Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 103 (Patreon)

Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 2

Authority : 7

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

-

Nobility : 6

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Drain Health (4, War)

Spawn Golem (5, Command)

Empathy : 5 ><

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

-

Spirituality : 6 ><

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

-

Ingenuity : 5

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

Tenacity : 6 ><

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

Blinding Trap (5, War)

-

Animosity : - - ><

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

“So.  How close am I to dead?”  Is Yuea’s first question when she wakes up.

She’s not in her own bed, because she destroyed her own bed during her transformation.  Instead, the officer’s quarters she commandeered is being shared by herself and a still sleeping Kalip, both managing with grass padded cots.  It looks distinctly uncomfortable, especially because I am tangentially aware that she currently has a shattered forearm, four broken ribs, a fracture in her left leg, and both torn muscles and lacerations across her whole body.

Yuea is in bad shape.  Her reliance on Amalgamate Human to continue healing her as she insisted on overstressing her new body before she learned how to move properly has left her near crippled.  And I don’t know if I will be able to put her back together.

The bee, still lacking the white and blue medico cap that I intended to make for it, wobbles in a way that I hope conveys to her that she needs to stay put.

“Fuck.”  Yuea says, dropping her head back to her pillow.  She has the best pillow in the fort right now; one of the children found it in a storage room and brought it to her.  A small kindness that I know hit her harder than maybe it would anyone else.

I’ve said before, but as far as I can tell, Yuea’s life has not been kind.  The way her gruff and coarse attitude cracks and erodes with every small bit of peace is intimately familiar to lives I have lived; she is yearning for the quiet compassion of a settled life.  Yuea has forced herself to be a soldier, and she is exceptional at it, and it is killing her.  It would have already killed her, if I hadn’t transformed her into something different.

The two bees in the room, both larger than the limited frame of her bed at this point, fuss over her.  Trying to make sure the thin blanket is settled properly, and there are no spiders sneaking into her bed.  Trying to make her comfortable.  Yuea tries to shrug them off, especially when one starts grooming her feathered head, but the bees persist through her grumbling.

“It’s like being a fucking kid again.”  She blows a gust of air aggressively at the leg of one of the bees that is combing back the black feathers she now has in place of hair.  “Fuck, that tickles!  I’m not supposed to tickle, you…” Yuea trails off, sagging back again as the bee gives her a look that, even with its limited facial expressions, comes across as pitifully sad.  “Alright, fine.”  She mutters.  “Shiny, you better heal up soon. This is exhausting.”

The bees both stop briefly, a pause partly made of my own anxiety seeping through, and partly because the repeatedly enhanced insects are smart enough to see part of the bigger picture of what is happening but not smart enough to hide it.

Yuea’s eyes lock onto one of the giant honeybees before it shivers like it’s shaking off something and resumes fussing with the blanket with its rune marked fuzzy legs.  “Shiny, are you in there?  You listening?”  She demands.  The bee looks up at her, and I tell it to ignore her, to which it ignores me and gives her a full body bobbing nod.  “You’re not healing, are you?”

I am not.  And I had come here, to see if there was something I could do about it.  Some way I could ask for help, something I could do about my condition.  And what I found was Yuea under the same balloon I am.  Broken, unsure if she’s even getting better, and certainly in no condition to do anything to help me.

Fortunately for Yuea, Drain Health isn’t on the list of things I am prevented from doing.  And even now, a part of me is sweeping distant parts of the Green for anthills or stirge swarms that I can guiltlessly sap of their life.  It’s a slow process, but with how Drain Health seems to get the most of its substance the closer I push something to death, and how restoration of my magics is slowed to a steady but limited drip, it seems to be the best way that I have to refill that particular spell.

“Dammit, Shiny.”  Yuea’s voice sounds as distressed as I’ve been feeling.  And, strangely, that brings me a level of comfort.  “Okay. What do you need?  Are we dragging you down somehow?  I can kill Kalip.”  She’s joking, and I know it, but I also know what she’s actually asking.

From the other cot on the opposite side of the room, Kalip’s voice speaks up, firm and confident for all that he, too, sounds dead tired.  “You can try, commander.”

“Oh good, you’re awake.”  One of my bees spies Yuea’s eyes flicking upward in mild sarcasm.  “That makes my plan harder.”

“You didn’t even get an answer.”  Kalip points out.

I spend the next half candle mark trying to explain to them, through interpretive bee dance, that they are not the problem.  The problem is that I am cracked, and lack the resources to seal the breaches that are preventing me from gaining the resources I need to seal the breaches.  A circular issue, and one I am not certain that I get across properly.

That worry, that my makeshift communication has failed, intensifies when Yuea snaps the fingers on her good hand to punctuate her next words.  “Alright.  So, we need a bandage that works on a rock.  Great.  We can do that.”

“Since when.”  Kalip doesn’t even bother making his protest a question.  Just speaks the words and lets it be known that he thinks her statement is a flagrant falsehood.  And in truth, I am glad he says it, because I would say it myself, if I had the option, and Kalip is an excellent stand in for my own voice.

Yuea snorts derisively.  “You didn’t learn to mix rock glue in field siege training?”  Kalip says nothing, though I can almost hear him wondering if Yuea is serious.  “Right.  Well.  It’s not hard, and the fort should have what we need for it.  Easy.”

“And what happens when filling a living crystal with rock glue breaks something?”  Oh, Kalip, I have never been so glad to have someone thinking what I am.

“…what else is going on while I’m stuck here?”  Yuea asks.

As if to punctuate that she’s stuck here more than anyone else, Kalip eases himself to a sitting position and swings his newly clawed feet over the edge of the bed.  I hadn’t noticed that detail when I reshaped him, and I feel as though I may have made proper shoes hard for him in the future.  He watches the bees as I try to direct them through giving a quick outline.  Fairly quickly, Kalip waves lethargically to cut the dancing off, and finds a scrapped piece of an old record from the fort pinned to the old commander’s desk that’s been shoved to the corner.

On it, he writes out, in large letters, a few proper nouns.  And suddenly the process becomes a lot easier, as my bees gain the ability to add pointing to names to their pantomime.

It makes conveying small details much easier.  The new survivors are… not comfortable, but not an issue for now.  It has been a day, they will take at least a tenday to truly metastasize into a problem.  Which means we have that long to figure out how to prevent that.  Yuea makes a veiled threat, and Kalip and I ignore her because there is no one in range of her threat that it actually apples to, and I want her to just rest.

The others from their group are doing alright, with Mela and Fisher already up and moving again.  Kalip gets a worrying glint in his eye as he learns that Mela is doing okay; I worry that the girl might not have realized what she was in for when she asked for training from him.

Part of me considers asking if either of them are aware of the strange relationship between Muelly, Jahn, and Malpa.  But while I have some mild worry for the three of them, I also don’t think breaching that privacy is something I should be doing, so I drop that one, even though one of the bees is disappointed that the dance they had been planning will be wasted now.  I console them, feeding sympathetic emotions back and forth between the trickle I am keeping our bond at for now.

I also cut off my explanation of how some of the children are trying to make friends with the verdlings in one of our cellars.  I think Kalip is misunderstanding my intent with it.  Which has been a common theme around here lately; I think the verdlings are misunderstanding the children.  Or perhaps I am.

If I manage to heal myself, the first thing I am doing is finding a way to simply speak to people.  This renewed limit has only served to make me irate and frustrated in equal measure.  A point that I am aware is perhaps annoying to hear about.  But then, it is annoying to live, constantly, and so I feel less bad in trying to express it to my companions.

The last thing I share is news of Lautra, and the odd defenses they have put up around their lake.  Yuea seems interested in the idea of an additional layer of protection, and has a myriad of questions for me that I have neither the information nor ability to answer.  Kalip, though, looks out the window with a far away look.

“Lutra.”  He mutters.  “We talked about them before.”  There is a moment of curiosity on his face, and one of my bees moves closer to peer at him before Kalip shifts back.  “I remember that conversation.  I remember a lot of things, a lot clearer than I should.  Did you do this?”  I did not.  Unless it is a side effect of Amalgamate Human.  Which seems likely.  I cannot make a bee shrug easily, though.  “Eh.  They can force deals, though, right?  That was one of their spells?”

Small Trade, yes.  I transfer across a nod, wondering exactly how much of what I wrote on the wood board in my planning room Kalip remembers.

“What’re you thinking?”  Yuea asks, reading into Kalip’s silence.

“The other apparatus, it forced a trade of power, for a bee.  Its trade spell can shift around where magic is.”  Kalip says, revealing that he retained quite a lot, as he stands with a groan of sore muscles and pained wounds.  He’s not nearly as bad off as Yuea, but he’s still hurt in small ways.  “So that’s it.  That’s the solution.”

My bees pull him back to sitting on the edge of his bed, as I try to explain, tediously, how that is not an option.  How I expect Lutra is suffering from the same crippling draining effect that I am.

“Oh.  That we can solve.”  Yuea’s voice is predatory in a way that makes both bees in the room send me an emotion that roughly sums up as ‘wanting to hide under the nearest large object’.

“Easy.”  Kalip agrees with her.  And for once, I am the one behind on what is happening.  “We have one known target.  We don’t even need to subjugate it.  Just find it.”

I feel as if I need to teach my bees a universal symbol for “Please, I am begging you, explain yourself!”  Since that symbol does not exist, I settle for having one of them perch their forelegs on Kalip’s knees and push their face very close to his until he clears his throat and gets the implication.

Perhaps I have invented a new universal symbol.

“You and Lutra can trade magic.”  Kalip says.  “So hand off chunks of farsight, and connection, for some of the trade.  Yuea and I - once Yuea’s on her feet again - go find the dirt apparatus, and you and Lutra force trade for the power you both need to heal.”  He shrugs.  “Easy.”

I hadn’t thought of that.  At all.  I’ve been thinking of Lutra as among a certain category of people here; the survivors.  The people who are damaged, who need healing and help, and who we cannot reasonably expect to put in work while they are in a broken condition.

But I expect myself to work.  Yuea and Kalip, likewise, treat their injuries as obstacles to be navigated.

And perhaps making Lutra part of their - her? - own recovery, will be good for the other apparatus.

I had forgotten, perhaps, that even a broken apparatus still has access to more magic than some of the elevated sorceresses of my past lives.  I had forgotten that broken people can be mended.

Now, there is only one problem.

This is a complex plan, and it will require communication and coordination with a person who is, perhaps, less than stable.  And currently surrounded by emotional magic and defensive rock spheres.

“That’s easy too.”  Kalip says, as one of the bees points to words to share my apprehension.  “I’m going to go find Zhoy.  Lutra’s magic doesn’t work on kids.  We’ll just have her ask.”  He stands up again, lifting the bee that is now partly curled in his lap onto his partially furred shoulder with a grunt.  “Easy.  Everything is so much easier, now.”  He mutters the last words like he’s surprised by it.

Yuea laughs, pushing through her own pain to do so, as he walks out of the room, carrying half of my flailing medical staff.

“Alright, Shiny.”  She starts to say.  “Leave me for a while, and get back to-“

I dump the entirety of what I have collected with Drain Health over the course of the conversation into her.  The magic I have left doesn’t hold long enough for me to pour my whole supply, but I get… I don’t know how to measure it.  Thirty drams of life?  It sounds like madness to even think.  Enough to fuse and regrow her worst shattered bone, mend two ribs, replace half her augmented blood, and close a few of the cuts.

Her breath comes out as a strangled gasp as Drain Health does its work, before she slumps back onto the bed.  The remaining bee tucks her in, while she tries to find the words to swear at me, probably for wasting resources.

She’s too late to damage my emotions, though.  I’m back to restored hope, tenuous as it is.  And if I’m very lucky, perhaps that hope can play out before the end of this long summer.

One problem at a time.