one other person can understand her, but everyone is busy and she doesn't want to make anyone do any more thinking unless the current situation becomes unworkable.

Okay. Um. Wait how the hell does the telepathic person know how long, is she just guessing– oh Marian had failed to properly parse the earlier bit, apparently because she can literally see it, like she has CT scan vision or something, that's wild and Marian viscerally covets it. 

Also that would be so incredibly doomy if not for the fact that Samora can fix brain damage. But Samora can do that so they just need to...figure out why this guy isn't currently fixable with Samora's magic at all, and deal with that? Ugh, did Samora mention Lesser Restoration previously, Marian thinks she did but she failed to take notes on it or remember properly what it does except that it didn't necessarily sound like it would fix kidney failure or advanced COPD. 

Relaying to Dr Chadra! "She thinks he's been down somewhere between two and ten minutes? But the arrest was unwitnessed, they only got to him later for some reason. They, uh, I think they can guess his initial symptoms because there were other people affected – uh, vomiting, confusion, loss of consciousness. And an - ongoing...life...drain?" Marian isn't going to attempt to turn that into correct medical terminology because she doesn't know what it means but she feels so stupid saying it like that. "There's a spell called Lesser Restoration that Samora has, that helped, but at an earlier stage with the other patients. There's some kind of central nervous system dysfunction from vascular damage causing edema and rising intracranial pressure? She thinks that triggered a respiratory arrest."

Pause for breath. "She, I mean the robe lady not Samora, can normally - see problems directly? Like some kind of magic scan vision, I think, maybe? But it's not working, either because of his condition or, I don't know, maybe it doesn't work on Earth or something." 

Well, Samora can at least see auras, right? Can she see anything useful for diagnosis? Also (Dr Chadra has been peering at Marian's documentation), she should have unlimited Stabilize, right? Is there any reason not to try that at regular intervals as a test of whether he's targetable yet? 

Oh that's a good question. "Samora, Dr Chadra wants to know if you can see anything in his, um, aura, that might help us figure out what's going on? Also he's asking if you can just keep trying Stabilize on him repeatedly – uh, would there ever be a case where that doesn't work but a stronger spell would, or should it be a decent test for whether he's targetable at all?" 

"The aura just tells me that he's fairly powerful and, ah, Evil, but yeah I can just spam* Stabilize, if it doesn't find a target then a Cure won't and vice versa."

Stabilize. Stabilize. Detect Evil. Stabilize.

*Term for using the same spell several rounds in a row. No etymological relationship to canned meat or bad emails.

There’s nowhere on Marian’s paper to document that a patient is evil

…It’s irrelevant to his medical care and seems kind of personal. “She can just see it or not,” she tells Dr Chadra, “there’s no, like, health metadata.”

Marian thinks to worry that Samora might it distracting to be telepathied and need to relay it when she’s supposed to be casting her spell, which is the impetus Marian needs to realize that the whole telephone situation is dumb. Samora should ask the telepathic healer-themed-superhero-with-CT-vision to talk to, hmm, Dr Chadra directly. 

There is some debate with the less-currently-occupied members of the medical team over what pathologies are implied by the list of symptoms plus “direct attack by a god”, which is foundering on the fact that it’s deeply unclear to anyone what gods can do.

“Let’s get some iSTAT labs and see what we’re dealing with,” Dr Harrison declares briskly. 

Stabilize with an infinity symbol in her margin, mental note to get the iSTAT results written down as soon as anyone yells them because she’s learned the hard way that they don’t sync to the computer if a patient doesn’t exist yet in the hospital system, OH SHIT it’s 9:50 and Marian’s on timekeeping.

“Trade off on compressions! And I think we’re due for epi!”

Stabilize is continuing not to work.

Well maybe they have an explanation for why not! That’s the worst venous blood gas reading that Fraser has seen in his nursing career. Those are not numbers compatible with life.

“I’ve got pH of 6.17, bicarb of four, pCO2 of 110. Lactate is, uh, 21. …pO2 32 but it’s venous.”

     “Can we get an arterial—“ Dr Harrison starts.

“Please feel free, I’m not trying for an arterial stick when I can’t even palpate a radial pulse!”

     “Lytes?”

“I’m working on it, okay, you’re lucky I got a vein on this guy at all, it’s a slow one.”

Doooes Celestial give Marian the vocabulary to communicate the problem? She’ll try! Their patient’s blood is really acidic. It’s a predictable result of someone spending a long time not breathing enough and with a really low blood pressure, their blood accumulates…waste…from trying to be alive without enough fuel and then without any fuel because his heart stopped beating, and at this point his heart probably isn’t going to do anything even if he’s getting air. Would that explain Stabilize failing? And can Samora think of anything else that might possibly work?

"If his blood is bad--Stabilize and Cures fix blood loss, if his blood is bad you could try taking it all out and I could see if that lets me put good blood in? I don't know if that's brilliant or stupid."

That's - what - okay Marian's job isn't to assess whether plans are brilliant or stupid it's just to relay them to doctors who will make a decision. 

That's stupid. (Even if it could work in theory for a different problem, this guy is right on the edge, and it would take forever, anyway, even with high-quality CPR they're getting a systolic blood pressure of 70 because the guy's vascular tone is shot, people with a blood pressure that low take forever to bleed.) 

...That's it, they're putting him on VA-ECMO.

What, seriously? 

Oh that's a great idea! They'll get him artificial oxygenation and circulation for a bit, ECMO is great at removing CO2, they'll give him a fuckton of bicarb and get his pH normalized and then they really should be able to get somewhere. Like, to be clear, this would be an insane idea if they didn't have Samora, okay, given all the reasons to assume catastrophic brain damage, but they do have Samora so they're going to fix it! Dr Chadra is so excited! 

...No, seriously, they're– what, in the hallway? 

Yeah okay they should probably put him in an actual patient room at this point. That sounds like the charge nurse's job. 

Marian isn't trained on ECMO though

...She spends several seconds trying to figure out how to explain the concept to Samora in Celestial without getting so distracted that she misses another callout, and settles on "they decided it's a good idea to take the blood out of him but we have a thing to fix it when it's out of his body and put it back better." 

Huh, she did not think that was going to turn out to be a good idea. "Okay. I'll keep casting Stabilize unless there's not space to be within ten feet of him."

This is such an insane plan! Why are they doing this! Dr Harrison is glaring at her like it’s personally her fault that they haven’t all drilled on getting fucking VA-ECMO running on a patient they’re actively coding within two minutes. You can’t just do that! This requires setup and planning! 

…She’s going to call the charge nurse up on 6C, the cardiac ICU where they actually ever do this, and BEG. Yes she needs whoever is certified on ECMO and ideally has actually done it within the last year, yes she needs them RIGHT NOW, it’s a really long story— oh, has she seen the news? There might’ve been stuff. Anyway can she get some staff to come down right this moment please! 

Dr Chadra has been interrogating Shavri about Healing-Sight for the last minute or so and she’s going to be incredibly helpful.

They’re going to need everyone in the room to be sterile. (Normally this would be set up in the OR but that’s an entire ninety-second walk away.) Can Samora and Shavri please both wash their hands and put on these gowns without at any point touching the outside of them, here, watch what Dr Harrison is doing…

This is so chaotic! Aaaah! Marian’s auditory processing is getting completely overwhelmed.

Tara from 6C is giving her a Look that means “can you tell me what the hell is going on and why?” and Marian…is apparently too socially chicken to scream “we have a D&D cleric with magic healing and this guy just fell through a portal!” across a crowded room in the middle of a code. And she can’t duck out into the hallway because she’s on documentation. She frantically to get Fraser’s attention in eyebrow semaphore.

…Yeah, sure, Fraser will duck out into the hallway again and fill in the new arrivals.

This is the most beautiful incredible thing that Shavri has ever seen or imagined in her entire life.

When a specialist tells you to follow a ritual procedure you follow it exactly. Samora is so careful about washing her hands and getting the special clothes on. And then she casts Stabilize several more times while trying to telepathy and/or hopeful-glances at the psion lady to the effect that she would like to be included in the conversation but only if it's convenient.

And then she remembers an obscure fact from school about a spell she basically never uses and only prepped this morning because she didn't have any better ideas! Positive Pulse, while it uses positive energy and can fix what's wrong with people, does not actually work by the same way as other healing spells! In particular, it doesn't need to find targets the way Channels and Cures, and it fixes a different set of things.

"I have a spell that might help," she says at a moment Marian and Shavri look marginally less overwhelmed. "It won't directly repair his body, it'll disrupt any process that's trying to kill him. Worth trying?" It's not like she's likely to have a different use for it today, it's first circle and almost never comes up.

Shavri is a lot less overwhelmed than Marian, honestly. She was having an incredibly interesting conversation with the...trainee-senior-healer? She's still trying to figure out their Healers' chain-of-command situation here, it's weird - but now he's off setting up the actual artifice that does the procedure and busy and she has a lot of extra mental capacity and nowhere to put it. 

:Might as well try: she sends to both of them, not sounding incredibly hopeful because she doesn't think something is ongoingly trying to kill Leareth, it's...one-time damage, that's just taking its time to play out. (And is abruptly eyeing Samora as the least busy person in the room and perhaps the most available to think-out-loud-in-Mindspeech at because she feels an urgent and explosive need to do that, but they should see if the spell works first.) 

Here's a burst of undirected positive energy that's just sort of splatted across the entire three-dimensional space Leareth is in rather than trying to fix a specific living system! It . . . maybe does something for a fraction of a second and then dissipates. Now Samora is the least busy person in the room again.

:If you had a slow continuous version instead of all at once it might get somewhere but I'm guessing it doesn't work that way and you only had one of it.: Maybe. It seems like it's maybe still not really targeting the right thing, just an interestingly different wrong thing than she assumes a channel would. 

Shavri's mental voice is matter-of-fact. :If you can still sense him I think he's not getting worse and we've got time. The thing they're doing is complicated so it's going to be a while, they would normally use it with people when they have some warning a problem is getting worse.: 

Samora still looking not-busy? Okay great Shavri is full of thoughts and they have to exit her head. 

:So the problem is - that we have a lot of different problems, right, and your healing only targets some, and at least one of the problems you can't aim a spell at is advanced enough that he's - kind of fallen apart as a living organism, so any spells that expect to find one of those don't work. There's a lot of very bad injury-like damage, which a channel would work on, but - when he didn't get one, right away, he started dying. He must've hung on for a pretty long time in spite of that, maybe twenty minutes, but - he probably spent most of that time not really getting enough air, and with his heart too weak to move enough blood. When someone isn't breathing or isn't breathing enough, there's - so air has a vital component that the body needs, right, and then a - used-up component that needs to be gotten rid of, like how eating and digesting leaves waste that you need to get rid of. If it builds up instead, then - when it's in tiny bubbles in a liquid like blood, rather than just in the air, it forms an acid. I didn't follow why but they can measure things like that here. ....And then the other problem is that the body isn't getting enough of the vital part of air, and most of the body can work for a short time without it, but it produces a special kind of waste and that waste is also acidic. He has both problems at once, so it's very very bad, they said it was 'incompatible with life', nothing in his body will work right. There's also a kind of - salt? - that leaks out of injured tissue, and having too much in your blood can make the heart beat wrong, and he has way too much. It's...like he's poisoned by natural substances made by his own body. If you had a spell to remove poisons that didn't actually require a specific target, like the positive energy one, that might do it, but I don't know if that even - makes sense as a concept, what makes something a poison is so contextual.: 

Shavri pauses to answer a question from the resident, frowning, then looks animated - though she's very carefully not waving her hands, they're doing delicate work here. After thirty seconds or so she turns back to Samora, her eyes beady-bright with enthusiasm. 

:Anyway! He needs to be breathing and moving blood through his body, to clear the poison – it's that simple for the one that's just used-up air, healthy people just breathe it right out – but his heart can't work with the poison still there, you see the problem? That's why I couldn't get anywhere with Healing, either. I thought, maybe if there were a way to completely replace the heart for a while – and they can do that! They put tubes into the great vessels in his body - they'll go through the groin, where they split, but the tubes are long, they reach further up - and they use a pump to take the blood out and...put it through artifice-lungs? I think I need to see that part to understand what he meant...but they clear the used-up air and and fill it with vital air instead and and pump it back around, like his heart normally would. So he won't die, even if he's not really alive either, and getting all the used-up air out of his blood will make it less acidic, and they can - counterbalance? - the other problem by giving him a different kind of salt that's the opposite of acidic.: Sandra had a word for that in Valdemaran and Shavri has forgoooootten it and it's driving her up the wall. :And then once his body is less poisoned, Stabilize should work, and then you can do a Cure and a Lesser Restoration and...it won't get everything but it should get him to 'not dying' while they figure out what else is wrong.: 

This planet is amazing. This specific part of it might now be Shavri's favorite place ever.

According to Marian's paper, it was 9:51 am when Dr Harrison announced they were trying ECMO. 

They have it fully connected and running by 10:07, which - based on the mutters and looks of incredulity shared among some of her 6C colleagues who got dragged in - Marian is led to believe is incredibly, astoundingly fast to accomplish from a totally unprepared start on a unit that doesn't do it routinely, and was probably only possible thanks to their new resident magic healer with CT vision to supplement the ultrasound guidance. It's still 20 minutes of CPR, and they can't stop yet, they need to titrate up the flow slowly and it won't be enough to support his entire circulation even at max if his heart is doing literally nothing. It's meant to help patients out with heart failure on top of respiratory issues, for actual open-heart surgery or whatever they do full cardiopulmonary bypass. Which they didn't want to risk here because, among other concerns, the injury-healing cleric magic might well consider 'open-heart surgery' an injury in need of healing and no one wants to test what would happen. 

...It's really cool but it hasn't actually worked yet and Marian's main emotion right now is overwhelm about all the FUCKING CHARTING. Eleanor from 6C saw Marian charting for the code and seems to have assumed this is her patient and taken it upon herself to patiently walk Marian through the 58327627 flowsheets she needs to populate. Okay, fine, that's exaggerating, but there are literally sixteen pages to chart on "Ninety-Three, Purple" which is now the patient's name in their system. 

They did it! 

...Is it working??

...Well, the life-force is getting substantially brighter, after having leveled out for the last fifteen minutes. It's still completely scattered. 'Not enough life-force' is a problem but it's not the reason why Samora's spells aren't landing, Samora's spells could fix that. 

:He's still showing up, right?: Shavri asks Samora for about the thirtieth time over the last sixteen minutes. 

Nothing Samora has is designed to deliver its healing any slower than "instantaneously", which is great when you're in combat but inconvenient here. Fortunately the Earth folks have so much incredibly cool nonmagical healing! (Aroden would have loved this.) (She wants Golarion to have it.)

"Yup, still there," she answers for the thirtieth time. Stabilize?

Nnnooooot yet. 

Can they get another blood gas to see if it’s working.

No! Or, like, fine, if he insists, but it’s been less than two minutes, they’re not even up to the goal flow rate yet, it won’t have changed very much! 

FINE he’s going to harass Shavri instead for Healing-Sight updates in real time. 

If he desperately needs to feel busy he could consider helping the nurses but he’s a resident so he’s not going to do that, is he

Shavri is staring intently.

….It’s really incredibly cool that they can do this and it does, in fact, look like it’s doing a vaguely successful job of artificially replacing the essential vital functions that Leareth’s body cannot handle right now. But that’s not the same as actually getting back any coherent life-force patterns that Shavri can hook her Gift into properly.

She’s going to keep trying, it currently feels very stupid to her that she doesn’t actually…know how…to solidly anchor a Healing-link to anything except the “loop” of a heartbeat, surely there’s got to be something she can link to. There’s getting to be a reasonable amount of life-force brightness! Well, a tiny fraction of what he should have but compared to before. Just, still completely fragmented and not at all operating as a coherent system.

(Shavri includes Samora in her update and also the other young woman she met first whose name she never successfully got, she seems to be responsible for writing things down. It would never have occurred to Shavri to assign a specific person to just doing that but it’s actually kind of brilliant, especially when things are this spectacularly complicated.)

Marian and Eleanor are currently working through yet another checklist which was, uh, supposed to be completed and signed off before they went ahead and connected the circuit and definitely not five minutes later. 

:Thanks: she thinks back at Shavri, but she does not have any boxes in the electronic medical record flowsheet to put any of that so what exactly is she supposed to do with it.

Samora is frowning contemplatively about the difficulty of getting Earth medicine to Golarion. It's not just the number of giant machines, it's that there are multiple different types of trained people involved in operating each one, and even if Samora was confident in her ability to absorb one person's worth of training and willing to stay on earth long enough for it she definitely can't absorb ten. (Stabilize.) And then building and maintaining the machines takes yet more people. And the closest thing she has right now to a plan for getting back to Golarion at all is only one way. (Stabilize.) Even if she founds a church here and enough other clerics get picked that someone will probably get Plane Shift eventually, that won't be enough for the kind of regular trade she's expecting to need for Absalom and Vigil to have hospitals like this one. (Detect Evil. Stabilize.) Iomedae, this is a point where a small change can shift the course of many things; help me find the decisive blow that breaks the stalemate and shifts the equilibrium. Abadar, there is so much value here that can be exchanged, make straight the road so that traders may walk it and reach each end richer than they set out. (Stabilize.)

Shavri discusses with Dr Chadra and during a pause in compressions (the fancy artifice is indeed not really generating enough circulation by itself but it makes pauses less costly) she gets herself aimed and whacks Leareth’s heart with as much Healing-energy as she can cram into a single split-second bolt.

It gets a blip on the monitor and someone actually squeaks and then…nothing happens, to the deep disappointment of everyone who was actually paying attention to that specifically.

….You know what else has a kind of cycling energy-loop! Lungs! And this doesn’t actually depend on the patient providing the breathing impetus themselves, it’s pretty intrinsic in the pattern of filling and emptying the lungs.

Shavri can get a link to it!!!! It’s a very tenuous link and it’s not really in the right place but she can squeeze some slightly more targeting Healing-energy into him, and it doesn’t all instantly fall out the bottom, and maybe there’s a trace of catching in his blood and reaching his heart….

10:15 am.

10:20 am. It’s now been more than thirty minutes. It’s a really good thing that Samora’s magic is so good at injuries, Marian thinks, this poor guy probably doesn’t have a single intact rib left.

She documents the results of another blood gas. It’s…less…horrifying…? They’ve probably done incredibly concerning things to his sodium levels by giving him like ten amps of bicarb, but his blood gas level is up to 11 and his CO2 is down to 69 which, like, Marian sees that number all the time with COPD patients, and his pH is about 6.8 now.

Stabilize doesn’t land and it doesn’t land and it doesn’t land and then it DOES!!!!

:Stop something went through I need to—: Shavri sends to the nurse doing compressions.

They have an electrical rhythm! It’s extremely fucked-looking and really looks like it should decay back to a non-rhythm in five seconds, but it…doesn’t somehow.

Samora saw that right!!!! It worked it worked it worked it might not stay working very much longer he’s kind of continuously being injured from the inside by whatever is horribly wrong with him - 

Cure Moderate Wounds!!! He probably has room for a Serious but she wants to hang on to  that last Remove Disease as long as possible.

It lands!!!!

Shavri has the simultaneous realizations that: 

One: she really should have thought to warn Samora that the thing where clerics in Golarion - and, she's inferred from Blai, other spellscasters - gain an absurd amount of extra life-force as they get more experienced, is not a thing in Velgarth, and Leareth can't benefit from the extra positive energy in anything stronger than the weakest Cure spell. 

Two: she should have thought!! about what to do!! if it worked!!! She did not think to warn anyone of the obvious thing Leareth might do if this works well enough to get him conscious and he abruptly wakes up in an unfamiliar and kind of terrifying place, which is to GATE OUT. She knows this because it's the source of their ENTIRE PROBLEM and she still forgot!! 

Then arguably it's fortunate that the spell doesn't work incredibly well!

It lands. It gets...a substantial amount...of the most acute-injury-like damage, including everything that's imminently life-threatening. But it's...not just that the metaphorical 'cup' for holding life-force is too small to capture all that positive energy, it's also still badly cracked enough that most of the remaining energy doesn't even have a chance to do anything before it spills away. 

The single most important part is that, three seconds ago, Leareth's heart had an electrical rhythm but was having a bit of a time actually moving blood. There was an enormous amount of direct injury to the heart muscle, and Stabilize somehow got it to beat anyway but not well. The Cure gets...some amount...of that. Not nearly all, less than half, even of the damage that looks like the same 'kind' to Shavri, maybe because the untargetable-by-a-Cure damage meant he couldn't absorb enough of the positive energy. But his heart is beating and seems like it's going to keep doing that!

It's not a normal electrical rhythm. The spell seemed to only target some of the Leareth's-body-poisoning-itself problem, and of that it only hit a fraction, and meanwhile the unaddressed injury means that the electrical conduction in his heart would be screwy even with perfect electrolytes and blood pH. He's still in some kind of horrible wide-complex ventricular escape rhythm, just...a surprisingly functional one. He has a blood pressure! They can get a pulse oximetry reading! Neither of them are incredibly delightful numbers but they are, at least, "this patient is alive" numbers. 

He doesn't move or show any sign of waking up. 

Shit what if that means the damage to his brain is somehow the wrong kind and Samora won't be able to fix it! 

Shavri gets her Sight over there as fast as she can and...oh, that could definitely be worse. She pushes it at Dr Chadra. The structure is mostly normalish-looking and there's circulation. There's a lot of something wrong, some kind of low-level generalized damage just like everywhere else, and there's inflammation and some swelling from it. He's not imminently dying of it and it looks like a lot of what's wrong should, in theory, be targetable if they can get his body to hold onto life-force or Healing-energy or positive energy or any of the things, but it's not at all surprising he's still unconscious. 

They should try Lesser Restoration? But, uh, possibly first Shavri should explain the Gate thing. 

She includes Samora and Marian. :He's still unconscious, so we don't need to worry about it yet, but - Samora's healing is instantaneous, which means he might at some point go straight from unconscious to Gate-capable. Last time he woke up injured and disoriented he Gated out on instinct. If he does that now it would be....bad.: 

How in the planes do you end up with combat instincts for Gate. 

Well, she already knew Shavri was a very strange and impressive type of caster from somewhere not Golarion.

"Is he the kind where tying his hands and sticking something in his mouth will stop him from casting? Also whether we do that or not you should stand where he can see you so he doesn't think he's been taken prisoner by  necromancers." Ask her how she knows.

Taken prisoner by what– nevermind. 

:Unfortunately that doesn't stop our mages: or else it would be a nonissue because he already has a thing stuck in his mouth that will thoroughly prevent him from speaking. :I can make sure I'm where he can see me but he doesn't actually know my face and he might not recognize the Healers' robes if he's disoriented enough. I'll be Mindspeaking him to explain, obviously, but we've never met and it's possible it would just alarm him more.: 

If they're worried he's going to wake up combative they should just sedate him first???? Like, there are risks to doing that when his blood pressure is kind of crap already, but they're hoping more Samora-healing will fix whatever's causing that to still be the case, right, and at the very least Stabilize should work again if he attempts to die on them. "Guy who tries to portal himself out while attached to an ECMO machine" is not specifically a genre of fighty patient Marian has encountered before, but lots of people are fighty about the whole being-in-the-ICU-with-tubes-in-them situation and there's a known solution to this problem! 

She still isn't sure how to properly telepathy-reply but she'll try to shove that at the telepathic healer. 

Shavri has managed to pick up that they have some kind of bizarre separate-chains-of-command situation where Marian cannot just make decisions about what to do without consulting the trainee-senior-Healer. She can bounce their discussion to Dr Chadra. 

Yes obviously if they're considering doing any healing that might cause their guy to suddenly wake up then he should be sedated and paralyzed first. Hopefully they'll conclude he doesn't need to be on ECMO anymore and they can wean him off it in a controlled fashion and then let him wake up. 

...They can do what. Is that...safe...? 

What, chemical paralysis? Yeah it's totally safe as long as someone's already on a ventilator, they do it all the time. 

Okay but is is strictly speaking necessary if he's not conscious anyway, because that sounds incredibly terrifying Shavri is not going to argue.

She conveys to Samora that they have a plan to make sure Leareth doesn't wake up and do anything he shouldn't, and she should wait until then to cast - how many Lesser Restorations does she have? And how many remaining spells that can be turned into Cure spells? Shavri's inclination would be to hit him with everything they can, Lesser Restorations first and hope it lets him hold life-force better and then another Cure once he can benefit more from it. But if Samora is running low on those, then - he's still steadily leaking life-force, and she knows Lesser Restoration didn't fix that for the other patients, so he's going to keep leaking and it sounds like dawn was not that many hours ago and they have a lot of today and tonight to get through before Samora can get more spells and they might need to keep it to, like, the bare minimum he needs to stay alive. 

"I have four Remove Sickness and a Comprehend Languages I can convert to Cure Light. Two Lesser Restorations and a reserved slot I can prep a third one into in fifteen minutes, any of those can swap to Cure Moderate. One Remove Disease that I'd like to hold onto and try to use on an actual disease, but if we need a Cure Serious it's there. And then one reserved fourth circle slot I can use for Cure Critical Wounds, or for another Remove Disease, or for Restoration if there's diamond dust available which we hadn't fully figured out yet. And three channels but those would ideally be arranged to get multiple people. I can do a Lesser Restoration now but it's not even noon yet I don't think, so if we want to space them out evenly I could do now dusk midnight and then an hour after dawn tomorrow?"

Oh right she still hasn't explained. :There's not going to be much point to the Cures more powerful than what you're calling Cure Light. People from our world don't have the - extra life-force capacity? - that spellcasters from your world seem to get, even if they're very powerful and experienced.:

Pause: :- Definitely use both Lesser Restorations now, or rather after the healers say they're ready for that. That isn't what I wanted to space out. He's got barely any of - the thing our cleric was calling Endurance? - but it's very recent damage, I think Lesser Restoration ought to put it back, and we can keep one in reserve. And then probably burn the Comprehend Languages for a Cure now, I can just translate with Mindspeech anyway if there would be a need for that, and that leaves us with up to four more to spread through the day– er, remind me what Remove Sickness does? I'm not sure if it's going to be directly useful...: 

Samora has fourth circle spells!!!! That probably changes a lot of things but Shavri needs more breathing space to think about it, she'd been forming her own mental plan entirely around Blai only having up to third circle. 

"I can do that. Remove Sickness makes it easier to recover from diseases and if you're nauseous it makes you not nauseous for a little over an hour. I've been expecting to turn them all into Cures." Do the other Earth medics look like it's a good time for the Lesser Restorations now?

(She has, and then tosses aside, the thought that if Leareth starts attacking people once he's healthy the lack of adventurer vitality will help her odds of stopping him. Most Evil people are saner than the ones she's been dealing with under the Gauntlight.)

(Given everyone else's symptoms, something to fix nausea might be a little bit helpful, but it's only an hour, and it's not critical, they can keep him well-hydrated regardless - which is so useful!!!!! - and whether Leareth is comfortable is currently very far from the top of Shavri's priority stack.) 

Dr Chadra would like to see this guy try to cast a portal spell while on 50 mcg/kg/min of propofol and a 100 mcg/kg loading dose of vecuronium plus an infusion at 50 mcg/kg/hour. 

"...Ummm yeah now would be a good time for more healing." His blood pressure really hates it, despite the fact that they've given him at least 15 doses of epinephrine over the last however-long. Marian is briefly filled with a mental image of all of that hitting him at once and him literally turning into the Hulk or something. 

Lesser Restoration! Does it do anything, either to his face or to the beeping Earth machines' symbols?

Marian thinks he looks better! It's the kind of thing where she has no idea what she's noticing, specifically, but it's gone from "she would be incredibly freaked out and frantically trying to summon help if she were alone in the room with him" to "well, it's not great, but he's really only around 80th percentile on Concerning Vibes."

It's also definitely helping with his vital signs! Not the part where he's still in some kind of truly bizarre wide-complex rhythm – it's at, like, 90 bpm, which would be a perfectly sensible and unsurprising heart rate if he were in sinus rhythm, but it's insanely fast to be an idioventricular escape rhythm and not nearly fast enough to be V-tach, what even is that. But - with a lot of additional help from the ECMO, admittedly - it's producing an art line blood pressure reading of 103/63 which is actually a lot higher than the bare minimum she's looking for. O2 sat reading at 97%! That could still be mostly the ECMO and not him but it's a happy number. She likes that number. 

It's a drastic improvement on Healing-Sight! It's a little bit complicated to compare, because Randi had no injuries – a channel would never have done anything for him at any point, she doesn't think – and Leareth has an awful lot of injurylike things wrong with him even if they're not visible to the naked eye, but...the part where some kind of fundamental underlying stamina for being alive is draining away is very recognizable. Leareth...looked about as badly off on that particular aspect as Randi did before his first Lesser Restoration. (And would have died of it a lot faster with only her efforts, because he's also injured and barely had any capacity to absorb or benefit fro Healing; Randi probably had weeks, but even a moderate injury - a fall down some stairs and a broken hip, say - would have finished him off within a day.) 

Anyway, just like with Randi, it hasn't brought him anywhere near back to normal but the relative difference is almost absurd. It's easy tripled his total capacity to hold life-force and tolerate Healing. 

...It didn't do much for the injuries, of course, and it didn't touch the ongoing life-force drain. She knew that already, though, it was the same for Nayoki. 

They have...five?...total Cures that won't come at the cost of stronger spell slots. If she assumes dawn was four hours ago, that's twenty hours - no, twenty-one, the prayer itself takes time - one every four hours. 

She's...not sure that Leareth right now could hold onto enough of the positive energy from a channel to get him through four hours. 

:I think he'd benefit a lot from one more: she sends to Samora. 

He can have another Lesser Restoration, then, and probably she should immediately follow it up with a Cure Light while he's most able to benefit from it, does that sound right to Shavri?

Yes, that's Shavri's thought! It probably doesn't matter much if it's within literally six seconds, she thinks he's going to re-accumulate the damage that the Lesser Restoration addressed but it's a lot slower than the life-force draining out of all the metaphorical cracks in him. 

It really doesn't seem physically possible for him to wake up and try to portal out of here on this much sedation, but apparently Marian is going to be anxious about that possibility anyway!

Positive energy: it solves like 20% of all problems. Minus one Comprehend Languages, plus one Cure Light Wounds.

Okay that was more like it!!!!!!!

...He's still worse off than anyone else looked when she left. Not, specifically, in ways that are going to kill him that much faster? The worst element is the life-force drain and he's...not, actually, leaking faster than the others were. His brain looks okay. Structurally, at least, she's not a Mindhealer and she has no idea if there are subtler problems that will affect his mental functioning. 

There's definitely a lot of other damage they didn't get, damage that has more in common with what was wrong with Randi than with an injury. Some kind of inflammatory nerve damage in particular, she's sure some of that was happening with the others but...Leareth got most of the way to dead, he really should be dead, and it's a lot more advanced, and apparently a Cure doesn't fix it. He's going to have a lot of trouble moving his limbs on purpose even once he's awake and not paralyzed. (And they should not arrange for this to happen in that order! It's very important that it should be the other order!) 

...Also his lungs are surprisingly problematic! Shavri had really thought most of the problem was them having spent more than thirty minutes pounding on his chest as hard as possible, on top of whatever direct injury the attack inflicted, but...there is definitely a non-injury problem in there.

(Shavri is thinking out loud to Samora and Marian and Dr Chadra and honestly anyone else who seems like they might hold still for it. She's having a lot of thoughts very fast and they don't want to stay trapped in her head.)

....It looks like an infection, actually, ohhhhhh, that makes perfect sense, Leareth was alone and slowly losing consciousness and also suffering from a problem that they know caused severe nausea for everyone else, yeah it's not surprising at all that he got a bunch of it in his lungs. The Cure fixed all the direct tissue damage but it doesn't get diseases, and that's a surprisingly severe pneumonia for it having been less than two hours, but there was a whole period when his body's defenses were totally down. The lungs have various active processes for getting rid of things that should not be in them and they weren't doing any of that for a while. 

They have a Remove Disease but that's a particularly expensive spell and she'd love to hear other ideas. 

Oh they should definitely put him on alll the antibiotics. And then maybe wait a while and see how much difficulty it's actually causing him? If his lungs are in enough trouble that they can't get him off the ECMO at all, it's probably worth a third circle spell up front to address that, but if he just needs ventilator support for a few days while the antibiotics work, that's fine. There are almost certainly other patients in the hospital who aren't likely to die of an infection today but a Remove Disease could still get them from a 50% chance of leaving the hospital alive to a lot better than that. He's definitely nervous about doing anything other than the maximum they can possibly do for this guy, so...ideally they would keep it in reserve as long as possible in case he does need it today? But he might not, it seems like having an infection isn't nearly at the top of his list of problems by severity. 

(Leareth is going to HATE the tube for helping him breathe, Shavri is pretty sure, so it's not entirely "fine", but...he probably wouldn't want her to prioritize that over maybe saving someone else's life even if it's the probabilistic kind of saving-a-life. She's happy with that plan.) 

"Uh, is Remove Disease more likely to work if you use it early? I remember you said there's a failure chance but I'm not sure if anything affects that or if it's, like, random?" 

"I've never heard of any patterns in it other than some diseases being harder to get rid of--scarlet leprosy is especially difficult, diarrhea is especially easy, that sort of thing. Which doesn't mean there aren't any, but if I had to guess it'll be as good odds tonight as now."

:I’m inclined to wait: Dr Chadra tells Shavri. :But do tell us right away if you see significant deterioration. For now, we’ll leave everything exactly as it is and recheck labs in an hour.:

Shavri has plenty to do but just holding a link and monitoring him with Sight doesn’t take her full attention, and right now Shavri feels a desperate need to be fully occupying her brain with something useful at all moments.

Marian is clearly busy and will resent a conversation but Samora doesn’t seem busy at all!

:I’m curious what you know about how the healing spells work?: she asks. :I never had a chance to get into it much with our cleric, there was an - emergency that wasn’t mostly healing related - more or less the entire time. Or I can answer questions about how our healing works, if you’re curious!:

"It sounds like you know a lot more about your healing than I do about mine; I mostly fight things. Is your healing the sort of thing anyone can learn, or is it inborn or from a god?"

:Inborn! Or, rather, potential is inborn, and sometimes it awakens but we're not sure of the conditions for that. And it has to be learned – I mean, even entirely self-taught Healers will usually figure out how to do basic things without killing their patients, but without any instruction they probably will kill at least one patient in the process of figuring it out, and only genuine prodigies can get very far that way. With training, though, there's - I don't know that there is a limit to how complicated the things you can do are, though there's a limit to how much Healing a given patient can take at once, because even with a really skilled Healer, almost all of it works through the existing pathways for natural healing in a patient's body, and some of the energy has to come from them. I'm mostly avoiding doing any direct Healing on our guy, other than holding a link, because I don't think he would have much stamina for it right now.: 

How does their guy look now? 

Not worse! Like, really terrible, but not deteriorating fast enough that Shavri can see a difference from three minutes ago. 

She'll take it!