Chapter 363: Castle Pancakes |
[I believe she has been here the entire time,] Grotto thought in response to my question. [The Mercury United had a potent suite of mental effects, at least one of which was an empowered form of Distracted. It kept us focused on him to the exclusion of all others and may have prevented us from considering whether he had nearby allies at all.]
“Such would explain why I did not notice his entire brood until they were upon us,”Shog added.
The woman wasn’t doing much, so I did a quick check in with my group. “Are you all okay?” I asked. “Is Etja?”
[Once I realized what was happening, Shog was more than quick enough to remove us from danger. The Heroism spell requires physical contact, but your deranged state coupled with our soul connection made it trivial for me to use Commandment. It allowed me to work without tempting you to bludgeon me.]
“What was the command?”
[I simply instructed you to believe I did not exist for the few seconds needed to purge you of foreign influence. Similar to what the United appeared to be doing.]
I thought back on the experience. It wasn’t as clean as Grotto was making it out to be, but I also didn’t want to linger on the potential oopsies a berserker Arlo could have made had his familiar not possessed a conditional Cleanse effect.
Instead, I turned my attention back to our mystery guest.
I was somewhat conflicted on how to approach her. She looked like a young Geulon woman who was going to die of blood loss if no one intervened in the next couple of minutes. She also looked like one of Mustachio’s allies, and her soul had the tell-tale weirdness of a United.
Come to think of it, how could we double tap a diffuse spray of mercury that had been banished into the void? I glanced at my notifications in case the System wanted to absolve me of the responsibility for making sure the guy was actually slain.
There was a notification, but it didn’t include the word slain. I read the first three words and closed back out of it.
You have defeated–
Defeated.
I made sure the new influx of annoyance I was feeling wasn’t a hostile mental effect, then pulled a duffel filled with normal-ass medical supplies from my inventory. I was making the executive decision to add a new rule: When in doubt, save the girl.
We could have a matching rule for guys, but that didn’t sound as good and it wasn’t relevant for the moment.
As I floated down to meet the young woman, I began to process what she’d been saying. She never stopped speaking in rapid-fire Losonbinora, with only the barest lip service paid to the pauses that were traditionally a part of the language.
I mentally reviewed what she’d been saying while I’d checked in with my allies.
“A severed brachial artery will cause death by blood loss in as little as two minutes and I can’t stop the bleeding because I don’t know how and even if I did know then I only have one arm remaining and while I’m immune to some aspects of shock, the physiological symptoms would make the performance of complex medical procedures difficult when limited to one hand.”
Her voice was relatively normal, but it kept coming, even when she should be taking breaths. She also spoke with different tones based on the content of her words, with the earlier muttering being detached and clinical. A more emotive inflection presented itself immediately after.
“They told me that trying to help would be dangerous but I also thought it would be like the myths that I used to read to me. I didn’t think we’d die. I thought we’d struggle and maybe we’d have to suffer some but we’d win because we want what’s best and good always prevails, and maybe the idea of heroes and villains is naive and I’m stupid for thinking it but if I really thought the world could fall to evil then how could I ever be happy?”
Her tone swapped again to something more resigned as I floated closer.
“Bleeding to death might be the best outcome now that Salibar is dead and the Xor’Drel entity is approaching. I expect for him to kill me like every other United he’s come into contact with other than Charl, not that he didn't try to kill Charl but unlike him I don’t have any supernatural capabilities that improve the resilience or regeneration of my physical body. I also only have one body so–”
Her eyes flicked up, and she was suddenly talking to me instead of to herself. This was the most normal voice so far, although it made me more uncomfortable than all the rest.
“–if you plan to kill me then please just make it as painless as possible. I don’t like how cold I feel. I was cold before but this is different. It’s deeper. I think I’m going to pass out soon and I don’t think I’ll wake back up. I’m afraid and don’t want to be afraid as I die, I’d rather it just happen and be over with. I thought there’d be more to life. Please just make it quick and don’t interrogate me.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, putting my bag down and kneeling beside her. She was still talking. It didn’t seem like she was going to take a break anytime soon, so I was forced to talk over her. “Sorry, this will probably hurt, but in a helpful way.”
I reached over and carefully gripped her arm just above the stump. Her upper arm was slender enough that I could touch my middle finger to my thumb. It didn’t take much exertion for my grip to create a stopgap tourniquet, halting the blood flow while I opened my bag and searched for the real thing. I had to be careful not to cause more damage than I already had. If she was physically ordinary my hand might as well have been an industrial vice. The woman watched me work, still mumbling, but didn’t try to pull away.
I went through the triage I knew for a severed limb, which was more than I’d ever wanted to know after dealing with the aftermath of Krimsim. I had the woman lay back so I could keep her stump elevated, applied the tourniquet, and wrapped the wound with a sterile dressing. I had some healing tinctures from Nuralie, weak enough to be used on mundane people, but only in emergencies. They were still rough on their constitution, and in some cases could cause more harm than good. I hesitated to give it to this woman without having someone more qualified evaluate her, but I changed my mind once I considered the environment we were in.
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While the swarm of grenades had never detonated, the remnant mana of those devices still lingered despite their destruction. I’d also slung my fair share of spells around while fighting Mustachio. There was more than enough mana in here for an ordinary person to be showing symptoms of overexposure, but this woman seemed to be tolerating it well enough. Then I looked down at the alarming amount of blood that she’d lost. The puddle had started draining into the crater I’d made, leaving a long, messy trail down its side.
I went ahead and offered her the tincture.
“I’m not sure why you’re trying to keep me alive,” she said weakly, “but I hope it’s not so you can torture me for information later. Your behavior doesn’t conform to what I’ve been led to believe about you which is causing me some distress that would have been alleviated if what you were offering me was something gross, but I see it’s a highly diluted alchemical healing product so now I’m just more confused.”
She kept talking the entire time she was drinking the tincture. Swallowing barely affected her speech.
“You’re wondering whether me talking is the product of trauma and that’s a totally normal response, but this is just how I am and it doesn’t stop even when I sleep. I’m told that what I say in my sleep makes less sense, but can be pretty entertaining though and now I worry that I am rambling because of trauma. This is a dangerous situation and you’re a dangerous person. I should be focusing on surviving, not explaining my condition.
“Oh, I see you feel remorseful for injuring me with your attack while you were out of control because you’re predisposed to experiencing a higher sense of empathy for women and those younger than you which is slightly paternalistic and maybe a bit sexist but it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s interesting that you don’t feel guilty since it reveals that you have a more developed understanding of your internal motivations than most, although it’s possible that’s a form of self-deception.”
“Now that I think about it, if you wanted to torture me would torture be worse than this? I’m not sure I could handle anything worse than this. This is several times more pain than I’ve ever felt at once, even though three years ago I had a migraine that lasted for two months and I couldn’t tell anyone about it. That’s when I changed caretakers and when I took over I realized my diet was poor and after offering me some fruit my headache went away and that experience was really bad but not as bad as this.”
I nodded along as I tried to figure out whether the confusing perspective shift in the middle of her rambling was intentional or not. She took over for her old caretaker and offered herself some fruit? It may have meant she started taking care of herself, but she wouldn’t have offered herself fruit. She would have just eaten it.
I started to form an uncomfortable theory about whom this woman had been ‘united’ with.
“I am feeling better though, so I appreciate the demi-potion,” she continued, her words growing quieter. “It even had a nice berry flavor and that came from cubba berries which grow near the Eschen gap in Eschendur. I wonder if the Littans have been eating cubba berries since they invaded that part of the country.” She blinked, her eyes lingering closed for a second. “I bet they don’t know to remove the seeds before eating them and have a lot of diarrhea because of it.”
Her eyes fluttered shut, and she fell asleep. The potion didn’t have a sedative mixed in, but Nuralie had told me this was a common reaction. The body responded as though it had just received the most nutritious meal it had ever experienced, resulting in the patient experiencing an epic urge to nap.
I kept her arm elevated as I observed her for a minute. She kept mumbling, as promised. I didn’t think she was about to die, so I figured out a stretcher, working up something that would keep her stump raised. I took a few breaths, shook off the adrenaline from the last hour, and got Etja tucked into a different stretcher as well.
My inventory was loaded with random medical supplies, a minority of it from before Krimsim, but the majority from after the city-wide disaster. Most of Closetland’s supplies for that sort of thing were kept in my assigned inventory slots, preserved through stasis and accessible to me from anywhere.
Once that was done, I split Gracorvus and secured half of its plates beneath the stretchers, letting me hover them up off the ground and fly them down the tunnel. I hadn’t gotten the Geulon woman’s name, and as she kept talking in her sleep it sounded like she was narrating a dream. There were pancakes on top of a castle battlement, melting while someone who was both her aunt and childhood bully told her that she should never bake with unidentified berries. Then she fell off the battlement in slow motion, and that went on for a while.
“I’mmm faaaaaaalling, I’mmm faaaaaaalling, I’mmm faaaaaalling…”
She didn’t sound upset about it, just concerned.
“Why save this one?”asked Shog. “She is one of the enemy.”
“I don’t know that she is an enemy, Shog. It looked like she was working with Mustache Man, but I think she’s been misled about what’s going on here.”
[She is still a United.]
“Sure. As far as I can tell.”
Shog looked down at the woman as we flew towards the control center. It was close, but we were taking it slow with the injured woman in tow.
“If you did not see her as an enemy, then you did not need to ensure her death. That does not mean you were obligated to intercede. You could have left her to die, but you took her instead.” Shog turned his head from side to side.“You are keeping her in case she reveals herself as a threat.”
“No,” I said. “Well, I guess that’s a small part of it, but only as a background paranoid contingency thing. It was my spell that took off her arm, so I wasn’t going to leave her there to die, especially not if she’s a victim.”
“Your investment of time and attention hinders us in the short term. Do you believe our long-term survival is better optimized through her presence?”
I glanced over at the big c’thon as he tried to logic his way to empathy. “That’s very reductive, but I’ll give the answer partial credit.”
[Consider the feelings of those who care about this woman, Shog.] I turned to Grotto, the direction of the Core’s unexpected insight causing my eyebrows to rise. [There is no reason to antagonize those people if we do not need to. If she dies, her ‘loved ones’ might blame us, regardless of how illogical it would be. While her presence is an inconvenience, enduring that inconvenience may prevent a much larger inconvenience from materializing in the future.]
My eyebrows returned to normal as the Core’s full argument exposed that he hadn’t suddenly grown a conscience.
“I do not think uncertain retribution justifies the amount of care Slayer has shown her.”
[Her family may also be willing to reward us for her safe return with gifts, favors, or support.]
“Ahh, a ransom! Now it is clear to me.”
“We aren’t ransoming this woman,” I said.
[Agreed, that is in poor taste. We will not expressly condition her safe return on the payment of remuneration.]
“Nor will such a condition be implied.”
“I am confused once more.”
While the trip to the control center took only a couple of minutes, the clumsy attempts of my companions to develop a moral formula for my decisionmaking made it feel much longer. To be fair, they were both hitting on things that were true on some level, although it’s not like I’d performed a Machiavellian cost-benefit analysis to decide whether I should save the young woman’s life.
Finally, we reached the control center, where the depth of the shit we were in could be properly measured.
Turns out, it was quite deep.