Timestamp: Winter 73rd, 513 A.V.
While Riverfall was not lacking healers, the one thing the healers of Riverfall tended not to do was service the menagerie. Oh some of the exhibits there were suitable for the normal healers to visit; the Symenestra and the zith for instance. But when a surly grassbear got a bad tooth ache, no one could ever talk one of the normal healers into seeing it. “Put the animal down.” That was the usual common phrase heard by The Menagerie Officials. But the truth was, acquiring new animals for their collections, training them to remain relatively calm while visitors gawked at them, and getting them used to the handling wasn’t easy.
So they worked hard to keep the ones they had healthy. That’s where The Sanctuary Staff came in. Once a week and sometimes more if needed, the animal healers there dropped by and worked on the displays. They maintained health, gave feeding suggestions, and even suggested changes for exhibits and containment for the displays the people of Riverfall enjoyed.
So when they had a decent animal in their collection, they tried to keep it happy and healthy. Kavala didn’t mind, because they called her when they needed a hand, not the formal healing clinic for people. The Menagerie Officials called her instead of the regular healers because she and the other healers at The Sanctuary were more equipped to handle situations like this. And the truth was, Kavala could handle the animals, even the really aggressive ones. The Konit healer was calm, cool, and collected, even under pressure and she tended to work fast and without fear around some of the big predators. Her Konti gift made that possible. So rather than staring at a Grassbear and wondering what was wrong with it that it wasn’t eating, she could just get close and often tell the problem. And in this case, it was one with an infected tooth. It hurt to chew. It hurt to breath. And she could even tell that the animal was getting no sleep because its tooth was that bad.
And while she couldn’t truthfully tell it that she was going to make it feel better, Kavala knew the best medicines and herbs to get it too sleep. And in this case, she was perfectly capable of luring the momma bear into a squeeze shoot, putting a type of mild knock-out poison in a syringe and placing it against a stick plunger tended to do the trick. She had the momma bear knocked out in its enclosure and was working on its mouth with her dental kit before the Menagerie Officials could say boo. That left others to deal with the cubs while Kavala used a large set of pliers to separate the m other bear from her septic tooth in rapid time. The Grassbear display held one female Bear, and two younger cubs – one a year and one the previous seasons. The male had died the year the Menagerie had been hit hard by the djed storm and hadn’t yet been replaced. The cubs had been planned to be grown up and moved to either a private collection or used to replace the male that was long gone. Kavala had urged against release because they’d always grown up in captivity. And the Menagerie hadn’t wanted to keep them since they already had a grassbear. So in limbo, the two cubs grew up as pets and were largely ignored as something to be dealt with later. They would take ten years easily to get to full breeding ages anyhow.
And while not aggressive like their wild counterparts, the cubs could be dangerous because they liked to play and liked to play rough. So when Kavala set to work on the mother bear, she fully expected the officails to watch the cubs and keep them away. She was focused, cleaning out the infection in the mother’s mouth and removing the tooth carefully. She’d had to make several cuts in the flesh of the bears jaw to let the infection drain, and then had cleaned out the pockets of pus and the left over depression where the tooth had been.
She hadn’t paid any attention to the cubs. The guards at the Menagerie were assuming she was the one watching the babies. And so between the two a gate got left open, a door unlocked and swinging free, and two cubs piled out of their enclosure into the crowds visiting the place. People screamed, children ran, and even several Akalak youth tried to pet the two cubs, but all wasn’t well with it. Kavala was oblivious, focusing on her work. The guards were decidedly useless, more worried about staying out of the way of the Grassbear cubs than getting them back into the enclosure where they belonged.
The cubs were two different sizes. One was about two hundred and fifty pounds… nowhere near his mother’s almost six hundred pounds. Meanwhile the other cub was about a hundred and a half pounds, smaller, but faster than the older sibling too. People screamed, someone ran to get the Kuvay’Nas, and meanwhile the healer worked on her patient and the guards tried their best to get the people out of the way of the bears, doing nothing about trying to get the bears back inside.
It was disorganized chaos, especially when the youngest of the cubs got into the refreshment stand, chased the attendant off, and started eating anything and everything for sale there that was edible. The other bear was just enjoying himself, sitting on his haunches and roaring which of course caused the crowd to surge and scream.
While Riverfall was not lacking healers, the one thing the healers of Riverfall tended not to do was service the menagerie. Oh some of the exhibits there were suitable for the normal healers to visit; the Symenestra and the zith for instance. But when a surly grassbear got a bad tooth ache, no one could ever talk one of the normal healers into seeing it. “Put the animal down.” That was the usual common phrase heard by The Menagerie Officials. But the truth was, acquiring new animals for their collections, training them to remain relatively calm while visitors gawked at them, and getting them used to the handling wasn’t easy.
So they worked hard to keep the ones they had healthy. That’s where The Sanctuary Staff came in. Once a week and sometimes more if needed, the animal healers there dropped by and worked on the displays. They maintained health, gave feeding suggestions, and even suggested changes for exhibits and containment for the displays the people of Riverfall enjoyed.
So when they had a decent animal in their collection, they tried to keep it happy and healthy. Kavala didn’t mind, because they called her when they needed a hand, not the formal healing clinic for people. The Menagerie Officials called her instead of the regular healers because she and the other healers at The Sanctuary were more equipped to handle situations like this. And the truth was, Kavala could handle the animals, even the really aggressive ones. The Konit healer was calm, cool, and collected, even under pressure and she tended to work fast and without fear around some of the big predators. Her Konti gift made that possible. So rather than staring at a Grassbear and wondering what was wrong with it that it wasn’t eating, she could just get close and often tell the problem. And in this case, it was one with an infected tooth. It hurt to chew. It hurt to breath. And she could even tell that the animal was getting no sleep because its tooth was that bad.
And while she couldn’t truthfully tell it that she was going to make it feel better, Kavala knew the best medicines and herbs to get it too sleep. And in this case, she was perfectly capable of luring the momma bear into a squeeze shoot, putting a type of mild knock-out poison in a syringe and placing it against a stick plunger tended to do the trick. She had the momma bear knocked out in its enclosure and was working on its mouth with her dental kit before the Menagerie Officials could say boo. That left others to deal with the cubs while Kavala used a large set of pliers to separate the m other bear from her septic tooth in rapid time. The Grassbear display held one female Bear, and two younger cubs – one a year and one the previous seasons. The male had died the year the Menagerie had been hit hard by the djed storm and hadn’t yet been replaced. The cubs had been planned to be grown up and moved to either a private collection or used to replace the male that was long gone. Kavala had urged against release because they’d always grown up in captivity. And the Menagerie hadn’t wanted to keep them since they already had a grassbear. So in limbo, the two cubs grew up as pets and were largely ignored as something to be dealt with later. They would take ten years easily to get to full breeding ages anyhow.
And while not aggressive like their wild counterparts, the cubs could be dangerous because they liked to play and liked to play rough. So when Kavala set to work on the mother bear, she fully expected the officails to watch the cubs and keep them away. She was focused, cleaning out the infection in the mother’s mouth and removing the tooth carefully. She’d had to make several cuts in the flesh of the bears jaw to let the infection drain, and then had cleaned out the pockets of pus and the left over depression where the tooth had been.
She hadn’t paid any attention to the cubs. The guards at the Menagerie were assuming she was the one watching the babies. And so between the two a gate got left open, a door unlocked and swinging free, and two cubs piled out of their enclosure into the crowds visiting the place. People screamed, children ran, and even several Akalak youth tried to pet the two cubs, but all wasn’t well with it. Kavala was oblivious, focusing on her work. The guards were decidedly useless, more worried about staying out of the way of the Grassbear cubs than getting them back into the enclosure where they belonged.
The cubs were two different sizes. One was about two hundred and fifty pounds… nowhere near his mother’s almost six hundred pounds. Meanwhile the other cub was about a hundred and a half pounds, smaller, but faster than the older sibling too. People screamed, someone ran to get the Kuvay’Nas, and meanwhile the healer worked on her patient and the guards tried their best to get the people out of the way of the bears, doing nothing about trying to get the bears back inside.
It was disorganized chaos, especially when the youngest of the cubs got into the refreshment stand, chased the attendant off, and started eating anything and everything for sale there that was edible. The other bear was just enjoying himself, sitting on his haunches and roaring which of course caused the crowd to surge and scream.
