A Flesh Outlook (Alea Campbello)

[Kuvarakh]

Continued from Here.

70th of Winter, 512

Wanda, the owner of Alchemmia Alchae, the only Alchemy Shop in Alvadas, hurried through the streets of that town, her feet driven by desperation. She was, perhaps for the first time in her life, angry at the patron deity, Ionu, for the playful distribution of icy barriers and obstacles. The Winter season had been an inundation of ice floes and ice bergs throughout the town all season. 'As if freezing our asses in SUMMER hadn't been bad enough, you might have given us a break THIS season with some warm weather!'

But it wasn't the cold that stung her eyes to tears. Time was of the essence, and she was having to practically crawl the length of the town to find the facility housing The Order of Transcendence. Her assistant and partner, Kuvarakh, was in dire need, his body so badly maimed and mutilated by the insects inadvertently transformed into steel-bodied, stone-eating super termites, that he needed to do 'that Nuit thing' and switch into a new body...Now!

The bugs had become more than a nuisance, they had become a genuine threat. Kuvarakh had managed to stop that threat, hopefully permanently, but he had been swarmed over in the process and half his body had been chewed up, to some degree or another. This included the loss of an arm, an eye and a foot. A couple of ribs were showing through the rents in his torso, along with a collar bone and the right side of his jaw. Were he not a Nuit, he'd be dead already from loss of blood. But the loss of the Nuit ichor was still perilous. He was at the shop, lying perfectly still in an apparent coma. If not for the efforts of a couple of ex-soldiers, he'd have lost too much already.

The incident with the bugs had drawn a crowd at its climax. Fortunately, a pair of ex-military men, with knowledge of the grim necessities of the battlefield, had stepped in and cauterized the stumps, applied pressure and tied off what they could to stem the loss of ichor. It was a draw at best. Kuvarakh's delirious, wrenching screams and the smell of burnt flesh was a nightmare waiting for her next attempt at sleep.

Before lapsing into unconsciousness, he had managed to slur the name 'Alea Campbello', 'The Order' and something about 'victim's bodies'. Wanda had no way of knowing if she would be there, but there was nothing for it but to check. She was accompanied by the earth reimancer girl that had been trying to help with the bugs, but this girl confessed she did not know any Kelvic 'Campbello' woman. Still, she said would be happy to run through the other wing of the OoT facility asking for her to save time.

Wanda was grateful for any help and, in fact, the reimancer was a great help locating the building, out of the random jumble that citizens awoke to every morning. They rushed into the facility, Wanda going right, and the other girl going left. After a few turns, Wanda burst into a hallway and saw a woman answering Alea's description entering a room on the right.

"Alea Campbello? Is that your name?" she cried in a mix of relief and anguish, "I need your help. I mean, Kuvarakh needs your help!"

[Alea Campbello]

Alea whirled round at the mention of Kuvarakh's name. She thought she had met this woman before, Wendy or something. The thing she was thinking about more though, was what had happened to Kuvarakh.
"What's wrong?" She blurted out "Is it something I did, Oh know it wasn't anything I did was it" She began shaking "I won't let you take me away" She began advancing towards the door, getting ready to turn if she had to.

[Kuvarakh]

"No, no, you don't understand." Wanda said, in barely restrained panic, "I need you to come with me for HIS sake, for Kuvarakh's sake. I'm not taking you away. I'm not with the Womiyu or anything. If you did something, I don't know and I don't care. Kuvarakh has been horribly hurt."

The Kelvic women had slowly been approaching, a look of intense purpose on her face. Wanda did not know if it was an intent to attack or flee, but she stood her ground. "Please listen to me. Sometimes alchemy leaves lingering djed radiation. And sometimes it can...affect things. Some of these affected things attacked him. He beat them, but he was torn to pieces."

Wanda was relieved to see the woman appear to focus on her now, rather than the door beyond. She lowered her voice, realizing that what she was about to say may have something to do with whatever this 'Alea' was concerned about. "He was delirious and saying your name over and over, along with something about 'bodies'." she whispered. "Well, he needs one right now or he may die."

[Alea Campbello]

"Bodies" Alea echoed, she understood just what Kuvarakh meant. And she could also guess what was happening to him. For him, this could be a matter of life and death, but Alea wasn't going to let it be the latter.

"Okay, I know what Kuv meant but I need your help, I'm going to fly out of the city and get a body and I need you to meet me with some form of transport to wherever he is, ok" She said so fast it almost sounded like gibberish

She then quickly undressed and flew towards the edge of the town.

[Kuvarakh]

'Transport?' Wanda puzzled, 'I came on foot. Wait a minute, Why did I do that? Wasn't there a cart? Yes...there was...Oh shyke, the horses ran off scared and pulled it away behind them.' She took a deep breath, her mind starting to focus. 'Okay, he said he'd brought it back from the temple. It wasn't our cart, so it must have been theirs. They're probably trained to return! The temple! I've got to get to the temple!'

She hurried out of the building and began "skating" her way back across town. More than once, she found herself snowbound from a lack of footing and an excess of inertia. She reached The Temple in less than a bell and quickly explained the situation. The priest was alarmed to hear what had befallen Kuvarakh and quickly dismissed any notion of payment.

Wanda was tearfully grateful when he offered to drive the cart for her. They climbed in and began to work there way across the glacial scenery to the Gaping Maw, where they hoped to meet up with Alea.

[Alea Campbello]

Alea flew back to Alvadas after getting a body. The man was hanging dangerously in her beak as she put him down and turned back into a human. She then hoisted him over her shoulder and began to look for Wanda. After looking for almost a bell she finally found a cart. However, Alea was not strong enough to get the man into the cart and began to panic. But then she got an idea. She held her hands out flat and began to push her djed to her fingertips. She let it out as liquid and then shaped it around the back of the man. She pushed him up as far as she could and then turned it into res. She quickly sent him up a few centimeters and then curved the res so that he landed in the cart. Just then she lost control and a few innocent bystanders were knocked back a few feet. She shouted sorry to them. She hurried to sit beside Wanda. She turned to the driver. He was dressed in robes of Ionu which she found but she dismissed it.
"Drive!" She shouted to him

[Kuvarakh]

The horses were definitely picking up on Wanda's distress. They were barely held in check by the priest driving the cart. By the time Wanda realized that Alea had arrived, the Kelvic woman was already hoisting the body, with air control, onto the bed of the cart.

A small group of nearby passersby were suddenly sent stumbling, as Alea called an apology after them. By then, Wanda was already begging with the driver to get underway, a request immediately duplicated more insistently by Alea.

The driver snapped the reins and they got moving. It took a bit of orienting for the driver to find the shop, Alchemmia Alchae, where Kuvarakh was waiting in a perilous state. The priest had gone from the Temple to the shop, and from the temple to the gates, but not from the gates to the shop. And, with the additional diversion, on Wanda's insistence, that they needed to stop at Kuvarakh's home to grab the art set he used to make the transfer glyphs, it took them a couple bells to arrive.

Wanda had spent some time to prepare Alea for what she was going to see. Kuvarakh's condition was grim at best, nightmarish at worst. He had been nearly half-eaten by a devouring swarm of angry, steel bodied, alchemically mutated termites. He had beaten them by imbuing their metal bodies with magnetism and fallen back rolling across plates of steel armor material so they clung to it as he rolled away. But so many had already latched onto him before he began his evasion that by the time he'd gotten them off him and stuck to each other and the plates of metal, he was a ragged corpse.

His left arm was gone, the stripped remains lying beside him. His right foot was as well, bony remains sitting nearby. Half his face was nearly eaten down to the bone, one eye socket empty. The entire front of his body was exposed through the shredded remains of his clothes. Organs could be seen through a pair of exposed ribs, white and stark in the open rents in his flesh. His collarbone stood out from the flesh on the side where the arm was gone.

His legs were not too badly mauled and this percentage of overall body weight was probably the difference between life and death for him. There was enough source of ichor regeneration and storage there to keep him on the brink.

Wanda broke down completely at this point. Crying and begging the comatose form to understand, "We HAD to get the bugs out and drown them before we went for help or this would have been for nothing. Please forgive me. I thought it would be what you'd WANT me to do,"

She nearly collapsed in shock and relief when one of the ex-soldiers reported that the loss of ichor had been stemmed as near as he could tell. There was an unspoken question between them whether it was enough, or in time, but with no pulse or breathing, it was impossible to tell. He simply looked dead.

[Alea Campbello]

Even after all the preparing Wanda had done to get her ready for the sight, Alea took one look at it and was sick all over the floor outside. Then she decided to be useful and once again tried to hop up onto the cart. She turned into a bird and flew up. Once up there she turned back into a human. She let the res flow out of her hands and then manipulated it so that it formed a curved path from behind the body to the shop. She then turned it into air and quickly ran to the shop and caught it. She then laid it on the ground and turned back into a bird.

She then went back and got the stuff and laid it down next to the body. For the next few minutes she stood watch outside and caught the occasional rats that scurried about. If anyone asked she would say that it was to help the place stop falling down, but in reality it was because she was really hungry. The bugs had damaged the property so much that all the mice had almost no job getting out.

[Kuvarakh]

"Oh, Kuvarakh! What do I do? You need to switch bodies, I know, but can you do it in...this condition?" Even though she knew that he must have known what a wreck he was, she still hated to speak of it as something as ghastly as it really was. "I brought the art set you said you used last time. I hope that these are the glyphs you mean."

She held up a sheet of parchment with columns of symbols she was not familiar with and a crude outline of a human body with lines drawn from the symbols to various locations on the body. His eyes remained closed, but he made a sudden twitch as though he meant to speak. Greasy bubbles popped on the side of his face as he did so and Wanda nearly retched right then and there. She sympathized with the Kelvic woman, Alea. Kuvarakh quivered a moment and then lay still again.

She shrugged in hopelessness, deciding that some facet of his consciousness must have surfaced for that moment, trying to confirm her guess. "Okay then, I guess this must be them. I'll be right back...just...well...stay there." She grimaced at the pointlessness of that last instruction, but found it even more depressing that Kuvarakh was unable to make a sarcastic response to it.

She rushed out to where Alea was eating something. She was too distracted to notice the little bloody bundles of rat fur lying about. "I need to scribe his Nuit glyphs for his transfer." She said with a tone of imminent failure. "Can you fly back to your people and find a Nuit to verify that these are correct?"

[Kuvarakh]

Wanda went out and stripped the body to its shorts, giving no thought to any concerns about social protocols of clothing and decency. The two men helped her drag the body inside, where they finished stripping it to the point that they could access every location indicated on the parchment.

When they exposed the chest, they found a grim puncture in the chest, like the man had been impaled on a stalactite. Since they were waiting for Alea to return anyway, Wanda did her best to stitch the wound up. With help from the two men, they worked on breaking the patterns of rigor up until Alea returned. She did not look like she was eager to report her results.

The other Nuit there at the time had been reluctant to outright "vouch" for the symbols' accuracy. He claimed that it was an instinctive thing that only really comes into focus when the need arises. He himself could not even guarantee that he drew his own symbols exactly the same way every time. Alea had pressed him and, upon further consideration, he admitted that they "felt" basically correct to him, but he thought there may be some slight intuitive adjustments made for significant changes in body size and weight.

Wanda and Alea looked at the body, and at each other, and agreed that this body seemed pretty much the same as Kuvarakh's current wreck had been. Wanda recalled Kuvarakh saying much the same thing when he had made these drawings and templates of the glyphs and their locations. His written instructions were vague in some ways, the knowledge apparently a racially instinctive thing that was not so simple to academically recall as one might think. Fortunately for him, Wanda was no beginner at the discipline of Glyphing and her experience, intuition and training were a great aid to understanding Kuvarakh's written recollections.