"Yeah! Here, look." Chantal slides over a piece of paper on the desk. "Isn't she talented? Louis-Philipe said he walked by a few times and she was working on it for ages." 

Um. 

Marian...actually does just feel very dubious that Sashy drew an elaborate demon-goat fight scene for fun? She's really pretty sure that Sashy wanted to communicate something - about Lionstar, she had assumed at the time, and that still feels like the most likely, and the man in the picture isn't obviously not Lionstar - 

- but she doesn't have the slightest idea what to make of it, otherwise. What. Just. What. 

Nellie is giving her an odd look, presumably because Marian has now been staring at the inexplicable demon-goat wizard fight drawing for, like, fifteen seconds without saying anything. 

Well what exactly is she supposed to say! That she thinks maybe Sashy is trying to communicate in earnest that Lionstar's problems are due to having been attacked by a horrifying demonic goat???? 

...She smiles (probably visibly incredibly insincerely) at Chantal. "It's such a good drawing! ...Um, I should go talk to her, try to make sure she knows we made it to the OR without any problems and stuff." And she picks up the paper and marches out of the nursing station. 

Hmmmmmmmm. 

Tsashi is pacing. It feels like it's been a long time and she's very worried about Lionstar. She couldn't find Merr-rayn and she thinks the other Healers who she tried to talk to maybe don't actually know who Lionstar is or what's wrong with him? It didn't seem like they were acting the way someone would act if they understood what happened to Lionstar. But Merr-rayn does know, and Tsashi is waiting for her to come back. 

She looks enormously relieved when she sees her approaching. 

Oh no the poor kid! Marian feels really bad about sort-of-avoiding-her for nearly an hour, even for good reasons like "spending any time on her other patient."

Also this is agonizing. She's going to, uh, pull the curtains most of the way closed, because having a mime-conversation with Sashy about what the fuck is going on in her drawing is mortifying enough but doing it in front of the whole unit is unimaginable.

She holds it up. ...No leading questions. She'll just point at the person in the picture and make a questioning face, rather than saying "Lionstar?" herself. 

Did the other Healer not even tell Merr-rayn anything?

"Lionstar!" Tsashi says, trying not to sound like she thinks Merr-rayn is being sort of slow. 

Okay. Right. Um.

In some ways it's the non-confusing answer, right, it fits with what she thought Sashy was going for when she asked for paper, and drawing to communicate key information feels massively more...in-character for her...than drawing a scene from a movie for fun, when it's the middle of the night and she's got to be exhausted and terrified for Lionstar's survival. 

It's just...what do you even do with the information "my patient's daughter-or-niece is claiming via Pictionary that my patient was attacked by a cursed demonic goat"??? 

...Marian gestures at her own midsection and makes a slicing motion, then gestures questioningly at the paper. 

Tsashi would really have thought that part was obvious! But, sure, she can make it very clear like Merr-rayn is a small child, and point at the horns in the drawing and then make a slicing motion at the Lionstar in the drawing. 

Okay. That - is what Marian was expecting, honestly, it's just that she still doesn't have the slightest idea what to do with it. 

(In addition to the CURSED GOAT DEVIL, the drawing of "Lionstar" is - what is he supposed to be depicted as doing? - it definitely looks like some sort of Harry Potter-esque wizardry? What is Marian supposed to do with that???) 

...The thing is, it wouldn't be very weird for a six-year-old to be genuinely confused about the difference between reality and playing-pretend. But it would be really weird for a normal twelve-year-old, and Sashy doesn't come across as exactly a normal twelve-year-old but the difference is toward her seeming more mature, not less. 

But, like, it's not actually possible? Right? Also what exactly is Marian supposed to do, call the ER and add this detail to the report???? Nope. That is literally physically impossible for her to do, actually. 

...She nods seriously at Sashy and tries to look grateful. 

Merr-rayn's expression does not seem incredibly promising for the Healers now knowing exactly what to do because they know what happened to Lionstar? Tsashi is mildly disappointed. It feels anticlimactic after all the effort she put into figuring out how to make the strange writing-utensil work to draw the Changecreature. 

...She's also very tired. If the message was communicated, maybe she'll go curl up on the bedthing again. 

Awww Marian is pretty sure she did something to disappoint the kid and she's not 100% sure what? Maybe she failed to hide that she wasn't really taking the picture seriously? 

It's 3:55 am. The inside of Marian's head is starting to feel like soggy sandpaper. 

Still nothing from the OR. She can't even stalk them remotely via their charting because for apparently impossible-to-change-because-politics historical reasons, they chart everything on PAPER. 

She'll...pace the unit, apparently. And make herself another coffee in the patient kitchen, which is dubiously a good idea when she's supposed to be home in bed and asleep in, like, five hours. And chug some Resource 2.0 meal replacement because she hasn't really eaten since a late dinner and that was, uh, nearly 8 hours ago now. And go see if Annie needs help with 196 and end up mixing double-strength epinephrine in a 1L bag, which is really a single-sentence summary of "at least one person's night is going even worse than hers." 

And wait... 

The OR doesn't call. The first update of any kind that Marian gets, in fact, is when Dr Sharma turns up at the nursing station at 4:25 am, looking utterly exhausted. And definitely not accompanied by a transport team, or patient. 

Oh no. Marian is...well, she's been having a bad feeling for the entire time interval since 2 am when they noticed the wound problem, and an escalating bad feeling since they passed the 45-minute mark in the OR, but she now has a much more specific bad feeling! 

She sets down the bag of antibiotics she's now mixing for Annie, and hurries over. "Do we - is there -" Oh no it's the kind of 4 am where she stops being able to produce sensible words. 

Very tired look. "Sorry, I should've probably - they're not ready for you yet. The charge nurse will call when they're finishing up and they want us to go up with our RT. ...She might be snippy with you but it's really not your fault, I did try to say that." 

Um. Aaaaaaah? 

"Did something, uh, happen?" 

"Oh, just, um." Dr Sharma shrugs. "Everything is taking three times as long as it should because our guy cannot tolerate anesthesia and, uh, apparently also can't tolerate anything we try to address that. Soooooo he's maybe sort of been running a BP in the 60s systolic for - more of the time than I'd like, because epi barely does anything and when we tried a higher atropine bolus he went into V-tach on us." Dr Sharma looks incredibly unhappy about this and like she maybe feels personally responsible. "- second time he went into V-tach. First time was when Dr Sita was doing the line and that actually went even worse, it took like three shocks to bring him out of it. Sats haven't been great most of that time either. So it's," another helpless shrug, "not great? Dr Sita thinks the low potassium is really hitting him hard, combined with the toxicity, but it's not like we really could've waited longer. And it's - he's a tough guy, if we can get him back down here and settled then I think we might get somewhere." 

Marian is...mostly not having any emotions about that, actually. Dr Sharma is clearly having emotions about it and it seems like having TWO emotional people trying to prep to receive a critically unstable patient is...not going to help with anything. 

(Poor Sashy. Marian doesn't really have anywhere to go with that thought, it's not like she can particularly explain what happened and why it was a bad sign for Lionstar's prognosis. Hopefully he doesn't look too awful when they bring him back to the room. Hopefully she doesn't have to round out her awful night by performing CPR in front of a terrified twelve-year-old. ........Hopefully, if she does, it works.) 

"Uh, do you have, like, a quick summary of what you did with the wound? Since it sounds like it might be a kind of hectic report." 

"...It looked pretty bad. Tissue necrosis like a centimeter deep, there's damage to the abdominal wall muscle. Dr Sita said it looked a bit like snake or scorpion venom but, uh, worse? And the systemic effects don't obviously match any specific venom profile. Antivenins are agent-specific so they're sending a specimen for analysis, but there's no way it'll be back tonight. We're hoping that we got all the residue of...whatever it was...Dr Sita was pretty freaked out, he made us double-glove to touch it."

Another shrug. "I was hoping he would, like, start looking better once we'd gotten most of it? It might just be hard to tell, I think he's doing that weird paradoxical-reaction thing where patients drop their BP in response to painful stimuli. They were going to pack it with that silver-impregnated bacteriostatic foam and do a wound vac dressing, you know, that thing where they hook it up to a machine that applies suction and keeps it drained? And then maybe we can stop poking him and keep his pain controlled and...see. What happens." 

Wound vac dressings are epic and sci-fi and if the circumstances were completely different, Marian would be so psyched right now to explain to Sashy how they work via elaborate diagrams. She's obscurely upset about how the night has gone and specifically how the nonstop trashfire of Lionstar's deteriorating condition meant that she hardly got to spend any time showing Sashy how things work. This is incredibly not a top priority to be upset about but still. 

"Yeah," she says quietly. 

Dr Sharma doesn't say anything else. She sort of flops into a chair and stares into space. 

...Yeah, that's pretty fair. She's been going nonstop since shortly after Lionstar arrived in the ER, which was...god, somehow both "more than six hours ago" and "only six hours ago???"...and unlike Marian, she's been on since, like, 7 am the previous morning. Marian will considerately leave her alone to decompress for the few precious minutes she's going to get before (hopefully!!!) they get to take the unstable patient back. 

The OR call comes fifteen minutes later. 4:40 am. The voice on the phone sounds VERY VERY TIRED but does not snap at Marian. Can they please come up right away, like, right away, with at least 3 people including the RT for transport?