Thank whatever gods may be.  She was not looking forward to consequences (and the infliction thereof), no matter how justified they might be.

She'll just take a moment to catch her breath.  Then she'll be back on duty, as she was before.  Her apologies for the wait.

A bit later, one of the injured patients - remarkably calm and put together, injured very lightly to the point that the sans-Ophelia triage guidelines would say to turn him away - gets to the front of the line and passes her a slip of paper with reasonable sleight of hand after being evaluated.

Codeword: Kyros

Can't meet in person, I'm looking into a limited time offer. Your order's done. Look where we first met, at the base of what passes for a spire there.

She doesn't let anything on.  Though the man does end up with an extra $5 on his person, somehow.  And a lack of wounds.

She murmurs to the guard that backed her up earlier, "Let Heron know that I'm going to have to take care of something while I grab lunch, once the line's died down.  Shouldn't take more than an hour unless there's a sandstorm."

"Sure, head. You can probably just take off now. Cleanest I've ever seen this place. Then again, it's a Tuesday. Nothing interesting happens on Tuesdays."

"Don't just say that.  Now something will, unless the arguing couple from earlier was our quota of...excitement for today."

But if it's quiet enough, then she will.  A brief detour through the markets to pick up some Nutri-Gel, and then out to that same old railyard she originally met Roland in.  The note is quickly burned once she has made sure she is not walking into a trap, and picked up her border pass.

Her pass is in a sealed plastic bag buried very shallow under a rusty electrical pole, the tallest thing in the area of the trainyard. It names one KYRA SMITH, F, height such and such weight such and such, PERMITTED for ENTRY into the city of Cincinnati. Another note details the fake history for her: Entered the city from the badlands three years ago, coming and going irregularly once every few weeks, does odd jobs, a smattering of former addresses and contacts (it would be suspicious to be MISSING these but if she looks for them she will not find them), no criminal history.

If she took any professional name, she would be a smith.  Or perhaps a brewer.

She notes her next expected time of entry, and shifts "read up on everything" higher on her priority schedule.  She tamps the earth flat again.  She does some very odd jobs.  She practices the backstory of Kyra Smith, a handywoman and escapee from one of those eschatologist cults in the desert.

(...She worries, that that comes so easily.  But she doesn't have time for rumination, let alone a reason to think that worrying about it will make her life better.  Really, it's the relative privation - or that is, at least, what she tells herself when she finds herself ruminating anyway.)

Nobody cuts down her tree this time. Lots of things happen in the Bordertown over the next few days. The whole world is turning, with or without her. People coming in, people leaving, thousands a day. The border market turns and churns, every day the goods are different and yet the same. The plucky kid who told her about the Anarchists finds her and offers to be an ear on the ground. People sneak through the gaps in the border, or make new ones. The Pumas roar through town once or twice a day. They're apparently tolerated because they pay well. There's rumors, always rumors: Some guy is hiding from the Triads out here, wants an investigator to figure out who fucked him over on a deal. They say the smugglers are having a quiet war between two rival cells. Dusty the mechanic heard about an abandoned Neord Dragline truck out in the hills- Unique engine, special design, only a few hundred ever made, xe'll pay $500 for someone to find it and haul it in. Some punks calling themselves the Church of the Red Sand are harassing squatters on the north side.

Dr. Anno arranges tests, asking her to walk between a bunch of sealed tents and follow written instructions- He doesn't even know which tents she's supposed to use the Sigil on and which she's not, in case his expectation could influence things.

She turns metal parts around, takes on the plucky kid now that she's starting to have enough money for hirelings - drafts his older sister figure to make sure he doesn't do anything reckless and eats well; she can afford that too, given the scrap supply and her somewhat unique advantages in supplying necessary materials and refurbishing it without specialized tools - 

She asks Dr. Anno about the Church situation, whether he believes it would bring trouble to the camp if she meddled.  (She's leaving the smugglers alone, though!)  Carefully assembles an outfit to do triage in.  Reads.  Studies guns.  Thinks about spellwork; she wants to stabilize an interaction of Force and Influential Domain for area control, and rederive Lantry's Preservation, especially given the utility and fragility of technology.  She might need to track down some of those psychedelic substances.  ...That can wait a bit.  She knows better than to let her brain free-associate while she's in such a precarious living situation.

If she finds the truck out there, she can probably haul what Dusty might appreciate in, with an afternoon of Vigorous effort - though she's not looking for it per se.

And then the testing comes.  (She makes sure that the observers stay out of her view, because she's very good at reading people.)  She's honestly kind of nervous about them, no matter that she's utterly confident in her magic.  She is still human, and she does not wish to alienate the Mercy Crew by...well, being so alien to them, healing without any true medical knowledge.

The kid and his urchin gang have been doing this kind of thing for a while, apparently. They're mostly orphans from one of the desert states, Urbana-Champaign, supping on the fringe of Cinci's relative prosperity. She does not happen to serendipitously find Dusty's coveted truck.

Dr. Anno thinks doing something about the Church could bring up the general chaos level of the Bordertown somewhat, but wouldn't specifically hurt the Mercy Crew aside from generating more business unless she leads an angry mob straight back or something.

Hanging out with the Mercy Crew as they talk when on break will let her rapidly absorb some of the knowledge and jargon, but there's still a huge gulf. They're mostly professionals, or long-time volunteers without formal accreditation. The tests seem to go well- Dr. Anno is secretive about them and reveals after the fact that Heron arranged most of the experiments, without knowing what, exactly, was being tested. Here's some charts and numbers about bacteria cultures and hormone signals in mice and such!

Then she'll slip into a casual outfit (slightly raggedy clothes, a shirt with too-long sleeves, knife on her hip) and investigate this Church.  And the squatters.

(She listens politely to the stuff about hormone signals, and shares her own knowledge of what people have observed various Sigils doing on a psychological level.  For someone with no formal training in the field of medicine, she picks things up with alacrity.)

At any rate, Dr. Anno is now confident that the Sigils are real and reproducible, and is now shifting to 'trying to figure out how it actually works'. He tells her that he's willing to learn- In appropriately remote areas away from prying eyes, and letting the rumor mill make of that what it will. Ahem.

The Church of Red Sand is a few dozen or so people with an eclectic set of beliefs and philosophy about praising the sun and living with the wind and, again, freedom from certain types of unacceptable technology. It boils down to a lot of moral lessons about appreciating whatever small pleasures you can and building friendships in a small community. They're kind of... Creepy about it, though. Group prayers and songs, 'buddy systems' where nobody who's getting the free meals and booze they offer is ever really alone, circle-round-the-fire discussions about what is truly good in the world, interrupting 'bad thoughts' such as questioning whether any of this is real. They appear to be on a recruitment drive, promising a happy life at their 'oasis', which is only ever described vaguely, to the miscellaneous down-and-out folk who got to the edge of Cinci but are kept from swelling its slums even more by the Border Wall.

...Yeeeeah she knows what this looks like.

Fucking cultists.

(Kyros's Empire Does Not Approve Of (isolationist) Cults.  It wreaks havoc on taxation.)

She is not going to go blow open their torture basement herself until she's determined whether Dr. Anno can learn Sigils, though.  It would be unacceptably reckless with her knowledge and her Archonate.

Speaking of teaching Dr. Anno magic, though - he has homework before he is considered ready to learn by Ophelia.

You see, he needs a staff.

(Or other focusing implement, but Ophelia started with a staff, so she's starting him with a staff.)

(Channeling even Life through your own body is likely to give you all the cancers.  Vigor...Would probably kill you like steroid overdoses do, if she's reading this right.  Or at least make you wish you were dead.)

She also proposes that he acquire a small dose of one of these psychedelics - based on their effect profiles, they're similar to some of the concoctions various Guilds used - just enough to feel them slightly unmoor him from normal thought, while not enough for the really fucky shit to get in the way.  (But that's not strictly necessary.  She's taught people with guided meditation alone, and while she did initially dose herself when she was learning, she's pretty sure she didn't precisely need it.  For things like 'tapping into magic', at least.  If she ever tries to design - or rather, find - novel spell sigils, she expects she'll need some creative assistance.  Though now that she's thinking of it, she wonders if those fancy virtual intelligence things can hallucinate...)

Anyway.  The staff.

The most important thing about a focus is that it mean something to him.  That he is invested in it, a little bit.  Magic is an intensely personal thing.

The second most important thing is that it also draws on cultural meanings of the relevant sigil/element.

...Actually, she wants to find out whether 'draws from Earthling Life or Vigor memes', 'draws from Terratus Archonal myths', 'draws from notable-for-Life-or-Vigor Earthling myths', or 'none of the above', make for a better staff for an Earth-native sigillist.  But anyway, magic works better if it has - the weight of culture behind it; that's where new Sigils come from to begin with.

And while he's working on that, he should actually read some of these Archon myths.  She recommends he start on the Orphan Midwife, but - he should figure out what calls to him the most.

"...Well, obviously, there's the Caduceus. Classic myth, long associations. Scarab or the ankh. Infinity... A clenched fist or bulging arm. An EKG signature? Adrenaline? Hmm. There's this one old photograph, really stuck in my mind, of a long-gone mural of a frankly overmuscled doctor holding the Caduceus staff and a palm out, fending off the Grim Reaper."

She nods.

"Then you're going to want this Caduceus, I think.  ...It helps if you make it yourself; do you know any crafts skills?"

"Not really. Wasn't my specialty, wasn't my hobby."

"Well, then.  We'll lean on the symbolism."

And with the help of a sketching program, Ophelia designs a staff - and a middling while later, if he has no plans to obtain one himself, presents him with an asklepion, twined about the heartbeat of an EKG; the snake's scales are a cunningly tesselated Sigil of Vigor, while the heartbeat is entwined with the Sigil of Life.

He could design one himself, but really has no idea where to go with it. He writes down some notes on what health and wellness and life mean to him. Patterns within patterns, life is motion, life is a lower-entropy state, balanced and spinning and splitting and fractal, bound by causality and genetics to the past and the future, contained within a squishy fragile shell. He writes some amateur poetry.

Her design is very aesthetic.

"I could probably get Roland to fab this up, but it's better not to leave too many hints. I'll make inquiries with someone who won't care. Maybe in the PZs. It can be a vainglorious art project."

"I was thinking to whittle it; wood from a tree that happens to be steeped in the energies of the Sigil of Life on a regular basis will surely help you gather some."

...hmm, she thinks the DNA helix actually ought to work fairly well laid across the Sigil of Life, come to think of it...

"If you think so? I can actually pay you for this, by the way. Up front, even. We have nest eggs and this isn't a confidence game, these are sitting in a safe, not helping people. How about two thou?"

She - blinks.  "That would certainly be sufficient to sustain me."