Physically I am fine. This ability is really, really useful. My companions are not. That Geller fellow was gracious enough to share some potions with us before he left, so I have been able to put two more of them into Karolina, but she has not woken up. I think her skull is broken.
I have conjured some furniture and shelter. In fact I even dared leaving them under the guard of my robotic assistant to leave a word with the priestess and the adventurers to direct Zora and Lidija to us. Russell is taking their skimmer over land towards the place I described just in case. They have given me even more potions. Yet I have to face reality, we are a failure. Our mission was to hunt for potions. We have used up more of them.
What did we do wrong? In hindsight, that is easy to answer. We did not consider that monsters could be everywhere and attack at all times, not just when we hunt them. In addition some monsters can dig and hide beneath the ground. We thought we could have an introspective deep talk on the way to some gruesome yet controlled hunting, like big game hunters of yore in Africa, where we incidentally actually do happen to be. Hubris came before the fall. I suppose this will be a good lessson. Right now it is dread wondering what I will do if my patients go into a crisis. Well, let’s be honest, I will use yet another potion. I dread what would happen if that potion were to fail to do its job. And I have a secret desire to chuckle remembering the fact that some great-grandmother’s husband of mine fought in East Africa in Word War One and actually was a hunter of big game. I need to find a way to exchange hindsight for foresight, even if the exchange rate is bad.
In fact am I repeating my mistake by musing about such questions while I should be standing watch?
Nevertheless I notice the dust rising in the distance just fine. It turns out to be caused by the skimmer Russel Clouns and Dean Tuckell are riding in on.
RC: Let me have a look at them.
He has a kind of crystal with a loop of fabric attached affixed to his head like an eye patch, looking like a kind of new age pirate attempting to do crystal healing to another ship he met on the high seas.
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RC: Some kind of induced shock …
He switches to Karolina.
RC: Classical blunt trauma. Who on the controls, when the collision happened?
P: He was.
RC: That figures. He will wake up and recover without intervention.
P: What about her?
RC: She will need a healer.
P: She is the healer!
RC: I am aware of the conundrum. Yet waking her up would quite likely kill her. It would be a measure of last resort.
There go our last potions. I don’t like it, but I don’t have to like it.
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I used to think that detecting people about to arrive by a dust cloud is an urban myth out of cowboy movies. Here I have learned better.
L: She is going to make it. I had to use my big ritual, but it worked.
PN: Thank you from the bottom of my heart
Z: She was lucky that we returned early. We have looted potions and an awakening stone.
Whether my aura or my face or both are giving me away I cannot tell.
Z: So we are back where we started in terms of potions. In addition we have lost the use of a vehicle. And one of us will take days to recover. Is that a correct summary?
Sometimes silence is an answer.
Z: Do we need to do anything at all?
PN: Imagine it were you or your children in that fortress.
We are getting good at this answering by silence act.
Z: We have to be realist. We do not have a lab for research, we have no way to isolate infected people.
L: How about the cave under the lake?