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[Alea Davenport]

Fall 1, 515

It was a quiet night on the beaches near Riverfall. The waves from the Suvan lapped gently against the shore, and a full moon brightly illuminated the scene. Washed up on the shore, her lower body submerged in the water, was a girl. She was unconscious, but breathing. Her long hair was strewn about in a tangled mess, and her only clothing was a worn dress that might once have been white.

~*~

It was not the cold that woke Alea, nor the wet, though they were plenty uncomfortable. It wasn't even the bed of small rocks she seemed to be lying on. The first thing she noticed as she struggled slowly to consciousness was a cool brightness. With an effort, she managed to flutter her eyes open long enough to glimpse the full moon in the sky above her.

Oh, is that all? she thought, and her consciousness left her again, just as the nearby watchtower flashed red.

~*~

There was no sense of passage of time, but before too long, the dream-like quality of the night gave way to more bodily concerns, and her face contorted into a frown as she slipped in and out of consciousness, distinctly aware of and able to list all of the factors of her discomfort, but somehow paralyzed and unable to take action to remedy her state, except in her dreams. In less than a bell, she dreamed she had gotten up out of the water no less than five times, only to return to the reality that it was still night and her body refused to move.

[Kavala]

The pull caught her hard and wouldn't let her go. Kavala dropped what she was doing - mixing philters - and trotted outside, glad she still had her riding clothes and boots on. As late as it was, she usually had stripped to a simple shift for work around the Within. Not tonight. She'd been too busy to think of dressing down a bit.

Her stomach rumbled but she knew she'd miss dinner. The pull was strong, as strong as if someone was in the room, but they were not. Kavala knew because she thoroughly searched. In fact, she scoured the whole of The Within, and then started on the outbuildings and walls of The Sanctuary. She found nothing in the barns, clinic, or outbuildings. She checked the deep Sea Cave, and found nothing as well though the pull was even stronger then.

It was strange. Usually her compulsion to heal was in an immediate area, not someplace she couldn't find.

Kavala threw the sea cave doors wide and stepped out into the loose sand. Her vision wasn't great after dark, so she called djed and felt it pool behind her eyes and altered the structure there, giving her a nice set of second eyelids inside her own and changing her own physical ocular structure until it more closely matched that of an Akalak. Infravision flared to life in the quickly fading light and she jogged out onto the beach. Enormous shapes joined her as three Imperial Watchers flowed like Cheva spawned shadows out of the gates with her to escort her down tot he waterline.

Kavala could see the color change where flotsam of still living things had washed up on the beach... slowly cooling some of them as the jellies and other sea creatures that had still been alive slowly died out of their element. Some where already cool and blended into the sand nicely already.

But there was a larger shape there, a person sized shape, and the three darkly molted forms flowed around her and raced towards it as Kavala broke into a light jog and felt her Rak'Keli compulsion bust into being even harder now that a target had been identified. She moved down the loose sand onto the hard packed sand and broke into a distance eating jog. The person... for it had to be a person... sprawled out across the sand with the waves still lapping their feet. At first Kavala thought it was a child, but as she grew closer she saw the woman was indeed young but more likely a teen.

Eth? That was Kavala's first thought. Had Syna or Leth... definitely Syna since it was almost full dark and the woman had no horns... cast out another of her followers from their domain? The Konti drew in a lungful of air, redoubled her speed, and tried to catch the three dogs. They were faster.

The dogs reached the girl first, dropping their great heads and sniffing around at her corpse. Kavala reached her last and had to wade into the sea of mingling dogs and shoo them away momentarily so she could get a closer look. The Konti reached out to touch the girl, gently speaking.

"Are you okay? Do you need help? My name is Kavala. Can you hear me?" The Konti said, kneeling next to the slim form fo the girl and then slowly running her hands across her shoulders and brushing her hair out of her face to check for head wounds. "Where are you hurt? I can feel your pain. What happened to you?" Kavala asked, curious now and wondering. She had already began to heal the girl, her slim white hands glowing with Rak'Keli's power as she ran them down the strange girls' form... soothing cuts and scrapes and bruises, looking for more abrasions and other more serious wounds.

[Alea Davenport]

Alea drifted in semi-consciousness, unaware of the passage of time. At one point, she hear noises around her, loud, shuffling movements that made her aching head pound. This was followed by a voice, but though she heard and understood the individual words, her disjointed mind couldn't interpret their meaning. She wanted to sink back into oblivion, but the warm hands softly exploring her head were doing something...strange. Her head felt...clearer, less fuzzy, and slightly less sore, but...

With the clearing of her head, sensations in the rest of her body intensified. "Ehnn," she moaned weakly, her face scrunching up as she experienced a sensation akin to having several spikes driven through her arms and legs. She coughed violently, but the motion only made it feel like the spikes were having a party and inviting their neighbors.

"Aaaahh," she added desperately, her eyes closed tight against the pain, which consumed her whole world. She would have screamed more loudly, if she could have, but her body felt so weak...

And then, she started to shake. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say she convulsed. It wasn't anything like shivering. It felt like her whole body was trying to jump out of her skin. One thing Alea knew, it wasn't making the pain in her limbs feel any better at all...

[Kavala]

There was something seriously wrong with the girl. Kavala had never felt anything like it. And before she could actually treat the girl, the Konti wanted to haul her out o the water. The tide was coming in and if the Konti got distracted and waves started washing over the human girl, she could drown before Kavala would notice.

The Healer gently rolled the girl onto her back, reached under her from her head, and grabbed her under the arms. Using the strength in her legs, the Konti hauled her up, digging her bare feet into the sand and pulling the girl higher onto dry sand.

Kavala brushed her hands across the girls face again, studying her symptoms and making note of them. She was in a great deal of pain, both physical and neurological. She twisted and trembled, her body going into a sort of shock, or so Kavala assumed. The Healer wished she had a blanket to throw around the girl as she pressed her hands onto the girls side and dragged them down her body to her legs, checking for more wounds and using her gnosis power to soothe what she could while she tried to figure out what was wrong with the woman.

Gnosis was a tricky thing. Sometimes, Rak'keli's power simply put a thought into her head and that lead her on track to what was actually wrong - like internal bleeding or perhaps a weak heart. But in this case, Rak'keli's power showed her exactly what was wrong with the girl and infused her mind with the knowledge immediately. The only problem was, it wasn't something she could fix with the gnosis.

A priest or priestess could, for sure, but Kavala hadn't been found worthy of that from Rak'keli's corner. For some reason, the girl had been deep in the water and had rose fast and true. She hadn't drowned, but the physical damage to her body was something tangible. There was air bubbles in her body... they were invading her joints, lungs, heart, skin and most incredibly dangerous of all her brain.

Kavala sat back on her heels, not sure why the bubbles were there... meaning what mechanism had caused them. The Konti sunk to her knees, resting her rump on her heels, and laid her hands on the woman's head. Brain first, the Konti thought, knowing how painful headaches could be and how damaging air could be where no air belonged. It was an unusual situation, one that the Konti could help with, but not without being super careful and taking things slowly. She was a reimancer along with being a healer, and in this particular case, the magic could help where the healing probably could not.

"You have air bubbles in your body... in your head, joints, lungs, and even your heart. I'm going to pull them out of your head first to clear your thinking, and then work on your heart. Everything else hurts because of hte air, but it won't kill you, not like bubbles in your brain and heart can." The Konti said, feeling her djed warm and her res begin to form from it. She reached out with her will, and called to the bubbles in the brain of the girl.

Slowly the attraction aspect of reimancy kicked in as Kavala called to the bubbles in the stranger's head. They moved slowly, agonizingly painful, as they lurched towards the surface, looking for a way out and a way to join the mage that called to them.

"I'm sorry... this has got to hurt..." The Konti said as she gritted her teeth and urged the air towards her. It migrated through Alea's brain, passing through tissue after tissue, and finally finding the hollow of her nasal cavity and merging with the air in the passage between her nose and her lungs.

Alea's nose started to bleed.

[Alea Davenport]

Alea could dimly hear a woman's voice, and though she could hear what was being said, she was in no state to fully understand. Bubbles? she thought, No, not bubbles. Pins. Spikes. Daggers, maybe, but not bubbles.

~*~

Afterwards, Alea would have little memory of the pain she suffered, agonies so intense and varied that they defied description. She dimly recalled begging for death at several points, though she wasn't sure whether she had been able to speak aloud or whether only the gods could hear.

~*~

Alea woke up on a bed far too soft to be quite real. The last thing she remembered was...trying to escape...something. She could not quite recall the details at the moment, and something in her mind told her she was happier that way. But she fully expected to be either crumpled on hard ground, or...somewhere much more unpleasant. Her imagination mercifully refused to supply details. So where was she?

Her eyes fluttered reluctantly open, failed to recognize her surroundings, and closed again while she tried to assess her situation through a muddle of disorientation. She was pretty sure she wasn't in the Bad Place. There was a subtle lack of wobble to the bed that suggested the building was not floating.

So the question was...Was she among friend, or foe? Both possibilities were equally likely, given the circumstances. And she was ill-equipped for both; she was hardly in a condition to move, much less fight, and even if she had met someone friendly, pursuit would not be far behind. She couldn't have run so far, not in such a short time. Though...how long had it been? Her sense of time was fuzzy and damaged, and led her to wonder if perhaps she was merely having a mildly pleasant dream. Dreams about sleeping were always nice...

Eventually, curiosity won out over caution. Besides, she had been laying in the bed for nearly a bell it felt like, and she couldn't just stay there forever. Cautiously opening her eyes, she sat up slowly, testing her body. Strange, her mind seemed to think she should feel stiff, or maybe sore at the very least. At worst, she just felt a bit drained. She hesitated to call out, not sure whether she wanted to be found. But she wasn't chained up, so she wasn't a prisoner, unless...

She walked unsteadily to the door, and found it unlocked. "H-hello?" she called hesitantly in a voice even she could barely hear.

OOCI'm assuming your healing is super good and Alea's mostly all better now Feel free to give me some symptoms I should still be suffering if you like