Dr Sita is definitely giving the impression of barely listening to a word Marian is saying, but he always does that and nonetheless definitely remembers all the details. He's mostly looking at Tsashi in the corner.

"- What's the kid's name? She's his daughter?" 

"...Her name is Sashy. She doesn't, uh, speak any English. Or French. She was with him and called for help. I, um, haven't - wanted to ask her to leave - it's not like we have any idea who else we could call to come get her..." 

"Hmmph. I'll put in a social work consult for the morning, and day shift should try to arrange an interpreter, if he's her guardian she can't exactly just live in the ICU until he recovers." Dr Sita lowers his voice slightly. "Or doesn't. He's in bad shape, taking him to the OR now is going to be risky. Does she know that's the plan?" 

"...Um. I - don't really know how to communicate it to her other than, like, mime? Or getting paper and drawing pictures or something?" Which Marian is aware she really should attempt, but it sounds hard and time-consuming and there keep being things. 

Dr Sita scowls. "For heaven's sake, Marian. Her dad might be dying. She deserves to have some idea what the hell is going on." He shakes his head. "- I can imagine it's been hectic, and I know you're not one to ask for help, but your colleague is sitting on his butt in the hallway. Get him in here to help with the OR prep, and focus on the kid." 

Marian has been PERSONALLY CALLED THE FUCK OUT, and honestly Dr Sita has a really good point, and she does hate feeling like she's begging the other staff to rescue her - especially on a night when she has no free time to help anyone else in return - and Louis-Philipe does seem pretty unbusy tonight relatively speaking, but. Aaaaaaaaaah. She's been here for nearly twelve hours and there are five more to go and she's exhausted and abruptly slightly wants to cry. 

"...Yeah." Her voice is BETRAYING HER by being wobbly. "I should do that." 

One of Dr Sita's better qualities, in Marian's eyes, is that he will never, ever show any sign of acknowledging that he's noticed if one of the other staff is being unprofessionally upset. (It's probably not that he's too oblivious to notice. Dr Prissan is genuinely oblivious. Dr Sita is considerate enough with patients and families that he's almost certainly capable of recognizing when people are upset.) 

He nods briskly and heads for Lionstar's bed. "Nellie? I'd like to have a look at this wound..." 

Aaaaand Marian should go....get some fresh sheets of printer paper, probably? And then she'll pull one of the bedside tables, recently decluttered by Nellie, over to the corner against the pillar where all of Lionstar's machines are plugged in - the room is starting to feel very crowded - and smile at Sashy and gesture for her to come over. 

...Tsashi is feeling very jumpy and on edge, but hiding in a corner is absolutely not going to help. She goes over and waits expectantly, keeping her expression controlled. 

There's something almost uncanny about the sheer degree of...poise, and self-possession, or whatever...this preteen kid has. 

Aaaaaand shit now Marian has to figure out how to convey via mime and drawing that Lionstar is going to the OR in a moderately risky attempt to save his life – and it would be outright deceptive to try to be reassuring about it and not act like it's a big deal, because Dr Sita seems to think it's very possible Lionstar won't come back from the OR alive, and now that he's flagged it, Marian...is being forced to think ahead, and has to admit that carrying out any kind of procedure on a patient with wildly abnormal electrolytes, who desats at the slightest provocation, and who is dependent on insane doses of atropine to have even vaguely normal vital signs, is not an un-doomy proposition. But also she doesn't want to terrify Sashy or make her freak out! 

...She takes a deep breath, and draws a person figure on the paper, sized to take up approximately the upper quarter of it. She adds some sketchy lines to indicate an endotracheal tube and IVs, and then points at it and points at Lionstar in the bed. 

Tsashi is following so far! Merr-rayn is presumably going to try to use this to tell her something about the Healing they're doing. She nods and makes a listening sound. 

So far so good! 

Marian adds in a cross-hatched line diagonally across the person-figure's stomach to indicate Lionstar's wound. She points at it and mimes clutching her stomach in pain. So far so good? Sashy is nodding again and looks like she understands? 

...Okay. Now to try to indicate 'this wound is getting much worse in confusing ways and we need to try more extreme treatment.' It's pretty visually obvious that something is horrifically wrong but she's not, like, actually sure how much of that Sashy saw? 

She adds dramatic black drippings on the drawing of the wound and lots of frowny faces. ...After a moment's thought, adds an unhappier expression drawn on the Lionstar-figure's face. 

Tsashi had in fact definitely noticed that the Changegoat-venom in Lionstar's wound is causing horrible problems! She nods. 

…Now for the harder part.

Marian draws a square-with-an-opening around the Lionstar-figure, and gestures at the walls and door. She adds a rectangle with a sketched pillow at one end, and a curly-haired stick figure sitting in it, and points at the recliner and at Sashy. (Following so far? Good…)

She draws a schematic of the hallway extending from the “door”, showing it bend around a corner and adding double lines for the ER doors. It’s not technically a perfectly accurate map of the hospital, but she adds a new hallway off the OR hallway and draws another big square “room” in the bottom quadrant of the paper. 

It would be convenient to have a way of conveying “time passing” but it’s not at all evident to Marian if Tsashi knows how to read clocks. She points at the figure in the picture and at Lionstar, then attempts to mime wheeling the bed to the doorway. She draws footprint-marks winding their way down the hallway, eventually drawing a dotted-square bed and dotted-figure in the “OR” room-square.

Tsashi had already remarked that the house is really unreasonably big! Apparently there’s a whole other corner of it and Lionstar has to go there? For some reason? 

And Sashy is not going with him! That part is important and Marian wants to make sure it’s not a surprise! She points at Sashy and then taps the Sashy-picture again, and keeps her finger emphatically on the paper while pointing at Lionstar with her other hand and repeating finger-walking along the hallway footprints. 

That is not incredibly difficult to follow.

Tsashi doesn’t like it! It almost feels worse because they haven’t tried to separate her from Lionstar before now, and so it feels like it must be significant and probably bad. Tsashi is still fairly sure that it won’t help to defend Lionstar with her knife, but - he would be so scared, if he were awake.

And she’s so scared for him, the Healers are worried and serious and calling more people in, and in many ways Lionstar looks more okay than he did at the very start, when they reached the other room before and she was briefly sure he was going to die, for real, that she had lost him and there was nothing she could do -

— and he might still die. Tsashi is fairly sure that this is why Merr-rayn is suddenly putting so much effort into talking to her with pictures, because she wants Tsashi to understand and she doesn’t think it can wait until Lionstar wakes up, because maybe Lionstar isn’t going to wake up.

And…she doesn’t, really, think it will matter for anything at all if she’s there in the room where they’re about to take Lionstar to do - something. She’s really quite sure that Merr-rayn and the others aren’t what she needs to protect him from. It’s not like he would even know if she were there.

She just, if he’s maybe going to die, doesn’t want him to die alone.

Oh no Sashy looks sad. This is incredibly predictable and Marian cannot actually change any of the facts that she's pretty sure are what Sashy is upset about, but STILL.

She wishes she could at least be comforting. If they could communicate she would ask if she could give Sashy a hug, but just making a hug motion at her feels...fraught and very plausibly unwelcome...and she's mortified just at the thought of trying to draw a whole complicated hugging diagram to ask if Sashy wants a hug. Dr Sita is right there. 

- she forges on. Sashy probably wants to know - or ought to know, at least - some vague outline of what they're going to do in the OR.

She'll...flip the paper over and draw a figure taking up the full size of it, so that the sketch of Lionstar's wound is big enough to see any detail, and then she'll– shit there's really no non-terrifying way to draw a scalpel. (She's not actually sure if they use scalpels for debridement? If they use something else instead it probably doesn't look any more reassuring?) 

Well, she can at least start with other setup details, though Marian has spent little enough time in the OR that her mental imagery for it comes as much from, like, medical TV as reality. She draws a table like the wheely bedside tables in the room, picking a weird perspective so she can show its legs, and the top of it can get drawings of a cube-with-side-lines "pile of gauze" and a kidney basin and some syringes. Marian is aware that her 3 am drawing quality is not, perhaps, the best in the world, but all of those are objects she has in the room and can actually pull out and show Sashy. 

She points at the drawing of the syringe, and mimes injecting something into the Lionstar-drawing's IV tubing, and then points at him and does her best dramatic portrayal of someone falling very deeply asleep. Lionstar is currently not very conscious, but he was responsive enough to react with discomfort before, and she wants to be sure Sashy knows that whatever happens in the OR, he won't feel any of it. 

(Marian is perhaps-fortunately much too distracted to notice, but Dr Sita - currently retaping Nellie's dressing a little more thoroughly, after successfully managing to keep all of his swearwords about the wound internal - is watching her discreetly and smiling slightly. Marian isn't actually bad at this part at all, once she's gotten some prodding to actually attempt it.) 

...This is honestly getting quite confusing to follow. There are going to be a lot of artifacts in the new room, but she could really have guessed that. They're going to...do magic to Lionstar to make him sleep?? She doesn't think he would like that, and also isn't entirely sure why it's necessary, he seems to be mostly unconscious unless something is bothering him and it's not like it would be better if no one could tell that a thing was bothering him???

(Tsashi is not actually incredibly familiar with the concept of "drugs that treat pain." The village has little access to anything aside from alcohol, and - mostly unbeknownst to her - Lionstar has pushed fairly hard to ensure that it's not a huge part of their lives. With a mage around, they don't currently need it for water safety, and it's a less efficient use of very limited grain or fruit than eating it, and can be a dangerous attractor for people living difficult lives without a huge amount of hope for their future. In any case, the children who are actually especially curious about Healing do know that alcohol, and hypothetically some kinds of plants that don't grow in their region but that they can learn to recognize, can be used to keep someone comfortable while a broken bone is set or an arrow is removed from a wound, but it hasn't explicitly come up in Tsashi's education.) 

She nods along, though, since she thinks she understands what Merr-rayn is planning to do even if she's not sure of the rationale for it. 

Right. Tsashi still doesn't look incredibly comfortable or enthused, which is fair enough really, but doesn't leave Marian feeling like leading with "and then we're going to saw some of Lionstar's flesh out with a sharp knife." 

...They'll do a lot of very thorough wound irrigation, she thinks? She draws a long hose coming from a sketched-out wall sink, which she's pretty sure bears little resemblance to how they actually do it but allows her to clarify her dubious-quality Pictionary attempt by pointing at the faucet in their current room. She draws a suction tubing coming from the wall (briefly going and picking up the oral suction catheter to show what it's meant to be), and she'll draw some disembodied hands holding each, and water-spray going out the end of the "hose", and a third disembodied hand with a square that's meant to be gauze mopping up the ooze from the wound. She acts out each element of this after drawing it. 

They're going to wash the injury! That makes perfect sense! It's presumably some kind of fancy magic-artifact washing that works better than, like, just pouring boiled and cooled-down river-water on someone's gash (the limit of what Tsashi vaguely knows you're supposed to do) but the concept makes sense! She nods her understanding with somewhat more enthusiasm. 

Oh good. It's probably stupid, but it feels important to, like, sort of establish some kind of grounds for Sashy to believe they're doing reasonable competent things, before she pulls out the scary thing. 

...Which she does have to do. The current paper has gotten very cluttered. She'll draw another that's an even-more zoomed-in sketch meant to be lionstar's torso, with arms on either side and a close-up of the wound, which this time gets slightly more detail and shading to attempt to depict the swollenness and discoloring and general horrifying grossness of it.

Aaaaaaaaaaand a disembodied surgeon's hand holding a scalpel, which in fact comes out looking basically just like an inexplicably short and stubby knife. 

- fuck, it turns out it's actually kind of technically complicated to draw the act of "removing some of the dead and damaged tissue with a scalpel." Um. Marian...will do her best to approximate it, by drawing some dotted lines while miming holding a scalpel with the other hand and dragging it over the picture, and then shade that area in and draw some drops of blood and then, uh, draw bits of removed flesh being picked up by a different disembodied hand holding tweezers. She's honestly not sure whether it's a) at all comprehensible to Sashy, or b) even slightly resembles what the process will look like in real life.  

Tsashi is watching very very intently. There's a lot of detail and she's genuinely quite tired at this point and it's taking substantial effort to figure out what in the world Merr-rayn is getting it, but it's very important. 

She does come away fairly sure that the thing Merr-rayn is describing in pictures is "cutting out the poisoned part of the wound." Which does actually make sense? She remembers how one time one of the village boys stepped on a very sharp thorn from a plant in one of the Changecircles, and part of it broke off inside his foot and Lionstar had to cut the hole it had left in his foot bigger in order to pull it out.

...And one of the men doesn't have a left arm below the elbow. Tsashi wasn't born yet when he lost it, but she's heard stories, that it was because he was bitten by a Changecreature. The older boy who told her said that the arm wasn't bitten off or anything, and they washed and bandaged the wound, but it festered, and the man was very sick, and they could only save him by getting rid of the arm. (And that he was very very lucky to have survived at all.) 

The thing that happened to Lionstar is much worse than just a thorn, or even an arm - it seems like it has to be much more dangerous to cut away the bad poisoned part, when doing that is going to mean making a wound that's even bigger and deeper - and he got very sick much faster than the man who just had his arm bitten. So that's pretty bad. 

But at least he's somewhere with Healers who have magic from before the Cataclysm. That has to be good, right? 

Tsashi nods very seriously. She's upset and scared, but it's not going to help Lionstar for her to be a baby about it, and she doesn't want to distract Merr-rayn any longer than necessary. 

This kid!!! Is so impressive!!!! Marian is so impressed with her!!!!! 

...well, probably. Technically Marian can't tell for sure that Tsashi definitely understood all of that and is taking it calmly because she understand why it's necessary, rather than pretending while not actually following. Buuuuut Marian does not currently feel like she has the stamina to keep trying at this, so...hopefully it's the first one. 

She nods seriously back.