"No, nor can any creatures I know of, but something might. Why?"

"I'm not sure if you can do things like removing genetic diseases? If you even have them – patterns are sort of confusing."

"You don't have patterns, as far as I can tell, so I couldn't even theoretically remove them from your kind of person. When people are having children they check for errors in the patterns of seeds before they plant them, usually against a list with a scribe supervising and helping. If there's something wrong with one of them, it just isn't planted. There are simple errors we remove from other species, though?"

"Oh, you grow like plants?" Pause. "Do you have any animals? Because we grow slightly differently, we aren't planted."

"We are plants? What else would we be? I don't know what you mean- I am confused." Does he mean that his type of person grows without being deliberately planted, with wind-blown seeds or something like that? Wouldn't that lead to confused infants dying in whatever random place they happened go grow? That would be tragic, and need to be fixed. Or they could bud and merge with each other like some small-seeds do, which would be weird but not necessarily a problem.

"It's… it'd probably be quite weird for you to find out how we work," he says.

"All right. If someone of your species did have a mistake or disease in their patterns, we wouldn't be able to tell, let alone fix it. In ours, if someone's pattern is damaged, they don't have children afterward, usually, if it would be heritable." Even when it's a few simple changes that anyone who had ever touched a seed could fix in a moment, except that would be wrong.

"Sounds like… a way to clean up the gene pool," he remarks, not transmitting.

Leaning over to look at his legs, he pokes at the cast thing to see how hard it'd be to remove. His legs twinge a little, but they're probably fixed enough to use at this point.

She tries to send a sense that she doesn't know what he just said. "I can go get something to remove those?" Probably with the explanation that they'd been wrong about whether the bones were broken, rather than that they had already healed.

"– Don't worry, it was nothing," he responds, and then, "That would be helpful, thanks."

The healer continues to stand blankly, and Relay looks at them briefly before returning to lying down in the hammock.

(The healer is kind of weird. Maybe they'll be less weird if they rest more.)

"I'll go get it then." She climbs back out the window.

After she's gone, Relay pokes the healer. Mentally.

The response consists of, basically, an echo. Which was not precisely what he wanted. He didn't realize he could break a person just by thinking at them loudly enough to stop.

Another poke gets the same result.

He decides… he is probably just going to have to deal with the fact he has a broken person here. Somehow. Maybe he will claim ignorance, or something.

In the meantime, he might pilot them around.

Relay is not super in the mood to try anything without the ability to walk around properly, though, so he just stays in the hammock.

And eventually the woman comes back, carrying a lidded wooden jar of some kind of thin liquid in her hand, with a serrated wooden knife sticking out of a pocket in her vest.

He smiles at her, a bit weakly, as she returns. "Sorry about them," he says, gesturing at the healer. "I think they're a bit overwhelmed." (… Sort of true.) "Is that for the cast?"

(... weird and kind of creepy. Possibly they have some sort of long-term organ damage, but it would be rude to ask, especially given the explanation.)

"Yes, the liquid softens the cast's material enough for the knife to cut it. Do you have a preference about whether I cut the cast off or you do? I should probably pour the liquid unless you really want to." (Both the cast's material and the fluid are harvested from the same plant, whose ancestor stiffened its fibrous leaves in response to substances in creatures' saliva and loosened them with the release of a fluid it normally held in sacs in the main stem. It's a very cool plant but obnoxiously difficult to grow intentionally, and too complicated to edit efficiently for most purposes. The cast-plant is much simpler to work and more useful than its ancestor. She wants one anyway.)

"I think I should be able to do it," he responds, leaning up a little. Internally, he's somewhat confused – he thinks he's starting to like the stranger, but he's wary of letting anyone near him with a potential weapon, especially given he thinks the earlier 'accident' was less than accidental. He tries to keep this off his face, as much as he can.

She hands over the jar and the knife (hilt-first), carefully avoiding touching his skin. The worst-case is probably just that he oversoaks the cast and its slime drips somewhere or he slips and slightly cuts his leg, and he can probably feel enough to be careful not to do that. She tries to send an impression of about the right amount of liquid to pour, enough to dampen the material in a line along where he intends to cut, and then leave it about half a minute before cutting it.

"Thanks," he responds.

He starts pouring, being careful to get the liquid only on the cast itself.

It dampens, and quickly reaches a texture somewhere between "spongy", "springy", and "cloth-like".

Not too hard to do it himself, then. He starts fiddling with the cast using the knife – carefully.

The knife's serration lets it cut through the material fairly steadily. It is eventually possible to peel it off.

He does so, gingerly in case his leg is still damaged. The twinge is still present, not much improved from its earlier pain, but definitely noticeably so.

He eyes the healer momentarily, considering his options, but finishes cutting apart the cast without doing anything.

She carefully takes the casts and wraps them in paper, trying to broadcast her intention to do that unless he objects. (Once she's outside, she'll put it in the two-layered-seal container where small-seed plants destroy biological materials that were once part of people, just in case, but it's probably fine to leave wrapped on her desk for now.)

"There are medicines that reduce pain, either on a specific spot or everywhere, although I'm not sure whether they would work on you."

He doesn't object to her doing so.

"I'm not sure, either," he responds. "Do you know how they work, or anything about their chemical makeup?" It sure would be nice if he knew more biochemistry.

The kind that is swallowed dissolves in alcohols better than in water and much better than in oil, while the kind that is spread upon skin is the opposite. The ones that are swallowed make pain smaller or less important, and the ones that are spread make the area numb for a time.