[color=Gold] "Yes, I heard the news, mom. I’m being careful. No, I’m not—taking unnecessary risks. I told you, I’m doing journalism now. Totally calm. Yea, Listen, I gotta go. I’m about to—no, I’m not meeting with any strangers. Mom, calm yourself. I am just going to get something to eat. Yes…Yes. Love you, too. Bye.”[/color] A tap on her wrist-mounted ecto ended the call, and she turned her attention back to the bleeding person in front of her. The small ear-bud stayed in its place, so she could get other notifications from the Ecto if anything came up. 

Of course she wasn’t going out to eat. She was meeting with one of her contacts, healing them for information. The Gemstone shortage was bad for the economy, but the desperation helped loosen people’s lips, which meant there was more information for someone like Adina. Her mother would have been incredibly disappointed, but she was doing what she needed to, for information, for the truth. [color=Gold]”Alright, stay still."[/color] She warned.

Her current patient was laying on a work table, with four of his friends standing around watching. Two of them had weapons out, in case Adina did something stupid. She wasn’t stupid, though. This was an even exchange. They didn’t have a healer, and the local ones were being stingy regarding their healing. She had a gemstone with…well admittedly not much of a charge left, but it was worth it. It had to be. The guy on the table had been shot, and while anyone could stitch it up, they thought they needed to have the bullet dug out. A bit of gentle probing revealed that no, he didn’t need it out. The bullet itself wasn’t causing more bleeding, and the heat of the bullet had basically self-sterilized. 

She healed the internal bleeding, using most of her Gemstone as her focus, and then packed the rest of the wound with gauze and wrapped it. It would bleed a little more, and she recommended he take it easy for a few days, but what he actually chose to do was his choice. Turning to the leader of the group, Adina wiped her hands on a rag, and tapped a few buttons on her Ecto. [color=Gold]”So, ready to talk?”[/color] She looked up the length of the gun, and waited for the other man to lower it. 

The mercenary leader looked over at his sweaty and still slightly-pale friend, and then looked down at his own Ecto. No doubt his entire crew’s devices were connected, and he could see their vitals and important information. Once he confirmed that the man’s vitals were stable, he lowered the weapon and gestured for Adina to follow him another area. “Here’s the pitch for our job.” He said, pressing some buttons on another computer. “Now you know all we know.”

[color=Gold]”Except for what actually happened on the job."[/color] Adina corrected. This was what she had asked for, but she was still hoping to get a little more.

The man let out a snort of amusement and shook his head. “What happened is we did our damn jobs.” He said. “And now you’ve got what we agreed upon. Now I suggest you make yourself scarce, before my men want to start target practice to let out some of their aggression.” Adina tapped a few buttons on her Ecto, confirming the data transmission, and then nodded. She lifted up her bag once more, the one with gauze and medical supplies, and walked out of the office. The mercenaries grew silent as she passed, watching her leave the way she came. Adina kept her head down, and left the building, heading back to town. She probably did need to get that bite to eat.

Her ecto beeped when she was eating, a notification of a news report matching her search criteria. The ecto was programmed to constantly search for certain phrases. This search was for [i]Umbra[/i] which traditionally gave her a lot of useless results. The problem with the major news outlets was that they were almost always the same thing, just with different words. Few really did investigative journalism anymore. They just regurgitated what they already knew. 

Most of the time, when she thought she had something new, it was just someone getting the facts wrong, or mixing up old stories with new, or downright guessing. She had almost dismissed the news reports completely as a source of information. But she couldn’t just ignore what the mass population was being told. Even if the information wasn’t good, people’s reactions to it, the way they chose to clam up or open up—they were just as important to her making progress as the actual stories were.

Adina finished up the street-food, and pulled up the story, skimming through it. She wasn’t surprised, but she was a little disappointed when she found that it was same story she had read a few hours before, with no more than ten words changed. And they called that journalism? [i]Pfft.[/i]