Solo Playing Doctor

[Lenz]

7th of Spring, 514 AV
Tent City

The woman had woken up startled from a nightmare. Her arms and legs were covered and sweat with consideration of the cold weather outside the tent.

She had stirred in her bedroll and had wrestled with the blanket that shrouded her body. She had brushed her matted hair away from her forehead and had tucked her luscious locks of crimson hair behind her ears.

She had plucked her coat from the various equipment she hoarded to the side of the tent and slipped on her shoes. She didn’t have an idea what she was doing, but she still grabbed her double bladed dagger in case things turned messy.

She didn’t have a care in the world for what the environment looked like outside the tent, nor did she understand what time it currently was. Instead, she went with what her rampant thoughts conjured up and stepped out into the world.

She was prepared for some practice. And everyone knows that practice makes perfect.

The sky was dark as if hinting at the possibility of a storm. A woman, all alone in the middle of the forest, wasn’t easily frightened off by the billowing clouds and the dimming of light. She was determined to practice her skills in the art of the double bladed dagger under any circumstance.

Her mind wasn’t clear of all thought per say as what was usually expected when handling such a dangerous tool. She knew this very well, so before she did anything, she sat down in the damp grass and set the blade to the side.

Promptly, she closed her eyes and crossed her legs over one another. She gradually raised her arms until the palms of her hands were firmly touching one another. After she had found the proper posture, she began to slowly breath.

She exhaled, reaching deep into her mind and cleaning out all thoughts and worries that were essential for the time being. She stuffed unimportant things in the back drawers of her brain and concentrated.

Her breathing was deep rather than shallow. Every time she exhaled she counted to two. Every time she inhaled she counted to four.

She had observed someone back when she was younger. He had been practicing meditation and had been humming numbers to himself. He had told her it was a way to calm a person down. When there was order and structure, they weren’t concerned about having to do things by themselves.

Lenz went ahead and tried this technique for herself. She inhaled first and slowly counted to four out loud, “One,” she whispered. “Two,” she breathed. “Three, four.”

Then, she let out the breath she had been holding in and counted to two. She repeated this technique several more times all the while feeling her stomach expand and contract slowly. She was in control of her actions and thoughts. She was control of everything she and she held a high responsibility to that.

Once her mind had finally become a blank canvas, she opened her eyes and smiled. She tentatively reached over for her dagger and stood up with the hilt grasped firmly in her hand.

To start, she made sure her stance was relatively balanced. She had never truly used her dagger before, so all of this was very new to her. She had only seen very few people use other weapons and had caught on to how they moved.

She made sure her stance was even, with her legs spread apart so that each foot was directly underneath a shoulder blade. She made sure they were parallel before outstretching the hand that held the weapon.

She held it out so that it was a decent distance from the rest of her body before she played with specific techniques and exercises.

Firstly, she simply drew the weapon from side to side, occasionally plunging the sharpened edge into the air. She heard the wind fly around the forced movements as she wrote out the letter ‘Z’. A light breeze kissed her cheeks as she continued to fight to imaginary threat in front of her.

Secondly, she decided to mix things up. After she had done the basic thrashing of the dagger, she had decided to get her legs and feet involved, so she lunged forward, piercing the blade through the air.

It definitely wasn’t what she was hoping to feel. Instead of fighting nonexistent materials, she shuffled over to a nearby tree. She regained her stance and took a deep breath before continuing.

Lenz took the blade and matched it to her waist before thrusting it from the side, cutting into the side of the tree. A few pieces of bark chipped off and flew to the side. This made her smile. She was hungry for more action.

She drew the weapon back to her waist and tried again, adding more force to her arm. She felt the power leave her hips, travel down her arm and release out of her hand into the tree. A larger mark was created by the sharp object.

This time she tried the other hand, switching the blade to her right. Her left hand has always been more dominant, but she had been practicing with her right, aiming to achieve being ambidextrous.

She was wary about how this would go, but one could never know until they tried, right?

[Lenz]

7th of Spring, 514 AV
Tent City

She immediately went back to practicing, this time she made sure her legs were farther apart from one another. She decided to try a front stance where her left leg was in front, with the knee bent where her right leg was in back and perfectly straight.

She had been told that this prevents being thrown off balance. It also helps increase momentum for the user as well as a higher advantage.

She adjusted her position to do as what she had remembered before continuing to strike the tree. After a while of doing the same redundant procedure, the woman decided to try something different; something she had never tried before.

She was eager to experiment, however, she was still generally new the entire concept of using a double bladed dagger, and therefore she had no real training. For one to experiment without knowledge of how to use a specific weapon could end with dire consequences.

Lenz was defiant, and very persistent, so she went ahead with what she wanted to do and not what seemed safe to her at the time.

This did not necessarily mean she was oblivious to safety. She was exactly opposite to being that. She knew that what she was holding was a dangerous tool and that she could hurt herself pretty badly if she messed around too much. She just wasn’t thinking during this time. Her mind was clear and centered in on practice and perfectly her novice techniques.

She had griped the blade an improper way with her right hand and had lifted it above her head. She was planning to strike the down coming from up above. She had the proper stance, but not the proper hold.

She went with her plan and did exactly as she had decided, slicing the tree from an overhead attack. As she did this, the weapon slipped to the side, taking a piece of bark with it. Although, it was no shield, the bark. The blade managed to wiggle around enough to tear off a large amount of flesh from Lenz’s arm.

Instinctively, the woman hissed, dropping the dagger to the ground. She held back some inappropriate and rather vulgar language as she held her wounded limb to her breast.

Her face contorted into a strange look of pain as she clenched her jaw tightly. She almost bit through her tongue, but had moved her teeth right around the muscle just in the nick of time.

“Why?” she cried, releasing her hold on her arm so that she could observe the damage she had caused herself.

The scene was gory, but not as severe as she had initially thought. Her vivid imagination as wild as it may be had manifested some gruesome idea that she had chopped her arm off.

“Thank goodness,” she sighed, leaning her head back in relief.

There was a deep gash in her lower arm to wrist. It was bloody with bits of severed flesh hanging off the cut edges. It looked like she had gotten into a fight with a raccoon or some other really hostile creature.

The woman went to retrieve her weapon, picking up the bloody tool by the hilt before turning on her heel to head home. She needed to do something about her injured arm, but what?

The entire time she trekked back to the tent her mind was a war zone. She debated about whether or not she should go to the clinic with that mad doctor that worked there. Why waste the time, the money or the life she had when she could stitch it up herself?

She most certainly didn’t hold a profession in the medical field, but she knew a thing or two about being a seamstress and sewing up pants and shirts. Why would flesh be much different?

[Lenz]

7th of Spring, 514 AV
Tent City

The hand that wasn’t wounded began to scrounge around her personal belongings. She hadn’t even bothered to remove her shoes before she blundered through the tent in a frenzy.

“What’s going on?” Ipisol cried out, having been awoken from her slumber. Once her eyes had landed on her guardian’s injured arm, the blood still vivid and gushing, she let out a scream, her eyes bugging out of her head.

“Are you okay?”

Lenz closed her eyes, the sense of desperation subsiding. She was becoming fatigued, her mind’s rampant thoughts diverting to things of lesser importance. What was she doing again?

Her eyes started to grow heavy. It wasn’t due to the loss of the blood entirely, but from the embarrassment and feeling of disappointment that swarmed over her in thick waves of darkness. How could she have been so stupid?

“I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. “But I need my needle and the spool of thread.”

The child nodded her head, acknowledging the woman’s request. The covers were thrown off her body in a flash as she jumped to the rescue, hunting for the items that were essential at a time such as now.

Lenz had been out one day, attending to her job as a seamstress when an overwhelming need for the basic tools had enveloped her in their unholy grasp. She had obligingly taken a needle and a spool of white thread from underneath her employer’s nose. She had told herself that she was simply borrowing the utensils and that she would soon return them.

She had needed them to sew up a pair of pants she had ripped. She just never had the time to give them back unnoticed. Her mind was forgetful like that, millions of other important thoughts stacked inside like a load of paperwork needing to be gone through.

“Found it,” a small voice said from the back of the tent. Her head emerged from out of a backpack, as she hastily walked toward Lenz. She handed her the needle and the thread before sitting down to observe.

“You might not want to watch,” the woman said, her face still contorted into a mask of pain and utter discomfort. She truly did not want to do this herself. She wished she could have someone reliable do this for her as she helplessly stood aside and watched.

But she was unlucky, for she had to do this herself. There was no way she was going to put Ipisol through something such as sewing up a grotesque wound.

“I’m fine,” the child replied, a grimace plastered onto her face.

“Alright then,” Lenz said as she gripped the needle in one hand and weakly stuck the thread through the eye of the needle. “I can do this.”

She looked down at the noticeable bloody line, tissue destroyed and torn to the side. New flesh cried out from under the old and broken. She gagged and nearly vomited in her mouth as she saw the morbidity of the situation as a whole.

Holding back her fear, she held her breath and without thinking, stuck the tip of the needle through a flab of healthy skin. With all else dead, she thought that she wouldn’t feel much pain. She was proven wrong as a nasty sound appalled the woman into a scream so loud it made her eardrum tremble.

She bit her lip and proceeded with the operation. “Almost done,” she breathed, blood slowly trickling down her chin. She had bitten through a part of her lip, the dead skin ripping clean off. What a terrible sight to see, it must have been for the child to watch.

“Look away,” Lenz commanded, but the kid opposed in doing so.

“Look away Ipisol,” Lenz insisted, tears running down her face. Hesitantly and with a look of horror constraining all signs of happiness, she turned around, tears threatening to fall from her own eyes.

Lenz went back to work. She stuck the tip of the needle on the opposite side of the wound, crying out again as she did. The thread caressed the bloody insides of her arm as she cocked her hand to switch the direction of the thread. She then stuck the needle on the other side, pulling the thread tightly as she did. A disturbing sound of tissue ‘squashing’ against vital fluids erupted. The pungent smell of blood causing an acidic taste to form in her mouth.

“Don’t vomit, don’t vomit,” she chanted to herself. “Stay strong.”

Ipisol remained turned away, with her head bowed, her shoulders bobbing up and down, sobbing noises escaping her thin, chapped lips.

“I’m sorry,” Lenz whispered to the child as she stuck the needle in the obliterated tissue again. Finally, she had finished. She pulled the last of the thread as tight as she could, her jaw forced closed by the pain that radiated up her arm into her shoulder and through her neck.

After she had made sure the wound was closed up, she tied the ends of the thread together and leant back. Her head crashed onto the floor, startling the little girl into whirling around to see what had happened.

“Lenzy?” she asked, her face tainted with the vile elements of salt and water. They streaked her face and marred her cheek bones. Lenz’s face was drenched with sweat, her eyelids heavy and daring to close altogether.

“Yes?”

“You’re going to be alright, right?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” Lenz breathed, gesturing for the child to accompany her. She willed herself to make room, her chest acting as a pillow for the child’s head. Ipiosl laid down beside her obligingly and the woman started to pet her head.

Soft tendrils of auburn hair fell through her fingers. The sensation was soft, unlike her own, always messy and often knotted.

“Of course I am,” she moaned before closing her eyes to sleep. Ipisol did as well and the two slept peacefully for the rest of the morning.

The End

[Zandelia]

Lenz :

Skills
Sewing – 2
Dagger – 2
Observation – 2
Meditation – 1
Leadership - 1

Lores
Meditative Breathing
Dagger: Balanced Stance
Dagger: Drawing/Sheathing
Sewing: Shallow Wound

Other
Scar – small on the arm. Will heal within 15 days

Notes :

Another nice thread!

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