Legend of Ransera

Of course, she listened to what he had to say on the matter; she always listened to him. Kala was also quite independent enough to make her own decisions, all the while taking in more expert input. She nodded thoughtfully.

"I think," she said slowly, "for now, I will try my mundane senses first, and follow up with Semblance. So much of the magic has to do with context more than power anyway, this ought to help me learn to understand what I am sensing through the Rune."

Watching him deftly catch another sample, she considered how best to answer his next question. She was never dishonest, but she tried to answer in a way that spoke to the spirit of his question as much as its letter. "I would not call myself a proper seamstress," she admitted, "but I know how to sew a bit. I can also cauterize with Fire, but I suppose I should practice sewing skin to prepare me for working with sinew thread." Cauterizing with elemental fire would be more helpful when a living person was bleeding out, she decided. Closing up a cadaver so it could be given proper funerary rites was probably best achieved with a needle and thread.

As he was looking through a drawer, she waited for him to give her the proper gauges for the task at hand.

But she couldn't help but ask, "So you don't recognize what she was injecting through your Rune?"

Kala liked a good mystery, but not if it cost people their lives.

"That is interesting," she allowed, taking what was given to her.

"I'm used to surgeons using silk thread. Fine, high tensile strength, but it does need to be removed manually when the healing has come along far enough. And, of course, necromantic healers can use various things to make sinew thread, which is purported to leave a minimum of scarring. I suppose that would prevent them from having to follow up with more effort."

She began to carefully sew the incision shut. Kala had been honest about her skills; she knew what she was doing, but she was hardly practiced enough to be a seamstress and this was her first time sewing human skin. There was a different feel about it, and she supposed it would feel different still if it were living tissue. The work banished anxiety, though she was quite alert; there were natural things coursing through her veins in response to her attention and care. The body manufactured its own drugs in many cases, though she had hardly begun to learn about such things.

"Elementalism, Semblance, Scrivening, Necromancy... a touch of Runeforging. I suppose I could scrive a circle to guide my Semblance, leave the sample there for a time and let the sense of it come into greater focus. I wouldn't know what it was by name, perhaps, but I would understand its properties better... I suppose one of us will have to take it to Master Jacun's in the Plaza of Jeweled Arches."

Then she fell silent, focusing on the task at hand. If she wasn't skilled, she was certainly painstaking about the work. There was a quiet respect for the dead about her, perhaps due to her forays into the necromantic arts.

"I am willing," she averred, having stepped back so he could examine her work. Now that she wasn't plying needle and thread, she opened herself up to her magical awareness. The cadaver was dead, but all matter was still made up of aether, so echoes of life remained. She sensed wisps of soul stuff, but not a ghost. If her overdose had been traumatic, that trauma didn't seem to have kept her tied to this mortal coil. She supposed that was a mercy.

Since they were going to try her idea, she began to scrive a circle of pictographs upon the notepad. Knowing, sensing, understanding, and wisdom—she tied things together with paths, enhanced those paths with mirrors, and formed a convergence that would allow them to work together. It took some time, and she would stop if he asked her to. The doctor was exacting, sometimes patient and sometimes impatient. She didn't know him well enough yet to be sure which he would be in this instance. But finally, she thought she had it.

Kala set the notepad down.

"All right," she said. "If you place the sample here, I will activate the pictographs. Then, I'll channel aether through my Rune of Semblance here, and if you do the same there, it ought to tie both our senses into it. It won't last very long. I didn't think to bring spellwright's ink or anything like that, but it ought to make our powers... well, it ought to make our semblance abilities more than the sum of their parts. We ought to get a more... kaleidoscopic view of it, I suppose. A more refined idea of what the drug is. It might not work, in which case the sample ought to still be good for whatever other tests you might run on it. Even if it doesn't work, I'll go home tonight and work on this design to see if I can't make it more helpful for future analyses."

She paused. "Are you ready?"

When he was, she awoke the pictographs to the aether, then channeled her aetheric sense through her Rune and then into the point she had indicated, then waited for him to meet her in the middle.

Kala felt the doctor's aether catch in her pictographs, then felt their awarenesses blend. She couldn't read his thoughts or his emotions, nor he hers, but their senses were doubled. It reminded her of studying a thing with Kaus, how she could almost see what he could see as well as what she could, their core bond blending them. But this doubled their senses, then trebled them. His was a more powerful gift, or he had trained it harder. She was used to Kaus being stronger than her, too, which required her to be more clever with what she had.

As he began to give his impressions, she rattled off her own.

"Quicksilver," she agreed, both for its brief duration and its appearance. "Gentle feelings, but... potent. Binds to the blood, but it's destructive. Perhaps that's why there's discoloration at the injection site. By the time it reaches the brain, it's already damaging the veins." She wondered if it was a habit that was quick to kill; if one injection damaged the circulatory system, she couldn't guess how many injections in how long a time could do irreparable and fatal damage. Contentment did not come cheap.

She fell silent, meditating on what she was sensing and giving the doctor a chance to build upon what she had said or refine it.

For a moment, she wondered whether she could manage to raise the girl's spirit to ask her questions directly if the doctor's alchemist friend couldn't identify the drug. But she put the thought out of her mind for now. She still wasn't proficient enough to risk it, both for her own safety and the girl's immortal soul. Best to let it rest with Wraedan for now.

There came a point where Kala came to the edge of her understanding. She could still follow what Urs was saying, what he was describing; she understood what he meant with his metaphors, though she wasn't sure she could articulate them any better. She just didn't know enough about pharmacology to understand what her spell was showing her. This was why she needed more than just power; she needed knowledge. It was the same as needing medical and surgical skills before she could fully unlock the potential of whatever she learned from necromancy.

Whenever he added a new impression, she made small noises of agreement, but it seemed he was going to have to take it to an expert.

"It must be very new," she said quietly when even he stopped finding new elements to comment upon. "Or a new mixture of things that baffles the senses. I hope your friend is more help than I am."

There was only the faintest note of rue in her voice. It was highly unlikely she would be better equipped to identify the substance than the doctor was, but she was always hopeful that she could be a help.

In any case, she hoped she had performed well enough assisting with the autopsy that he wasn't rethinking his decision to teach her. She had come here to study medicine, but he was teaching her about surgery and she was deepening her understanding of scrivening and semblance as well. Everything seemed interconnected, and it was exciting when one thing she knew proved applicable to another thing. It gave her more of a sense for how the world fit together.