( log six | clinic catchall | open | are you really harmful for me? )

[dedikated]

Who: Clinic staff + anyone who wants to drop by!
What: Monthy catchall for clinic visits and shenanigans
Where: Take a wild guess
When: All through July
Warnings: Injuries, probably. Card games. Terrible people pretending to be not terrible people.


[[ take it to the comments, baby! NOTE: clinic info and plotting posts can be found at undersupplied if you want to check it out. ]]

Comments

[verinumeri]

[ His negotiations with Miss Delight, the provision of a schematic for the piano, had made him dubious as to the practicality of asking Mr. Hope for the drugs. Beyond his reluctance to make many trades or become so reliant on a god (or further, as they all were for food, air, shelter), he simply couldn't explain the exact science behind the drug. Why fingolimod had worked better than all the other options. Not even Newton could, as they hadn't studied it.

Magical healing, much as he wanted more of an explanation from that, seemed his best bet of anything.

Hermann takes the paper with a nod, tucking it into his blazer's breast pocket. ]

Thank you.

[ With a slight twist of his mouth, almost a smile. ]

I don't care for promises, in any case, and I don't expect much.

[dedikated]

Just doing my job. [ Down here, that isn't nearly as much as she would like, but anything is better than nothing.

God, she misses the resources of the clinics back home. She never realised just how much reliance on medication and non-powered healing there was back home until she tried working without it. Her own lips tug up at the corner at his philosophy - it's not a bad one to have, especially here. But promises are reflexive sometimes - the promise to do the most, to protect someone. Things like that, where you really do mean them.

(And they're always the ones that get broken, aren't they?) ] Still. We'll do what we can. [ Even if that means somehow finding other ways of managing pain or anything else that they could achieve.

Dammit, she really should have concentrated on more than admin and power work during her apprenticeship. Although, who would have ever guessed that she'd be in an undersupplied cave trying to keep people alive? She never wanted to be underground again in the first damn place. ]

[verinumeri]

[ That almost inclines closer to actual, but that he comments as well surprises him, the words not intended, not more that a subconscious drift. ]

Nice to have a job. Something to do.

[ To feel, be useful. There might still be individuals who protested the idea of human utility as an ugly byproduct of capitalist, commercial culture, ideology, what have you. Perhaps some Marxist cog in the machine ravings. It's the sort of thing Newton would spew, determined to be brashly, brazenly anarchist while giving twelve years of his life to a military organization. Only, philosophical protests of that nature hadn't much viability in a place like this.

More to the point, it's not something Hermann would ever conceive of, never mind humor. He wants to be useful. Has to be useful. Haven had made clinics an awkward, deeply settled thorn. He would insist on his title, clinging to the buffering weight of it, the shield, but it largely served as a reminder. Not that sort of doctor. No help.

Promises or no promises, they'll do what they can -- they'll help. Those days, these days, he's only ever the person who needs it. An awkward thorn, but away from his own insecurities, and he'd rather be away, it's good to see, too -- the organization, the structure, the assistance for the whole.

Having the paper, the 'what we can', he ought to go, business done. But, he's curious. Hermann glances toward the papers, the numbers. ]

Do you mind if I ask...?

[dedikated]

[ She nods at the first part without hesitating. It's all she's ever known - even before she started working, Kate had always kept herself too busy to think. Extracurricular activities - sports, and more sports, training, making sure Marc got his nose out of a book once in a while - and later just diving so far into avoiding any of those things that it became a kind of busy in and of itself.

Then she started working, and then The Agency came and she forgot what it was like to sleep more than a couple of hours a night. And although combat is a useful skill down here - one she took back to like a duck to water - it isn't one she wants to fill her life with again. Especially not underground.

(She more than learned that lesson when the fog rolled in, more than realised that this place was bringing nightmares she didn't realise she had back to life.)

She could empathise with the feeling useful part, spending way too many hours in here for things that could probably be done by anyone. Her real skillset hasn't come into use yet - only this project, and maybe the sensors have even come close to being any real kind of use down here. Her first aid is comprehensive, but hardly as effective as magical healers. And without the little things, like ordering stock or organising payroll, she feels a lot more superfluous than she lets on.

But Hermann, thankfully, brings the papers to attention before that rabbit hole becomes an actual point. She leans over and picks them up, leafing through them habitually. ] Work project. Not finished yet. [ Mentioning it now, bringing it out in the open before it's completed - when she's still iffy on whether she can iron out the last few kinks and make them genuinely workable - doesn't seem right.

She doesn't want to get anyone's hopes up, not the way Bianca's had been before they started trying to strengthen Sharon's powers. ]

[verinumeri]

[ Unfinished. Hermann hesitates to inquire further.

He understands, or would, if told the reasoning. He cannot know from five words and tends not to speculate on human motivations. Only familiarity, a sense of recognition, strikes enough of a chord that the reverberations resonate. Something like the mud at Lake Como, like all that he could not tell his father, not tell anyone, until he'd done it. Only worthwhile, only worth discussing if done, if finished, if it was more than a promise, a hope. An expectation.

Though his tenure in the PPDC had emphasized the frequent necessity of working with others, that it could improve a project to discuss it with the right mind, he's not sure he could contribute anything here, and it seems too presumptive to start on such a footing. Numbers he knows, but what she got from knocking at different objects, he couldn't say. The reasonable assumption? That it's more than he can know. He avoids the word magic when he can, but when he can't, cedes it.

Hermann debates how to proceed, if he should. She hadn't said he couldn't or shouldn't ask. Perhaps best to plow along until she clearly foreclosed it. ]

What is it meant to do? Excuse me -- it's only I noticed the numbers.

[ His fingers curl and flex on his cane's handle, anxious spidering. ]

[dedikated]

The numbers? [ She repeats it because that is a weird reason to get attached to her notes, Science dude. Kate, you have a lot to learn. She glances at the notes for another moment, running her tongue along her teeth and staying still for a moment. Deciding whether to explain.

Or how much to explain. ] I can enchant things. [ Which she says as though it is a boring, standard fact of life. Which, for her, it is. Even if it has its own levels of appeal after thirty years of getting used to it. It's hardly flashy, is it? It's woefully niche, as well. ] The numbers are seconds. How strong I want it... That kind of thing. [ And a few other things that she needs to keep in mind to properly create an enchantment.

There's a few pages where the numbers have been scribbled out and re-written, as if she's decided that those ones don't work. ]

[verinumeri]

[ Duration or strength, measures and notations rather than calculations and equations. It confirms that it's nothing he can assist with. Nothing deflates, really, as he had expected just that.

As she'd picked them up, he cannot see the pages. Even when she'd flipped through, he wouldn't crane his neck to pry. That some had been struck out, numbers changing and adjusted, he'd noticed on the single page he'd glimpsed at the start. It seems a fascinating process. Fascinating, too, and still a struggle for him to wield, the normality of enchanting for her.

He wants to ask to what end. Protection? That seems the easiest, most reasonable assumption. ]

Are your enchantments in some fashion restricted by the object? That is... walls might be made sturdier, a scalpel sharper, or is it more open-ended?

[dedikated]

No.

[ But her eyes light up, just slightly, with some mixture of amusement and fondness. He can't know that he stumbled on the ability of a friend of hers, but all the same, Kate can see the way Carl effortlessly, instinctively enchants things beyond their physical limits. She misses that - the knives he could turn into something far deadlier than they already were, or how impossibly light staffs did far more damage than they should (never really her weapon, but Faith wielded them like she controlled her spiralling, ever-burning fire, like an extension of her own body).

But, before she goes too far down memory lane, remembers too many times his powers helped her - a rope that was far sturdier, incapable of being clawed to shreds, and all the other things - she grabs a pair of sunglasses from the countertop - her own, ever present - and slides her fingers across the temples, up and down in a smooth motion that is for nothing but her own thought. ]

I make items react to powers. [ It's never the easiest thing to explain, and doing so leaves her with a pang of desire for home, or at least for people from it. People who know what power enchantment is, even if they're not familiar with a person who can do it. ] Make things see powers, detect them.

[ Strengthen or absorb them. ]