"If they won't I will."

...Thanks, I guess.

"I hope it won't come to that, but I bet the city budget's going to be a bit tight after all of this." He sighs. "Might end up heading back up north. Come down here to cash in on the dungeon rush, all I get is nearly getting my face clawed off by zombies. But hey. Levels."

Nod, nod, that's how it is. Stabilize, Stabilize.

When they get to the part of the city where Blai joined the fighting, there's another issue.

The helpers tagging along to move people survey the scene of carnage. Drakes, Gnolls, humans. And—

"Are we supposed to grab the Antinium too?" one of them asks.

The healer looks at Blai. The driver looks at Blai.

"Unless there's a preexisting agreement according to which they'd prefer to manage their own healing why wouldn't we? They helped - that one over there melted his limbs off attacking the giant one -"

(Yeah, that one is super dead.)

"I think we should get them?" the driver volunteers, tentatively. "I've never... seen any of them before today except Klbkch... but he takes healing potions from the Watch."

        "I don't know how to fix an Antinium," says the healer, nervously. "Can't exactly stitch them. I can take the others."

The movers shrug and get to work. They're clearly uncomfortable with the Antinium, and startle whenever one moves, but raise no complaints.

There's not a lot of them. The vast majority of the Antinium left behind are dead. Perhaps a good thing because they're large enough that they take up the space of three of another species. A contrast with Klbkch, who was more similar to a human or Drake.

Those they do pick up say nothing and stay in place once situated, even those missing entire limbs or with their carapace half caved in. It's actually really difficult to tell which ones are dead and which ones are alive until one of the movers has the bright idea of requesting out loud that all those alive raise a limb to indicate; not all of the living accomplish these, but they at least manage a twitch, which speeds things up a lot.

They're not weirder than Drakes or gnolls to Blai. He'll stabilize them preferentially if they confuse the local Healer.

Another train of empty wagons will show up, and the recovery team will switch over so the people they treated can be shipped back to the city center. They work their to the gate, where the devastation of the attack is more prominent: entire blocks flattened, corpses rotten and fresh piled up against the rubble, people picking through the ruins for their valuables and others frantically trying to stabilize even more injured.

There are Guardsmen helping with the cleanup here and rationing out healing potion. A tall Drake—Watch Captain Zevara, if Blai remembers from when she spoke to him weeks ago—approaches and waits for him to have a moment.

"Select Artigas?" she asks quietly. "Will you be available for a channel in the near future?"

"Not today, but I have a few spells I can convert into single-target healing if there is someone who won't make it till tomorrow." Stabilize. Stabilize.

"No, most cases where that would help we can scrape up a healing potion if we need to. It's—half the Watch is out of commission, and a lot of able-bodied citizens that normally would be a resource to call on, and we've got hundreds, maybe thousands of people displaced, and—there's going to be a lot of pressure on services. It would help a lot to get as many men as we can up on their feet right now. We're looking at 300, maybe 400 dead, one to two thousand injured at conservative estimates, and the first twenty-four hours are critical for recovery efforts.

"Is there no—mana potions, stamina potions—anything that can stretch you one today." She doesn't sound optimistic.

"I could try them but I don't have a guess if they'd work. I can try - asking Iomedae - but I do not expect Her to have anything to spare."

"Iomedae is—the god of your world, which sponsors your class?" Klbkch gave her a heads up. She still can't quite wrap her head around the concepts of living gods. "You can petition her, with—some sort of [Message]? What is she likely to do, if she is willing to help?"

"If She - it's not a matter of willingness, She doesn't want any of these people to lie bleeding until they die, it's if she can afford to, if she wouldn't be giving up something more important farther away, if it wouldn't take too much out of Her. If She can, I'm going to ask her for one of my channels that I would have tomorrow, to come instead today, or for a temporary Splendor boost that lasts long enough to let me have another by the standard constraints."

"Of course," she says. "It would be appreciated if you could try. Do you need anything for it?"

"No." He'll find a quiet spot, kneel, pray. Also Pray.

Select, as you surmise, I am up to my eyebrows in debt. I don't know how you found that discount tag and wish I could bottle it, but we have not yet entered the territory where I get paid to give you stuff. And every one of these people is only infinitely important as their own light in the world, and I have never, ever, in my existence, been in a position to pay for that without flowthrough effects thrown in unless I'm getting bulk rates better than this. You know all that, which is why I'm not saying it; you'll infer it.

Desna. Found you a bargain bin waaaaaay over there. Nobody's picked through it in ages. See anybody you like?

What a remarkably neutral sort of place. But maybe...

Keisha Silverfang is a City Gnoll.

She's not ashamed of it. She was ten years old when her parents followed Krshia to Liscor a decade ago, along with dozens more Silverfangs, and she doesn't remember her life before that very well. She sometimes dreams about the great plains, the rolling hills, looking for bugs in the grass, but it's not—she doesn't know the plains the way she knows how to haggle with the Drake at the supplies store down the street, or how she waves to the guards at the east gate she knows by name, not the way she can stalk a deer in the tall grass by the Enam River, or how she's read her copy of From Zeres to First Landing cover to cover enough times the binding's practically falling apart.

When, at fourteen, she asked not to apprentice to her parents' jewelry trade but to follow their downstairs neighbor out hunting, everyone thought... lots of things, really. That she was getting in touch with her roots. That she didn't like it in the city. That she wasn't getting enough stimulation for a young Gnoll—well, that one was right, a little bit.

Really, she was bored.

Liscor is—great. She likes having sewers and shops and a mattress to sleep on and a brick roof over her head. Everyone took a trip down south to meet with the rest of the tribe, three years ago, and it was fine; honestly, Ekirra's incessant complaining was worse than the actual lack of amenties. But she did acquire a new appreciation for her home once they got back to Liscor. Whatever people think, she's decided she's tremendously uninterested in playing hunter-gatherer and sleeping in bedrolls her whole life.

But she doesn't want to spend her life cooped in these city walls either, trading gold for silver and silver for gold day after day, until she dies of old age on a pile of coins like a miserdrake.

Her parents tell her she misses the plains, that it's in her blood. She doesn't think that's right. But she wants—more.

During the day, she hunts, and levels, and looks up at the High Passes climbing up and up past the clouds to where goats and monsters lie, and who knows what else is up there? In the evenings, she leafs through her second-hand books, wondering what it must be like to stand on the bridges of Salazsar and see the City of Gems glittering beneath the stars.

In the night, she dreams.

Keisha is a Level 6 [Dreamer].

She hasn't told anyone about it. It's not that she thinks anyone is going to be upset. "Levels are levels," they say. But it feels... private. Her own little world in the recesses of her mind.

All these places she's only read about became hers to walk in dreams. But even with the Skills for it, it's not the same thing. If anything, it makes her want the real thing even more, to feel the cobblestones with her own paws and taste the salt in the air, not only her pale imaginings of it from words on paper. Eventually, dwelling on what she can't have gets old.

These days, her dreams are more abstract. She steals some time to practice her tracking, a lot of nights, but invariably she wanders off into the gaps and finds new places, forests full of strange creatures or cities hanging from the clouds, wonders great and terrible that slip through her fingers like sand until she wakes.

She wonders if they're real places, sometimes, conjured into her mindscape by [Dream of Elsewhere]. They're not, as far as she can tell; she doesn't think it works like that. But she wishes they were.

When the dungeon under Liscor is discovered, Keshia considers taking a shot at it. She's a Level 11 [Hunter], and plenty of idiots with barely a few levels in [Warrior] are risking their fur in the upper levels. It's only a fleeting thought. What's she going to find down there? Death and monsters and pottery older than dirt. Call her when they find a lost underground civilization of ancient Gnolls.

She has a bad feeling about it, anyway. When the delving operations begin in earnest, her dreams become troubled. She wakes in cold sweat some mornings, not knowing why. She doesn't tell anyone. What would she say?

The night before the attack isn't different from any other, which she'll later point to as evidence that it was all in her mind all along. She gets a good night's sleep, in fact, and it's not a hunting day, so she stays in helping out with the chores.

When someone comes knocking at the door shouting about an undead invasion at the north gates, that the walls are falling, and her mom and her brother are arguing whether they should hunker down or evacuate farther south, or leave the city entirely—

Well, of course she grabs her bow and goes.

Hey. Hey you. Go talk to that guy and tell him a butterfly sent you.

Keisha is commandeering extra hands to help unbarricade a room someone trapped themself in when she feels... this... thing. It's sort of like dipping into a daydream for a second, like she's elsewhere, seeing—the stars, if they weren't pinpricks in the sky, but right in front of her, a million miles only an arm's reach to touch—

And like waking from a dream, she remembers there's something really important she has to do. Also, she has a headache.

"Hey, am I asleep?" she asks the Drake she's recruited.

        "...What?"

"Uh. Never mind. Sorry, can you take care of this? I need to go do something."

Where's that guy? She got distracted for a sec.

Over here, on his knees for some reason.

Is he interruptible. Maybe he's using a long-duration Skill. If she stands near but not too close to him, vaguely in his line of facing, and—crouches down?—and tries to wave, does he snap out of it?

"- can I help you?"

"I'm supposed to say a butterfly sent me." Now that she thinks of it, it's super weird that she knows that for some reason.

- he scrambles to his feet, takes her by the hand, and pulls her toward the healing coordinator. "I think we have another cleric! Fill up my channeling building - twice probably - maybe three times but don't count on it -"