[hr][center][color=808B96][color=00BFFF][h2][b]T a f f y[/b][/h2][/color]Southeastern Mir [b]-[/b] Max's plane crash site[/color][/center]
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Taffy rolled her eyes as the Spicati continued to speak, but she didn't let his words bother her.  He had surprised her at first, and she had been stressed by the possibility of an exploding fuel tank in the plane, so she had reacted with a hostility that she regretted - only a little bit, but she [i]did[/i] regret it.  Now that she was listening to him, she could tell from his tone that he didn't really mean any offense by the slew of foul language that left his mouth.  Taffy had been around patients in a lot of pain who said things they didn't mean, and she had also had patients from lower class areas that really didn't know better than the crude slang they were around all the time in the slums.  Now that she could chalk this hedgehog up as part of this latter category, she took what he said in stride and was able to downgrade her emotional status towards him from 'hostile' to 'belligerent.'

That didn't help her from taking a little spiteful glee as the young otter boy muttered what [i]sounded[/i] like "Your mother, moffie."  She was a little shocked to hear that, but she couldn't bring herself to scold the boy when she still felt rather sullen about the pilot herself.

When she had approached the boy and reached out, he had almost squirmed away from her, as if unwilling to be touched.  It had been Max, ironically, that seemed to change the boy's mind, and he let Taffy remove the blood-crusted old bandages.  It was clear now that this otter boy didn't seem associated with Max, so that made Taffy wonder how he had gotten here by himself this far into the forest.  For that matter, though he looked searchingly in her eyes, she could tell there was something off about him.  It was just a niggling at the back of her mind, but it was like he didn't quite [i]look[/i] like one of the riverfolk...in fact, his face had an almost-

The last of the old bandages fell away just as the boy collapsed to the ground with a soft thud.  Taffy was immediately on her knees at his side, and she checked his pulse first at his wrist, then his neck.  Her mind was now going through the motions of treatment, and had abandoned whatever train of thought she had before, her anger being placed next to the other tools at her mental disposal.  "He's alive, just unconscious," she said neutrally, though she let out a small sigh of relief all the same.  "Give me a moment to get him patched up, then we need to move him to shelter somewhere."

She set her pack down next to her and drew out what she needed - a damp cloth to wipe away dried blood, antiseptic ointment to prevent infection, and bandages expertly woven into place over the injuries she could see.  As her hands worked with automatic motions long trained for the situation, she fell into a familiar pattern that let her mind focus back onto her power.  [i]I need to make sure I'm not missing anything,[/i] she thought to herself as she went through the mental exercises she had been trained in since she had been very young.

The light glimmered once again from her bright blue eyes as they roved up and down the boy's body.  She saw past fur and skin to the trails of lifeblood that flowed in the boy's veins.  It wasn't that she literally saw his blood vessels - she had seen enough open wounds and cut-open specimens to know what those looked like - but instead it felt more like an abstraction of the boy's overall health as measured by the lines representing his blood flow.

This was the Tan'Ur family line's Codus - Vitalsight.

[i]Okay, that should do it,[/i] Taffy thought.  She let go of the mental threads of control, and the light faded from her eyes once more just as she finished the last bandage.  A mild headache began to bug her as she pulled out a small needle-less injector, carefully measured a silvery-gray liquid into it, then pressed it against the boy's chest.  The device gave a fast hiss as it worked, and Taffy placed the injector back into her pack along with everything else.  The headache remained, but she knew it would go away as long as she kept herself from using her Codus for a while.

"My name is Taffy Tanner," she said as she turned her face up to Max, who stood nearby.  "I'm out here on a hike.  I'm a medical student at Colosse."  Then she returned some of the edge to her voice as she said pointedly, "Don't think I'm getting all buddy-buddy with you, now - I'm just introducing myself to make it easier to work together, and so you can call me by my proper name instead of 'girl.'"  She closed up her pack and replaced it on her shoulders, then moved to place her black-"gloved" hands below the otter boy's shoulders.  "Now, if you can grab his ankles, we can move him to some better shelter until he wakes up."