When things from the Outer Darkness try to meddle in Creation, Pharasma stops them. She does not differentiate between the ones that want to bring technology and progress and the ones that want to bring h̴̛̺͇̤̖͔̦͗̽͑̾̈́̌̾͑̑̈͋͐̚o̵̢̤̰̠̔́͛̄̈̓̎̈́̋̕̚͝r̵̨̻͔͇̗͛͌̇̓̅r̷̨̧͉̱̜̣̖̳͔̘̀̋̀̽́̋̑̏̈́̎́̀̉̒̽͐͝f̴̢̌̓͋͐̏̾͒͘y̴͍̳͋̾͗͒̊̓̃͑̑̔̓̕͠͠ͅȋ̷̡̨͔͉̯͍͔̭̣̬̂̋̾̊̆̐̌͜͝ͅǹ̷̦̗̭͕̺͓̹͔̯̱̹̀́̀̋̈́́͛̅͒̌͒͊̀͒̕͝g̵͓͇̦̰̦̱̺̫͊͒ͅ ̵̢̭̖͙̖̥̻̻̱̰͖̻̭̦̦̗̒̀̑̆̍ï̷͓̗̜̳̘͙̣̱̺̝̖̽̊͛͛̂͗̏̾́̿͑͐̍̓́̽n̶̡̧̬͍̺̙͒́̓̋̈́͋̎̆̃͌͝c̷̛͕̖̹̿̊̅̈́̎͋̏̌͊͆̿̋͠o̷̝̞̦͔̙̙̙̮͈̫̥͙̓̎̉͑͘m̴̖̜̍̽̎͆̉͋̒̋̚̕͝͝p̴̻̣̘͓̫̟̟̦̱̱̗̐̃̂̅̀̀̃͛̑̀̿̋r̶̨͖̥͖̬̤̯̰͓͝ę̸̧̝̩̦̞̻̺͖͓̘̜͚͓̣͓̊̈͒͐̌͐̓́̽̂͠h̶̛͇̝̰͓̮̻̮͆͘͝ͅe̶̡̨̢̢̧̞̩̮̹͉̫͍̼͛̾͊͑̏̆͑̆̒͑̂̓̑̈́͘ͅn̷̡̲͔͈̞͙̤̍̒̑̕͘s̴̥͙̅̈́͌̃̉̋ǐ̶̢̛̗̤̪̜̠͕͉̦̤̟̔̉̂͗͛̈́͆͒̿͛͂͌͜b̵̨̛͉͔̰̭̯̟̩̭̮̭̼̿̆̎̊̓́̂̿̕͝l̶̦̤̺̞̝͑̌̆̍̈̔̊̉̾́̚͝ḛ̷͖̥̯͍̤̲̠̾̑̆͘͝ ̴̧̛͕͔̣̬̭̲̫̯͈̹̝̻̥̟̼̎̇̌̐̀͛̄͋̑̎̈́̚͘̚͠ṱ̸͈̙͈́́͛͗̈́̉́͝͝h̷̛̫̭̺̠̫̹͈͎̤̻̠͔̀̍̈́̀͊̚͘̚͠ͅi̵̢̧̧̧̛̬͈̖̟̭̜͚̖̪̻͔͋̽̊̋͝n̶̨̟̙̜̩͂̈́̇g̴͕̪͚̰̣̘̱̱̎̓̒́̊̀̌̓̀̈͘s̷̨̬̙̝̼̱̼̯̩̼̱͔̿ ̸̖̥̠̙̺̒͊̽̈́̿́̽̌̂͐̈́͘͝. 

However, She does allow the ones that observably somehow literally only want to prevent the deaths of babies. This is an exception that spent a very long time not coming up, because most things from the Outer Darkness, even if they want to prevent the deaths of babies, also want to do some other things. But eventually She encounters some things from the Outer Darkness that happen to be observably committed to Literally Just Preventing The Deaths of Babies, and in fact a bit obsessively interested in not having too many effects outside of that. 

So....sure, fine. 

They have budget for eight hospitals, and select eight locations (chosen randomly anywhere on the planet, weighted by population). They add new hospitals if utilization is higher than on other planets with comparable population densities in the surrounding areas, and stubbornly refuse to consider any factors other than utilization; if people need the hospital, they'll use it. The planet they're operating on is classified as Extremely Dangerous, which means they can't have anyone who uses Loki's alphabet-magic and can't have an onsite demon. They can of course put in orders for the demon and have them Teleported over a minute later. They are strongly advised against sending anyone with an immortal soul, anyone vulnerable to mental alteration, anyone who has made commitments of confidentiality about anything they know, etcetera etecetera etcetera...

...Cleery sometimes kind of gets the sense that Vanda Nosseo would if they could just forbid anyone from visiting Extremely Dangerous planets at all. Buncha cops. 

Her site is near a river and near-ish a settlement of a couple thousand people, which is probably a major city given the tech level. They put up a sign with an animated image of a person carrying a sick baby into the hospital and walking out with a healthy one. She makes sure all of the equipment is teleported in and unpacked and set up, and that the place doesn't feel ridiculously medical and grim, and then she sweeps some floors because the site manager is also the janitor. 

Lindsha is not orange. She's a magic rock, and her magic rock soul is orange, but she herself is a grey. She can use magic rock powers to heal babies, and will, because, like, that is the whole point, is the healing of the babies, but mostly construes her job as making sure that nobody shows up to kill any of the babies for being corrupted with demon magic, or whatever it is this time. At least not on the premises. She tries to avoid... looking offsite... too much, because if you start socking people in the face for murdering a baby you just healed you are stepping into some very deep shit all told. Also she turns Allspeak off if anyone looks angry at her and starts yelling. Important reflex to have trained if you're going to Stay Put And Save Babies, not being able to respond to threats about it.

Antler is a skilled troporter with a whole rack full of mouse cages (and for certain specific conditions, guinea pigs, rabbits, and a couple of basement dwellers in maintenance vats). Ey's really into the frontier medicine thing. It feels like it matters a lot more than operating some well-stocked clinic with easily reachable backup and ten people who could sub for you if you decided to spontaneously spend six months comparing and contrasting various Icelands. The high-energy anxiety of the whole operation is what keeps em showing up.

Button is not a medical professional at all and mostly spends her waking time taking care of the body Antler's frenetically neglected, partaking of odd jobs like remembering people's birthdays, and organizing movie nights and stuff like that because even heroic frontier medics need breaks. They've shifted their schedules so that Antler covers local night while most of the people who are accustomed to sleeping are doing that.

Jorequa is an angel. This week she has azure feathers with gold flecks in them. Lindsha told her not to wear the matching jewelry, people will come in with a baby claiming it has this or that and then actually just grab your shiny rocks and run (Lindsha saw someone literally drop the baby they got from who knows where, on the floor, in order to do this, and they kept that baby on site for four weeks before the site manager made the call to transfer it to a sister org that does adoptions), but Jorequa just goes chunkier and makes sure nothing has clasps. The wings demand lapis lazuli. More importantly, though, she is here to save babies! Babies are great for refining her skill at fine detail work, because they're very small, and they're also so so so so cute, like (as is in fact the case) Jorequa spent nine hundred years operating on a mental architecture with a large red button marked "BABY" and it never got pressed because there weren't babies in Heaven, and then she saw one and she was hooked on a basal level, like the first taste of sugar or the pubertal discovery of orgasms. The idea of babies dying is awful. No babies will die on her watch.

Gol Hill is a small village on the river Porthmos, a week by river north of Sardis, population around a hundred twenty depending whether you count the old man Tennes, who lives out a ways, and his family, but they don't help with barn buildings and they don't show up for church unless they're injured so most people don't count them. This far north, the river is only traversable in the springtime, so the people of Gol Hill get their news of farther off with the spring rains, or occasionally from Enna who the birds speak to.

Savos and his second wife and his four living children do help with barn buildings and do show up for church, and anyway Savos's sister is married to the miller Jarrow, so anyone would count Savos as living in Gol Hill, even though his land is actually quite far away from the six buildings that get called the town proper.

Savos first sees the strange new building when he's planting his crops. It's built where there was previously a rocky outcropping of no use even to goats; it has a small footprint but is quite tall, and some people would identify it at once as a wizard tower but Savos has never seen a wizard or a wizard tower so that guess doesn't come to mind particularly faster than any other. He studies it carefully for a moment and concludes it is definitely fairies, or wizards, or some other evil thing, and had better be given a wide berth. One of the goats wandered too near it and he decides to give that goat up for lost. He goes home and instructs his children sternly to stay away from the strange building. 

The priest, when consulted, agrees that it's fairies or wizards or some other evil thing. Probably someone should inform the baron. Savos does not want to inform the baron, because the baron might have the building burned and the field burned with it and he needs that field. He considers carefully and decides to tell the baron once the heavy rains have started, so the baron will have to resort to some solution other than burning.

One of the other sites, an underwater hospital for the merpeople who apparently live in the oceans of this planet (cool!), got reasonably quick uptake, so Cleery loans out most of her staff there - no need to have everyone sitting around when there aren't currently any babies to save. It's not rare for uptake to be slow at first. Even if people are desperate for their babies to be saved, they might not trust outsiders - and they might be right not to, when there's a dozen NGOs just trying to secure babies for interdimensional adoption. Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal would never, but these people have no way to know that they're not smug imperialists like everyone else. 

In any event it's kind of convenient that no patients are here yet because they have precisely three incubators for extremely premature babies and one has a wiring fault and one wants a software update and one is currently in an unacceptable-to-Amentans state, and Cleery and Jorequa have plenty to do just checking that all the other equipment is in working order and writing pointed letters to whoever sent donated equipment that wants reliable wifi to a frontier neonatal hospital and binging Survivor and painting all the adorable little nurseries for babies that'll be in need of long-term care.

The Baron is alerted of the weird building at the start of the rainy season but decides that if it's not growing or sending out monsters at night (it's not? no? good) dealing with it can wait until the rains end. 

Well, drat. 

Their first patients, so to speak, are some birds that set up a nest in the rafters of the hospital and are then washed out in a particularly vicious thunderstorm. They don't always have the luxury of helping injured birds but there are no human patients, right now, so Cleery scoops them up very gently out of the mud they're stuck in and brings them in to the waiting room for Jorequa to take a look at.

Jorequa examines the birds and queues up a video on veterinary medicine while she cleans off the mud and dries off the water since she can guess that that's step one. If they have broken little bird bones she will straighten those right up.

They have broken little bird bones, and shock, and hypothermia, and their feathers are too bent out of shape to fly. 


Also one of the gutters is blocked and it's dumping muddy overflow onto the wheelchair ramp. Cleery leaves the birds to Jorequa and heads outside to deal with that. She sometimes wants to have a word with the people who design these installations, who are evidently from planets without any goddamned weather. 

"I can fix the gutter when the birds are taken care of," calls Jorequa. "And the mud."

"Hey, Qua, do you prefer karaoke or Pictionary?" asks Button.

"Pictionary."

Button makes a note of this and goes to ask Cleery.

Cleery is writing a NOTICE that if your building REQUIRES ANGELS FOR MAINTENANCE this should be VERY CLEAR IN THE DESIGN DOCS. Obviously a hospital will USUALLY HAVE ANGELS but design docs need to REFLECT REQUIREMENTS; she could easily have sent Jorequa off with most of the staff to heal the mermaids. 

"Uh, I kind of wanted to finish this season of Survivor tonight but I'll do Pictionary if it's the version where you alternate writing a caption for the picture and a picture for the caption - actually I think maybe we don't have enough staff for that right now-"

Old Wallers comes to Enna when his horse gets sick. He's tried the priest already, obviously, but whatever's wrong with the horse a blessing won't fix it. She looks closely and determines that it's poisoning; probably something bad got in with the hay. Losing a horse is always a tragedy, but particularly so if you're Wallers, who only has the one and whose grown daughters all live a day's ride away, in Little Crick. He sits there, defeated, staring at the muddy ground. 

The horse rubs her head anxiously against Enna, whining of the pain, expecting Enna to fix it. She can't. 

"The strange house down on the edge of Savos's place heals animals," she finds herself saying. "- I mean, it might also be evil. I don't know about that. I just know what the birds tell me."

He straightens up. "It does?"

"I just know what the birds tell me."

Wallers brings his horse to the strange tall house. He means to send her in alone but she's stubborn, refuses to go, and also fading fast, so he walks right up to the door and stands there holding up her head.

"Hello, welcome to Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital, do you have a baby in need of medical attention?" says Lindsha, opening the door. She's dressed strangely in an creamsicle-and-silver dress with matching elaborate midcalf boots, and has small numerous teeth, and she looks very young but her hair is uniformly grey already.

Definitely a faerie. 

"No," he says gruffly. "You can't have any of my babies, and any of my grandbabies neither, and not any babies I haven't listed. - May's my horse, and she's sick, and I heard that animals that came here got better."

"...when it's slow and there's no babies to heal we'll do animals sometimes... Oi, Cleery, are horses 'war materiel'?"

"At this tech level? Yeah, pretty sure they are. - sorry."

Faeries who aren't very bright. "May's a plow horse," he says. "Won't go any faster than a walk and spooks at songbirds, sometimes."

"Sorry, we're actually just here to heal babies."

To steal babies and raise them in the land of the fae, more like. "Thank you," he says, because you can't be disrespectful to fairies, and then he turns around and tries to leave but May's stopped being willing to walk entirely.

He sits with her until she dies. 

Lindsha doesn't watch. She doesn't care much about horses but it's a habit at this point.

Cleery isn't wrong -- draft horses are an important kind of military materiel; while not wholly irreplaceable, they make up the core of almost any effort to cause things to be in places at scale, which any expert will admit is the essence of warfare. Beyond this vital yet unglorious contribution to every war ever fought, there is also the recent case of three draft horses who, only a few thousand miles away from Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital (Taldor Branch), played an unexpectedly large role in the defeat and humiliation of an archfiend and are scheduled to receive commendations from the queen of Cheliax for their service, just as soon as things have settled down a little bit.

Six weeks pass. The rains make the river fierce and swollen and lively. 

Manela knows very well that only a foolish person gives their baby to the fairies, and that if you do you had better expect they'll whisk the baby away to Faerie and raise it as their own, if you're lucky and they don't just eat it or something. But the thing is that the baby's cough is getting worse, and when that happened to her sister it kept getting worse until she died, and if the baby is whisked off to Faerie she'll still be alive. Right?

She waits until the baby is barely breathing at all and her lips are thin and blue, and then she takes her to the faeries. If they can save her they can have her. And maybe in thirty years Manela will see a faerie out of the corner of her eye and know that her daughter is alive.

Lindsha lets her in.

"Do we finally have a patient?" Antler bounds into the room, brandishing a black mouse. "Trouble breathing, is that it?"

Manela glares fiercely at the fairies and clings to the baby even though she came here to give her to them.

"...I don't need to hold it, but I do need to touch it," says Antler. "Can you confirm that it is a breathing problem or do you not know what's wrong at all?"

"She's a girl."

"And a very cute one too, or would be if she could breathe. I need to touch her, just a toe or an ear or whatever is fine, and then I'll put her illness in this mouse here, and then she won't have it anymore, but I do have to know what I'm putting in the mouse. What's wrong with her?"

"She had a cough." She's not coughing anymore but that's because she's too weak. Manela is not exactly offering the baby but she's not impeding the fairies touching her.

Antler is not with Gandlun's Mercy Hospital because even consent negotiations with parents are exhausting, let alone the children themselves. They poke the baby's ear and put the cough in the mouse and then dash off with the mouse to put it in isolation and wash their hands.

Manela watches this, dazed. "Is she...the mouse, now?"

"No, they just put the disease in the mouse. Now you've got the baby same as before except without the disease," says Lindsha. "If you want to wait and see if there's anything else she needs help with you're welcome to, you can even take a nap in the waiting room and I'll look after her for you, but you could probably just take her home now no problem."

Manela looks back at the baby. She does look ...alive. And not like they'll certainly bury her by sunrise. "You don't keep the baby?"

"No! No, it's like on the sign. You walk in with a sick baby, you walk out with the same baby all better. We're just here to heal babies."

"...and then you come back for her when she's grown and has borne a daughter?"

"No! We don't track you at all."

"Oh." She is a bit dumbfounded and then remembers to be polite to the fair folk. 

"Thank you, ma'am?" Is that person who fixed the baby a ma'am. She's dressed confusingly if she's a she and he's dressed confusingly if he's a he.

"You're welcome, and I'll tell the person who did the healing you said so too. Have a wonderful day, ma'am!"

Then Manela will stagger out into the rain and cling to her baby and not cry until they are home and still nothing terrible has befallen them. 

In the summer the Baron rides out with his men to address the mysterious wizard tower, which he is learned enough to identify as a wizard tower. He is cautious. One doesn't want to offend the kind of wizard who lives in a tower too tall to have been made without magic. He sends one of his entourage ahead to announce him; if the man gets turned to stone then probably he'll figure out how to make this someone else's problem. 

The door of the strange wizard tower swings open as he approaches it. He conceals his terror and enters. 

"Good morning, do you have a baby who needs medical attention?"

He's just going to ignore that and have the interaction he braced himself to have. "I am Andar of Sadvak, a knight in the service of the Baron of Sadvak, on whose land this tower sits. The Baron intends to pay a visit, and will arrive this afternoon."

"Does the baron have a baby who needs medical attention? That's the only thing we're here for. Healing babies."

"Which god empowers you with healing?"

"The hospital is not affiliated with any religion. We're not here to answer questions about our mysterious origins, because that is not healing babies, and we came here solely to heal babies."

"Well, that's - this land is the Baron's. You can't operate a hospital here without the approval of the Baron."

In hindsight this was a foolish and dangerous thing to say to a probable wizard maybe fairy, but the woman's nonchalance is very disturbing. 

"If the local government objects to us we can move the hospital to another location. You, or the baron, would need to talk to the site manager about that."

"- right. I'd like to talk to the site manager, if you please."

"Oi, Cleery! Local government's come to call."

Cleery is not one of those anti-imperialists who makes the mistake of assuming that the governments your government is unjustly at war with are themselves virtuous or representing the people or anything. They're all cops, they all suck. She grimaces and gets up and goes to the front. "Hello. I'm Cleery Candasa. I'm the site manager for Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital."

Let's try this again, then. "I am Andar of Sadvak, a knight in the service of the Baron of Sadvak, on whose land this tower sits. The Baron intends to pay a visit, and will arrive this afternoon."

"Okay."

"Was that all?"

"I'm concerned that...on account of your foreignness, you might get off to a bad start with the Baron, on whose land you've built this tower without his permission, and I want to advise you on how to impress him when he visits."

"Well, he could bring a sick baby, and we'd heal the baby. We're really impressively good at that. We can also do babies that are born too early and too small, if you know of any of those."

"I recommend that you arrange some comfortable guest rooms, as the Baron has travelled a long way, and apologize for building the tower without his permission. He is a reasonable man and will probably be willing to arrive at some kind of arrangement."

"Okay." 

Cleery refuses as a matter of principle to treat cops with more deference than anyone else but she's also happy to apologize to anyone else inconvenienced by where they put the hospital, so that's fine.

"And if you could tell the Baron about where your powers are from and where you are from I expect that'd reassure him substantially."

"Mmm."

"I hope this is the beginning of a fruitful and honorable relationship."

"Okay."

Well, he tried.

The Baron arrives a respectable amount of time after Andar is determined (because Andar returns) not to have been turned to stone or murdered or anything. He wasn't very far away but he did not want to give the impression he is waiting on the newcomers, even if they are powerful wizards. Andar reports that they seem fairly obsessed with babies but did offer to move their tower if it was poorly placed, which is...cooperative of them except insofar as it implies a very powerful wizard indeed. Baron Tortellis thinks moving towers around is hard even if you are a wizard. 

They dismount and walk up to the tower. 

"Welcome to Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital. We save babies. Do you have any babies you need us to take a look at?"

The Baron has had some time to anticipate this nonsense. "This is the barony of Sadvak, and it is my duty to ensure that its children grow up to be noble sons of Taldor. We will gladly partner with anyone with the powers to offer healing, once we have confirmed that this healing is not evil in nature, and not the scheme of some enemy of Taldor."

"If the location is a problem I can move the hospital by up to 1 mile in any surface direction or two hundred feet up or down if this improves access to the hospital for people with sick babies." Again she is not doing this just because he is a cop, she will also move the hospital if non-cops ask her to.

"I think we can overlook your decision to build without permission if, of course, we are able to confirm that your healing is what you represent it to be and is not the work of some enemy. You will of course owe taxes."

"Is that, like, a percentage of income?"

Baron Tortellis doesn't know anything about economics but he knows when someone is trying to get one over on him. "It is a sum of money you owe annually to me, as the lord of these lands."

"Oh. We don't have any money and won't at any point have any money. We do all the healing for free. We are not able to pay any taxes. We will heal all babies anyone brings to us, though."

"I see. I'll have to think about that."

"Okay."

"You will be expected to obey the laws of Sadvak and of Porthmos Prefecture and of Taldor."

"We heal babies. We don't do other things, except sometimes explain to people that we heal babies or make sure the site is enabling us to save babies."

"Well, it seems certainly possible to pursue the aims of your order while respecting the law."

"Okay."

He does not want to stay the night because these people are probably fairies. "Urgent business calls me away." The urgent business of not getting ensnared by fairies. "Thank you for speaking with me."

"Come back if you have a sick baby."

Yeah he's going to go very far away and make someone responsible for keeping an eye out and seeing if the fairies eat the whole village.

Cleery does a little dance. "Who is the goat? I am the goat."

"You're the goat?"

"It stands for Greatest Of All Time. Man, I always get imprisoned or murdered by the local governments. Always. This might be the first time they've correctly gone 'these people are weird as fuck and I'm gonna leave them alone' and I am the Greatest Of All Time."

"I think it's very brave of you to be here even though you could be murdered."

"If you've never been murdered by cops you're not pissing off cops enough. ...or you're indestructible. I guess it could also be that."

Word spreads slowly. On the one hand, they're obviously some kind of horrible evil thing. On the other hand, it's not as if desperate parents have not for thousands of years made terrible bargains to keep their children alive. And also the children do keep being alive, without any apparent horrible curses. The town starts attracting travellers. Savos lets people sleep in his barn for a bit of food or coin. When the next spring's rains come, the boats that make their way down the river bring word that the fairies out near Got Hill heal babies.

Some people come with babies with complex problems that require long courses of treatment. Some people come with older children, and are turned away. (Various splinter groups of Gandlun's Mercy have had vicious debates about the age cutoff, but Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal does only babies.) Some people try to abandon their babies with the fairies. Some people want help with infertility. 

Savos builds another barn. 

When the archmage Naima, the other person who heals babies, stops by Sardis one year and three months after Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital set up upriver,  there are notably fewer babies in need of her powers. Still a lot of babies, not everyone can afford the river trip and not everyone trusts the fairies and not all babies will survive a week, but - it's the kind of thing one might notice, if one keeps obsessive statistics on baby mortality. 

The archmage Naima's time is absurdly valuable, so all aspects of her operations that can possibly be handled by someone else are handled by someone else. Her secretary blocks out a day for the Porthmos region several months in advance. She speaks to Naima's Oppara liaison, who assigns a junior cleric to head up the river and make announcements and arrangements in Elsekulp, Kazuhn City, Karakuru, and Sardis. This cleric is also tasked with learning about and recording any local medicines and healing practices, which produces several pages of notes about the healing bathhouses of Karakuru, and a handful of scattered sentences about local clerics with odd specialties, beliefs about magic charms with healing properties, a fairly stale unicorn sighting in the Border Wood, and some fairies north of Sardis that are said to heal exclusively babies.

Other people deliver notices to the outlying villages that the archmage Naima will arrive, and what it means, in broad terms, that the archmage Naima will arrive. For ten gold an old person not ready to die can become young again. They will probably change their species and their sex, and will certainly change their face. It will also cure cancer and any chronic health issues, although it might also give you new ones. For one gold (for half that, for children under ten), you can be regenerated, and grow back a limb or awful scarring or your teeth, unless you're very strong, in which case it doesn't always work. These services aren't of much use to babies, so even though Naima can also lend strength to the sick to allow them to recover, it doesn't come up as much on these trips to outlying areas; you really need regular doses of the regenerative hex to massively decrease infant mortality, although one-off instances do make a temporary dent in it. 

On the appointed day, Naima touches almost seven thousand people. It's lower than she'd hoped for, but she hopes that more people will come the next time she visits, As always, she is followed by her secretary, and by five apprentices who furiously record as much information on people's ailments as possible. Her secretary arranges for follow-up statistics to be taken of deaths in the weeks to come, to help them know how much of a dent the one-off instances make in those. The initial statistics are carried home by the apprentices. The followup statistics, which are always spotty, arrive from Sardis more than three months later by boat. Naima reads them, at least in the sense that she spends a spell on absorbing the information, but she doesn't spend time chewing on the implications of the numbers, having absorbed the statistics for a dozen other towns in the same instant. She's already forgotten the note about the fairies near Sardis, which she dismissed as unimportant the moment she read it. Even a nice fairy, which she'll begrudgingly admit might exist, isn't a particularly revolutionary finding. Nice fairies don't scale, and Naima doesn't want to interact with them because Naima really dislikes fairies. 

So the statistics sit in a drawer with the others, one copy at the hospital and one copy in Naima's house, until Hamideh - the only one of Naima's senior apprentices who still bothers with going over tapping statistics, a now sixteen-year-old girl who only speaks Kelish fluently, and only rarely uses it to talk to anyone - gets tired of working on encyclopedia sections and procrastinates by going over the numbers for the Porthmos region.

Utilization was much lower for infants than for other age groups in Sardis. Even in outlying towns, it's usually higher. The month of followup statistics she has also shows low infant mortality, and no particular increase over time. Mortality for older children is high - Sardis is a fairly miserable town, from the description, and many children are employed in the local mines. Chronic poisoning levels were notably high, probably from the ore processing. Few people, especially men, seem to reach old age, judging from the death statistics she has. But the infants are doing well. And they're doing well in Karakuru, the other nearby settlement Naima visited, even though Hamideh doesn't see why a medicinal hot spring would work better on an infant than an adult. The effect is stronger in Sardis, anyway.

A month is not enough time to be sure, of course. Most such oddities in the numbers are just that people who haven't had Naima looking right over their shoulder are bad at recording deaths, and most of the remaining ones are odd luck, so the numbers disappear if you go and collect more of them. But it's odd to see two towns four days away from each other where mortality goes noticeably up at age five, even though the mining accidents don't appear in the numbers until age ten or eleven.

Babies near Sardis and Karakuru on the river Porthmos are markedly more likely to survive than in other areas of Taldor, even though older children near Sardis are unusually likely to die from poisoning and workplace accidents due to mining, writes Hamideh. Notes on the region discuss the healing hot springs of Karakuru, and a legend about fairies who heal infants near the village of Gol Hill. The effect looks strong enough to be worth investigating.

Naima absolutely doesn't read every memo she gets, but she does read every memo she gets from Hamideh; it's the only way that Hamideh feels remotely comfortable saying anything. She checks the numbers herself - magically, again, but this time she thinks about them. 

One year and nine months after Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital begins operation, Naima decides to spend a couple hours in the town of Karakuru, asking a handful of the bathhouse owners about whether the hot springs are known to have any particularly strong effect on infants or pregnant women.

- AH YOUR ARCHAMGESHIP WHY I AM HONORED TO SEE YOU

Why does everybody do that. Not that it isn't sort of gratifying when she's trying to get people to do things they would otherwise be disinclined to, but she really feels that wanting to hear about the health benefits of a bathhouse is a pretty normal thing to want from someone who runs a bathhouse.

"Yes, yes. I don't mean to take up your evening, I'm just interested in the healing properties of the water here."

"The springs are exceedingly healthy! Not finer springs in the duchy! If you would patronize us it would be an honor to serve you -"

No, see, she personally is really about as healthy as it's possible to be. Also she doesn't go to public bathhouses. - if she says that they are going to throw out everyone currently in this bathhouse. Why can't people just skip to the part where they talk about medicine.

She lets the poor man go on for a minute and then thanks him and pays him a gold piece for his time.

At the bathhouse that's as geographically far away from this one as possible while still being in Karakuru, she changes her face and her clothes and represents herself as a scholar who is collecting information about the healing springs of Karakuru for the records of the Archmage Naima's hospital, which likes to collect records about that sort of thing. 

She can get six opinions pretty fast, ranging from "yep, excellent hot springs we have here" and attempts to get her to go their brother's, to flat denials of the hot springs doing anything whatsoever and long descriptions of what you actually need to do to make pregnancy go well (special herbal rub, sells for two sestarii out back) to a long explanation of how they were blessed by a saint two hundred years ago and (an interjection from someone else who happens to be around) how this PROVES a vitally important theological point against those heretical dynokessites. 

Have the springs been known to heal illnesses? Poisonings? Deformities? Who uses the bathhouses, are children allowed in? And if so, do people actually bring children to them regularly? Do they allow actively sick people in? How much tourism do they get, and from how far away, is it common for people from as far away as Sardis or Kazuhn City to visit for them? How much tourism do they get from Oppara? How much does it cost, and where's the cheapest place? Are there places one can access the fountains without paying?

Illnesses, sure absolutely, poisonings, well maybe (who can tell if an illness is a poison or not? There is brisk debate on this topic), deformities are also a topic of brisk debate, children are allowed in the bathhouses and sometimes come, they mostly allow coughing people in but obviously not plagued people (various warding gestures, waving around entire strings of holy symbols).

People from Sardis visit occasionally! Occasionally. They do not get tourism from Oppara. Oppara is, like, the moon. It costs this many sestarii and different people claim to be the cheapest place.

There are people willing to be bribed to show her to places you can get to the fountains without paying, right now? Not very many places, obviously the owners close them up when they get the chance. And there's more springs way over there on that mountain (points at hilltop) but people only rarely make the trek.

None of this really seems like it adds up to a lower infant mortality rate in Sardis. Maybe if the water was magical, but it doesn't seem to be.

She asks where the local Pharasmin cleric is; the town is large enough that it ought to have one. Does the cleric know anything about the springs and their effect on the health of young children here? Has she ever lived anywhere else, to compare the rate of infant deaths to? Is there any advice that she gives new mothers to keep their babies healthy?

The local Pharasmin cleric is an elderly midwife who thinks that children don't spend enough time properly clean and resting, and that therefore hot springs are good for children because they are warm and give them a break. She lived in an even smaller village before Pharasma chose her, which had worse child mortality because it didn't have a cleric of Pharasma and she had to send all the way to Sardis if there was going to be a new mother.

Some young mothers are going to visit the faeries if their children have problems, but that's not very safe, now is it, faeries being faeries. Her advice is to keep mother and child warm and make sure the child gets fed as much as it needs, and it's very important the mother stays healthy enough so she can still produce milk because cow's milk really isn't as good.

Well, that's all completely sensible, but it's the kind of sensible that Pharasmin midwives are everywhere.

An ideal investigation would hit Sardis, too, but it's late now, and she's booked tomorrow and the next day, and she doesn't really want to spend her next free night asking questions to random people in Sardis who are probably just bad at keeping records.

She tells her secretary to arrange to hire a group of ordinary, low-powered Taldan adventurers to investigate Karakuru and Sardis for anything that might explain their low infant mortality rate, with a doubled reward if they can find anything that turns out to be of widespread medical use. She then directs her own focus to more interesting questions.

It takes a few weeks before the report gets back, because these adventurers were thorough and wanted to check everything themselves.

300-500 years ago (accounts vary) the bronze dragon Ascertul died near Sardis and a bountiful orchard grew over his corpse. It is said that those who eat fruits from this orchard are healthier and live longer lives. The adventurers spoke to the uncle of the man who owns the orchard, who said he never eats anything else and is one hundred and seven years old.

There is a clan of faeries located near Gol Hill who will take sick babies and give the parents healthy babies. One of the mothers let the party's cleric look at the baby and it seemed to resemble a normal human baby to all the divinations they had available.

A naiad dwelling north of Karakuru purifies the river waters.

Nobody in the village of Silvergallows can die on the last day of each season. They say this is because the village headman's great great great grandmother once saved an arch-priest of Pharasma who blessed the town in gratitude.

A foreign paladin of Shizuru is said to have abandoned all of his magical possessions somewhere around what is now the village South Whispertree to go live an ascetic life in the mountains. They've all been lost now, but the adventurers eventually found a Shizuran holy symbol embedded in a cobblestone, with a faint aura of healing magic. The people of the village don't seem particularly healthy for normal farmers, but do maybe seem particularly healthy for farmers whose fields are sparse and rocky and also were burned pretty badly by a rampage of fire drakes last summer.

There's also a collection of a few dozen other rumors that the adventurers were unable to substantiate.

As an herbalist, she's most interested in the orchard, but it seems a very poor explanation for low infant mortality in the face of other health problems. The fairies who take the sick babies and give out healthy ones seem like the best explanation, all told, even though they would have to be taking in a remarkable number of babies to make an observable difference in the overall numbers. Perhaps the most unlikely element of this theory is that so many mothers would accept a method that doesn't save their child. Although, now that she thinks of it, tales of the fairies kidnapping children and replacing them with their own often claim that the children live on in the first world. It's possible that eating fairy food doesn't kill you if you're transported bodily into the first world all the time, rather than nightly only in your dreams. It seems hard to say whether such an existence would be better or worse than simply moving on to the Boneyard... but, on the other hand, she can hardly claim not to understand the impulse of a desperate young mother to do something incredibly stupid on the off chance that it saves her child.

It's a pity that kidnapping and replacing children isn't really what you would call a useful medical intervention.

Things are going pretty well at the Gol Hill branch of Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital. It took a while, but the locals are much more likely to come to them before their babies are on the brink of death, at this point, and they've got some tiny preemie twins in the incubators which everyone on staff always absolutely loves because you get to see the little tiny babies get bigger. Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal does not believe in using images of saved babies in promotional images back home but they're happy to use numbers - a thousand babies saved, two thousand - and donations are rolling in.  They might add some more sites on this planet soon. The local government hasn't had them murdered at all.

Baron Tortellis was initially assuming that at some point the fairies would cause enough trouble that he had to stamp them out, and then he'd be scolded for having let them slide for so long, but when they stay in their tower and do nothing but heal babies he just hikes up tolls on the river, saying it's to pay for dredging it out so it's traversible out of the rainy season. He doesn't actually dredge it out because he doesn't know who to pay for that work but the tolls are a healthy income source.

His priest put up a fuss for a while but Tortellis nodded very solemnly every time and then didn't do anything about the fairies and eventually the priest dropped it.