The waitress returned, bancing a trio of ptters with deft skill. She set one in front of each of us.
“Is there anything else you’d like?”
“I think we have all we need for now,” Serru said. “Thank you.”
“I’ll check back in a bit. Enjoy your meal.”
“You should bring me with you,” Aryennos said.
“We should?” Serru said.
“Didn’t I just prove that I know things that could be useful to you? Well, sort of? And you’ll have to go by Coppersands to reach the Gss Shallows, they have a good library and I can do some proper research fast, and there are schools on and near the Quincunx ring road... I think.”
“And this is not about wishing to observe and become the chronicler of an adult newcomer visiting the Quincunx?”
Aryennos shrugged. “Well, that too. Presumably no one knew the st two times that it might be something that would happen occasionally and it would help to record it. It’s reasonable to believe that if there have been at least three adult newcomers, there will be more, given enough time, and more information might help the next one. On top of that, I’m personally intensely curious, and also, I’m really grateful for everything you did. So I actually have a lot of reasons why I want to come with you. I’m not good at travelling but I can learn and I can help inside vilges and cities where there are other people who might ask questions or notice, um, cultural differences.”
“What about your job?” I asked.
“I didn’t write to them yet. It’ll be fine. I’ll send them a message about having an accident and falling into a singur research opportunity and I’ll be home when it’s complete. There’s another librarian who can manage until then.”
I looked at Serru. “He makes some good points. If nothing else, if having something written down about what I’m going through makes it easier for the next person who wakes up here confused, that’s worth it.”
She smiled. “I rather thought, once he brought up that point, that you would feel that way. I bought supplies only for two. Aryennos, if you’re coming along, we’re going back to the general store and I will tell you what to buy and you will do so without arguing, correct?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“Good. Taverns with beds, or stores for buying tents, or even shelters, do not appear every day. You will need food, as well, although we can gather a great deal of that as we go. For the moment, this is Nathan’s first encounter with properly-prepared food in our world, so I believe we should allow her to appreciate it.”
Which I did.
I mean, I had a lot of experience eating whatever was avaible in a hurry between calls, sometimes just wolfing down a gas station chocote bar because there was no time for more, and the less said the better about energy drinks or coffee that threatened to dissolve its own cup; an actual burger and fries became a luxury lunch some days. I was lucky enough to have no dietary issues and had learned to just eat whatever there was when it was avaible and not think too much about what was in it or how it tasted.
This had fvours that I couldn’t identify, although some reminded me of Serru’s campfire cooking, but they mingled wonderfully. Mine was a mixture of vegetables cooked together in some kind of sweet-ish sauce and served on top of a fluffy ftbread disc that absorbed all the juices; apparently you could just cut off bites of the bread and eat it with the topping, or pick it up, or eat the toppings and then the bread, whichever you preferred. Not only was there no rush to eat, but I could make myself eat slowly and savour every bite.
There was a cool creamy fruity dessert that made me think of mousse, as well.
While we lingered over that, Serru brought a compact wooden box out of her bag and set it on the table. “This is a shipping box. They’re reusable, we can keep it or drop it at the post office. What’s inside is for you. I sent a message from Quailbrook to a close friend in Coppersands, since we would have to make a substantial detour to reach a town before then, and told him I’m helping a paramedic I met who arrived here empty-handed.”
Curious, I wedged the tight-fitting lid off the box and looked inside.
There were two items rattling around in there.
I picked up the moulded, semi-rigid not-what-I-thought-of-as-leather case, a deep red with white edging and a white heart on it. It had a simple csp that I unfastened so I could flip back the fp and slide the contents out.
A small paper booklet came with it; I caught that and set it on the table.
The item inside was made of metal that looked like it had been anodized red, with a pearly white heart in the middle of it. The round-cornered rectangle reminded me of a computer tablet, other than being at least twice as thick as any I’d ever seen. After a brief moment of fumbling, I discovered a tch at the bottom that allowed the front cover to swing up on a hinge along the top edge.
The inside of the cover housed loonie-sized discs. Five of them were made of something spongy and white with red metal cores, and three had the colours reversed; each fit in its own snug socket. A further strip of metal at the bottom folded out and all the way back around, with several widely-spaced ridges along it.
The main part of the device was a red metal frame around a cloudy-white gss surface. The frame was the width of my finger all the way around except at the top, where it widened to allow for two small horizontal wheels, and two small circur indentations were along the right side.
The bottom of it fit precisely between the ridges on that metal strip that folded around from the cover, so the whole thing could be pced upright on a ft surface with the gss screen at a comfortable and adjustable angle.
“Those are universal for paramedics and many other healers,” Serru said. “I don’t know how they work, really, only that the pads are pced somewhere specific on the chest and it provides useful information, but Terenei promised to make sure the complete instructions for that precise model were included.”
I set down the red metal device and picked up the booklet. It wasn’t stapled or glued, just folded, but it did include straightforward instructions: when the pads were applied, it would continually read body temperature, heart rate and rhythm, blood pressure, respiration rate, oxygen levels, and lung sounds. The wheels allowed species and age to be set to calibrate the ranges; I guess unlike my Vitals trick, it didn’t figure that out for itself. It would turn itself on once the sensor pads were in pce, and it would turn itself off once the cover was closed.
It included a diagram of where to pce them on a humanoid that was eerily familiar, with instructions and a further diagram for using the additional three that were coloured differently on centaurs, cervids, and lmids. That made sense, that the biology of a centaur might be more complicated, and presumably cervids were the deer-people and lmids were something I hadn’t seen yet.
This was the core information I’d been trained to need, and I didn’t have to be in centaur form or use mana to get it.
The other item was a small red metal box with rounded corners, and the top and bottom fit into each other tightly, but there was a metal tab on the top that could be rotated sideways. That exposed an oval opening with something white and soft and fibrous inside—something like wet wipes maybe? When I closed it and flipped it over, I found white text there that solved the mystery: ‘Wipes for Monitor Sensors,’ and a heart under it.
I stared at it for a moment. A cordless monitor that had wireless leads and would give me all that information? How did that fit with a culture where people walked or rode horses or in wagons? That used magic red hearts to restart cardiac function, and had medical treatments that covered broad-strokes swathes like ‘all bone and connective tissue damage’?
“This is absolutely what I would consider essential diagnostic information, all in one package, and it looks like it was designed to be fairly foolproof.”
Serru smiled, “Terenei’s grandfather is an alchemist and he often runs the shop for him. He checked for me. Those monitors are universal necessary tools for paramedics. There are others that some paramedics find useful, especially the ones who tend to work farthest from settlements, and a doctor managing the ongoing health of one or more communities would have a range of tools a paramedic would be unlikely to find useful.”
“Doctors usually have monitors with more sensors,” Aryennos said. “It gives them more detailed information, and they can save results over time so you can look for patterns. But probably the battery runs down really fast on those.”
Serru nodded. “Terenei would also have been able to choose a model designed specifically to be durable with long battery life, for use on the road, although I’m sure there were features that were traded for that. That was the one item that absolutely every paramedic has, in some form.”
“I doubt it was inexpensive, since it would be meant to function for a very long time. Please? Let me pay for half of whatever it cost?”
Serru shrugged and nodded. “I’ll check the total Terenei sent me and tell you.” She smiled. “I suppose it may be of less use, given one of the abilities you have now, but I don’t think it will be wasted.”
“It absolutely will not,” I said firmly. “How is it powered? You mentioned battery life.”
“Our rooms will each have a charger. It looks like a thick-walled shallow metal box with a shiny chrome outer face and a dull grey metal interior studded with crystals of precise size and pcement. Anything left in it will recharge overnight. It takes a very long time for the charge to drop if something isn’t being used, and medical gear will have high-quality batteries that will tolerate extensive use.”
How was I hearing words like ‘battery’ and ‘charger’ when that couldn’t possibly be right? There was just no way there were lithium-ion or nickel-cadmium batteries involved.
But a battery was ultimately just power storage, right? Apparently I was getting a transtion on that level, not a literal version that would leave me still asking questions. Portable and versatile life-saving medical gear, powered by a long-sting battery with a low passive discharge rate and recharged wirelessly by devices in rented rooms and presumably other pces. That would allow a clearer diagnosis... for which magical alchemist-made treatment was appropriate for the situation.
Sure, why not? Just go with whatever was locally accepted as normal and consistent.
“I think you can find a volunteer or two so you can try it out in private,” Serru added. “It would be better to have some sense of how it works instead of trying to read the instructions while helping someone.”
“i would if I could,” Aryennos said, “but I’m pretty sure that Bandage around my ribs would get in the way.”
“I need to give you a hug,” I said. “Both of you. But maybe after we finish here.”
Serru chuckled. “Put that in your bag and enjoy dessert, then. Here, I’ll take the box back.”
I did. A lot.
We decided, soon after, to ask for our rooms.
They didn’t have many of them, but there was no one else staying and we were able to each have our own. I expected problems with stairs even though taking into account the existence and needs of centaurs was apparently just a normal fact of life. I should have known better. The rooms weren’t upstairs, or at least, not all of them: they were clustered at the end of one arm of the building. There were two rge rooms downstairs and, I was told, four upstairs that were more human-sized, accessible via a stairway beside one of the rge rooms.
We gathered in my room, for obvious reasons.
A crystal panel on the wall made the lumina stones suspended from a pair of brassy hooks on opposite walls glow into life.
I looked around with interest. It had a huge bed, several brassy clothing hooks on the wall, a sink with a mirror over it in one corner, a table under the window fnked by a single human-sized chair and an oversized one that made me wonder briefly who that was for. The floor was covered in a thick pale rug that gave me excellent traction, and I didn’t feel crowded or awkward in the space avaible.
All the wood beams around the window and supporting the ceiling above were painted in a light pleasant pink; the cob walls were washed with sky blue and painted with scattered butterflies I was starting to recognize. The bed was covered with a bnket woven in pastel blue and pink and yellow and green, matching the curtains, and the wood of the furniture was all a warm golden colour with a strong dark grain.
“This is really nice.”
“What did you expect?” Serru asked in amusement, sitting on the edge of the bed. Aryennos perched in the human-sized chair.
“Honestly? Your world confuses me so much sometimes that I should really just stop expecting anything. I keep snapping back and forth between things that would be considered primitive in my world and things that are extremely advanced, and a lot of things just sit at right angles on a different scale entirely. I can’t predict anything.”
Actually, I probably could, but it was that people would be friendly and polite, and things would be beautiful as well as functional as often as possible.
“Taverns and inns offer rooms so travellers can have a comfortable safe pce to sleep for the night without any concerns. They are designed and built and furnished to serve that purpose. And so that’s what their rooms do.”
“No keys? No door locks?”
Aryennos gave me a puzzled look. “While we’re renting these rooms, they’re temporarily our residences. Serru and I are only in this one because you invited us.”
“No one can intrude any more than they can open a tent from outside,” Serru said.
Sounded like that was another one of those fundamental concepts that was hard for me to really get and hard for them to think of a way to expin. “Okay. I’ll take your word for it.”
