When morning came and Titus roused, Iris was shocked to learn she had been asleep for nearly three days -- save for the one occasion when she had awoken, blipped, and promptly collapsed. The Gaping Maw was once again sailing across Giantrock Lake, even as repairs from the battle were still underway. According to Titus, the crew was still on high alert for further conflict with the mermaids, but opinions were varied about whether or not they would attack again.
Interestingly, there was an open bounty on Gerald the fish, who had apparently escaped during the battle. The captain was convinced he was still aboard the ship, for reasons that eluded everyone, and had promised double wages to the person who found and recaptured him. Iris was somewhat surprised to learn that the rest of the crew was getting paid wages while she was only getting room and board, but soon supposed that made sense. Most of the crew were, after all, skilled and experienced sailors – or at least had otherwise valuable skills. Apparently Victoria had been assigned to Gerald duty, and spent most of her days floating up and down through the ship in search of him.
After catching Iris up on the goings-on around the ship, Titus explained her physical condition.
"Simply put, you lost all your blood."
"All of it?" Iris's jaw fell open.
"Not literally all of it," Titus corrected, "but a lot. Like, really, a lot. Healing magic works wonders to close wounds and keep people alive, but it causes all kinds of other damage in the process -- burned veins, overstressed muscles, that kind of thing. The worse the wound, the worse the damage. Your body then has to heal that damage on its own, but blood is a pretty important part of that process, so your body has to replenish your blood before it can really get to work healing. That's why you've been asleep so long, your body is focusing on repairing itself instead."
"I guess that makes sense, why the bandages though?"
"Well, that's where it gets kind of tricky," Titus sighed, "without going into a lecture about it, several of your organs were damaged, and they don't heal the same way that regular flesh does. Not only do they take a lot more magic, they also don't heal instantly. They soak up a bunch of the magic, and then take their time using it to heal. That's fine, as long as they're full of magic they'll typically keep working while they heal. The problem is that when they're severely damaged, they can't hold as much magic as they need to heal, so as the process unfolds and the magic inside an organ gets used up, it starts sucking in magic from the surrounding tissue."
Titus paused to make sure Iris seemed to be following him, and then continued, "basically, even though magic heals surface wounds instantly, it's kind of temporary. The body still has to do a lot of the fine work of repairing the wound on its own, the magic just holds it together and keeps your blood inside while that happens. That part has a lot to do with why magically healed wounds will remain sore and swollen for a while afterwards, it's because your body's still doing work in the area. But, if you take that magic out before the body's done, the wound can reopen. So, in your case, your organs are using up the magic I put in them, then soaking up the magic from your flesh, and causing the wounds the reopen."
"Wait," Iris interjected, "does that mean if you healed someone, you could pull the magic back out of them to undo the healing?"
"I can't, no. Some people can, though. I've seen some mana draining abilities cause that if used on freshly healed wounds. It's a popular torture technique, actually – it’s pretty gruesome stuff."
"Yeah," Iris agreed, "why can't you just keep adding more magic though?"
"I have been, but there are limits on what your body can handle. Not to mention that you're not my only patient, and there's not exactly a bell that rings when it happens. Now that you're awake you can let me know if you feel the wounds reopen -- and trust me, you'll feel it -- but while you slept, the bandages gave me some peace of mind that you at least wouldn't bleed out if I looked away for a minute."
"Or nodded off for a few hours?" she asked with a smirk.
Titus chuckled slightly, and then sighed, "it's been a long few days."
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"Speaking of, how much longer am I bedridden?" Iris asked.
"Oh, I'd say two or three weeks."
"Weeks?!" she shouted.
Titus held up his hands defensively, "I'm kidding! You'll be good to start walking around tomorrow, but I'm not clearing you for crew duties for at least another few days."
"I guess that's not so bad," Iris sighed, "it'll give me some time to read."
For much of the day, Iris did exactly that. She started some of the manuscripts Milo had given her and requested she pass on to someone important. Several of the articles were story pieces about local events in Giantrock City, such as the time the questing hall developed a slime infestation that grew so severe, so quickly, that the whole building was boarded up while adventurers went in to exterminate. The slimes, however, had other ideas, and responded to the adventurers' attack not by fighting back, but by oozing through the cracks of the building and out onto the city streets to flee into nearby homes and businesses – leading to a week-long, city-wide slime crisis. Iris wondered if that's how that nice old lady she met had ended up with a pet slime.
Another story told of the arrival of mysterious masked agents in the city, occasionally spotted accompanying high ranking city and Adventuring Corps officials at closed door government meetings. It was a rather short story, citing a tip from an anonymous source, and ending with the question of "who are these strange figures, and what are their intentions with our city?" The story was dated just a few weeks before Iris and her party had arrived in the city, and made no mention of Morose. There was also a handwritten note scrawled in the margins, which read "barred from publication by order of the Mayor General. What don't they want us to know?"
Though Iris quite enjoyed the unique insights to the city's recent history, the articles she found the most impressive were quite different. Rather than short stories about current events, these were long -- often several pages -- and discussed things such as the intricate mechanisms of the printing press and the history of its construction, or the movements and patterns of the stars and moons in the sky.
Of these, the one that Iris found the most intriguing was an article titled "The Moving Stars: Actually other worlds?" and described a few stars that seemed to meander and wander across the night sky relative to their firmly stationary relatives. Iris had spent quite some time in her life stargazing, and had noticed a few of these moving stars herself, but never thought much about it. According to Milo's article, however, the motions of the stars was not only predictable, but remarkable consistent, citing several scholarly papers throughout the centuries that documented repeated movements that can still be observed today. The article went on to explain that these movements, when thoroughly mapped out, revealed a pattern that could be best explained by distant worlds somehow moving in a complex dance with their own through something called “the aether.”
Eventually, Iris grew tired of reading -- something that only happened on the most boring of days, when she had more time than she knew what to do with. She moved on to practicing her abilities instead, hoping to squeeze out the final experience points she needed to level up. Her options were limited, however, as Titus had made it explicitly clear she wasn't to leave her bed until he approved it. She settled for pulling a small pebble from her bag and blipping it across the room, attempting to quickly blip it back into her hand before it hit a wall or dropped to the floor.
She soon graduated to two pebbles, confirming that she could in fact blip multiple objects at once. It only took a few tries -- and a few dropped pebbles -- to get the hang of it, but when she added a third pebble it became sufficiently difficult to pose a challenge. Blipping all three pebbles from her hand was trivial, but getting them all to appear in the same place was much more difficult. The pebbles often scattered in all directions, allowing her to only "catch" one or two before the others hit a wall or fell to the floor. It was certainly easier to blip the pebbles back into her hand the closer they were together, though she sensed there was progress to be made in both getting them to appear closer together, and in blipping them back with greater distance between them.
It soon evolved into a little game that she played for herself, with a scoring system of her own design. After a little bit of coaching, she managed to teach Abby how to write tally marks on a page of her journal with a tentacle wrapped around a quill like a toddler's fist when they're first learning to write, and after a while longer Abby learned to properly interpret the scores based on how many pebbles Iris successfully retrieved. Surprisingly to Iris, Abby seemed remarkably capable of understanding not just addition, but multiplication, which allowed a rule that multiplied the score by the number of pebbles blipped. This game occupied the rest of her day, and by the evening she had only seen a miniscule gain of experience points, but she was thankful that it occupied her mind enough to keep her thoughts off of her injuries.
IRIS ORION
Hero Rank, Level 11
Experience Points: 9055 / 9420
Progress to next level: 96.12%