Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound
1.3      Making a Splash
1.3.3    An Unrequited Love
1.3.3.23 Chrysalis

A main trunk aisle, three times the width of their barrow, led straight from the entry arch to a where three assistants stood behind a wide counter set up against the far wall. At its left end, a middle aged lady with a kindly face and half-moon spectacles was dealing with a queue of patients, using a set of brass scales to measure out their prescriptions. At its right end, there was a shorter but more impatient queue of what looked like journeymen; the timid young lad dealing with them was writing down their orders in a ledger so fast that his quill was just a blur, but most seemed full of their own importance and treated him like a cretin whose every entry must be double checked. In the middle of the counter, his arms crossed impassively, was a tall figure who seemed to be doing nothing but whom Kafana felt also missed seeing nothing - not even the lint in her pockets.

Was he a manager? Security? Ceiling-height display cabinets filled with samples gave the room a cavernous feel, where instead of crawl-ways between stalagmite-strewn caves there were pillars of polished oak that were split into ever more precise sub-categories by the canopy of increasingly narrow passages that split away from both sides of the trunk. Lots of small valuable items and short lines of sight - surely it would look like paradise to high level thief and conman - unless they were being guarded by suspicious people with equally high magic or other skills?

Kafana prepared herself to deal with a surprised and antagonistic reaction, and tried to decide which of the three it would be easiest to persuade that it was necessary for them to meet with Dottore himself.

But when they reached the counter, the most intimidating of the shop assistants took one look at them and at Pierrot where he lay on Bungo's cart, and then pre-empted her decision by stepping forwards. She followed his gaze as, without rushing, he took in the unbleached linen of Pierrot's baggy second-hand Messengers Guild uniform that had been stained grey with time; then the pristine white of the bandage wrapped around one gangly leg that drew attention to the strangeness of his knobbly joints; and then finally the pallor shrouding the vivacity of the face that Pierrot had learned to control so expressively and whose eyes hinted at some fear felt within each time he failed to stop a mute grimace of pain from intruding upon it. There wasn't a flicker on the assistant's own face, to betray his opinions. Kafana opened her mouth to ask.

She stepped back with the words unspoken, mouth still hanging open, as he surprised her by lifting open a section of the counter and motioning them to pass through the staff-only archway behind it. Bulgaria, never one to miss a cue, stepped forward to take the lead, giving the assistant a friendly nod in passing as if wheeling around wounded workers was just a boring everyday occurrence that of course nobody should bother commenting upon.

The noises of the city grew quieter as they entered a circular cloistered courtyard dominated by an immense fig tree, so ancient and twisted that it reminded her of a pair of wrestlers trying to strangle each other. The timid lad caught up with them a moment later and stammered something indecipherable. Then, looking annoyed at himself, he gently took one of Kafana's hands and guided her towards a timber-frame tower that tapered all the way up to a spire clad in burnished copper and a ring of bird perches and circular openings below it. By the time they had ascended a spiral ramp to the rune-inscribed laboratory on the second floor where Dottore met them, Kafana felt quiet inside too. Was she under an enchantment like the one protecting the Plaza of Peace? She didn't care.

Dottore remained still when they arrived but, other than the somber colour of his robes, Kafana was only certain of two things; that Dottore had known they were coming; and that he had picked which pose and place to await them with as much skill as a seasoned actor planning their marks, considering where on the stage they would be, how they'd be lit and what it would look like to the audience. Dottore was standing in front of a high arched window, looking out upon the twilit city with his back turned to them and yet, even before he delivered his opening line, she could tell the performance had started; the confidence and mystery that he managed to convey with just timing and posture was already framing him in the role of the authority, and them in the role of supplicants. Why did he feel such a strong need to be the one in control? Was he like a judge that's afraid of being ignored, or a lord that's afraid of being stolen from? Or was he afraid that harm might be caused by them questioning his veracity or status?

Still apparently preoccupied, Dottore continued to look away from them as he spoke in a contemplative tone, his words bouncing off the wall: "Yet again, Pierre?" "Iuvenis fugis dis aster!" "I said it, did I not?" "Yet listen, you did not, hmm?" "Well it is that your pack receives you back again; well again you will be, and that is our pact."

Kafana was stunned. Dottore had a richly rounded voice that most courtroom barristers would envy, and he had used it to enunciate each phrase, with a care usually reserved for grand addresses being recorded for posterity. Alas, each one was then followed by a stilted pause before Dottore continued onto his next phrase. Perhaps it was pride - perhaps he thought his words were so valuable that his generosity in gifting them to others deserving the recipients take enough time to appreciate their every nuance. Perhaps he wrote more often than he spoke, and had long since developed a habit of always checking his words. Either way, though, the effect was maddening!

She gritted her teeth until Dottore finally turned to face them and, in a changed tone, spoke directly to them: "Tempus est ut cogitationes mentis ad actionem corporis ducant."

She must have felt puzzled, because a moment later she received a whispered translation from the expert system she'd created to study Soul Bound in a depth she didn't have time for, and point out things she hadn't picked up on.

Dinah: [Yo! Wanna know what the wordy dude said? "Time for me to put my actions where my mouth is." But he said it in a language from the First Empire that only a few scholars know nowadays, because that's what was used by the long-dead guy who said it first.]

Seconds later he had lifted Pierrot onto a padded operating table then raised one leather gloved hand in a casual motion. Hanging from the ceiling, half-encased in highly polished metal bowls, were three enormous mage lamps; and now, in response to his gesture, they lit up the patient with beams of pink light so dazzling that even Bulgaria flinched away. Psychedelic after-images filled Kafana's vision even when she closed her eyes. Should she use her healing magic? Judging by the sound coming from the table, Dottore had already started treating Pierrot and she'd been told that would involve healing methods she didn't yet know; just the thought of how much she could learn if she were able to watch made her feel hunger. But what if he made a mistake because her singing distracted him at the wrong moment?

She slipped into Meditation, distancing herself from the immediacy of her feelings just long enough to think calmly about her two options. Hang on, why just two? She was a Womble, wasn't she? Her instincts were warning her that it would be disruptive, in this particular time and place, for her to burst into a song that called upon Cov, but that sort of priestess wasn't the only role she could play. She was a guardian of all the deities and there were some types of performance that Dottore wouldn't be surprised to see coming from a person attired as a Bard. She studied the acoustics of the room with the sense she'd gained from her Stealth Performance skill while she slowly took Giovanni's Masterpiece out of her stash and raised the violin into position. Now who should she invoke, if not Cov?

His earlier mention of being in a pack with Pierrot made her think of Zer, the shape-changing deity from whom all creatures had formed. The colour of the lamps that Dottore had chosen decided her, and in her hands the faint instrumental strains with which she began The Leader of the Pack nosed their way into the empty spaces of the room with caution of a wild animal exploring new territory. She opened her mind to Zer and added a bit of emphasis whenever the lyrics mentioned hurt, eyes, looking or seeing; mainly, though, she poured her feelings into a sense of brotherhood, of support for the rightful return of a much missed one to the place where they belonged - the one place able to completed them and that was completed by them in return.

She felt the presence of something incomprehensibly vast and endlessly kind and a warmth filled her that drove out the pain from her eyes, leaving a feeling of joyous vitality in her body and unconditional acceptance in her mind. She opened her eyes and beamed as she saw Bungo and Bulgaria opening theirs at the same time, able in that moment to feel their emotions as her own and know them, on some instinctive level, as members of her own pack.

Bungo turned to watch Dottore, and she did the same. He wasn't just wearing long black leather gloves and polished black leather boots with unusually shaped heels. Every part of his body that wasn't hidden under his robes seemed to be covered. Even his plague mask, she noticed, spread all the way to the back of his skull where dark leather thongs laced it fast enough to keep a hood on even the fiercest of falcons. In an effort to focus on the healing rather than the healer, she deliberately moved her gaze to his hands, which were currently smoothing a green tinged oil into the muscular areas above and below Pierrot's damaged knee. It smelled faintly of nuts, but she didn't recognise it.

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She spoke in a whisper, even though the NPC's couldn't hear what was said in the group's private chat channel: {Bungo, any idea what's in that oil?}

Matching her volume without thinking about it, Bungo sounded a little like a naturalist being careful not to alarm a nearby mountain gorilla while describing its habits. He didn't just reply, he painted a scene in words: {Yes, but I've only seen it once. Among the stalls I visited when going around markets to find new things to register with my Gather Ingredients skill, I remember that one equine welfare boutique was so outrageously overpriced that only nobles or those owning prize-winning race horses would think of entering. The assistant staffing it was bored out of her mind and was so happy to have someone to chat with that it didn't cost me a single coin! Anyway, Dottore's oil is identical to the oil from a bottle labelled as a rare but powerful remedy produced by cold-pressing the seeds from a particular narrow-leaved species of flax that now grew only on the cliffs of Magusa. Err, does that help?}

Bulgaria responded but, though also quiet, he sounded more like a gossip with a juicy story to confide: {Perhaps. One afternoon I saw a colleague of mine in the campus bar - one of the doctors who treated students at the campus medical practice but he was wearing clothes better suited to attending funerals. I'd heard he was competent and dedicated, yet he was half drunk and working towards full with a grim determination. All doctors know that patients sometimes die; that some deaths bring difficult thoughts or feelings and that there are many ways to cope. But you can never be sure how well a particular way to cope will work for any particular death; and it didn't didn't look like drink was working too well. So I sat with him.}

Kafana didn't entirely ignore the story, letting the words wash over her, but kept most of her attention on Pierrot. She grasped her Guardian's Pendant in the same way that she did when healing, trying to sense where there was resonance in herself with the image held by Pierrot's body of how it ought be and where that didn't match its current state. There was a flicking she didn't understand, but if she let the resonance get stronger, would it start affecting Pierrot? How could she tell if it would interfere with what Dottore was doing, when she didn't understand what he was doing? She held off.

Bulgaria: {He started normally, talking about the girl who'd died and why he disapproved of folk healers copying herbal remedies from horse doctors, even when countless generations of usage have left no record of someone noticing that particular remedy causing harm to even a single horse. But after the first couple of times I asked for more details, he built up enough steam to keep going without further prompting and he delivered, with increasing vehement elaboration, a rant so epic that I felt it deserved standing applause from a packed theatre audience.}

Dottore had dosed or injected Pierrot with several different potions, and she could sense they were concentrated in specific areas, though some of these were slowly moving in a way that gave Dottore fine control over how they mixed. She watched a single finger as he halved the blood flow in an individual vein by pushing on the spot above it with the precise pressure needed to constrict it by the desired amount. Amazing! But that didn't explain the flickering. She needed to see more.

Bulgaria: {The main problem is that a folk healer who isn't part of a large community might be successful the first nine times they use a remedy with no systematic record of its effect upon humans. But even similar species can have big differences in how they react to pharmaceuticals. If the tenth patient has a rare condition that when combined with the remedy will cause liver damage that's fatal within twenty-four months, the folk healer has no way to see the danger coming. They're driving with an outdated map while blindfolded.}

Different species? She knew part of Pierrot's heritage was Zeradan, and that players from the previous version of Soul Bound who had pure Zeradan characters were able to change between a humanoid form and a lupine one. Did Pierrot's body have more than one image of the natural form for it to take? If so, how did that affect healing and how was Dottore coping with it? Kafana activated her Truesight skill and started looking for mana flows.

Bungo: {That's in arlife. What about in velife? Healers can see exactly how a body is being affected and, if the level of their skill is high enough, they might be able to use even snake oil as a safe and effective remedy. Wouldn't that change things?}

There was plenty of mana in the room, including a surprising amount of healthy Zer blended into the pink beams of light, but she couldn't see any obvious signs of mana flowing directly from Dottore to Pierrot. Was he just using potions and mundane pressure from his fingers? She sighed as Dottore applied a support bandage to the much improved knee and she realised that she'd run out of time. Or had she? Everything she'd seen had been recorded by her tiara. She sent a request to Dinah to review the last five minutes of her sense experiences for clues she'd missed.

Bulgaria: {Good question, Bungo. Let's see if I can impress him.}

Bulgaria gave a politely faked cough and then waited until Dottore turned to look at him before he spoke: "It is only just that note be taken of the apparent efficacy of your eleemosynary endeavour. So please treat it as a sign of admiration not criticism, if I express interest in the process by which you gained and evaluated the evidence supporting one particular vulnerary verdict. To whit, when evaluating the expected net benefit of using that particular type of flax oil with this particular patient, I'm sure you considered the possibility of it being one of those remedies that is harmful if given to a patient in some particular rare group. Any fool can find a dodgy merchant or quack-authored tome making great claims about the sample they used to screen for such interactions, about how representative their sample was of the population it was picked from, and about the rules they rigorously followed. But you are learned and, as everyone knows, you are the last person to take such claims on trust. So I am most curious about the source of your confidence. Is it from having treated Pierrot before? Is it from some magical scan or precaution? Is it from decades worth of painstaking records gathered and guarded by the guild? Or does it come from something else?"

Bulgaria didn't try to emulate Dottore's verbal habits, though the way he took care to pronounce every syllable reminded Kafana of taking dictation. But neither did he vary his volume or tone in the compelling way he used when performing stories. Indeed he seemed neutral, almost unemotional; grey and dusty. Would it work? Dottore waited to be sure Bulgaria had finished for so long that Kafana would have had time to sing most of Dulcissime, and even a glacier might have tapped its foot impatiently.

When he did speak, however, his voice was full of scorn and outrage. And he didn't pause once.

Dottore: "Vulnary verdict? You sesquipedalian sciolist, the most direly decerebrate deipnosophist docent would deign that your doryphoric digladiation desecrates even the demotic deblaterations of the most pseudodoxial fanfaron fossicking our favelas. You dare deem me a divagating fidimplicitary, then in quisquiliary festination you brandish macilent meaning as claim to lexiphanic kinship and common perissological cause? Absquatulate!"

Dinah: [My translation? "Get lost, you faker!"]

Bulgaria: {Ouch. Definitely not impressed. That's me out. Good luck, guys.}

Bungo replied: {Wait! What do we do?} but it was to Bulgaria's hastily departing back.

Dottore had finished now, and looked like he was about to dismiss them too. Well, any decision would be better than none. She spoke as confidently and calmly as she could.

Kafana: {Tell him who we are, Bungo. Nothing fancy. No titles or boasts. Maybe say who our trainers are - play for time.}

Bungo: "Hello Sir. I'm Bungo. I'm not a member of a guild yet, but I've been accepted for training by Captain of the Watch Lelio Pantalone, Silvanus the Ipotane, High Master Flavio, Gregorio the Skull Crusher and Baba Olga the Seer. Standing beside me is Kafana Sincero. She has been accepted for training by Grand Master Mage Bernado Nafaro, High Master Cook Columbina and your adopted daughter, Suor Isabella. Thank you for healing our friend, Pierrot."

Dinah: [I found a clue. There are a lot of rune patterns on the items in this room; especially the treatment table. Most of them have not been filled with mana, though, which makes them hard to spot. I've sent a copy to Wellington. Can you check which types of mana Dottore has the most of?]

She turned her Truesight on Dottore as he dismissed Bungo with a sniff: "All well and good, but now the lad's been seen to, have you any further cause to keep me from my research? Do you wish to pry secrets from me, perhaps? Like that shifty stevedore Bulgaria, do you also think you deserve knowledge that was gathered and preserved from corruption by the efforts of a guild you don't belong to, have not paid dues to and will not swear to?"

Dottore knew who Bulgaria was and even that he'd gone around the Arsenal pretending to be a stevedore? No wonder he hadn't trusted him. Bungo's mouth dropped open, lost for words.

Dinah: [Lots of Rac, Zer and Dro alignment, and a fair amount of Mor and Lun. He can definitely use Runic and Healing magic, and with the right potions or items he might be able to See omens or even Shift his form. There might be something unusual about his body, but he's enchanted his clothing to block anyone making out the details.]

So it was up to her. They had nothing he wanted, no authority he respected and she certainly couldn't out-think him. She might as well put her faith in luck and good intentions. Faith? She looked at the pendant she was still holding and then at the beams of pink light; beams the colour of Zerius, the sun in the sky; beams the colour of the mana filling Dottore who might be a shifter; beams the colour of the heart-shaped rune that symbolised the kindly shifter deity Zer. She smiled.

Calmly she stepped forward and raised the pendant into the beam before praying aloud: "May the blessings of Zer enfold this room and all who stand within it. May he judge my heart as I offer my pledge to respect the privacy and confidences of Dottore, and offer aid to him and to Suor Isabella. And may he then show an unmistakable sign of whether it is his will that Dottore accept my offers?"

Light reflected from the pendant in all directions piercing the gloom, causing Dottore to stumble backwards as one shone through the goggles of his mask. Kafana gasped in horror as a twisting motion wracked his body; he seemed to be trying to reach for something with one arm but was repeatedly failing. Finally, with a great convulsive wrench, he managed to grip the thong lacing his mask closed and wrench it off. Moments later the whole suit fell away like an abandoned chrysalis as, with a triumphant screech, a bird the size of a Dalmatian dog took wing.

A blue-banded sparrowhawk. Exactly like the one that she and Bungo had seen resting on an olive tree. Oh my!