On the side of a road in Reno, Nevada lies a young woman, whose appearance is unusually attention-grabbing for someone lying on the side of the road. Perhaps the most noticeable thing is the sword clutched in her right hand, three feet long and razor sharp with silver inlay visible along the blade where it's not coated in thick dark slime. Or perhaps it's the shield in her other hand, and the crystal embedded in it that shines like a flashlight. Or perhaps it's the pool of blood she's lying in, which is steadily getting larger.
Sure. That seems like the best path of action here. Maybe he can Google whether that's a thing for D&D clerics probably Fraser should instead focus on finishing his report, since after this he has to also go do a much more complicated report on exactly which paperwork tasks he's done versus left half finished.
Here are the spells she wants, here is how she plans to use them to aid the causes of Good and Law, here are the pitfalls she sees ahead of her today and here are the ways she plans to avoid them . . .The spell interface weaves itself seamlessly into her prayers, filling her mind with spell structures.
Marian can spend half an hour catching up on everything in the chart and then running fetch errands while occasionally checking if Samora looks more interruptible yet, but after that she kiiind of does want to sneak in and check her drains and central line and stuff? If Samora is still doing her prayer ritual or whatever it is then Marian can tiptoe in and try not be obtrusive, and feel very awkward but she’s not incredibly comfortable not laying eyes on a patient up close early in her shift.
Samora's eyes follow Marian, and she smiles a small but friendly smile, but she doesn't otherwise react.
At the end of the hour, she has:
Fourth circle: Holy Smite*, Sending, reserved slot
Third circle: Searing Light*, three copies of Remove Disease
Second circle: Bless Weapon*, Share Language, two copies of Lesser Restoration, reserved slot
First circle: Shield of Faith*, Positive Pulse, Comprehend Languages, four copies of Remove Sickness that are probably just going to get converted to Cure Light Wounds but it's good to have options.
Orisons: Stabilize, Detect Poison, Detect Magic, Mending
*Author's note: Domain spell slots can only be used for domain spells and cannot be converted to Cures.
She heals her disease, pulls out her stomach tube and IVs (much more carefully this time), stows her dagger, considers doing a heal on herself and decides that with the treatment she's already gotten and how hard she's already betting on "no combat today" it's not worth the spell slot, climbs out of bed and opens the privacy curtain, grinning.
Marian isn’t actually there right now, being occupied on a fetch errand; her podmate, Callie, is on the phone, and startles. “Ma’am, should you be up—“
Wait shit that’s the scary iso patient (this is literally the only fact she knows about the patient, she wasn’t on yesterday.)
“Uh, you just stay there, I’ll call your nurse over - MARIAN! Marian your girl’s out of bed! Get your ass over here!”
This is audible even from the med room! Marian hurries over.
…Okay, she’s confused. She’s SO confused. And can’t even resolve her confusion by asking Samora what the deal is! She’s just going to stand here feeling stupid!
Picture of her praying and healing herself! Point at the "standing up and healing other people" stage! Hand tentatively reaching out to tap her glove?
…Marian now feels even stupider because that sure is what’s depicted on the paper! It just also makes no sense.
She’s fine with letting Samora touch her glove, though. (Not because she expects it to help with anything, but it’s a thing her patient wants that isn’t, like, actively unsafe, and she has no particular reason to refuse.)
The glove-tap is accompanied by another unfamiliar word and gesture, and then Marian instantly becomes fluent in a new language. It's a very pretty language and its name translates to "Celestial" and what Samora says next, totally understandably at least on the level of words, translates to:
"Thank you very much for all the help! You and your comrades probably saved my life. Now that Iomedae has given me spells for today we can finally speak normally. I'd be happy to heal as many of your other injured people as I can, but I get the sense you might need an explanation of how empowered priests work first?"
Okay she's...having a psychotic break? Or maybe dreaming? That isn't how languages work! Or how anything works! What!!!
...still not waking up.
"I think I need an explanation of what the fuck you just did," Marian says, surprisingly calmly, in the...new language...that she suddenly speaks...?
(The fact that she's probably dreaming makes this feel significantly less awkward! Also the fact that even buying the premise, her dream-colleagues don't speak ""Celestial"" and won't overhear her being unprofessional.)
(Orrrrrr maybe she's having a psychotic break and from the perspective of her colleagues just started ???speaking in tongues??? at random? In which case she'll never get over that, but presumably someone will do something about it soon. ...She should maybe not do any patient treatment in case she's having a psychotic break. Hopefully she wouldn't, like, hallucinate not doing patient interventions while actually doing them, that seems like not how things work...)
...Callie honestly has no context on the fact that Marian didn't previously share a language with her patient! Maybe Marian was assigned that patient in the first place because she speaks whatever that is! She's going to continue going about her business and be grateful SHE doesn't speak any second languages and this may have gotten her out of being assigned the horrible iso patient
Wow, has Marian actually not seen a spell before? If so it's very reasonable of her to be concerned; when Samora got fluency in Celestial shoved into her head it was awesome but also scary.
"I used the spell Share Language to give you access to my knowledge of Celestial for the next 24 hours. Is this a place magic doesn't usually work after all? I thought it couldn't be since mine seems to be working normally. Uh, magic is--well, a wizard would be able to give a formal definition but it's when people or animals make things happen by means that aren't just moving and talking. It can come from the gods or from the world or be cultivated by study or be inborn."
(Fun fact from the narrator: Celestial has something of a cuss word deficit and in particular has no cuss words related to biological functions. Marian basically said "what the coitus". This is not relevant to anything.)
(Marian realized midway that she was trying to say something the language didn’t really support and probably said something super weird instead, which would be more mortifying than it is except that seems like the sheer bizarreness of the entire situation has mostly overridden social awkwardness and also this language is objectively wrong and unsatisfying.)
Also: FRASER. FRASER WHAT THE SHIT.
She takes a deep breath. “Uh. According to everything I know about reality, magic isn’t a real thing and gods - probably don’t exist - people do disagree a lot on that but it’s definitely not a giving people magic powers thing…”
(If this is a dream it’s admittedly a really cool one - she’s never dreamed an entire foreign language with interesting linguistic quirks before…)
Wow, this must be a really big no magic zone if the people in it don't know magic exists and aren't sure about the gods.
"In Lastwall most villages have someone who can do magic, even if it's just a laundry and mending wizard or the village priest, and the gods--there's one wizard who pretends to be a god with other wizards pretending to be his priests, and hardly anyone believes him, but I don't think anyone thinks any of the other gods are like that, let alone all of them. It would have to be the largest conspiracy in history and lots of the people who'd have to be in it are out to kill each other."
This dream has so much cool worldbuilding Marian still doesn't feel like she's dreaming (or psychotic)? Which probably shouldn't be taken as much evidence of anything - dreams do that thing where it feels like there's a whole dream-leadup to the situation even if you didn't actually dream the whole thing, your brain fills in details when you look at it and maybe having a psychotic break does that too - but, well, it definitely feels like she remembers an entire yesterday of coherent events that just...in hindsight sure did get progressively weirder...
Focus. It feels - mean and also pretty pointless if true - to tell the person she’s maybe dreaming about or hallucinating that she thinks they’re a dream character/ hallucination, so - she’ll just take this at face value.
"Right. Okay. I - think that isn't the case here. And also isn't in the Mediterranean. - I showed you the map earlier, the place that looked like the map you drew. They, like, have internet there? I’m pretty sure we would know if they had wizards doing laundry. So, uh,” the ‘if you’re real’ can maybe stay implicit, “I think you must be from - not Earth.”
"I have no idea how I could have been brought to another planet without magic, but I also have no idea how I could have been brought across the ocean in minutes without magic, so perhaps you're right. I wonder if Tris did something clever."
And whether Tris will be able to reverse it if so, and whether being even farther away than she thought makes it a higher priority to tell these people about Iomedae and learn their healing methods.
"Right. Okay. Um. I - guess you should explain how empowered priests work?"
It's now occurring to Marian that if this is somehow real (!!!????) and Samora really can heal people, that's incredibly important, and also aaaaaaaaaaaaaah she would have to interact with the other unit staff about it aaaaaaaaaaah.
This is a lot of responsibility! It could be worse, though, at least she's been to theology school.
"A priest needs to be aligned with their god, both in terms of being the same alignment on one axis and within one step on the other, and in terms of having similar priorities and concerns and generally being the sort of person who will use the power they get to advance their god's interests. Actually, I should check, do you know about alignments here? Good and Evil seem really obvious, but I'm not sure how much humans could have worked out about Law and Chaos without any detection magic or holy books or anything."
So Fraser WAS right about it being a literal actual D&D alignment chart. Why???
“We do have those concepts. Uh, yeah, I think good and evil are more obviously although they’re not, like - you can’t check and people disagree a lot on ethics. Um. Law and Chaos are…a thing in this particular fictional game? Which also has wizards and who can get healing magic from their god. Yeah I know that’s really weird.”
It feels like it increases the odds this is a dream, except that Marian did not think she would have remembered a lot of these facts about D&D.
“Your god is Lawful Good?” She does remember Samora pointing very emphatically at the upper left square.
They have legends and. . . games? about Law and Chaos but probably not a detailed consensus understanding of them. Also: yessss she read the bread diagram correctly, they do draw Good on top and Law on the left.
"People in Avistan disagree on ethics sometimes too, but I would predict less often. And yes, Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil--of solving the hard problems that threaten the world as effectively as possible, honorably and in cooperation with the other forces of Good. In Avistan the big problems are things like Evil gods conquering countries or demons invading through planar rifts, so Her church there has a very military focus, but if there's no divine intervention here the big problems are potentially something else?"