This city, like many others near the sea, is well-equipped to care for the needs of aquatics. Plenty of pools, knowledgeable biologists, and charming artificial channels near many parks give opportunities for aquatics to be able to explore new places and see new people, instead of being confined to their pools. There's even a hastily-built medical center intended care for the needs of aquatics with other conditions on top; if anywhere could handle Alia post-transformation, it would likely be here, on this island.

In the prep area quickly improvised outside the hospital, wanting to keep Alia near a small stream in case she needed to be submerged, a small team of doctors and nurses are standing around, ready to rush in and summon the entire hospital if necessary. The dialysis machine is ready, together with a comfortable hospital bed built perfect for Alia and a variety of sensors ready to be hooked up to her body. The nurse gently places the mask over Alia's mouth; thomassians take treatable pain very seriously, and the mask can begin sending a stream of powerful anesthetics to spare Alia from any kind of pain or discomfort that might happen to her when untransformed.

"Ready?" her favorite nurse asked her, with a breathy, and gentle voice, as she waited tensely for the transformation to be over and Alia return to how she was without magic flowing through her veins.

No, but that wouldn't be nice to say. "Yes, thank you."

(The water features are very pretty but she doesn't want to be an aquatic.)

The Event ends, everywhere on the planet at almost exactly the same time.

Alia's claws and ears and whiskers disappear.

She passes out.

No heartbeat, but she's still breathing weakly.

The doctors and nurses are waiting, trying to understand how the squid has changed Alia, ready for anything. They quietly and calmly try using both chest compressions and precisely targeted electrical pulses from a source, hoping to get some response from Alia's heart.

Chest compressions and electricity both make her heart convulse but it doesn't resume pumping.

She stops breathing.

Her fingers are getting bluish.

They should have done this a long time ago. The nurses rush ahead into the hospital, rushing Alia to the closest room with a heart and lung machine as rapidly as they can. Working fast, it takes but a few minute before the machine has begun pumping blood in place of Alia's heart. They also start carting in ECMO equipment into that room, as another thing to try in case the HLM somehow wasn't enough.

She's looking less blue now.

At least her skin is. Her blood is blue and viscous.

Diarrhea oozes.

Perhaps this is what squids would be like? Kicking the ventilation system into high gear and changing into masks that block the smell is easy, and cleaning up Alia is barely any more effort than that. Measuring oxygen concentration and brain function would probably be a necessity; the doctors have no idea what the viscous blue blood could mean, but if other signs of life work normally, they can probably afford to get out of crisis mode and give Alia some beyond-deserved rest.

An external pulse oximeter still shows around 40%, but she's breathing on her own (or at least moving her chest on her own) and a lab measurement finds 95% percent oxygenation of her, uh, haemocyanin, which turns her vividly blue again.

Her brain flickers sporadically. She has a bleeding stroke in her left frontal lobe.

Sodium: low.

Magnesium: low.

Blood sugar: high.

She has a fever of 38.1.

She's ...crying? Despite being thoroughly unconscious.

... those wouldn't be tears, then. IV solution, ready. Treatment for any fluid buildup from the stroke, ready. The newfangled insulin control system, ready. Ice-based gel cooling packs, ready. It's always miserable when someone gets sent to cryo without already knowing their date, but the hospital cryonics team is on higher alert than unusual after the doctors saw Alia's condition. One of them rapidly makes himself leader, dedicating all his concentration to understanding what might prove necessary for someone absorbing the traits of an octopus, while absent-mindedly patting Alia's body, hoping to get some hint from a change in her skin or physiology.

Her extremities are cold. It's hard to tell which parts are blue because of deoxygenated hemoglobin and which parts are blue because of oxygenated haemocyanin. She has a bruise from Kyra holding her hand.

The IV solution helps a lot. Her heart twitches on its own and her brain activity looks normal for someone unconscious.

Oxygen and circulation, check. Presumably. At the moment. While on an HLM. The leader makes a call, talking to Alia's handler from the Magical Girl Solidarity Council, trying to explain everything he knows about Alia's history and current situation, hoping to have a better option for helping preserve her health going forward than keeping her on a heart and lung machine. Every treatment is ad-hoc and improvised, but everyone still does their very best to care for every Magical Girl. Eventually, Alia will want to be moved to back to her apartment with its converted and familiar hospital room. But for now, they'll want to wait to be sure about her condition before moving her anywhere at all.

As the IV continues, Alia stirs.

She sticks her tongue out in a voiceless "blegh".

Her extremities are warming up, as much as can be felt with the cooking packs.

She squeezes her eyes shut and shivers.

"Alia, can you feel the sensation in your hand? Please squeeze my hand if you can hear me. Do you feel cold, or hungry, or out of breath? Are the anesthetics blocking off all the pain?"

That's a lot of questions. She smiles weakly and squeezes the nurse's hand even more weakly.

Uh. Yes, yes, vehement no, yes, yes.

The nurse nods, keeping her eyes on Alia. "What does your gut instinct tell you to be doing? Is there a craving for any kind of food or drink, or some kind of movement?" Someone else enters holding the special kind of onesie designed for hospital use, custom-fit for Alia's size. They're hoping that the pressure and weight of it would help keep Alia more comfortable; they're expecting to actually be able to move her to one of the more luxurious suites near the garden on the roof, hoping to give her as painless and relaxing a recovery as they could provide.

She opens her mouth.

The people in the room are just confused. They're hoping that any of the readings might have changed for the better.

Her stats are stable.

She coughs. Some blood splatters from her lips, and then she vomits, too weak to turn her head to the side. She fasted before the Event, so not much comes up, just a bit of fishy-smelling bile.

The nurses briefly take off her mask, lovingly wiping off any of the bile. They wait a while, but are more than ready to transfer her to the nicest room the hospital has available, once they can be fairly sure that Alia won't be too hurt by the trip.

She keeps coughing.

Nothing else suddenly goes wrong in the next ten minutes.

Ten minutes without further incident should be enough time that they should feel basically OK with moving her up. The suite she's gently moved to has a huge window looking over at a balcony with a nice garden, the dense vegetation making it difficult to make out anyone looking through the window. There's a little old lady living in the apartment across from Alia's suite that occasionally sits on a chair out on the balcony; Alia has the option to electronically close off the curtains to the window taking up most of the wall, whenever she wants privacy. Space and Comfort are 2 things thomassians value highly; buildings are carefully designed to feel bigger on the inside, including the spacious room that Alia had on the floor beneath the garden on the roof.

Kyra sits with her and reads her a hurt/comfort romance story from her favorite collaborative-fiction website.

"She's turning green? Literally green. And still coughing up blood."