Works on yourself. You will get better faster if you practice more but past a certain point you will need to learn to tap people who aren't using it for mana. To get you started I will need really nice paper and some fancy ink, the initial concepts click properly when you look at a scroll and that's the only way I know how to make them because ink and paper weren't limiting factors in Arda.

Dreamy look. "I can get you that as soon as we're done tonight! Um, how are you doing for mana– wait, why does it work to tap it from people here if it's not even energy from here, if it's from this positive plane, why do random people here even have a connection to that?" 

Mana is not from the positive energy plane. Mana is used to power the spell which is used to open a controllable temporary conduit to the positive energy plane.

Next patient is up, it's a terrified, sobbing girl of about thirteen with her entire arm, chest, neck, and side of her face scalded by a pot of boiling water. 

Shavri goes back to Mindspeech. :Huh! That sounds like it must come from here, but I didn't notice. Wasn't watching you that closely. I can watch you instead of the patient on this one: 

Bella yoinks some mana from the patient, who probably under the circumstances won't notice, and heals her.

:...I might've seen something that time?: Shavri hedges. :I'm not sure, there was a lot of other things moving: 

The girl pats frantically at her face and neck. "Is it, am I going to have a sca– oh! You fixed it! You're incredible!" 

Thanks!

"Well, either way it's not a lot of energy, whatever the mana's coming from," Shavri says. "I don't think it should really hurt my ability to do normal Healing." Pause. "I do still want to watch you painblock though, to see if I can figure out how you're doing that. It's subtle arts not magic so I wouldn't be able to just learn it, right?" 

Right, you have to be born with subtle arts, I don't currently have a way to give it to you.

Nod. "That's more the way I expect things to work." Shavri's eyes go unfocused. "Oh, um, Gemma says you've cleared out the backlog of injured patients waiting to be seen. Unless you can heal infections that started with a small injury and then got bad but she wasn't sure if that'd be covered with your spell." 

It might be but I haven't tried it, nobody in Arda got infections.

"...Well, if you want to try it's this way." Shavri hops up and leads her down the hall to a room where a feverish-looking man is tossing and turning while a worried Healing-trainee sits next to him. :He sliced his leg up chopping wood and bandaged it up and then didn't do anything for days. One of us could've fixed it easily right away but infections are way harder: 

Bella tries the spell. It helps with the slice but leaves the inflammation and fever.

Sigh. "Worth trying. Um, we'll probably get more people showing up at some point, in the meantime I guess we don't urgently need painblocking either. Maybe you can talk to Melody about the Mindhealing side and what the plans are there?" 

Sure. Where is Melody?

Melody is not instantly findable; when Shavri tries for with Mindspeech, this turns out to be because she's back in the living-quarters wing, putting up new curtains. She's nearby and quickly summonable. 

"...Hmm, well, so, I'm not actually sure how it makes sense to do this." Melody paces up and down in front of the big central desk, fidgeting with her bracelet. "Last time I was stationed here, people would just sort of turn up and whoever was there or the loudest emergency would get seen and I kept telling Aber to schedule people but they'd show up at random times anyway – I mean, that's how it works for the normal House of Healing, you just come in and get seen by a Healer in order of arrival and priority, there aren't appointments. Worked less well for me because some days nobody would come and sometimes twenty people would and I'd have to ask half of them to please come back the next day and make the other half wait ages and it was chaos. It kind of makes sense as a way of doing things on circuit, if I'm only to be in a given town for a week, but there's got to be a better way to do it if we're both going to stick around here for a while – just a minute, need more tea." 

She nips off and comes back with a cup. "Sorry. Anyway, I had a thought that, well sometimes people need one or two sessions and sometimes it's a lot more, and that's unfortunately kind of impossible with the circuit system. So, what if we kept the circuits but cut the length of each stop, so they could make more rounds per year, and instead of cramming in as many sessions as possible, they just try to direct the people who need longer-term Mindhealer attention to come to Haven? And we can send the message out more generally on the Mindspeech relay, and then the two of us could stick around here and try to do it in a nice organized way."

She shrugs and tugs at her bun. "It's still kind of a terrible system, there ought to be one of us in every major town, but for some reason there are couple hundred Gifted Healers in Valdemar and counting you we're now at six, er, I guess seven with Lancir but he's got his plate rather full already. Anyway – you've tried to do this before in another world where you were the only therapist. Thoughts? How did you make that work?" 

Uh, Elves are very patient. I didn't have to schedule them very aggressively because they'd take 'come back in six months' about the same as 'wait five minutes'.

Melody bursts out laughing. 

"...Well, that's probably going to work less well here. Well, idea: we get an actual clerk, like, I don't know, Queen Elspeth has to keep track of her commitments. And then people can turn up whenever they like and talk to the clerk instead of interrupting me in the middle of whatever, and we can schedule some recurring things out and leave some time free each day, so the clerk can give new people a time whenever one of us is free. And then maybe within six months or so we'll actually make the concept of 'showing up a place at a specific time instead of whenever's convenient' stick. To be fair a lot of people in the poorer parts of Haven don't have very reliable ways of telling the time so I guess it's understandable." 

Yes, I think practices in Materia sometimes do it that way.

"Hmm – seems good if someone else independently had the idea." Melody paces some more. "One thing, we're going to have urgent things come up. Which sounds like it wasn't an issue with your Elves? Er, did people in Materia get the thing where, I don't know, someone inexplicably starts thinking they're the Chosen One of Kernos and He's sending them messages via the number of pigeons in the town square and telling them to murder people and they won't stop screaming about it? Because, um, that's a thing that happens here." 

Materians do, but I didn't have a book on it and didn't see it in Elves.

"Damn. I'd hoped you might have a strategy for dealing with it. I, um, use a really stupid kind of block that I invented by accident when I was fourteen," she looks down sheepishly, "look, I didn't even know I had Mindhealing Gift, we thought it was Projective Empathy, I would never have done it otherwise, but we had this woman at the House of Healing who thought her week-old babe was possessed by demons and tried to drown her in the river – someone stopped her, thank the gods – but she wouldn't stop attacking Gemma and throwing things at her when she tried to go near, and Gemma was begging me to make her calm down so she'd be able to check if she was injured. I could See that everything was a mess in her head, a bunch of areas in the pattern were linking up when oughtn't to and everything was just...going too fast, her surface thoughts were this incomprehensible jumble. Anyway I just sort of yanked a bunch of the over-active threads sideways and knotted them where they couldn't talk to the rest, and she went quiet. Wasn't really capable of holding a conversation but she'd do what Gemma said, ate some food and went to sleep. Then, er, when it hadn't worn off in the morning like I assumed it would, I went in to try to put things back the way they were before, and she snapped out of it and was mostly normal again."

She grimaces. "Should've been a hint that I didn't have Projective Empathy, it doesn't stick that way. Anyway it does seem to break people out of...whatever causes those sorts of delusions, I don't understand it. Sometimes they fall back into it later, I had a man on my east circuit for a while who'd need me to redo it every other year or so, his family would send him to live in a hut in the woods until I came by again. Annoyingly, the locals tend to think someone in that state is possessed by demons – I'm pretty sure it's not that because I can't see how my stupid block would fix demons – but I ended up getting ordained as a lay-priestess in the Temple of Kernos so that people would be more willing to let me try an 'exorcism.'"

Shrug. "I showed Lancir the block once and then made him try it on me just to check that it wasn't a horrific torture experience, and it's not – though it's weird, you sort of don't feel like a person, experiences are happening but it's like they're not happening to anyone in particular. Anyway, um, just to warn you, and I'm curious if we can figure out a way of using your subtle arts that would address it better." 

Somebody who is possessed by Materian demons doesn't act psychotic and it's not safe for subtle artists to even talk to them by telepathy, let alone work on them. Uh, if the state of the art for psychotic breaks is really bad I can experiment but I want to be super careful about it.

"Materia has actual demons? I, er, think demons do exist here, I dug up some books about it, they're Abyssal creatures and they can be summoned and given forms here but they mostly just eat things, possibly including people's minds but as far as I know that's unrelated to the psychotic break thing. And yes, of course, please be careful. Honestly the reason I haven't improved much on the stupid block is that I've been extremely careful ever since I learned what my Gift could do. I'm incredibly lucky I didn't break anything permanently before that. Er, I think my thing is better than the previous state of the art, which was usually the Healers giving the person a really strong sleeping draught and they'd wake up fine again about a quarter of the time. I did eventually manage to sync up with one of the other Mindhealers and he has a different kind of block he uses, on the one hand it's a lot less extreme but on the other he just leaves it there until it comes down by itself months later, and it is pretty impairing. So I prefer mine, but it is stupid and there's got to be something better out there if we could find a safe way of experimenting."