Week 6: Now with 200% more fire where it should and should not be
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
(AN: This update contains graphic description of medical procedures in the second portion. Viewer discretion is advised)
Sitting in your workshop, you held the cursed blade out at arm's length. Long, meant to take two hale hands to hold, and decorated with a golden hilt and rune carvings on the blade, you felt the power of the curses strike up and down the weapon. This was no mere mortal creation of your own typology, but rather some immortal tool that had been crafted in ages long past where Man had not walked first among the sentient races of the earth. The maeldictum were wrought deep into it's construction, harbringers of evil deeds and horrifying wroth etched into the fuller as deep as the core of the metal itself. A casual scan had horrified you, for each time the weapon was drawn, it was sworn to kill a man before being sheathed again. The fact Eowyn had handed it to you, gold-and-laquere sheath ready to accept the blade, had not been missed by your sense of the power for the weapon. Worse still were the great evil deeds buried deep in the soul of the creation. Kings- many kings- had died on this blade as betrayal forced the hand of those they loved. Goths and Huns had slain each other as they dueled over the fates this blade had warped as it tore through the stream of history.
Now, it sat on your workshop table, emminating evil. Thrice, you would need to break the curses of it before it could be issued. How? Fuck if you knew. Leaning back as you set it down, you heard a mutter coming from the hall behind your workshop.
"Are we really having Sevenfingers help move me in?"
Mistletoe, it had to be. Sofia was too loaded of a name for her now.
"Yes, we're having Medicine Boy help move you in." Calypso said, sighing. "Honestly, I don't know why you're so cold towards him."
"He's charging you an arm and a leg for your amulet! You need that- it's what saved your ass last night!"
Calypso sighed, slumping against the wall. "Sofia. He's running this dump, managing Homer's dumb ass, and still churning out equipment for us at a remarkable rate. More importantly, Medicine Boy isn't just a name, it's a fucking title. Trompdoy got shot to shit three weeks ago, and he managed to get her back online in time for the raid of that hideout! We need that!"
"I didn't have any problems-"
"Because you never had the time to get them!" Calypso yelled. "I've talked to Rose about it enough to know. You think you're doing fine. You're good. It's all going good. Then you take one hit too many, one bruise you can't explain, get locked down. Get ambushed going to school or at work- because they don't care. A swarm of ghouls tries to get you in public, or a vampire hits you from behind. Nobody can protect you anymore, so you try hiding. It doesn't work."
As touching as the conversation was, you had the Shit to Do list and it wasn't quite done yet. "Calypso!" you yelled, digging into a desk drawer quickly for a bottle of mineral oil.
It wasn't long before she was in your workshop, marveling at the gigantic, towering piles of assorted shit you'd been using as ingredients. Tossing her the bottle, you smirked.
"For your trinket, in case it sticks. Also, I need you to sort those neurodes you brought in."
Walking past her as you moved to leave, you leaned in close. "And thanks for taking care of Mistletoe."
"She doesn't like her room much." Calypso replied, leaning in close enough for her lips to brush your ear. "She hasn't cracked yet. If we're lucky, she never will."
Walking out past her, you moved through the corridor like you owned the place because you did own the place and promptly got to your lobby to see a pair of magical girls there sitting in seiza next to a small bottle of something and a well-contained barrel fire.
"Ey!" you yelled, moving forwards angrily. "Not in my fucking lobby!"
"Sorry!" the girls yelled, while you just got a good stout walking stick to hook around the barrel. While they showered you in apologies, you just made sure your building wouldn't burn down.
"Who are you, anyway?" you asked, squinting.
"I, uh, I'm Rose." One of them said. "We met a few weeks ago? I came because I heard about the raid and you might have an item handy for sale?"
"I'm Lappin." The other said, trying to smile and failing. "I just wanted lunch someplace safe."
You nodded. "Well, c'mon in then. It been getting bad out there?"
"More Witches in town, and there's a big one who set up in the forests north of the train line." Lappin said, shivering. "I'm not a city girl, and it's been really bad. I even took a strike team in, but we couldn't do anything."
Squinting, you looked at her. "The train yard's in Midtown, though. What forest north of it?"
"I have no idea." Lappin said, sighing. Leading her to the kitchen and serving up some porridge with bacon, you watched her intently. "All I know is we went into the Moody Woods, hit the Bounded Field of the Witch, and ran like hell. Headed south about three miles and hit the city, quarter mile after that was the trainyard. That's when I found Rose, and-"
"Damnit." You muttered. "Was the trainyard still full of Alchemists?"
"No. Saw signs of a fight, but no Alchemists."
Nodding again, you got your own lunch from the communal pot and everything was silence for a while. Sweet, blissful silence.
"GANGWAY THE HATCHES!" Homer yelled as an explosion rolled out of the Library. "SHE'S GONNA BLOW!"
Dashing out with a fuck on your lips, you watched as a blast of arcane energy threw Homer out of the Library and right on to you as a scroll sat on the plinth inside on fire. Not normal fire, no, this was fucking magical fire, and if your nose was right on the money this was ethereal fire too. Good shit, strong shit, but god damnit Homer!
Gently and firmly picking Homer up by the scruff of his neck, you kindly and politely threw him into a chair to think about what he'd done and get over any arcane energy induced migranes while you dealt with the ethereal fire he'd lit. Once the initial explosion had blasted the shit out of him and therefore done the magical equivalent of throwing a breaker, the scroll of A4 paper had died down to the sort of dull roar you were used to from your furnace.
Wait. You had magically enchanted forever burning paper, and a furnace that always ate heat like a motherfucker.
"Homer!" you yelled, grinning.
"No' now, boss, nearly got it." Homer muttered, punch-drunk from the fact he'd probably lit himself up like a Christmas tree from that stunt. "Soon we can cast Fireball. They'll nae be stoppen us nau."
"Homer, do you think you could do this to a brick?"
"Aye, ah can make tha' brick burn with the ligh' o a sun!" Homer said, grabbing a red solo cup of Flavor-Aide™ and raising it high above his head. "Just as soon as I visit me wee lassie, an' get to… an get too… er, wot came af'er that again?"
You shrugged, Homer shrugged, and the glass spilled and coated him in red goop. It was gonna be one of those days.
-/-/-/-/
Looking at you behind the service counter you'd set up in the lobby, Eowyn handed you a grocery bag full of silvicane, bandages, and clean shop rags.
"I got the stuff." she said, flatly. "Trompdoy's been feeling pretty bad, though. Not sleeping well, and she's starting to smell terrible. That burn wasn't that bad- she should have pulled some healing by now!"
Rifling through the pack, you nodded mildly and grabbed a milk jug of watered-down Gatorade. "The heal time of a burn scales with the affected surface area. A full quarter of her body is gonna eat up time, especially with my slapdash treatment."
Knocking on Trompdoy's door, you heard a muttered 'come in' prompting your entry. Sniffing the air, you sighed quietly. No smell of infection, thank God, but there was a thick reek of bodily odor and a slight smell of raw flesh. Much less good, that. Bundling in, you put the supplies down, before heading back out to get a few five gallon buckets. Filling one with warm water from the shower- prompting a sudden dip in temperature and some mild swearing from Mistletoe and Calypso inside- you went back to Trompdoy's room to get to work.
The first and most important thing to do was to get her clean. As much as you claimed to be a shitty medic, the fact was you spent enough time in the vet clinic so that you could work around most animals. As far as you were concerned, a mammal was a mammal as long as you weren't proscribing medicine. After that, you could start piling on the silver sulfide cream, and covering the burns with teflon-backed bandages so they didn't stick and rip up the new skin forming underneath when you changed them. The extra ten bucks a box would be worth it.
"Tompdoy," you said carefully to the young woman. "How are you doing?"
"T-t-terible." she muttered, spasming a little. "I itched it this morning, and now it's like I'm on fire again. My hands hurt more than they help."
Wincing at the smell, you nodded and pulled out a medical kit you'd been putting together. Tapping out two Benadryl, you handed them over with the jug of Gatorade and beckoned for her to drink.
"The pills should keep the itch down by targeting the histamine reaction." you recited by rote. "Take three after breakfast and one every ninety minutes after until you hit eight pills in a day; then only take them if it starts getting bad. You'll probably fly over the daily limit, but as long as you're not going through the bottle in a week it probably won't turn your liver into swiss cheese."
"Not three to start today?"
You shrugged. "If a lower dose will work, we'll take it. Now take off your shirt."
Eowyn and Trompdoy looked at you like you'd grown a second head. "What."
Holding up one of the shop rags, you sighed. "I can smell the BO from here, and I know a few tricks for washing a bad burn. Now, hoody off."
Eowyn held up a finger, opened her mouth, jiggled her hand around as she thought, and withdrew her objection silently as Trompdoy started to blush.
"I'm not wearing anything under this." she said, staring. "I'm not going to let you get a free look!"
"I'm not fishing for tits, I'm here to make sure you get better in a reasonable timeframe." you replied stiffly. "Besides, if I wanted to get an eyeful, I'd still run the shower instead of making, y'know, the blind guy do it."
"Um, er, well…" Trompdoy replied uncomfortably.
Sighing, you sat on an overturned and empty bucket, deliberately facing away from them. "I'm waiting here."
"I put this on the day after, and well, I can't get it off." Trompdoy said to your back. "If I try, my shoulder crinkles and it hurts, and then I lean forward and my back goes off and then I'm itching and crawling and trying not to yell for a few hours."
You nodded, before turning to face Trompdoy sitting back to you. "I'll have to cut it off, then."
"Okay."
Pulling out your pocketknife, you got to work. The shirt- because it was a shirt, even if it was made of super thick cotton like a hoody- would need to come off wholesale, and since it was Trompdoy's left side that got burned, you decided to work on the right. A little gentle sawing got the collar cut, and then it was fairly easy to work your way down to the bottom hem. A little more sawing, and you could start taking the shirt off.
"Ah! Ow, ow ow oh god it hurts ow!" Trompdoy yelled as you worked the shirt off her, skin crinkling as you swore. Burns oozed, and a lot of the time layers of skin would flake up and off under the burn as things frantically tried to heal. Combine dead skin still attached to live skin at some point and bodily fluid serving as a binder, and you were literally tearing out layers of dead skin by pulling her shirt off.
"Shh, shh, it's ok." you muttered, working the sleeve off as gently as you could. There were only three major areas of third-degree burns, and your early scrub-out looked like they got everything, thank God. Trying to go in with steel wool to get dead flesh out before it potentially turned necrotic had already driven you into drinking your ritual alcohol once, and doing that again would be bad. "Let's get you washed up."
You'd call this a sponge bath, except there wasn't really a sponge. Putting a bucket for Trompdoy to sit on in a tarp basin that led to the room's drain, you started dampening up the shop rags, then coating them gently in soapy water and laying them on the burns. With the nerves so close to the surface, sensation could be strained at best, and sensitive at worse in areas it wasn't gone totally.
"Hothothothothothot" Trompdoy muttered, prompting you to splash more cool water into the rinse bucket. Once her burns were covered, with all of her left arm, side, and a good bit of the front and back of her torso done, you handed Eowyn another soapy rag.
"Well I'm not washing all of her." you stated flatly. "I'm a guy."
"Yeah, I know." she replied, shooting you a stinkeye. "Why do you think I insisted on being here while you did this?"
While Eowyn handled bathing the 3/4 of Trompdoy that wasn't hideously burned, you focused on the bits that were. Friction, of any sort, would be bad, but you did need a little mechanical action to get things moved around, Light pressure- almost nonexistent, just the weight of your hand- was enough, though, and soon enough you could slowly rinse the rags, and through them Trompdoy. One cup of lukewarm water at a time, you worked your way across her side, while your bare feet were covered in the filthy water that slowly worked its way towards the drain.
"So this next part's gonna be interesting." you said, grabbing a beach towel. Wrapping it around your quarter of Trompdoy, you started pat-drying her, while a few non-wet shop rags got used on the rest until you handed Eowyn the towel and worked a rag around the hand and armpit. Once that was done came the medication.
"Feeling better?" Eowyn asked, curious.
Trompdoy tried to smile, before she shivered a little. "Some. I don't smell now, at least."
"That's good." her partner said, while you just smeared the silvidine on a long bandage. Stepping up behind Trompdoy, you explained what you were doing carefully while you got the tape ready.
"So, what I'm going to do is put the burn cream on these bandage pads, and then we're gonna tape 'em down." you said, before gently squishing the affair on. You were starting right on top of her shoulder, and the next pad covered in white goo went closer to her neck, letting you tape the two together and the undamaged skin on the right of her collar. "We're gonna change these every day until you start getting better, and you're getting a bath every day."
"Every day?" Trompdoy asked as you started work on her front. "I thought we only got showers on Wednesday?"
"One, there's enough of y'all that I'm changing that to Tuesday-Thursday because I'm not putting up with BO in my dining room; and two, this is medical. I never skimp on medical."
"Even if it means telling me to rob a pharmacy." Eowyn added unflatteringly.
Trompdoy chuckled a little, making you overlap a bandage by an annoying amount. "I see."
"Yeah." you muttered, glad that the burn stopped above her hip in the front. If you got much lower, the tape arrangements would need to become delicate at best. Next would be the armpit, and wasn't that a job and a half to make work. It took four cuts in a bandage to make it flex well enough, but you could work on the arm after that. "Eowyn, can you handle the baths?"
"I think I can handle them, yeah." the Rider said, chuckling. "She'll owe me one, but it won't be too bad."
"Good, because I got shit to do." you muttered. "As much as I love you two and your consistency in paying rent, it's been nearly twenty minutes of bandage jigsaw here and my hands are getting tired."
"Aw, is the widdle medic getting tired?"
You resisted the urge to yawn, and taped another bandage into place. "First off, last night I had to go yell at Homer for trying to use the Library after curfew because his arcane draw kept waking me up. Second off, yes."
The girls chuckled at you, but you kept at it until the job was done and you could throw a blanket around Trompdoy. Now you could finally go take a damn nap in peace and quiet.
-/-/-/-/
It was Friday before you could finally really get to work on your workshop. The ever-burning materials that Homer had been making had finally gotten formulas laid out, so you could use them in controlled applications instead of just sticking them in old glass jelly jars and putting them in the lobby so you could save on electricity. As your repeat work on Trompdoy and the other girls had shown, though, you needed a way to get the girls enhanced medical care at the drop of the proverbial hat. This in turn meant magical curatives. Being neither pharmacist nor alchemist nor chemically inclined outside the power of our lord and savior nitrogen reactions, you needed to fall back on some hoodoo to get that done.
The end result, once you badgered Calypso into making a Harbor Freight run to get you an anvil, was going to be deferred while you rebuilt your furnace. Originally designed much like a pottery kiln, you came to the sudden and upright realization that you really couldn't actually do a lot with your setup. Sure, you could transmute a piece from it's thaumaturgical base ingredients into a finished project, but after that you were mildly limited. The most annoying part was you could only get one or two bags of cement at a time, since that was the number of girls you had handy and let's face it, most of them were under sixteen and hauling a hundred pound bag of concrete was no small job.
Your new setup was going to be much more efficient, though. With a pair of vacuum cleaner blowers serving as both an upstream pressure source and as a downstream vacuum source (after running the furnace exhaust through an intercooler vessel so you had hot water) cast into the system from the get-go, the new system had a much better forced draft array. Equally importantly, you also shelled out for some plaster-of-paris, which made great ghetto refractory cement so you could be sure the actual cast-in-place ferrocrete parts didn't suffer thermal decomposition.
Yes, it still counted as ferrocrete if you used chickenwire mesh as the reinforcing structure. Honestly, mundane construction made about as much sense as your magical works sometimes.
Once the furnace layer was done, the next step was to build your forge and new ovens. By drawing heat off the lower furnace by way of being directly over it, you could now simultaneously 'cook' a part for later use while building something else, as well as perform magically enhanced hot joinery in your construction. The exhaust and force draft system were different, naturally, but that was a plus in your book. With that all done, you decided to test the system.
To start it, you shoveled in the eternally burning project rejects, some assorted busted-up furnature from the cleanout, and shut the furnace door tight. Then came the pressure fan, whirring up and getting it to all ignite. Good! You could feel the arcane pull, and then you hit up the vacuum fan to really get her going. As the built in thermometer started ticking up higher, you smiled and opened the door to shove in more shit to burn. The new, heavy construction would take about thirty minutes to get up to operating temperatures, but could stay that way for hours. In the meantime, the forge.
This, you couldn't just burn shit in. You needed to use strong material here, since it would intermingle with your work. Thus, a bag of charcoal- not Kingsford, since the fuckers put coal dust in and that would add sulfur you'd need to cook out later- later and you had a lit forge. From there, you pulled out three pieces of rebar, a five pound hammer, and got to work.
The problem, you mused as the hammer strikes rung, was that the eternal flame enchantment as applied to bricks was a slow, low burn; it took one paving stone nearly an hour to boil a gallon of uncovered water. Great for cooking, not so great for crafting. You could work with that, though, since some testing told you that arcane fire tended to make arcane contamination. That, in turn, meant it could enrich materials passively, without your direct influence. Considering the hardest part of making potions or bombs was the enrichment stage?
Yeah, time to get to work building an enrichment stand. As you threw flux into the work, your grin went from ear to ear while your hands slowly started to ache. Controlling a hammer with three fingers was hard; controlling the work with four was harder. Opening a furnace chamber when you figured the first stage was done, you slotted the unfinished three-prong stand while you started wrapping two-liter bottles in tin foil and flux. You managed to fit six of them in the other oven bay- since you now had three, wonder of wonders- and finally pulled out the semifinished stand.
Your new arcane forge had a sense of humor as leaf-tree designs wrapped and twinned around the design, the imperfections of your forge-work melted away into a naturalistic aesthetic. Taking the three hockey-puck sized burners you'd had Homer build earlier and slotting them in, you placed the entire array over the failed heating tile and slotted it all back in to allow the parts to integrate. Meanwhile, pulling out your potion bottles, the plastic had cooked out to get you several… one?... ish liter bottles, which would fit perfectly in your rack once you were done with it.
It was also worth mentioning it no longer felt like you were trying to steer a U-haul truck down I-75 that hadn't been serviced since the Regan administration when doing arcane work, so big plus there! When the potion rack was done, you pulled it out and grinned. This. This was what success looked like, as you filled three bottles up with warm water and let them start percolating.
You now had… free time. That was an odd feeling. Heading to your little-used rec room, you heard a slight cough. Inside, Mistletoe was curled up in one of the beanbag chairs, curled up around a landline you'd hacked in some time ago. God only knew why you'd done it, but it existed and worked.
"Yeah." She muttered. "I just don't know, Chris. I mean, it's a dump, but it's a dump with good people. I keep getting lucky, you know?"
A wah-wah sound came out the other end you couldn't decipher.
"Calypso got out fine. I'm just worried, alright? I know you want in, but it's not worth it. The monkey's paw closes and you get trapped."
More wah-wah.
"No, I didn't! It's just- well, you know! Dad didn't take it well, alright? There was a fight."
Angry wah-wah noises as you slipped in. Mistletoe nearly dropped the phone, before she glared at you and sighed.
"When your dad's a homophobic asshole who thinks you're an abomination against God, yeah. I felt my power there, Chris. I could have put him down like a dog."
You tried not to wince, but you couldn't hide it.
"If he tried to hit me? I would have."
Now the muttering coming out the other end of the headset took on a darker tone.
"Yeah, I know. I love you too. Goodnight, babe."
There was a solid ten minutes as you looked at each other out of the corner of your eyes, before you finally broke the silence by getting a deck of cards. Shuffling it, you looked at Sofia, and sighed.
"So when I got in here initially, I was gonna talk about rent, but after overhearing the end of that I'd rather not." You said cleanly.
"Yeah, I know." Sofia replied, face pinched. "Can I pay weekly?"
You nodded, and she set a mess of bills on the floor before pushing them to you. A hundred bucks, a fat stack of yen, and a mess of pesos. Not too esoteric this time at least.
"You're good." You replied, nodding. Sorting it amnicably and sticking it in your pocket, you looked up as Sofia coughed.
"Do you care?" she asked.
"About the money? Nah." You said, shrugging. "Honestly I'm happy these are all of denominations still in print, and not like a mess of francs again."
"I mean about me being a lesbian."
Sighing, you put your head in a hand. "It's… I don't have an opinion on it? Is that the right way to say it? It doesn't affect me, and I have a dozen other fish to fry. As long as I can sleep at night and the other girls aren't saying you're making problems, I can't really complain."
"Thanks." Sofia muttered. "Well, it's as good as I'll get. If Chris comes-"
"Names!" you interrupted, snapping out. "God's wounds, do you want a Witch to learn that? Their hexes could kill her!"
Sofia recoiled a bit, and shuddered. "I mean… er… Ferra?"
"Better." You groused.
"Ferra's not in a good place." Sofia said, wincing. "Her family is divorcing, and both sides aren't well off. She needs to scram before the state takes her in."
"I'll talk to Homer, probably get him to spruce up a room." You said, sighing. "I need to make something next week, so that'll keep the Library out of commission, and we've still got some time before we need to improve the kitchen again… probably gonna need more help around here at some point… ugh."
"Math?"
"Worse." You groused. "Logistics."
You both shared a threadbare smile, before you grabbed a notebook and started sketching out tables. Things were going to get hectic soon.
/-/-/-/-/-
Votes
Build a Tool
[] Trinket
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 3.
[] Wand
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] Bomb
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] No, you want to work on your building instead
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
[] No, you want to research an item instead.
Tool Effects:
Potion Stand I: Will automatically build 3x Tier I Bombs per action spent crafting or triple production of higher tier bombs.
Forge: Allows you to forge, increasing the number of other tools you can construct.
Arcane Furnace II: Allows you to work on up to three components to a project simultaneously. Upgrades Workshop Level by 1.
Sitting in your workshop, you held the cursed blade out at arm's length. Long, meant to take two hale hands to hold, and decorated with a golden hilt and rune carvings on the blade, you felt the power of the curses strike up and down the weapon. This was no mere mortal creation of your own typology, but rather some immortal tool that had been crafted in ages long past where Man had not walked first among the sentient races of the earth. The maeldictum were wrought deep into it's construction, harbringers of evil deeds and horrifying wroth etched into the fuller as deep as the core of the metal itself. A casual scan had horrified you, for each time the weapon was drawn, it was sworn to kill a man before being sheathed again. The fact Eowyn had handed it to you, gold-and-laquere sheath ready to accept the blade, had not been missed by your sense of the power for the weapon. Worse still were the great evil deeds buried deep in the soul of the creation. Kings- many kings- had died on this blade as betrayal forced the hand of those they loved. Goths and Huns had slain each other as they dueled over the fates this blade had warped as it tore through the stream of history.
Now, it sat on your workshop table, emminating evil. Thrice, you would need to break the curses of it before it could be issued. How? Fuck if you knew. Leaning back as you set it down, you heard a mutter coming from the hall behind your workshop.
"Are we really having Sevenfingers help move me in?"
Mistletoe, it had to be. Sofia was too loaded of a name for her now.
"Yes, we're having Medicine Boy help move you in." Calypso said, sighing. "Honestly, I don't know why you're so cold towards him."
"He's charging you an arm and a leg for your amulet! You need that- it's what saved your ass last night!"
Calypso sighed, slumping against the wall. "Sofia. He's running this dump, managing Homer's dumb ass, and still churning out equipment for us at a remarkable rate. More importantly, Medicine Boy isn't just a name, it's a fucking title. Trompdoy got shot to shit three weeks ago, and he managed to get her back online in time for the raid of that hideout! We need that!"
"I didn't have any problems-"
"Because you never had the time to get them!" Calypso yelled. "I've talked to Rose about it enough to know. You think you're doing fine. You're good. It's all going good. Then you take one hit too many, one bruise you can't explain, get locked down. Get ambushed going to school or at work- because they don't care. A swarm of ghouls tries to get you in public, or a vampire hits you from behind. Nobody can protect you anymore, so you try hiding. It doesn't work."
As touching as the conversation was, you had the Shit to Do list and it wasn't quite done yet. "Calypso!" you yelled, digging into a desk drawer quickly for a bottle of mineral oil.
It wasn't long before she was in your workshop, marveling at the gigantic, towering piles of assorted shit you'd been using as ingredients. Tossing her the bottle, you smirked.
"For your trinket, in case it sticks. Also, I need you to sort those neurodes you brought in."
Walking past her as you moved to leave, you leaned in close. "And thanks for taking care of Mistletoe."
"She doesn't like her room much." Calypso replied, leaning in close enough for her lips to brush your ear. "She hasn't cracked yet. If we're lucky, she never will."
Walking out past her, you moved through the corridor like you owned the place because you did own the place and promptly got to your lobby to see a pair of magical girls there sitting in seiza next to a small bottle of something and a well-contained barrel fire.
"Ey!" you yelled, moving forwards angrily. "Not in my fucking lobby!"
"Sorry!" the girls yelled, while you just got a good stout walking stick to hook around the barrel. While they showered you in apologies, you just made sure your building wouldn't burn down.
"Who are you, anyway?" you asked, squinting.
"I, uh, I'm Rose." One of them said. "We met a few weeks ago? I came because I heard about the raid and you might have an item handy for sale?"
"I'm Lappin." The other said, trying to smile and failing. "I just wanted lunch someplace safe."
You nodded. "Well, c'mon in then. It been getting bad out there?"
"More Witches in town, and there's a big one who set up in the forests north of the train line." Lappin said, shivering. "I'm not a city girl, and it's been really bad. I even took a strike team in, but we couldn't do anything."
Squinting, you looked at her. "The train yard's in Midtown, though. What forest north of it?"
"I have no idea." Lappin said, sighing. Leading her to the kitchen and serving up some porridge with bacon, you watched her intently. "All I know is we went into the Moody Woods, hit the Bounded Field of the Witch, and ran like hell. Headed south about three miles and hit the city, quarter mile after that was the trainyard. That's when I found Rose, and-"
"Damnit." You muttered. "Was the trainyard still full of Alchemists?"
"No. Saw signs of a fight, but no Alchemists."
Nodding again, you got your own lunch from the communal pot and everything was silence for a while. Sweet, blissful silence.
"GANGWAY THE HATCHES!" Homer yelled as an explosion rolled out of the Library. "SHE'S GONNA BLOW!"
Dashing out with a fuck on your lips, you watched as a blast of arcane energy threw Homer out of the Library and right on to you as a scroll sat on the plinth inside on fire. Not normal fire, no, this was fucking magical fire, and if your nose was right on the money this was ethereal fire too. Good shit, strong shit, but god damnit Homer!
Gently and firmly picking Homer up by the scruff of his neck, you kindly and politely threw him into a chair to think about what he'd done and get over any arcane energy induced migranes while you dealt with the ethereal fire he'd lit. Once the initial explosion had blasted the shit out of him and therefore done the magical equivalent of throwing a breaker, the scroll of A4 paper had died down to the sort of dull roar you were used to from your furnace.
Wait. You had magically enchanted forever burning paper, and a furnace that always ate heat like a motherfucker.
"Homer!" you yelled, grinning.
"No' now, boss, nearly got it." Homer muttered, punch-drunk from the fact he'd probably lit himself up like a Christmas tree from that stunt. "Soon we can cast Fireball. They'll nae be stoppen us nau."
"Homer, do you think you could do this to a brick?"
"Aye, ah can make tha' brick burn with the ligh' o a sun!" Homer said, grabbing a red solo cup of Flavor-Aide™ and raising it high above his head. "Just as soon as I visit me wee lassie, an' get to… an get too… er, wot came af'er that again?"
You shrugged, Homer shrugged, and the glass spilled and coated him in red goop. It was gonna be one of those days.
-/-/-/-/
Looking at you behind the service counter you'd set up in the lobby, Eowyn handed you a grocery bag full of silvicane, bandages, and clean shop rags.
"I got the stuff." she said, flatly. "Trompdoy's been feeling pretty bad, though. Not sleeping well, and she's starting to smell terrible. That burn wasn't that bad- she should have pulled some healing by now!"
Rifling through the pack, you nodded mildly and grabbed a milk jug of watered-down Gatorade. "The heal time of a burn scales with the affected surface area. A full quarter of her body is gonna eat up time, especially with my slapdash treatment."
Knocking on Trompdoy's door, you heard a muttered 'come in' prompting your entry. Sniffing the air, you sighed quietly. No smell of infection, thank God, but there was a thick reek of bodily odor and a slight smell of raw flesh. Much less good, that. Bundling in, you put the supplies down, before heading back out to get a few five gallon buckets. Filling one with warm water from the shower- prompting a sudden dip in temperature and some mild swearing from Mistletoe and Calypso inside- you went back to Trompdoy's room to get to work.
The first and most important thing to do was to get her clean. As much as you claimed to be a shitty medic, the fact was you spent enough time in the vet clinic so that you could work around most animals. As far as you were concerned, a mammal was a mammal as long as you weren't proscribing medicine. After that, you could start piling on the silver sulfide cream, and covering the burns with teflon-backed bandages so they didn't stick and rip up the new skin forming underneath when you changed them. The extra ten bucks a box would be worth it.
"Tompdoy," you said carefully to the young woman. "How are you doing?"
"T-t-terible." she muttered, spasming a little. "I itched it this morning, and now it's like I'm on fire again. My hands hurt more than they help."
Wincing at the smell, you nodded and pulled out a medical kit you'd been putting together. Tapping out two Benadryl, you handed them over with the jug of Gatorade and beckoned for her to drink.
"The pills should keep the itch down by targeting the histamine reaction." you recited by rote. "Take three after breakfast and one every ninety minutes after until you hit eight pills in a day; then only take them if it starts getting bad. You'll probably fly over the daily limit, but as long as you're not going through the bottle in a week it probably won't turn your liver into swiss cheese."
"Not three to start today?"
You shrugged. "If a lower dose will work, we'll take it. Now take off your shirt."
Eowyn and Trompdoy looked at you like you'd grown a second head. "What."
Holding up one of the shop rags, you sighed. "I can smell the BO from here, and I know a few tricks for washing a bad burn. Now, hoody off."
Eowyn held up a finger, opened her mouth, jiggled her hand around as she thought, and withdrew her objection silently as Trompdoy started to blush.
"I'm not wearing anything under this." she said, staring. "I'm not going to let you get a free look!"
"I'm not fishing for tits, I'm here to make sure you get better in a reasonable timeframe." you replied stiffly. "Besides, if I wanted to get an eyeful, I'd still run the shower instead of making, y'know, the blind guy do it."
"Um, er, well…" Trompdoy replied uncomfortably.
Sighing, you sat on an overturned and empty bucket, deliberately facing away from them. "I'm waiting here."
"I put this on the day after, and well, I can't get it off." Trompdoy said to your back. "If I try, my shoulder crinkles and it hurts, and then I lean forward and my back goes off and then I'm itching and crawling and trying not to yell for a few hours."
You nodded, before turning to face Trompdoy sitting back to you. "I'll have to cut it off, then."
"Okay."
Pulling out your pocketknife, you got to work. The shirt- because it was a shirt, even if it was made of super thick cotton like a hoody- would need to come off wholesale, and since it was Trompdoy's left side that got burned, you decided to work on the right. A little gentle sawing got the collar cut, and then it was fairly easy to work your way down to the bottom hem. A little more sawing, and you could start taking the shirt off.
"Ah! Ow, ow ow oh god it hurts ow!" Trompdoy yelled as you worked the shirt off her, skin crinkling as you swore. Burns oozed, and a lot of the time layers of skin would flake up and off under the burn as things frantically tried to heal. Combine dead skin still attached to live skin at some point and bodily fluid serving as a binder, and you were literally tearing out layers of dead skin by pulling her shirt off.
"Shh, shh, it's ok." you muttered, working the sleeve off as gently as you could. There were only three major areas of third-degree burns, and your early scrub-out looked like they got everything, thank God. Trying to go in with steel wool to get dead flesh out before it potentially turned necrotic had already driven you into drinking your ritual alcohol once, and doing that again would be bad. "Let's get you washed up."
You'd call this a sponge bath, except there wasn't really a sponge. Putting a bucket for Trompdoy to sit on in a tarp basin that led to the room's drain, you started dampening up the shop rags, then coating them gently in soapy water and laying them on the burns. With the nerves so close to the surface, sensation could be strained at best, and sensitive at worse in areas it wasn't gone totally.
"Hothothothothothot" Trompdoy muttered, prompting you to splash more cool water into the rinse bucket. Once her burns were covered, with all of her left arm, side, and a good bit of the front and back of her torso done, you handed Eowyn another soapy rag.
"Well I'm not washing all of her." you stated flatly. "I'm a guy."
"Yeah, I know." she replied, shooting you a stinkeye. "Why do you think I insisted on being here while you did this?"
While Eowyn handled bathing the 3/4 of Trompdoy that wasn't hideously burned, you focused on the bits that were. Friction, of any sort, would be bad, but you did need a little mechanical action to get things moved around, Light pressure- almost nonexistent, just the weight of your hand- was enough, though, and soon enough you could slowly rinse the rags, and through them Trompdoy. One cup of lukewarm water at a time, you worked your way across her side, while your bare feet were covered in the filthy water that slowly worked its way towards the drain.
"So this next part's gonna be interesting." you said, grabbing a beach towel. Wrapping it around your quarter of Trompdoy, you started pat-drying her, while a few non-wet shop rags got used on the rest until you handed Eowyn the towel and worked a rag around the hand and armpit. Once that was done came the medication.
"Feeling better?" Eowyn asked, curious.
Trompdoy tried to smile, before she shivered a little. "Some. I don't smell now, at least."
"That's good." her partner said, while you just smeared the silvidine on a long bandage. Stepping up behind Trompdoy, you explained what you were doing carefully while you got the tape ready.
"So, what I'm going to do is put the burn cream on these bandage pads, and then we're gonna tape 'em down." you said, before gently squishing the affair on. You were starting right on top of her shoulder, and the next pad covered in white goo went closer to her neck, letting you tape the two together and the undamaged skin on the right of her collar. "We're gonna change these every day until you start getting better, and you're getting a bath every day."
"Every day?" Trompdoy asked as you started work on her front. "I thought we only got showers on Wednesday?"
"One, there's enough of y'all that I'm changing that to Tuesday-Thursday because I'm not putting up with BO in my dining room; and two, this is medical. I never skimp on medical."
"Even if it means telling me to rob a pharmacy." Eowyn added unflatteringly.
Trompdoy chuckled a little, making you overlap a bandage by an annoying amount. "I see."
"Yeah." you muttered, glad that the burn stopped above her hip in the front. If you got much lower, the tape arrangements would need to become delicate at best. Next would be the armpit, and wasn't that a job and a half to make work. It took four cuts in a bandage to make it flex well enough, but you could work on the arm after that. "Eowyn, can you handle the baths?"
"I think I can handle them, yeah." the Rider said, chuckling. "She'll owe me one, but it won't be too bad."
"Good, because I got shit to do." you muttered. "As much as I love you two and your consistency in paying rent, it's been nearly twenty minutes of bandage jigsaw here and my hands are getting tired."
"Aw, is the widdle medic getting tired?"
You resisted the urge to yawn, and taped another bandage into place. "First off, last night I had to go yell at Homer for trying to use the Library after curfew because his arcane draw kept waking me up. Second off, yes."
The girls chuckled at you, but you kept at it until the job was done and you could throw a blanket around Trompdoy. Now you could finally go take a damn nap in peace and quiet.
-/-/-/-/
It was Friday before you could finally really get to work on your workshop. The ever-burning materials that Homer had been making had finally gotten formulas laid out, so you could use them in controlled applications instead of just sticking them in old glass jelly jars and putting them in the lobby so you could save on electricity. As your repeat work on Trompdoy and the other girls had shown, though, you needed a way to get the girls enhanced medical care at the drop of the proverbial hat. This in turn meant magical curatives. Being neither pharmacist nor alchemist nor chemically inclined outside the power of our lord and savior nitrogen reactions, you needed to fall back on some hoodoo to get that done.
The end result, once you badgered Calypso into making a Harbor Freight run to get you an anvil, was going to be deferred while you rebuilt your furnace. Originally designed much like a pottery kiln, you came to the sudden and upright realization that you really couldn't actually do a lot with your setup. Sure, you could transmute a piece from it's thaumaturgical base ingredients into a finished project, but after that you were mildly limited. The most annoying part was you could only get one or two bags of cement at a time, since that was the number of girls you had handy and let's face it, most of them were under sixteen and hauling a hundred pound bag of concrete was no small job.
Your new setup was going to be much more efficient, though. With a pair of vacuum cleaner blowers serving as both an upstream pressure source and as a downstream vacuum source (after running the furnace exhaust through an intercooler vessel so you had hot water) cast into the system from the get-go, the new system had a much better forced draft array. Equally importantly, you also shelled out for some plaster-of-paris, which made great ghetto refractory cement so you could be sure the actual cast-in-place ferrocrete parts didn't suffer thermal decomposition.
Yes, it still counted as ferrocrete if you used chickenwire mesh as the reinforcing structure. Honestly, mundane construction made about as much sense as your magical works sometimes.
Once the furnace layer was done, the next step was to build your forge and new ovens. By drawing heat off the lower furnace by way of being directly over it, you could now simultaneously 'cook' a part for later use while building something else, as well as perform magically enhanced hot joinery in your construction. The exhaust and force draft system were different, naturally, but that was a plus in your book. With that all done, you decided to test the system.
To start it, you shoveled in the eternally burning project rejects, some assorted busted-up furnature from the cleanout, and shut the furnace door tight. Then came the pressure fan, whirring up and getting it to all ignite. Good! You could feel the arcane pull, and then you hit up the vacuum fan to really get her going. As the built in thermometer started ticking up higher, you smiled and opened the door to shove in more shit to burn. The new, heavy construction would take about thirty minutes to get up to operating temperatures, but could stay that way for hours. In the meantime, the forge.
This, you couldn't just burn shit in. You needed to use strong material here, since it would intermingle with your work. Thus, a bag of charcoal- not Kingsford, since the fuckers put coal dust in and that would add sulfur you'd need to cook out later- later and you had a lit forge. From there, you pulled out three pieces of rebar, a five pound hammer, and got to work.
The problem, you mused as the hammer strikes rung, was that the eternal flame enchantment as applied to bricks was a slow, low burn; it took one paving stone nearly an hour to boil a gallon of uncovered water. Great for cooking, not so great for crafting. You could work with that, though, since some testing told you that arcane fire tended to make arcane contamination. That, in turn, meant it could enrich materials passively, without your direct influence. Considering the hardest part of making potions or bombs was the enrichment stage?
Yeah, time to get to work building an enrichment stand. As you threw flux into the work, your grin went from ear to ear while your hands slowly started to ache. Controlling a hammer with three fingers was hard; controlling the work with four was harder. Opening a furnace chamber when you figured the first stage was done, you slotted the unfinished three-prong stand while you started wrapping two-liter bottles in tin foil and flux. You managed to fit six of them in the other oven bay- since you now had three, wonder of wonders- and finally pulled out the semifinished stand.
Your new arcane forge had a sense of humor as leaf-tree designs wrapped and twinned around the design, the imperfections of your forge-work melted away into a naturalistic aesthetic. Taking the three hockey-puck sized burners you'd had Homer build earlier and slotting them in, you placed the entire array over the failed heating tile and slotted it all back in to allow the parts to integrate. Meanwhile, pulling out your potion bottles, the plastic had cooked out to get you several… one?... ish liter bottles, which would fit perfectly in your rack once you were done with it.
It was also worth mentioning it no longer felt like you were trying to steer a U-haul truck down I-75 that hadn't been serviced since the Regan administration when doing arcane work, so big plus there! When the potion rack was done, you pulled it out and grinned. This. This was what success looked like, as you filled three bottles up with warm water and let them start percolating.
You now had… free time. That was an odd feeling. Heading to your little-used rec room, you heard a slight cough. Inside, Mistletoe was curled up in one of the beanbag chairs, curled up around a landline you'd hacked in some time ago. God only knew why you'd done it, but it existed and worked.
"Yeah." She muttered. "I just don't know, Chris. I mean, it's a dump, but it's a dump with good people. I keep getting lucky, you know?"
A wah-wah sound came out the other end you couldn't decipher.
"Calypso got out fine. I'm just worried, alright? I know you want in, but it's not worth it. The monkey's paw closes and you get trapped."
More wah-wah.
"No, I didn't! It's just- well, you know! Dad didn't take it well, alright? There was a fight."
Angry wah-wah noises as you slipped in. Mistletoe nearly dropped the phone, before she glared at you and sighed.
"When your dad's a homophobic asshole who thinks you're an abomination against God, yeah. I felt my power there, Chris. I could have put him down like a dog."
You tried not to wince, but you couldn't hide it.
"If he tried to hit me? I would have."
Now the muttering coming out the other end of the headset took on a darker tone.
"Yeah, I know. I love you too. Goodnight, babe."
There was a solid ten minutes as you looked at each other out of the corner of your eyes, before you finally broke the silence by getting a deck of cards. Shuffling it, you looked at Sofia, and sighed.
"So when I got in here initially, I was gonna talk about rent, but after overhearing the end of that I'd rather not." You said cleanly.
"Yeah, I know." Sofia replied, face pinched. "Can I pay weekly?"
You nodded, and she set a mess of bills on the floor before pushing them to you. A hundred bucks, a fat stack of yen, and a mess of pesos. Not too esoteric this time at least.
"You're good." You replied, nodding. Sorting it amnicably and sticking it in your pocket, you looked up as Sofia coughed.
"Do you care?" she asked.
"About the money? Nah." You said, shrugging. "Honestly I'm happy these are all of denominations still in print, and not like a mess of francs again."
"I mean about me being a lesbian."
Sighing, you put your head in a hand. "It's… I don't have an opinion on it? Is that the right way to say it? It doesn't affect me, and I have a dozen other fish to fry. As long as I can sleep at night and the other girls aren't saying you're making problems, I can't really complain."
"Thanks." Sofia muttered. "Well, it's as good as I'll get. If Chris comes-"
"Names!" you interrupted, snapping out. "God's wounds, do you want a Witch to learn that? Their hexes could kill her!"
Sofia recoiled a bit, and shuddered. "I mean… er… Ferra?"
"Better." You groused.
"Ferra's not in a good place." Sofia said, wincing. "Her family is divorcing, and both sides aren't well off. She needs to scram before the state takes her in."
"I'll talk to Homer, probably get him to spruce up a room." You said, sighing. "I need to make something next week, so that'll keep the Library out of commission, and we've still got some time before we need to improve the kitchen again… probably gonna need more help around here at some point… ugh."
"Math?"
"Worse." You groused. "Logistics."
You both shared a threadbare smile, before you grabbed a notebook and started sketching out tables. Things were going to get hectic soon.
/-/-/-/-/-
Votes
Build a Tool
[] Trinket
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 3.
[] Wand
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] Bomb
-[] Write in Level, between 1 and 1.
[] No, you want to work on your building instead
[] No, you want to improve your workshop instead.
[] No, you want to research an item instead.
Tool Effects:
Potion Stand I: Will automatically build 3x Tier I Bombs per action spent crafting or triple production of higher tier bombs.
Forge: Allows you to forge, increasing the number of other tools you can construct.
Arcane Furnace II: Allows you to work on up to three components to a project simultaneously. Upgrades Workshop Level by 1.
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