Callie leaned against the cool, cream-white wall at the back of Lubao’s municipal hall. The rain had abated for now but the monsoon humidity remained, clinging to her skin and weighing down her breath. It felt grounding - something to help her ignore the constant prickling across her form and the itch burrowed deep beneath it.
More than that… She sighed. Minor architectural differences aside, this place felt more than a little familiar. The parking lot, the wide streets on one side, the painted fence ineffectually guarding a wide expanse of green scrubland on the other - all of it summoned memories of those few happy months hanging out at the mall with friends easily won and hard-fought for, whiling the days away before responsibility could pin them down.
Speaking of all of that.. Callie smiled as she tracked a figure hurrying down the long road towards the building. Her eyes felt sharper, now - or perhaps she was just even more hypervigilant than she had been before. It was hard to tell. Feeling the rush of displaced air as Charter fell into her hand, she made the slightest exertion of her will to open a portal that would save her a few dozen seconds…
The needles dug in, just slightly.
Huh. Thought that would be worse.Of course, any thought along those lines was cut short by the figure suddenly bursting through the portal, all fluttering habit and desperate haste. Callie chuckled as she let it close behind her.
“Hey, easy, easy! Still got a few minutes before we get going, Sister. No rush.”Marta stops in her tracks, the sudden stop causing her to almost topple over from the inertia, quickly wobbling back into place to avoid a most undignified pratfall. Seeing that she’s being observed, she clears her throat in an attempt to salvage the day’s impression.
“Ahem. Callie. Nice to see you! Good weather, isn’t it? Small miracles and all that.”She gestured vaguely to the sky above, feeling more at ease.
“I must say, I do enjoy this downtime. You don’t realize how stressful war really is until you get back home and you feel yourself really unwind.”She struck Callie on the shoulder with a playful jab.
“How’s your shore leave been, eh?”“Worse, now!” Callie laughed, rubbing where Marta’s strike had landed.
“Foresight didn’t tell me that’d be so hard... Seriously, though - still not at my best but much better than you last saw me.” She flung her arms out with a bold grin.
“As you can see! Your healing does a girl a power of good - almost makes me jealous!”
The hospital is much like other hospitals: walls shaped and coloured like nothing in particular, dry, slightly acrid disinfected air and a constant background hum of electrical lights and instruments. Granted, it is also a hospital that has been touched by the chaos of the recent counter-coup. Surgeons and nurses stride the corridors with more urgency than normal, weaving around beds occupied by men and women less than fully intact, laid outside the wards that ought to have housed them.
A gleaming light tinged in viridian flashes through the halls. Injuries disappear wherever she walks - her power mending even the most grievous wound or disease. She is long used to receiving praise and even prayer from those she has helped around the world - that makes her uncomfortable. She wouldn’t call herself a saint, though some would disagree.
But not everything can be solved on the physical level. And so, she helps. She carries things that need carrying, she helps make food, she cleans and sterilizes the needed spaces, and provides succour to those who have suffered wounds beyond the physical.
Diligent and dutiful, she nonetheless eventually reaches a cordoned-off area of the hospital that could have held many of those crammed into the rest of the space but for lack of power. The emergency generators were able to keep only most of the building operational, which will have to do for the stretch of time predicted for the electrical infrastructure damaged in the uprising to be restored. Thus, an entire section lies in darkness that only slightly recedes before the healer as she crosses its threshold.
One would be forgiven for thinking those shadowed wards entirely unoccupied, unfit for treating sick or wounded alike as they are, nor at all appropriate for those whose trauma is mental rather than physical. The clear light thrown out from under a door off a nondescript corridor, reaching out to meet the healer’s own, would nonetheless put paid to that idea. After all, none of the everyday miracles of modern medical practice are quite suited to dealing with a trauma not of mind, nor of body, but of the soul.
Caroline Lidmann lies on the hospital bed, sunken eyes open and unseeing. Unbound from its usual tail, dull, wispy hair spills out behind her on the pillow atop the headrest; her chest rises and falls in time with deep yet half-formed breaths. Below, her hand clutches her Arm, held like it is a fact of reality that it belongs there, which of course it is. Of the few attempts to pry it out that others have made, none have succeeded, and so the spyglass continues to cast the room in a glow that seems to siphon warmth from the surrounds it lies upon - and substance from its holder.
For, barring the Arm, Caroline’s entire form is diaphanous - not wholly there, half-shadow in her shape visible on the mattress beneath her,
through her. Even the substance of the bed itself and the blanket covering her seem as though leeched, the world laying punishment upon them for daring to associate with one that it half-rejects.
At the bedside, a woman raises her head to mark the opening of the door and gives a professional nod to the one who entered through it. Her camouflage and peaked cap atop dark hair held in a tight bun mark her as an officer (as does the stern if not unkind weight of her gaze), even as the stethoscope notes her particular command as atypical. “A pleasure, Sister; I was told you would be here. I am Master Sergeant Lorena Tecson Salcedo, specialising in antiquarian medicine. This one has been placed in my care, for the time being.”
“Ah- yes, it’s nice to meet you. You can just- call me what you like, it’s fine.”She offers a discreet nod and goes to observe the “patient.” Marta would like to say that she has learned enough in her days to “belong” at a hospital bedside. She is no doctor, and she respects them for her efforts, but she can more often than not prevent people from falling apart not to die within the half a minute necessary for her Arms to “change”.
This is something out of her expertise as she understood it. Mysterious, magical jiggery-pokery wasn’t exactly something you could learn at a United Nations Refugee Camp.
Not that this would be enough to stop her. The person on that bed is a comrade in the good fight, and she’ll figure out a way even if she has to tug on the coattails of divine providence.
“So, uh, Sergeant Salcedo. How’s the patient doing? Any changes?.”“Nothing since I arrived from Q.C. to oversee this facility one and a half weeks ago; no response to stimuli, no function beyond autonomic. I would call it an ordinary coma, which would be explicable, were it not for… The other symptoms.” Salcedo stares at, through, the figure on the bed. “I will be honest with you, Sister: I have cared for dozens of other Arms Masters during my service, many of whom required it after reaching beyond their grasp. This case is unlike any of those times. The patient’s Arm is more highly ranked than any I have come across before but even as it is categorised under spatial manipulation it lacks any facet of intangibility, stasis, self-teleportation - there is nothing in her file that would suggest her present state is due to power gone astray.”
She tucked her arms behind back, the shadow thrown away from the spyglass’ light shifting with them. “And yet, the reports from the helicopter pilot and crew accompanying her all agree that she gained these symptoms as she was using her Arm, which its current effect would seem to confirm.” Salcedo turned her eyes back to Marta, more inscrutable than before. “As I understand it, you were present at the point of the power’s use; do you have any further insight into how it expressed itself and whether it differed in any way from the patient’s typical Arms Master abilities?”
Marta shakes her head.
“Sure, I was there, but I was in the backlines. By the time I saw it happening I had to react to an injured person, and…” She approaches the bed haltingly before looking to the Sergeant for permission.
“May I?.”“Of course.”
Marta approaches the bed, clutching her rosary with her left hand as she lays the armored right hand upon Caroline’s arm. She tries to gently pull the Arm from her grip, but fails, and instead just presses the hand gently.
“Merciful Lord, we thank you for your kindness and benevolence. We praise you who has uplifted the meek and humbled the mighty, who has been the shepherd of righteous men.”She looks to the sergeant for an instant, wondering what she thinks of this “treatment”; her face remains expressionless, albeit with more attentiveness than before and… Something else, in her eyes. Marta focuses again.
“As I am dutifully wed in spirit to thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, I kindly pray that I be granted the authority to drive out the impure and to banish disease and illness among those who have recourse in thee.”Releasing the crucifix in her left hand, she tries to raise up Caroline’s clenched hand.
“When you are an outcast, the Lord shall sustain thee. When you are on your sickbed, the Lord shall nourish thee.”She kneels by the bed, her strong hands trying to peel off but a single finger, her every thought preoccupied with the salvation of just one more soul. The Right Hand of Mercy emits another shimmering flash of bright viridian light, warring with Charter’s frigid glow.
“If it be the will of the Lord my God, in whom I trust, then may the impure spirit be cast out, and let the wayward lamb return from the hills and the rushes to be with its flock.”A moment. For doubt; for faith.
Slowly, the finger uncurls beneath Marta’s own. Green light reaches out again, not fighting now but embracing its pale fellow with its warmth. As one, they draw back into Charter - and then the viridescence flows into Caroline herself, gently suffusing her, the shadows beneath her banished first by merciful glow; then, more and more, by her own, solid form. One by one, the rest of the fingers follow in unclasping from the spyglass’ living metal, until at last it falls away and vanishes into nothing.
Callie’s eyes flutter closed, a meaningless murmur on her lips; her head falls to one side; and she stills, but for the deep, steady draw and release of air.
Behind her, Salcedo is a woman transformed: eyes wide, sternness melted away. She steps, then rushes forward, one hand reaching for the wrist from below which the spyglass fell, now hanging off one side of the bed; the other tracing the sign of the cross. “Pulse… Is regular and strong. Still only autonomic; we will have to monitor her, but this is still…” She shakes her head. “Diyós ko… I had hoped, but…”
Marta breathes out, letting the stress in her frame bleed out. She follows Salcedo in making the sign of the cross.
“Sometimes hope is what sustains us, Sergeant. I couldn’t honestly tell you that I knew what was going to happen, but well… I had to try, right?.”She offers a relieved smile and raises both hands reverently.
“Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and not be afraid.”“‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - not by works,’” Salcedo answers, trailing off. “That… The words you speak might be more true than even you may know, Sister Marta.” The sergeant shakes herself, brushing dust from her sleeve as she stands, still gazing down at Callie. “It is always a wonder to witness those whose Arms bestow renewal as much as they do judgement. I read your file too, of course, what I was cleared for of it; I knew that there was every chance that she would be beyond your Hand’s reach. And yet, for all that the body succumbs to time, the soul is everlasting.”
A moment of pause. Then she lifts her head, mouth half-open, eyes darting across to -
almost meet Marta’s gaze, before halting, hesitant. “I… I should not speak heresy before a woman of the cloth.”
The sister waves her off with a carefree expression.
“Oh, pshaw, don’t worry about that kind of thing. As long as you’re doing good, you’re good in my book.”She dismisses her Arm and offers her hand in recognition.
“So let’s both keep working hard, alright?”The sergeant stares, down at the hand, and then at Marta, and then at the hand again - and then she laughs, and takes it. “Sister Marta, I have served for two and a half decades, seeing so many Arms and their bearers, learning of them and their function, and I have formed… Something like a hypothesis, something like a belief. Many in my work see them merely as an extension of the soul - but that cannot be all. No human soul can do such a thing alone.”
Lorena reaches up to remove her cap, leaving tightly bound hair below, and clutch it to her chest. “The Lord God sent to us the Word once before, that He might redeem us. I believe that He has done so once again. I believe that your comrade drank deeply, beyond even the fullness of the Light veiled in metal that He gave for her to call upon, and could not bear it.”
“And I believe that you, by the Light that He has given to you and by your faith in Him, have now restored her.” She shifts the cap in her hand and reaches down to Marta’s, encapsulating and embracing it between her own, meeting her eyes with a look of appreciation and… Awe. That’s it. “Thank you. May it shine on others as brightly.”
esqueleto
Gerlando