Oh, is that all. That's a relief.

"I think what happened last time couldn't happen again without the internet, so we're probably safe."

"I would have assumed your disapproval sufficient."

"...this is kinda a long story. Do you actually want to hear it?"

"I'm curious, but I don't know if you want to—”

The door opens, and Doc comes in, looking shaken.

"Cameron," he says, his voice breathy with awed horror, almost a whisper, "what have you done."

What.

"What."

Oh no, did the sky shell shatter after all?

"Could you be more specific."

"One of the victims from the disaster is here. She—"

"Cameron, she's missing her soul."

Cameron doesn't sigh in relief that this world isn't about to be destroyed. Alvin seems really spooked by this.

And if something's gone wrong with her healing she needs to fix it now. "Show me."

He nods, schools his features into a professional calm, and leads her out.

The patient is one of the women she'd brought back from the dead; Cameron might recognize her as having had negligible direct damage to vital organs. She's worried, but not as much as Doc had been.

She appears to Cameron's scan to be a perfectly healthy normal human.

Cameron stops and blinks at the entirely conscious and ambulatory person.

"This is her? Doc, what precisely are you talking about when you say she's missing her soul?"

        "I'm what," she squeaks in alarm.

Doc suppresses a pained sigh.

"You're in no acute danger," he says in a calming tone. "We don't yet fully understand what's going on, but I expect we will be able to find you a solution in time."

To Cameron: "She came in because she noticed she wasn't able to cast spells. My diagnostics indicate that she's mostly physically healthy, but her magical systems aren't showing up at all. I might want to bring in a specialist to take a closer look at the interface."

"She's lost her magic?"

Cameron steps forward and touches the woman's shoulder, muttering, "I swear the word 'soul' has caused more grief than all of the things it is used to mean combined."

Cameron frowns in concentration and asks, "Did this happen to anyone else I healed? ...Tegan?"

"...I'm not sure. I haven't heard of any other cases. At least three still have their – magic, including Tegan."

"And Tegan was scattered over thirty square feet of chaos before I got to her, so its not that."

Cameron glances back. "Could you get Tegan in here? I want to look at them side by side."

"Just a minute, please," Tegan calls through the door.

She emerges shortly, dressed and sheveled.

Cameron absently pokes her Style, and finds that it has actually collected enough impressions to function. It creates a pair of perfectly molded heavy canvas booty shorts around her hips, a pair of slim knee-high boots, and a long-sleeved formal shirt in skin-tight latex.

She puts Tegan next to the other woman and puts a hand on each of them.

"My biosense has two halves, and each half has two modes," Cameron explains for the Doc's benefit. "I can see the body as it is, or I can see the body as my magic thinks it should be. I can see what a body should have but doesn't, or I can see what a body does have that it shouldn't."

She switches between modes.

She frowns.

"Oh. That's so weird. The first sense is showing no discrepancies at all, but the second sense is... Doc? I need a third data point. Grab my leg?"

...he puts a hand on her thigh.

The second half of her sense, in the mode that shows missing parts, is showing her a countless galaxy of tiny discrepancies in Tegan, and in the Doc too when he touches her, but the moment he does touch her the mental image coming from the first half of her sense suddenly changes, updating.

"Whoa. That's new."

The image of the woman as she should be, and Cameron has to focus closely to be sure, now shares the same missing pieces. And yet, the map of foreign matter doesn't show any of those same structures in the woman.

"It's like the inverse of what I see in someone with a medical or cybernetic implant," Cameron explains. "My magic thinks you and Tegan are missing something that this woman has, but also that her ideal state is the way you currently are, with the thing missing."

"It sounds like people where you come from have something extra, and that you're healing spell sometimes adds that something when used on people here. And that the something extra... displaces the soul, somehow? Could it be a different kind of soul?"

"Can we not use the word 'soul'. It means way too many things."

Cameron steps back, puzzled. "With a physical implant, the object shows up on the map of foreign material in the body, but space for the implant shows up on the map of ideal state. The more integrated into the body, the more reliable this is. If your magic is physiologically controlled, the same principle should apply to an extreme."

"...can your magic... break?"

"The... magic organ, can be damaged, but that's almost always fatal—

"—oh."

        Softly, "I did die."

Cameron blinks. "You... think she died of unrelated magic failure, during the disaster? That would explain things but would also be one hell of a coincidence..."

That the souls these people have been talking about are a magic thing unique to them that they need to live implies a lot, actually, but raises half again as many new questions. They are human, or as close as makes no difference, but they're all apparently dependent on some kind of magical life support.

Cameron resists making a joke about diagnosing all of them with undeath. That would probably be tactless.

Such messy interdependence is additional weak evidence for this being a natural world rather than some eldritch horror's fish-tank, at least.

"Not necessarily unrelated."

"Point."

"There's one thing I can try, but I don't know if it'll work. With both of you, out-voting the baseline, so to speak, I think my spell will revert her, but I have no idea if that will restore her magic."

"Would it be reversible?"

(He's no longer particularly bothering to keep his hands on her thigh.)