I have asked that Askos focuses on healing until there is nothing else I can teach him, he begrudgingly accepted and agreed to not play the commander in this current exercise.
My apprentices didn’t manage to gain any kind of victory today, though they did come close on a couple occasions. Both of them have gotten better at avoiding being under fire and preventing their enemies from targeting them, which definitely helps keep them mobile enough to properly heal the soldiers that need to be healed.
Junior has gotten to the point where she can get a perfect mental map of someone’s body almost instantly. While Askos, on the other hand, is able to figure out what is wrong with a crowd of people in the same amount of time, less information gained from any one person but all of it is immediately relevant to keeping them alive.
Ultimately Askos would be better at dealing with a large scale emergency in the moment, but Junior would be better at dealing with the aftermath. Which is exactly what happened today.
There was an explosion in town, there was a large crowd of people coming to see some kind of play and the explosion happened in the middle of that. Five people were killed immediately, with several dozen injured. Askos and Junior happened to be nearby when it happened, close enough to hear it but not close enough to react immediately. Once they got to the scene Junior freaked out a little but managed to get to work on the most injured victims, while Askos was identifying the worst of the damage and organizing everyone to make treatment as smooth as possible, all while keeping the few on the verge of death alive with his own magic.
By the time I showed up to the scene everything was more or less under control, the perpetrator was caught and no one was at risk of dying. And so I let Askos, Junior, and a bunch of other healers take care of things, only making my presence known at the end to congratulate my apprentices on handling an emergency well.
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I learned a couple things watching them work. My apprentices are already a cut above the rest when it comes to healing, between their natural talent and my personal instruction they have grown very quickly. Askos has always had a cool head when dealing with emergencies, the situation with the poisoned child a while back proves as much. But before he lacked confidence, he was anxious and it showed in a bad way, now he organized the other healers with complete confidence. He didn’t always make the right call, he is still inexperienced, but having him make somewhat bad decisions and getting people to follow them was still better than no decisions being made.
If anything he did even better leading a small group of healers than he did leading an army the other day. Even my dad agrees, he would make a great adventurer.
The perpetrator turned out to be a very young child who has more raw talent than control, she wanted ice cream but her mother told her no so she threw a fit. The mother isn’t really able to restrain the child while the father, who is presumed to be a true immortal, is not in the picture. The mother basically just gave up the daughter at that point, I wasn’t there when it happened but from what I heard she just handed the child to the city official and stormed away in frustration.
As Par is on the front lines it fell upon Tiddol, me, and a number of other important people, including some of the scholars, to determine what was going to happen with the child. The mother is unreachable and the child has no other family who would be able to take her in. The general consensus was that we should build an orphanage, this isn’t the first time children have been left without parents but it is the first time there was no one we could give them too. Having orphans just live in the streets can only end badly, way too many of my dad’s stories involve orphans rising up and decapitating the government they were born into, I’m not the head but I am definitely the face. And even if that wasn’t the case, I don’t want my people to suffer any more than they have to.
During the discussions the scholars offered to run an orphanage school in the style of their order, assuming we build everything required and fund it. That wasn’t too difficult, we’re making enough money to more than pay for anything and we build more complex buildings in a couple days all of the time. It just fell on the scholars to get all of the materials that we couldn’t get and hire all of the staff required.
That meeting ended up taking my whole day, I got maybe half an hour to work on my current project. But whatever, it doesn’t matter too much. Building a device to help people type is hardly a time-sensitive issue while building an orphanage is. I just hope the scholars can teach the girl how to control her powers.
Anyway, Good NIght Diary.