"Whether he lives alone - whether he even has a place to stay in town, come to think of it - we have no idea what kind of social support he has access to. Or what his insurance is, which affects whether we could discharge him to rehab if he doesn't have any support at home..." 

...Ugh this is going to be complicated. Marian can be pretty sure that her patient doesn't know anywhere in town, doesn't have anywhere to stay, and definitely doesn't have US health insurance. Which, yeah, is kind of complicated! They - probably want the medical team to end up believing he's new to town, rather than homeless? Though there obviously won't be any records of his arrival and she's not sure if, like, that's the sort of thing the police would check for... Claiming that he's confused or doesn't remember what happened might be a simpler way to avoid suspicion, but risks having the medical team decide he can't be safely discharged. It would really suck if they decide to admit him to the psych ward and Marian is not totally sure how to steer away from that without raising other suspicions. 

She nods. "Can I at least try to communicate to him that our goal is to get him recovered enough to safely discharge home, and we just don't know exactly what that's going to look like?" 

Candace glances over at the patient again. "I suppose that is what we're hoping for." She doesn't seem incredibly convinced that it's a realistic hope. 

"Yeah." Marian looks over at her patient as well. She has no idea how much of the conversational subtext his psychic powers let him follow, but hopefully some? 

It's... complicated, more than he would have hoped or even expected.  And complicated in a way Marian doesn't like.  Candace wants to know... if he has a life here, if he belongs here, and of course he doesn't - he doesn't know any of the language! - but Marian doesn't want to say that and isn't sure what the best thing to do is?  

It sounds like they should talk about it once Candace is gone, but it'll be so difficult to communicate... He can't tell what the problem is, but he can tell there's something about how they're - how this whole society is - thinking about him that doesn't make sense to him and that he's oddly sure he won't like.  The straightforward thing, just letting him go once he's better, is unlikely to happen, and he doesn't understand why.  It's not about the guard wanting to talk to him about the violence, or mostly not, it's... confusing and complicated, and he feels like he may have trusted Marian's basic confidence in her society a little too much.

It won't help anything, to be visibly frustrated about it.  If Marian isn't sure what to say, then they should clearly leave it alone for now.  He looks disappointed, but understanding rather than impatient, and too tired for a long conversation.  Projects the same, and muted frustration which he's clearly putting off for later.

"I'll try to explain to him later when I have time to focus on it," Marian says. "It takes kind of a while." 

...Man, under other circumstances she would be pleased that this social worker is apparently taking her job seriously and trying to outperform the common scenario - even more common back at her old job at Montfort - where homeless patients would be discharged without anyone really considering where they were going to go. And her patient in fact doesn't have anywhere to go - he certainly can't go home - it's just that, uh, the circumstances make it hard to navigate having the system help him without making everything way more complicated. 

(She has a feeling that something else about this interaction is bothering her patient, but she isn't sure what, and in any case she can't worry about it right now.) 

Candace doesn't have much else to accomplish here today, in any case. She'll point at the guy's drawing-communication asking about his discharge planning, shrug apologetically, and point at Marian, and then she'll go take photos of the other important drawings that Marian is giving her, and then she'll retreat outside the room to finish charting everything. 

...Well, Marian is at least pretty sure they got through that without any additional suspicion being raised, and will probably have the next several days to figure out how to approach the next conversation? 

Karal nods at Candace and copies pointing at Marian, looking subdued but content enough with that.  She is, for multiple reasons, much easier to communicate with.

It's reassuring that Marian thinks there will be plenty of time without anything inevitable happening.  (It also means it will take that long before anyone can even theoretically expect to have a thorough conversation with him, which is less good, but it's not as if he could have truthfully expected better.)

He should definitely not try communicating anything until he can't feel Candace's mind any more, and likely for a while after, given how small his range is.  He'll rest, pay attention to her emotions and Marian's, and think about how to draw any of the new questions he has.

…After a while, Leareth (who was slightly tracking the conversation, but mostly drifting as an alternative to being stressed about the lack of control) pulls his thoughts together more firmly.

He thinks they - probably learned something, from Candace, and from Marian’s reactions to Candace, not exactly about their prospects over the next week but more about the world they find themselves in? He’s not sure what, but he agrees with Karal that it didn’t feel like Candace’s reactions and concerns were mostly about the violence. It was - something he doesn’t fully understand but definitely wouldn’t have been expecting?

All of that is very vague. Karal is the one who was paying closer attention, and the one who’s - more specialized in reasoning from vague intuitions. What does he think?

Karal had been planning on waiting and seeing if Marian could explain, but Leareth is probably right that he has most of the pieces of it already.

It wasn't that Candace was unkind to him, it's that... she thought his life was her business, somehow?  Like he was - who...?  He tries to discard all his assumptions about who he is, she doesn't know any of that and he supposes can't know most of it, given how different their worlds are...  Who would you think of that way, and why, and what would it mean?

It wasn't quite like he was a child, she wasn't that protective and wasn't... he doesn't know how to phrase it even in his thoughts... it's not that she didn't think he was capable of having coherent opinions, it's that she thought his opinions didn't matter - like most people would treat a young highborn woman they somehow found alone and hurt on the side of the road, where it's obviously important to take care of her but the main question is not what she wants but what her father expects of you, except instead it's - what?  What this society expects for everyone?  Something like that, perhaps, although Karal can't imagine a society that treats everyone as if they're that sort of... valuable but not for anything about them... let alone why it would do such a thing.

But it's consistent with the amount of healing resources all these people have been expending on a complete stranger, if they simply think everyone is worth that.

And he supposes that if a society considers itself bound to put this much effort into saving anyone's life, it might also care very much about whether people live their lives in ways that will require that.  It might want them not to take risks, because just like a young highborn woman they're someone who needs to be saved whether their choices have been reasonable or not.

... Yes, that fits, that's the thing he didn't like about Candace's thoughts - that she didn't think the risks of his life were his to take.  He still doesn't like it, but he feels like he understands better now how things might end up that way.  And, for all that most of him resents the attitude, he cannot really complain - because if this place wasn't like that, he and Leareth would be dead.

Leareth appreciates Karal's analysis; he's not sure he could have picked up on all of those pieces on his own, but it does ring true. 

It's - not how he would choose to set up a society in a world that had such abundant resources and advanced technology - but he thinks he recognizes some of what they might be reaching for. Once you can afford it, it's appealing to make the world safer, and you can start with safety from things like war and famine, but there's also a broader thing, to make people safe from only having bad options. Which - can maybe end up sort of hard to distinguish from trying to make people safe from the consequences of their own decisions, and Leareth can see why that bothers Karal, especially since from their perspective it's not like their options are even very bad? But to a society this wealthy, being released from the House of Healing while still recovering and somewhat incapacitated, and without a specific place to go, is probably seen as an unusually bad set of options? Does Karal think that seems to match with the flavor of Marian's worry? 

Yes, that fits - that the thing Karal couldn't understand is simply that this society wants so much for all its people to be safe.  And so it thinks it gets to decide which options are the bad ones it shouldn't let people take, because it doesn't always trust them to know.  Doesn't, maybe, believe people should be allowed not to want to be safe. 

Which... half makes sense to Karal, because the category of people who don't want to be safe includes both him and reckless young men who want to take deadly risks for no good reason, and he can see why someone might want to stop them.  But... it should be easy to tell which someone is.  Is it harder than he thinks, or are they not trying, or... it feels like something else and he doesn't understand what it is.  Marian doesn't believe people will trust her word that Karal will be all right if they let him go.  That seems wrong to Karal already - Marian is perceptive and resourceful and clearly cares about people, why woudn't she be trusted about this? - but the way she thinks doesn't feel like anyone can really make the decision, and Karal doesn't understand how that can possibly be the case.  The more he considers this place the more levels of confusion there are.

But it is true that their options would not be very good, without knowing the language or the world, if they didn't have magic they don't want Candace to know about.  Karal thinks that even without Leareth and with no magic he would do better if they let him go than if they... did whatever it is that Marian is afraid of... but he supposes he cannot be sure.

What is the outcome Marian is afraid of?  He definitely doesn't understand that either, and he very much hopes she can explain what it is and why it might happen.  Lock him up somewhere supposedly comfortable, he supposes, just like you'd do with a young highborn woman you meant to give back to her parents - but there's nobody to give him back to and he doesn't know what they might want to do instead.  Except keep him forever, maybe - which would be a more frightening prospect if he thought they had any real chance of succeeding.

In the meantime - how would Leareth set up a society in a world like this?  Would he let people decide they don't want to be safe?  If it's not too hard to think about, it might help make sense of what's happening here.  And Karal is just curious.

Leareth thinks he would...still want guardrails, including guardrails that are at least very difficult to opt out of and make the decision not to be safe, but - that there's probably a way to set it up that feels much less like...having specific people trying to act in a protective role like a parent would? It's very predictable that adults don't like this. If he were redesigning the situation here, with unlimited resources, and trying to make it safe for Karal and him to just leave the hospital as soon as they can walk, there...would just be safe places to sleep outside and plants with edible food, maybe? There would be options better than starving in the street that didn't involve being - taken care of - by other people. 

On "it should be easy to tell which someone is", Leareth - is just not sure they have that much information about him and Karal? Candace certainly doesn't, because Marian isn't telling her everything and is to some extent trying to sell her on a misleading story. He doesn't understand exactly what Marian's role or authority here is, but - she's very young, early 20s if he had to guess, even if she also seems very good at what she does, and it's a very common way for things to work for authority to go off seniority. 

...he's abruptly out of energy for thinking, sorry. 

Safe places to sleep outside and plants with edible food sound both much more pleasant and just much more comprehensible than this!  But maybe it's harder, somehow, to have that, than to have all the non-mage-artifacts and complicated systems for everything these people have?  Karal certainly couldn't know.

Seniority is definitely often related to how mature and competent someone is, but-- oh, is it just that there's too many people here for them to all know each other?  Well, not among the healers, they clearly do know all the important and unimportant things about everyone here, but - Marian didn't know Candace at all, did she, and maybe whoever is in command over Candace and her part of all the confusing work they're doing doesn't know Marian either, and has no way to know how trustworthy she is besides how long she's been here...

... He doesn't like it, but that is again neither here nor there.  It makes sense, that a larger society would have to work in a more impersonal way, and he will get used to it.

And yes, he probably shouldn't be asking Leareth to think about complicated things that aren't even immediately relevant... Well, no, Leareth can just stop when he's tired, it wouldn't be good for either of them for Karal to restrain himself from ever being curious about unnecessary things - but it's understandable to find all this exhausting.

Perhaps that's a sign that Karal should let them sleep again, instead of trying to keep track of Candace and Marian and anyone they might be interacting with.  He's... exhausted too, when he lets himself notice it, it's just that he's so out of the habit.

Oh, yes, this is definitely a large impersonal organization. ...Leareth likes many things about large impersonal organizations, actually, though - significantly because of what they correlate with? You need a certain level of prosperity; you need a city, with enough people and enough wealth; large bureaucratic organizations are definitely not the optimal form of things for human flourishing but, in Velgarth, the places where they can and do exist are usually better off than the places with only the social structures familiar and comfortable to Karal. 

(He does think it's a feature of - a place with a lot of resources but not unlimited resources? This place is what you get if you have to be efficient in order to provide Healing and support to everyone in need of it; his sense is that everyone here is very busy and working very hard on limited slack, and that's also a factor in why Candace was...seeing them on the surface and mentally boxing it in with what's familiar to her. Busy people think like that; they have to, to function at all.) 

...Anyway, sleep. Sleep is good. And later they can have whatever conversation Marian wanted to have, but Leareth is too tired to think that far ahead right now. 

Karal did very much like Sunhame when he visited, back before... everything.  But he didn't visit for long enough to really see how any of it worked.  If large impersonal organizations are what you need to get that - or places greater than that, because he gets the feeling from Leareth's thoughts that many of them exist - then he thinks he can get used to them.  And surely they'll be easier to deal with once he has some idea of how they work and why, so it's lucky that Leareth already has it.  But, yes, sleep first.

(He doesn't feel any need to think ahead for the conversation with Marian - by now she seems entirely on their side, no need for separate strategies, and she knows so much more about what's happening that it would be a waste of their time to plan anything without her.)

He dreams about home, first the comfortable familiarity and then its slow dissolution in favor of confusing strangers acting in charge of things nobody should be in charge of.

Leareth dreams about abstract math, and has confused nightmares about the priest of Vkandis interspersed with Urtho's Tower going up and whiting out the horizon. 

Well, the poor man fell asleep before the social worker had finished charting and left them alone. (She took a long break in her charting to check Facebook, which Marian would normally find sympathetic but arghhhhh she wanted privacy with her patient.) 

Given that, Marian is in general content to let her poor patient sleep for a nice long time! That social work conversation was exhausting for her, and he was probably using his psionic powers the whole time to try to figure out what was going on.

She does need to have a followup conversation with him about, uh, how to help him navigate getting successfully discharged from the hospital rather than transferred to psych - and also what he's going to do - but it's going to be hard to figure out how to communicate all the things he really deserves to know and needs context on, and Marian isn't averse to waiting. 

(Also her patient has PSIONIC FUCKING POWERS and Marian needs to. Do processing. At some point. However. How about she does that later and not now.) 

Also also the unit is actually really busy and the moment Marian is clearly not occupied, several colleagues want to know if she can help them with half a dozen tasks. 

Marian is...on reflection fine with this? Her patient has the call bell and she does, actually, trust him to call for help if he wakes up and needs something. She has all the alarm settings on the monitor how she wants them. She's going to pop in and take an art line blood sugar a few times, but he stays up in a decent range and his sats are fine on the current ventilator settings. She'll spend a while glancing at the monitor every ten minutes while she hurries past to help someone else. (It's nice. She's been feeling behind on her helping-colleagues mental quota.) 

She didn't think to set an alarm for his temperature, because it's been totally normal and non-worrying this entire time and she hasn't allocated very much attention to it, and apparently the default yellow-alarm setting is 39.0° C and so it takes her kind of an embarrassing length of time to notice that he's above 38 now, which...is still a fever.

She confirms the embarrassing length of time by refreshing the chart with vitals every fifteen minutes - he was hovering between 36.2 and 36.6 all night until two hours ago, 37.1 one hour ago - 10:30 am - and then rising quickly, 37.7 to 38.2 to, now, 38.8° C. 

He has, like, five billion risk factors for an infection, doesn't he. 

His heart rate didn't budge for a while but is now starting to creep up again, it's at 124. His blood pressure is still okay, at least, on dobutamine and a reasonable rather than maxed rate of norepinephrine, but - ughh, Lisa was steadily weaning it during the later part of the night and at some point he plateau'd, Marian hasn't really questioned it because he was maxed her entire shift yesterday but that is, if not an actual deterioration, a change in the trend toward improvement. 

He did get antibiotics but only the surgical prophylaxis ones, not broad-spectrum, and more than twenty-four hours ago. 

Ughhhhh. Marian...had better give him some PRN Tylenol, and then go wake him up and find out how he's feeling, and hopefully her assessment will give some obvious sign of where the stupid infection is and they won't have to send cultures of literally everything to narrow it down. 

She hangs the Tylenol first, and then nudges him awake. 

He feels like he wakes up unusually slowly, but probably it was just the dream.  What were they-- oh, there was a woman trying to figure out who he is and what to do with him, and Leareth thinks this is... necessary for cities to work?  Probably it'll all make a lot more sense once Marian explains it to them.

He gives her a tired smile, and projects an amorphous question about what happened with Candace and what it means for the future.

Empathy projection isn't that good at specific content and also Marian is, uh, distracted by more near-term priorities. She gets that he...has a general question and uncertainty? 

She shakes her head apologetically, then shows him the little person-drawing from earlier, the one she did for the conversation with the resident, and makes a thumbs-down gesture and a questioning face. Hopefully, since he can also read her mind or at least her feelings, that's enough to convey 'are you feeling worse?' 

(It's also obvious that she's worried, in a new way, though not very worried, it has a flavor of - a familiar tedious detour or tripping hazard or something, she expects it to be inconvenient and unpleasant but she's not all that alarmed.) 

She feels the brief flare of his frustration - he doesn't care about all the many Healer details of how he's feeling, he's alive and awake and wants to know what will happen to him-- 

--he is being very stupid, and should stop.  He closes his eyes and forcibly calms himself down.  She's right that if something is wrong (again...) then it's more important to deal with it now than to talk about things that cannot happen for days or perhaps weeks.

Is he feeling worse?  It takes him a long moment to properly focus his attention on all the unpleasant things going on with his body that he has a long habit of ignoring when there's nothing he can do about them.  Nothing is obviously newly unpleasant, he just feels... a little more tired, a little lightheaded, a little cold - not this world's strange new problems that happen when someone cuts his chest open and pokes him full of tubes, but the sort of thing he's worked and fought through every month of the war.  He gives her a frown that's more vaguely displeased uncertainty than real complaint, and tilts his hand back and forth.

Karal's reaction is enough to drag Leareth to awareness, though he immediately notices that it's...harder...to wake up, to think, everything.

- oh, Marian thinks something is wrong. That makes sense. It's probably affecting him harder than Karal, he's not used to Karal's body and to ignoring its physical discomforts and he has...less to work with. Unfortunately Leareth also isn't sure of what. 

She's sorry to be annoying about it! Just, like, she isn't very worried but the reason she's not worried is because she's planning to get right on figuring out what the problem is so they can get a culture and (tomorrow, once it's back) target it with the right antibiotics and he'll be okay. 

...It's surprisingly hard to figure out how to convey the concept of 'you have a fever which means there's an infection somewhere' to him, given the fact that surely that is a concept he has and something he's experienced before? She would just take his temperature orally and draw a graph but she...is not sure he's from somewhere where he ever had access to a doctor's clinic and would be familiar with thermometers? (She's never checked his temperature that way before, the catheter has a temp probe in it.) 

She...can feel his forehead with the back of her hand, since that's a stereotypical way that people check for fevers without thermometers? And wince a bit, because he's definitely hot and clammy. And...she can point at him and mime fanning herself like she's overheated and then hugging herself and trying to pretend-shiver (which turns out to be hard to do on demand!) and rapidly alternate a couple of times?