Aww, is he worried she’s tired? That’s actually really sweet! Marian is - honestly doing surprisingly fine given the early start to her day and less than full night of sleep, not to mention the lack of breaks, and also it’s not even that late yet, not quite 4 pm.

...Plausibly he has no idea what time it is or how long it’s been, actually? And now is a good opportunity to try to explain to him that she has to leave in about three hours and someone else will be taking care of him. - oh and she should explain how to use a call bell, and that there are alarms that will alert someone right away if he has a problem, even if they’re not in the room with him. 

That’s a lot of drawing! She’ll start with “what time is it”. 

…If she draws an analog clock, does he seem to recognize that? 

He watches it expectantly with what might be recognition, but looks confused about something.  (The thing he's confused by is that it looks like a sundial, matching the Empathy feeling that it has something to do with time, but then why does it cast two shadows? Do they have two suns here??)

If she lets him have the pen, he'll tentatively draw a sun above the top of her circle and some stars below the bottom of it, and look to see if she agrees with that?  (... Or if she at least recognizes the concepts. If he's seen the sky here at all, it was only when he was too nearly dead to remember it.)

…They are definitely having some kind of mutual confusion over how clocks work??? His drawing would maybe make sense if days were twelve hours total and hours were twice as long but...okay, fine, Marian doesn't actually feel like trying to resolve that confusion. 

She nods, then shakes her head, then shrugs, to try to convey that he seems to have correctly understood something about what she was trying to draw but she's now also confused, and then she's going to give up and flip the paper over and just draw...a timeline. The start of it can have a sun on the horizon with an up-arrow to indicate that she means sunrise, and a whole sequence of suns at various places in the sky until she gets to sunset at the other end of the page.

She draws a figure lying on the ground bleeding with a knife in its hand at around the sunrise point, and a Marian figure beside it. Then moves her finger along to about 3/4 of the way through the day, makes a mark, and gestures at the room and both of them.

They do have one sun, which goes its normal way through the sky!  He's relieved.

And surprised that it's all been less than a day, but... he supposes there's no real reason why it wouldn't have been, except that he slept so many times and so many confusing things happened, but of course those are not unconnected, and it's not as if there's very much time he actually remembers.

He wants to arrange all the other things that happened on that line, to have a better idea of what his sense of time is doing and where it all went, but he's... not entirely sure he can remember all the things in order, let alone draw them, and in any case it's not actually important.

Instead he points to Marian, mimes sleep, points to the sunset mark or a ways after it?

(Marian is absolutely intending to fill in the line with all the points that her patient probably remembers! It seems pretty important! But she can answer that question first.

She nods and - hmm she’s not actually sure what time sunset is right now, it's at least still light out for some time after she leaves the hospital, but she's inclined to make sunset also represent shift change for simplicity. She draws Marian and then some footprints wandering down the page to a simplified house-drawing with a bed in it. She adds an incoming arrow and a different stick figure, to try to convey that someone else will be coming in and he won't, like, be alone overnight. 

He smiles at the little footprints!  It's good that Marian has a house with a bed in it.  (He's suddenly tempted to ask who else lives in her house, but he should probably leave her personal life alone - just that he feels like she's his friend doesn't mean she agrees.)

He nods at the different person.  And she seemed like she had a lot of other things she wanted to try to explain, so he should probably let her do that...

...At some point she really does want to explain the OR, but that seems too complicated for the space she has on the paper. She draws a line around midmorning and an arrow to a stick figure in the bed with barely-open slit eyes and a figure beside him - the first time he woke up.

Late morning gets an arrow to a sketch of the IV pump fallen over and a stick figure sitting up in bed (she still feels soooo bad about this!) 

She draws a line just past the noon mark, and rather than try to draw 'started having heart problems', she points at him and imitates the heartbeat motion he made in front of his chest and the exaggerated flopping arm gesture he used to convey the exhaustion and weakness he was feeling. 

After that, things all happened within a pretty narrow interval - it was less than an hour total - so arrows can go to available spots on the paper. She draws a stick figure with a tube in its hand rather than its mouth, then lots of arrows showing figures coming into the room, then a little while later a figure with the tube back. And then, right, he was awake again within maaaaybe ten, fifteen minutes, but he probably has no idea how long it was, so she draws another line juuust after that point and an arrow to another slit-eyed figure. 

The paper is now getting a bit crowded and chaotic, but hopefully watching her go through the process of drawing it will have helped him feel more situated? 

She's so good at remembering what happened and in what order and when!  ...Makes sense, with how she wasn't nearly dead twice.  He probably wouldn't be having all that trouble on a normal day either.

He nods, and doesn't really have anything to say about any of it, but sends understanding and appreciation.  And spends a while looking at the paper and going through the confused chaos of his memories to try to make them all make sense, now that there's more of a structure to attach them to.

Leareth is finding all of this deeply reassuring! It's very important for him to feel oriented, and it's - still difficult, when his mage-sight isn't working and he knows rather little about the broader scope of the place where they are, but it actually helps a lot just having a timeline of what things happened in what order. 

His mind relaxes noticeably, and he feels more mentally present than he has since the attack - still not engaging with the body or its Gifts at all, but like it might be possible to think coherent thoughts and have any of it matter.

He appreciates both Karal and Marian quite a lot, right now.

Marian stays nearby but gives him some space to process it.

That's very good!  He had been wondering in the back of his mind whether Leareth would come out to engage with any of these questions, but didn't want to push him.  It's good that he did and that he finds it helpful.  Also it's good that he noticed how great Marian is.  Karal thinks it'll be very useful to have his input once they get to anything more complicated - even this impaired, Leareth knows so much more than he does, and he thinks in ways that, while much less suited to dealing with being too confused to make good decisions, are very likely better at making sense of the confusion, now that this is starting to look possible again.

When they're finished making sense of all the memories they can find, Karal is still inclined to try to find out more about their personal situation before tackling the larger and more difficult questions, but if either Leareth or Marian have suggestions, he'll definitely listen.

(Marian isn't going to push. That was a lot of information and interaction and she's not assuming he has the energy for more just now.) 

Leareth mostly wants a timeline like this one, but for the future instead of the past?

This is significantly more for feeling-safe reasons as because he thinks it'll be decision relevant; he doubts they get much of a say in what happens over the next few days, and it doesn't necessarily make sense to want a say given that he is, at this point, convinced that Marian is trying very hard to keep them alive and cares about their wellbeing; she might be an unwitting agent of a god, if they are still in Velgarth, but even then, they're somewhere far enough and strange enough that Leareth isn't sure his most familiar threat protocol shold apply. ...But regardless, Leareth will feel a lot less helpless and unmoored if he has a sense of the expected routine and rhythms of this place. 

...Though that may not be predictable to Marian, since it seems like the near-death event earlier wasn't and - that makes sense, things are like that for Healers, but Healers can normally at least see a broad sense of what's wrong with a patient and guess at what things might get worse, and probably Marian also has that? Communicating it sounds hard but, again, he would appreciate knowing. 

- and of course it's important to know what comes after this, once they're more recovered, but he's not sure that's really within Marian's scope. He thinks he remembers that she seemed unsure, before? 

That is what Karal would want to know first too - it's true that they're unlikely to be able to make useful decisions, but the way they react to things still seems to make a difference, and it's easier to react helpfully if they know what to expect.

He'll grab another page and draw a line that has... a sunrise and a sunset, which he points to being the same as Marian's, and then another sunrise and another sunset.  ...Questioning expression?  He could try asking about specific things, but he probably isn't going to have very good guesses about what the important things are.

Oh, he wants to know the plan for him for tomorrow! That's such a deeply reasonable thing to want! Marian would also like to know that, wheeeeen is roooounds Honestly, even in the absence of a specific medical plan, there's probably a bunch she can fill in, since at least she knows what sorts of things routinely happen in the ICU in general? 

...First she re-draws the line for "now" on the part with the first sunrise and sunset, and then draws some shading - to hopefully indicate that she's not sure when precisely it will happen - and an arrow to a sketch of a lot of stick figures congregated just outside the box for her patient's room. She points at Karal, points at the figures, and makes a 'talking' gesture, to try to convey 'the point is for a lot of knowledgeable people to talk about you and how you're doing.' Does he seem to follow? 

If it wasn't for the Empathy he would probably make some deeply concerning guesses for why so many people needed to talk about him and what the possible outcomes might be!  As it is, he gets the general idea, although he still looks a bit worried.  Do they need that many people to figure out what's going on with him?  He thought they already knew what the scary problem was and now he was mostly okay?  ... He's really not sure how to convey any of that.

He thinks a moment, grabs a new piece of paper, and draws - Karal in bed, an arrow to a drawing of lots of people talking, an arrow from that to Karal sitting up.  Another arrow from the first drawing to a similar one with just Marian and not all the people talking, and from that to a flopped over dead Karal?  Questioning worried look?

Oh noooooooo poor guy!

(It’s not than unsurprising a way for someone to feel, which definitely makes it easier to Marian to guess at what the drawing means. She’s had a lot of patients who were stressed specifically about being in the ICU because they assumed it meant their condition was scarily bad and they were probably dying.)

…She’s not quite sure what to say because - she is actually pretty worried about him? He has some positive factors going for him - he’s young, obviously very fit, and very cooperative with his treatment to the extent he understands what’s going on - but also he is actually in pretty bad shape. He did some damage to his heart (an ejection fraction of 10% isn’t just from low potassium), he’s requiring a fuckton of vasopressors to manage shock, and his respiratory status is trending worse rather than better, which is so unsurprising given the broken ribs plus a systemic inflammatory response to injuries and some degree of heart failure, but still isn’t good. Also he has pretty serious burns that could still get infected. 

ALSO she still has NO IDEA what was actually causing the inexplicable recurring hypokalemia and hypoglycemia, and whatever the underlying condition is could well have other effects they don’t know to test for. So it’s the unknown here that scare her, which is - honestly a lot of what bringing the full medical team in to focus on a particular patient is for? 

— wow okay she has no idea how to draw that, though. (Or if it’s, like, a good idea to try to tell him? She usually prefers to be as honest as possible with patients who express wanting to know what’s going on, but that’s really especially hard to do in pictograms and she doesn’t want to scare him by implying he’s definitely dying. He’s not! His vital signs are fine right now and Marian has no specific reason to expect that to change, there’s just - an awful lot that could still go wrong.)

Oh, also it’s the case that the number of people is inflated by students who are mainly there to learn stuff by observation? Which Marian takes for granted as a fact about hospitals, but plausibly her patient doesn’t know that? (Also there’s the whole breakdown by specialty - like, a lot of people don’t have any particular nutrition problems but the dietician still joins for rounds - though it actually seems like his electrolyte issue would be at least related to his nutritional needs, and it might be one of those weird genetic metabolism syndromes where you need a special diet, so that’s not a great example here.)

She…will get a new sheet of paper and try to draw the same crowded scene, but this time there are a handful of figures which are bigger than the others and have speech bubbles. One speech bubble can get a drawing of a heart (she’ll point at it and make the heartbeat motion, in case her ability to draw a recognizable anatomical heart is insufficient), one can get a drawing of lungs (again, she acts out breathing to try to make that clear), one gets a drawing of a bowl of soup with a spoon (and she mimes eating.) And each of the bigger figures gets a cluster of smaller figures around them, which have pens in one hand and squares of paper with lines to indicate writing in the other hand…?

Ah, so she is worried about him, Empathy tells him that while she's still deciding what to say.  He's not just basically fine like he thought he was, there are... a lot of complicated things going on... and for some of them she doesn't know why even though she mostly knows how to fix them?  Well, it's definitely better to know it than not.  But Empathy also tells him she still feels like he's probably not going to die (or be horribly crippled, he hopes).  He looks a little subdued but not scared (because really what would be the point). 

The drawing mostly makes sense!  He's not entirely sure about all the smaller people - messengers, assistants, students, or something else along those lines, but either way they're not directly needed to just figure out what's wrong with him, and it makes sense of the number.  He nods.

He also makes an uncertain but slightly hopeful face at the bowl of soup, and points to the tube?

Oh no did she get his hopes up about having the tube out soon and being able to eat.

Marian isn’t sure how much this will help, but she’ll try to draw an in-profile anatomical diagram of where a nasogastric tube goes, and draw…okay, fine, “soup” is close enough…being conveyed to his stomach. She makes an apologetic face and then finds the earlier timeline drawing she did, points at the patient with tube removed, and acts out someone being really short of breath. He’s not ready to breathe without help yet - and probably won’t be tomorrow either - but he needs nutrition in the meantime and they have ways to accomplish that? 

(Leareth is if anything mostly reassured by what Karal can pick up from Marian’s unspoken thoughts. Of course there’s a lot wrong with them - they were injured by the initial attack, are still suffering from serious backlash - that he was making worse before with his Gate-to-safety instincts - and also Karal tried to kill them, and Karal is - not incompetent at accomplishing what he wants to. 

Anyway, it’s reassuring that Marian is obviously tracking the fact that there’s a lot of things wrong with them, and that she isn’t entirely on top of it? She’s clearly inclined to watch them closely and will be positioned to intervene quickly if they do have another unexpected problem.)

Oh, if Leareth thinks it's reassuring then Karal will be reassured.  Leareth sounds like he has a lot more background in making sense of this sort of thing, and what he's thinking does sound very reasonable, Karal is just... not used to assessing his state on a level other than whether he can walk or fight and whether there's anything simple he can do to improve his ability at those. 

(There's faint pleasure in the background of his thoughts, at Leareth judging him competent.)

More tubes?...  He grimaces slightly, but cannot very well argue.  He does need food, and he remembers breathing being difficult enough that he might not be able to do it and eat at once.  What a state to be in...  He wonders, again, why they're doing all this, it's clearly so much effort - but he definitely can't usefully draw that, or do anything with the information. 

What is information he could do something with... No, first he should wait for Marian to draw more things, there's an entire night and day left to fill with what will presumably be increasingly uncertain predicted events.

Marian is running into a problem where conveying the concept of 'repeat labs' in pictographs - to a patient who seems confused by clocks as well as her phone - sounds really hard actually.

...She can at least populate the night with a bunch of marks - placed so there are about five of them between the sunrise and the sunset - and make a sketch on the first one of two people on either side of a bed with a person in it, and then briefly act out 'helping him turn over in bed' as clearly as she can without actually doing it. It seems fair to warn him that they'll be in to do that every 2-3 hours all night. 

(Leareth thinks the food-tube is a really clever idea! He - has no specific memories to draw on here, but a vague sense that it's a challenge for Healers that sometimes patients are too ill to eat but still need energy for Healing-work.

...He wouldn't be shocked if it's an idea he's had before and tried to implement in some previous lifetime; he wouldn't remember either way.) 

Karal frowns a little at the sketch, but quickly decides he trusts Marian to wake him up in some sensible way rather than trying to move him while he's asleep.  Although at the moment he feels pretty capable of turning over in bed himself, so maybe he can just do that once in a while and avoid having people try to help, which continues to feel vaguely embarrassing.

And there's going to be... some other thing... that she's frustrated about being unable to communicate?  He feels much the same way, and gives her a rueful smile along with projected shared-frustration and doing-well-enough.