22st of July 2006 A.D.

"One minute." you say. Catching your father's eyes, then Gard's, you point at your eyes, then motion your hand towards the bathroom door and backroom door. No names. Yyou kneel beside the handcuffed rifleman, the one who had surrendered, and begin to tear his shirt into makeshift bandages for his friend. Limned in the flickering green fire of your anima, you look into his wide eyes and talk in a low voice. "I want to know where the other two are. And if there is anything you think I should know about your boss or this situation, now is the time to tell me. Before I get mad"

Groans and gasps are your only answer, though they might have been of fear and not pain as their eyes open to the sight of whirling night-black blades that cut the man's jacket and shirt apart, of gleaming greenish needles as long as a human hand filled with unknown concoctions. It seems that for your power the human body is only so much meat, sinew and skin to mend and to patch.

Lost one Essence.

Flipping open your phone with one of the improbable appendages that seems to be oddly well suited to the task you ask: "Clippy Trauma response protocols, see if you can find videos."

Now if only I could see what you are supposed to do on a screen that small... Responding to your thoughts the power woven through your soul spins a quartz lense into being like a potter working clay. It slots neatly into a black iron support at just the right height so that the light of the screen onto the nearby wall in a way that retains a coherent image.

"Molly we cant' leave you here..." your dad starts, but Gard raises a doubtful eyebrow and motions at your armored tinkering self as though to ask 'You think a few stray bullets are going to stop her?'

On the one hand you are flattered, but on the other it would have been nice if she had not given you the work to begin with.

For his part Dad sighs: "Take the bathroom, be careful..." You stop paying attention as your world narrows to the task at hand, cleaning off the blood and feeling for the edges of the wound with the pads of your fingers then with the needle-like appendages and then so smoothly that you do not even realize it you start to stitch the man up with thread that is being automatically unwound from the material of his shirt, passed through the glare of sterilizing tightly focused radiation and then put to use.

I'm not irradiating him am I? probably not the moment to be asking that but Usum is here to calm your fears. You are not because while alpha radiation can be concentrated to kill bacteria it simply does not have the penetrating power to do much else, especially at the low volumes you are producing. It only has to sterilize a thread after all and that does not have much surface area.

Apparently it is simply the natural bias of tools spun from your power to go for that over rubbing alcohol.

A giggle slips past your lips, judging from the look in the prisoners' eyes it isn't very reassuring. Well too bad for them, when they have the means to stitch complex trauma then they can complain.

Thankfully none of the arteries had been hit, though one of the larger veins on the right side of the chest seems to have been touched, you are sure it has a name, but Clippy isn't feeding your the names of things just the positions.

There's a burst of gunfire from the backroom, but you pay it no mind, sure that your dad and Gard together can handle it. And done... that is some neat stitch work if your say so yourself...

"You stitched him up?" You don't think you have aver heard Gard sound amused before, though to be fair she sounds impressed too.

"Yeah, was I not supposed to?" you ask as your dad sets one more cuffed prisoner on the floor, this one bruised all about the neck and the right side of his face and neck but thankfully not bleeding.

"Generally tight bandaging should do for trauma situations," dad explains. He just looks relieved no matter how weird the results might be. You are past the first hurdle and no one is in danger of dying.

Oh... right, simple bandaging would not have been repairing the body in any meaningful sense so your tools would not be fit to purpose. It wasn't until Clippy changed to ER diagrams instead of on the spot trauma response that the proverbial spark had gone off. Something tells you that you can do a lot more with the repair and improvement of flesh. Visions of gleaming brass flowing from your hands to replace imperfect organic forms flash though your mind: Friction-less ball bearings with three sixty degrees of motions, twitch fiber muscles from carbon composite, nanotubes permeating everything in the place of vulnerable veins , all bound by spirits willing, eager to serve.

Shaking off the mental image of your own personal cyborg manufacture you get off the floor getting the crick out of your neck before the next part. On the plus side there isn't likely to be any need to save the lives of the local ghouls, on the minus side ghouls.

"Clippy send call to 911, leave your voice as is they are going to know you are trying to hide it...." Something occurs to you. "Use an encryption site, like the kind they use for swatting."

"Searching..."

Dad asks that swatting is and to your surprise Gard responds before you can. Had someone actually tried it on her? You have a brief fantasy of some internet troll swatting a literal psychopomp. You probably shouldn't find it as entertaining as you do.


Going down the creaky steps to the basement and then the ladder into Undertown itself is a lot more creepy when you are here in the flesh seeing only as far as Gad's heavy duty lantern can illuminate than as a bodyless spirit guided by prophetic purpose.

The air tastes strange down here and it is not just the filth and sewage, it's too still, too bitter under the crushing weight of the dark above that separates you from the sky, from the rising and setting of the sun that wears away at wards and enchantments. It is as if magic itself has grown stagnant in this noisome realm, the carrion of a thousand thousand failed spells slowly rotting under the feet of the unknowing people of Chicago. No wonder so many wicked things are drawn here, it is not just the literal protection from the sun, but a darkness of sorcery and spirit that most fits their wants.

Crumbling rooms close off into narrow tunnels scarce wide enough for one of you to pass without walking sideways and then they open up into caverns carved as much by the unstoppable touch of water as by the hand of man. You find the half collapsed remains of old subway stations, numbers askew creaking at your passage, you spot the garish marks of gangs though you do not see another living soul.

Then out of the dark something comes screeching and screaming in shrill voices. As you raise your sword all you see is... bats, a whole flock of them, black-winged shadows against the light that you had brought into their domain, but still just bats.

"Er... sorry," you can feel a blush rise to your cheeks. "I didn't mean to be jumpy"

You pass by the bat roost quickly, as much to guard your nose as anything. As bad as the smell is down here it does not compare to the floor fully covered in guamo.

"Wait!" Gard calls from your left. "Look there."

There are footprints in the sticky white mess, recent ones even though you cannot be more than another half mile from the place you had seen the ghouls feasting. Wait a second... those were not just footsteps, those are some real nice boots, kind of distinctive as well. The last time you had seen ones like that was...

"Lydia..." you breathe shocked. What would she be doing down here? The part of you that is still half convinced she has nothing to do with any of this mess asks. But then what would anyone else wearing three hundred dollar boots be doing down here.

Wildly you look around, but there is no other pair of tracks, just hers. Was she here alone...?

What do you do?

[] Explain what you saw, try to follow the tracks, may or may not lead towards the ghouls

[] Take the path you know, you cannot risk getting lost down here

[] Write in

OOC: You rolled really well for the medical without skill, though any doctor who looks at your handwork is going to have a lot of questions.