The four of them each coiled up a vine and staggered out of the woods, back to the fire. Heather joined them, counting under her breath. Danielle activated Medic’s Diagnostics as they arrived at their fire circle, and started looking for what she could learn about everyone. Treatment for hyperventilation in progress, the Skill whispered as she glanced at Heather. Multiple lacerations, it added, as Danielle turned her attention back to Akari and Sadie. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she muttered to the Skill.

  “I don’t have enough mana for all of this!” Heather blurted out.

  “I’ll use my Skills to help us prioritize,” Danielle said. “We’ll do the worst ones first. Sadie, sit down so I can look at it all properly. Please.”

  “You always tell me to sit down! It helps, Danielle,” Sadie complained. She had been pacing, which was a habit she also had when dealing with headaches. This wasn’t a dorm room, though, and Danielle couldn’t compare the various cuts if she was moving.

  “I’m going to tell you to take some pain meds, just like old times, too,” Danielle said. “Please Sadie, I can’t do triage while you’re up and moving, I need to be able to see.”

  “Pain meds – I can get out the pills,” Heather said, latching on to something she could do immediately.

  “And water, please,” said Akari.

  “Is the distilled water cool enough to wash wounds in?” Danielle asked.

  “Of course it is – just a minute,” Heather said.

  “I’ll get your first aid kit, Danielle,” Cassy said.

  “Yes please.” Danielle focused on Akari and Sadie. The cut on Akari’s neck was clearly the worst, though not immediately life-threatening. It was one of the deeper cuts, and in an awkward place, hard to bandage. There was another rather serious one on Sadie’s left ankle, curling at least a third of the way around it.

  “Here,” Heather said, offering pills to Akari. “You can swallow all right, right? This is a little more than the bottle says, but when my mom had kidney stones, they told us she could take a lot more as long as it wasn’t so much per day, and this is still less than she was taking then.”

  “Good enough for me,” Akari said, taking three pills and a canteen and swallowing them.

  Danielle and Heather both cringed as tilting her head back to drink opened the neck cut wider. “This one is the priority,” Danielle told Heather. “Align Body and Close Wound, and then I’ll point you at the next most serious one, and so on. Any mana that can, comes from tokens, right?”

  “Right,” Heather said, rummaging in her first aid kit. “Cassy, can you get Sadie’s pills? Three of the Fever-Ace from my kit, and a full canteen.” She passed Cassy the pill bottle, then knelt in front of Akari, holding a mana token.

  “Got it,” Cassy said. “Danielle, your kit’s by your foot, don’t trip on it.”

  “Got it,” Danielle echoed, picking up her first aid kit and moving aside while Heather went to work on Akari’s neck. “Did anyone bring a pen? I don’t really want to use the blazing markers on this, but I need something to mark which cuts I’ve looked at.”

  “I have something,” Cassy said. “Can it wait until after pills are distributed?”

  “Yes,” Danielle said, pulling out soap, wash cloth, and rubbing alcohol. She set her kit down open for her Skill to react to, then looked around and came back with one of the warm canteens of distilled water.

  Sadie was swallowing her pills as Danielle knelt down next to her again. “OK, I’m going to work my way up from your ankles,” Danielle began, when Cassy tapped her on her shoulder and held out three pills. “What?” she asked, then immediately felt stupid. Obviously Cassy wanted her to take pain pills too.

  “You might not be feeling it much now, but you’ll be glad you took them later,” Cassy said.

  Danielle nodded and gulped them down with water from the canteen Cassy offered, then put it down next to her first aid kit. Sadie was getting out of her denim uniform, which was helpful; as soon as she sat back down, Danielle got back to work washing enough blood off of Sadie’s wounds to evaluate them. Cassy brought her a gel-ink pen, and she started writing markers next to the cuts: a / for ones that needed stitches or healing, a ? for wounds that had high priority to just get healing, and a narrow oval with a smaller circle inside to symbolize a bandaid for cuts shallow enough to just clean and cover up.

  “Done,” Heather said. “Two down from my pool, 15 from the healing reserve.”

  “Do the ankle next, and then eat your purple tomatoes,” Danielle said, switching places with her and starting her evaluation on Akari. She fortunately didn’t have any wounds on her legs, but she’d been slapped across the chest and upper arms a couple of times. Danielle marked the wounds through the tears in her T-Shirt. By the time she was done, it was glaringly obvious that there were too many cuts that needed more than a bandage for Heather to heal them all.

  “That one was 20 mana,” Heather reported. “There’s only 25 left in the main healing token supply, and even with the tomatoes I only have eight pool mana left. What are we going to do?! There are way more than four wounds left to do!”

  “There are more than eight, too,” Danielle said grimly, “but I think if we reserve your mana for Align Body, I can stitch the rest of the serious ones. It’s going to hurt, though, we need to get some clean sticks to bite on or something. Then we can use band-aids or gauze and tape to sort of tape the other ones together, and tomorrow you can start healing again with the worst of the taped ones. Day after tomorrow, you do the stitched ones, and I take out the stitches.”

  “That’s – wow. OK, that sounds like it’ll work,” Cassy said. “But it does also sound really painful for all concerned.”

  “I’ve got that antibiotic with pain relief to put on when I’m done,” Danielle said. “It won’t make it any less torturous while I’m working, but it’ll help the pain go down faster.”

  “I’m not sure I like this plan,” Cassy said. “What about your arms? Who’s going to stitch you?”

  Danielle looked at her left arm, almost surprised to be reminded that she had several bleeding cuts of her own there. The arm of her T-shirt was bright red.

  “How about you wash and tape those while Heather sterilizes a needle for me?” Danielle said “You need to hold it in the fire until it glows, Heather – “

  “Hold it in the fire how?” Heather exclaimed. “It’s a needle, I’ll burn my fingers off before it even gets warm!”

  “OK, good point, sorry,” Danielle said. “Uh, other options – boiling. Put it in one of the distiller pots with a little water, boil it, then ten minutes later you take the pot and hold it in the river until it cools. Then we use the boiled water to wash my hands, and then I get the needle out of the bottom and use it. Hands clean, needle clean, good to go.”

  “How about using the rubbing alcohol?” Cassy said with some asperity.

  “Alcohol works on people,” Danielle said. “Boiling doesn’t work for people. Ergo, alcohol is reserved for people.”

  “You – you aren’t wrong,” Cassy admitted, sounding torn.

  “You start bandaging, Cassy,” Heather said resolutely. “I’ll boil the needle. Where is it, Danielle?”

  “In my kit,” Danielle said. “There’s a little paper packet. Use the one with the smallest eye.”

  “Got it,” Heather said.

  Cassy shook her head, but got another bottle of distilled water and rolled up Danielle’s sleeve. She washed the cuts there with soap and water, then with the rubbing alcohol, which awakened the pain, but Danielle clenched her teeth and kept her response down to a hiss. Cassy cut a gauze pad into three narrow strips, and put a line of antibiotic cream down each one, then used the bandaging tape to tape them down, with the tape perpendicular to the line of the cut, so it held the two sides together. When she finished, the wounds were all neatly covered in a way that would support healing – and they were also throbbing in pain.

  “Whatever kept me from feeling it before has officially worn off,” Danielle said. “Thanks for making me take the Fever-Ace.”

  “You’re welcome, but are you sure you want to continue with this plan?” Cassy asked.

  “It’ll be fine,” Akari said. “A bunch of little needle pricks aren’t going to hurt more than the thorny vine-whip.”

  “It’ll feel weird, though, when I pull the thread through,” Danielle said.

  “Well, that’d be the same at a clinic Inside, wouldn’t it?” Akari asked.

  “I’m pretty sure a clinic Inside would have local anesthetics to help,” Danielle pointed out. “The best you get out here is a biting stick.”

  “I’m whittling the bark off some,” Heather said from beside the fire. “The water’s been boiling for a while, too, but I forgot to ask the time when it started, so maybe ten minutes, but maybe not?”

  “It’s boiled either way, go cool it down so we can start this nightmare,” Sadie said. “We still have fish to gut and start smoking after that, and some of us are going to be slow, so we need to get moving or we won’t get done before dark.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “How can you think about fish at a time like this?” Heather asked.

  “It’s survival,” Sadie said. “I’m not dying of these little cuts, but I’m going to need food to recover.”

  “I both hate and love how well you’re all dealing with this,” Cassy said. “Hate it because I really want to freak out and – and act like an Insider, I guess, I dunno, but you keep saying all this stuff that is slightly horrifying and yet not wrong, and I love how it gives me hope that we’re actually going to get through the winter and everything. But I still don’t want you guys to have to go through with this ‘stitches and no anesthetic’ thing.”

  “Have you picked up a local anesthetic Skill you didn’t mention?” Akari asked.

  “Hah. Hah. No. I’m just,” Cassy trailed off. “I’m going to give this plan a chance to work, but if you can’t take it, I want you to know that there’s an alternative, where you grow your System less and don’t unlock Skill: Pain Resistance, but you also don’t have to get stabbed with a needle any more than however many times it took you to tap out, OK?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve already unlocked Pain Resistance,” Sadie said. “Now I’m going for Rapid Wound Healing.”

  Sadie laughed, and Danielle and Akari laughed with her. Cassy and Heather exchanged looks, but Heather still took the pot of boiling water (and one needle) off to the river to cool it, and Cassy helped Danielle wash her hands with more of the distilled water. Then she filled the rest of the distiller pots and got them going again, and held Heather’s biting sticks up to the fire to sterilize them a little.

  Heather came back with the boiled water and needle, and Danielle got the spool of thread out of her first aid kit and knelt next to Sadie. It took her four tries to thread the needle, between the particularly small eye and the slight trembling in her hands. “Are you sure you’re OK for this?” Cassy asked again.

  “I’m fine if Sadie is,” Danielle said. “I just have to activate my Skills again. Are you ready, Heather? I need you to hold Align Body while I work.”

  “I’m ready,” Heather said, kneeling next to her.

  “OK, Sadie, here’s what’s going to happen,” Danielle said. “I’m going to need you to take off your T-shirt; I know it’s embarrassing but it’s just the five of us girls. You can put it back on after. Once we can see all three spots, I’m going to activate Medic’s Diagnostics and Combat Medic, and stitch up the three worst of these cuts. Combat Medic should make me faster, and I’m going to go as fast as I can to get done before any of the Skills runs out, because neither Heather nor I have mana to spare right now. It’s going to hurt a lot. Bite on the stick and if you have to scream around it, that’s your right. When I’m done with each one, we’ll put on the antibiotic cream with the pain relief ingredient. It’ll still hurt some, though, because this stuff is for bug bites and kitchen accidents, not the results of mutant-thorn-bush fights.”

  “OK. I hate it, let’s do it,” Sadie said, taking off her shirt. That left her sitting in her shorts and bra. “OK, Heather, this one first,” Danielle said, pointing to a cut on Sadie’s side just above the waistband of her shorts. “Then the one on her calf. Then the one up here by the shoulder.”

  “Got it,” Heather said. “On the count of three?”

  “Actually, give me a few seconds to get some alcohol on all of those,” Danielle said.

  “Oh, right. Oh no! I forgot to do that for the ones I healed,” Heather said.

  “Well, that’s – we can’t do anything about that now, but let’s not make it any worse,” Danielle said, applying rubbing alcohol with a cotton ball. Sadie was stoically silent. Once all three wounds were disinfected, Danielle told Heather, “OK, now we go on the count of three.”

  Heather counted down, but Danielle had two Skills to activate, so she started on “two” with Medic’s Diagnostics. She managed to get Combat Medic up just before Heather said “three” and activated her own Skill. Danielle and examined the wound. Stitches or other mechanical closure will be required if healing is unavailable, the Skill whispered. “I know that, System, but tell me how many stitches, how far apart?” Danielle muttered back.

  That apparently seemed like more of a ‘guiding your hands’ thing than a ‘whispering numbers’ thing to the System, because instead of words she felt the pressure of her hands trying to move on their own. She leaned into it, and started stitching the cut on Sadie’s side, letting the Skill adjust her when it didn’t like her spacing. Sadie made a small, pained sound and went stiff. Muscle relaxation is preferable for stitching, her Skill whispered. Curved needles are more desirable equipment for this task, it added.

  “Heather, remind me to bend a needle – my Skill is complaining about not having a curved one,” Danielle said.

  “I’ll try,” Heather said.

  Behind them, Cassy said “I’ll write it down.”

  “Oo vuh fihh,” Sadie said around the stick.

  “What’s that?” Heather asked. “You can take the stick out for a second if you – ” she broke off as Danielle put the needle in again and Sadie clenched up again.

  “I think it’s ‘do the fish,’” Akari supplied. Sadie gave Akari a thumbs-up.

  “After I write down Danielle’s kind of important note, I’ll gut the fish,” Cassy said. “Someone owes me a not-it on fish gutting later, though!”

  Danielle had to pause a moment as Sadie laughed, then she got back to work. Her stitches weren’t as perfectly even and parallel as she wished they were, and she suspected she was stressing Heather’s Skill quite a bit with the motions necessary to get the straight needle to do what she needed it to do. Still, she got the wound stitched closed before the Skill ran out and moved on. Heather had to reactivate Align Body for each cut, regardless of how fast Danielle went; it normally lasted long enough for Heather to push through a healing, even on someone with some resistance, so it wasn’t the main factor that was pushing her to hurry. That was her own Skills, which cost three mana to activate together, but at least their duration wasn’t reset as she moved from cut to cut. Well, that, and she wanted to get the painful part over with so Sadie and Akari could rest and let their Fever-Ace kick in.

  Sadie was all control, breathing hard but making herself take deep breaths, clenching her teeth over the stick but mostly remaining silent. It took at least fifteen minutes to stitch the three wounds, and Danielle had to refresh her Skills for the third one.

  “Are you ready, Akari?” she asked. “Got your shirt off and your biting stick? I need to move over to you immediately when I’m done with this one here, I’m almost out of mana.”

  “You haven’t had any purple tomatoes today, have you?” Cassy asked.

  “Oh – I completely forgot about those,” Danielle said. “I might be over-focusing a little here. Uh, I don’t want to touch food while I’m stitching people, though. Can you maybe, um, feed me a few? Nine?’

  “I can do that if you take a break after this cut, and let Heather do the disinfecting stuff on Akari,” Cassy said.

  “Ack, yes, you’re right, I almost forgot that too. Am I all right? You don’t think I’m too shocky to be stitching or – or something, do you?” Danielle asked.

  “I think you’re a little bit in that weird emergency mindset where time is funny and only the next critical thing in front of you matters,” Cassy said. “As far as the stitching though?” she came over and looked as Danielle tied off the thread at the end of the shoulder wound. “I don’t think you’re doing a bad job at all, for someone who’s never done this before and doesn’t exactly have the right tools. Your Skill’s filling in a lot of gaps, I imagine.”

  “It is, for sure. You have no idea how creepy it feels, Cassy,” Danielle said.

  “Having your Skill move your hands, you mean?” Cassy asked.

  “No, stabbing in the needle and, and pulling the thread through and stuff. And watching it turn all red.” Danielle shuddered. “I’m done, get the antibiotic, Heather – no, we promised the one with the pain relief – yes, that one. Thank you. I’m, I’m gonna get fed some tomatoes and get ready to do five more. You have five mana left, right?”

  “Yeah, five,” Heather confirmed, gently spreading antibiotic ointment on Sadie’s stitched cuts.

  “Why did you do three on Sadie instead of four?” Akari asked. “It should be a fair share or something.”

  “No – I’m doing the eight worst injuries, regardless of who had them,” Danielle said. “Sadie has Cut Resistance, remember? It hit her harder a couple places, but mostly her cuts are shallower.”

  “Oh. OK. Thank you I guess,” Akari said.

  Cassy was feeding Danielle tomatoes while Heather bandaged over the stitches. “Listen, Akari, I want you to know I mean it when I say you can scream if you have to. Just because Sadie’s the strong, silent type doesn’t mean you have to do it, too. Although I want you to know I appreciate that about you, Sadie,” Danielle said between tomatoes.

  “Except when I’m pacing,” Sadie joked.

  “The pacing can get on my nerves, but it still beats moaning and groaning over a lack-of-sleep headache like a certain fifth-grade roommate used to,” Danielle said. “You’d think she was practicing to be a ghost in some drama-group play the way she’d go on, and after she kept me up all night harassing me for help with her own homework that she couldn’t be bothered to work on during study hour, too.”

  “That’s twelve,” Cassy said. “Do you want to wash your hands again?”

  Danielle looked at her hands – bloody. “That seems like a good idea,” she admitted, and Cassy helped her do that without touching anything else, too. “Thanks. It kind of feels stupid, making you feed me and pour and stuff, but nothing’s sterile except the needle.”

  “Not even that anymore,” Cassy said. “Do you want me to re-boil it?”

  “I’m pretty sure if this were a real medical place, we’d have to, but given the situation, I don’t know,” Danielle admitted. “Akari’s still bleeding over there. That’s sterilized water, right? Let’s just pour that over it too. We know Sadie, she isn’t carrying any weird blood-borne diseases.”

  “And if she was, your or Heather would get a Skill to deal with them pretty soon anyway,” Akari said.

  Sadie spoke up to assure them, “I’m not.”

  Cassy helped Danielle wash the needle, such as it was; at least she used soap. Then she re-threaded it (it took five tries this time) and settled herself in front of Akari. “OK, is everything disinfected?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but what are we going to do about the one under her bra?” Heather asked. “Does she need to, you know, take that off too?”

  “I’m thinking she can just kind of pull it down when we get to that one,” Danielle said. “It’s last. Worst case, we move into a tent for it I guess, but I think with your Skill in play it’ll be OK.”

  Akari was not, in fact, as quiet as Sadie; but on the whole she did a better job of relaxing her muscles in the area where Danielle and Heather were working. Danielle kept reminding her that yelling a little was fine (but also thanked her for not literally screaming). “It’s OK, we’re making progress, that’s two down,” she said. “Refreshing my Skills now.”

  “This one next, right?” Heather asked, and when Danielle nodded in confirmation, she activated Align Body and said, “Go.”

  The last and most awkward cut was hard to stitch with Akari’s hands in the area along with Heather’s finger (targeting her Skill). It took half again as long as any of the others, but Medic’s Diagnostics told her that it was “acceptably sutured” when she was done. Danielle was down to four mana, although she knew she could eat another twelve tomatoes if she had to. Heather was entirely dry, though, which meant no Align Body if Danielle needed to continue. Medic’s Diagnostics recommended stitches a few more places, but when Danielle firmly put aside the needle and got band-aids and tape instead, it helped her tape everything at the right angles to provide maximum support for healing.

  The sun was still annoyingly bright in a cheery blue sky when she and Heather finally finished spreading antibiotic cream and applying bandages. Danielle’s watch said it was just a bit after seven pm. Cassy had cooked the last two fish for supper, while they worked; it awkwardly made four fillets for five people again, but she and Heather volunteered to split one and let the three injured each have one to themselves. Everyone could at least have as many salmonberries as they wanted, which helped.

  They went to the latrine as a group and guarded each other while they used it, just in case there were more vine monsters out there. After that, Danielle crawled into a tent, put her winter cloak under her, her rain poncho over her, and a satchel under her head for a lumpy pillow, and did her level best to count stitches on the hood of her poncho until she fell asleep.

  She woke up briefly to find the tent nearly dark, and Sadie sleeping beside her, arranged more or less the same way. They’d both rolled the ponchos off, but the night was warm. The glow necklace was hanging from a pair of ties sewn into the tent’s roof. Danielle was sleepily proud to see it still glowing. Voices outside sounded like Cassy and Heather. Someone had put her staff inside the tent, close to hand; she checked the enhanced stone to confirm it was hers, and fell asleep again with it in her hand, drifting off even as she debated the merits of getting up for more pain relievers.

  an option...

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