Oh!  Yes, he probably does have a fever, just not enough of one to be out of his mind, or incapable of-- well, incapable of anything he'd be capable of without one, which is very few things right now anyway, so it's even less surprising that he didn't notice.  He nods, projecting understanding and unworried familiarity, along with a note of apology for mentally snapping at her.  The healers here can do so many impossible things, surely they can deal with a mundane sickness.

Well, it's probably more complicated than that when there are so many other things wrong - but still, Marian thinks it'll be fine, so it can't be very bad.

--Except - if he does get feverish enough to not know what's real, there's no telling how much damage he or Leareth might do here, with magic or even just Empathy.  (He remembers the one really bad fever of his adult life, and how much he fought everyone trying to help him...)  They should really try not to let that happen.

... He has no immediate idea how to usefully mime or draw any of that.  So he just gives Marian a hopeful look - maybe she has some more plans to convey, and maybe they'll make his communication easier.

He's - unworried and then suddenly remembering that there might be something to worry about, something unlikely but it would be bad if it happened...? Does being feverish interact with psionic powers, that's Marian's first guess. (She thinks she read a book where that was included in the worldbuilding once.) It does seem like it could make things...worse...if he gets sick enough to be confused or delirious, which happens less in young previously-healthy patients but being in the ICU is itself a risk even when people find it a less confusing experience than he clearly does, and he checks a lot of boxes on the risk factor list: on pain meds, still in pain anyway, electrolyte disturbances, ugh. 

Well, she can be aggressive about not letting his fever go too high, if Tylenol doesn't cut it she can put a cooling blanket on him. Which feels pretty mean with a conscious patient but he would almost certainly prefer it to unintentionally causing problems. 

...She can try to mime that one of the medications in his many IV pumps should help, by pointing at the vial hanging there and then first repeating the miserable-feverish-person act followed by relaxing? 

Yes, it seems like she gets it!  More nodding.  And he appreciates it so much when she guesses what the problem is without him having to do anything about it.  He feels like he'd be very bad at drawing right now.

It takes him a moment to remember that the bags of what looks like water contain mysterious substances that go into his blood and make all sorts of strange things happen, but - yes, good, if they can make sure he doesn't get too feverish, that solves the entire problem.  He doesn't need to get better, really, just to not get worse, but he's pretty sure she can tell that.

Did Leareth get all of that?  He does seem particularly out of it, again.  Karal tries to make sure he knows the basics of what's happening - they have a fever, Marian can fix whatever they're sick with, but in case she can't fix it fast enough and they get delirious, it's very important not to do anything even if things seem very confusing and dangerous.  Karal might have to keep Leareth away from the magic again, if that seems like it might happen.  He's sorry about that.

Leareth understands. He...thinks he's less likely, unless he literally believes their lives are in danger? He's been doing a lot of deliberately retraining mental habits toward passivity and letting Karal take the lead, which is going to become an enormously inconvenient trauma response to try to undo as soon as he...can do things again...but it seemed pretty important for right now. 

...All right and now Marian needs to figure out if he has any more specific symptoms than just 'fever', because it's not yet incredibly obvious to her where the infection is coming from. It could be literally any of: the burns, his surgical wound, his central line, a UTI from the catheter, probably not pneumonia because surely they would have noticed nasty secretions first and Marian would not have forgotten noticing that but it's not impossible. Honestly it's also not as impossible as she would like that they missed damage to his bowels from all the blunt trauma. 

She can use the little person figure to attempt to go through a list of possible symptoms. Is his chest more painful? The worst burns, mostly on his forearms? (They're covered, she'll probably want to do a dressing change anyway and can check them for suspicious redness or drainage at the time, but she didn't bring supplies for that with her.) Is his line site tender? Abdominal pain?  

(Poor Leareth.  Karal would hate having to do that.  ...And he probably will have to do it at some point, won't he.  Well, he'll worry about it then.)

He does his best to go through the whole list, but fails to notice anything helpful.  He still has the mental habit of just... not considering it his business how much things hurt, because he doesn't know what's supposed to be happening and can't do anything about it - this is generally very helpful in dealing with healers, but it does make it harder to give this sort of information when it's suddenly needed.  (The healers he's used to don't ask nearly as many questions.)  Everything feels somewhat unpleasant, nothing feels egregiously awful, and he's not confident at all about comparing anything to how it felt earlier, because he wasn't paying attention.  (His Empathy-projections of uncertainty come with an apologetic tone, for that.)

It's okay. They're going to have to do cultures of everything and start broad-spectrum antibiotics while they wait to have the information they need for targeted ones, that's all. 

...She should explain cultures, it'll probably only take like ten minutes and it's not desperately urgent, she'll page the resident for antibiotic orders but draw pictures while she waits.

Hmm. She mimes drawing blood - since he's seen her do that before - and shows her one of the big blood-culture flasks from the supply drawer. Then clipboard, paper, draw...pouring a little bit of blood onto a petri dish. She scratches out her first attempt at that and starts over because it 'a circle' is not going to help if he's never seen a petri dish before, it should be obviously a container with clear gel stuff in it. She draws several petri dishes - the later ones get lazier - and a sketched arc of a sun rising and falling over them to show 'time passing' - and the later ones get successively more dots and blobby mold-shapes.

She draws an old-fashioned microscope (lens, eyepieces, stylized eyes beside the eyepiece because it came out looking pretty ambiguous) and - arrow pointing at one of the dots, leading to a big circle to hopefully indicate 'magnified close-up'. She draws some wiggly little bacteria-shapes. 

Does he seem to be following any of that? 

She's going to... make his blood grow into shapes outside his body??  That's a pretty deeply alarming concept!  Why is she doing that??  And then putting... worms?... in them with some sort of artifact?  Uh, what.

...Probably it's something completely different and he's just completely failing to make sense of it.

He apologetically tugs at Leareth's attention to see if he can understand what all of that is about.  He knows so much more about complicated Healing-stuff...  Karal really rather hopes it's something completely different.  He really doesn't want there to be creepy little Karal-blobs in bowls somewhere, and he also doesn't want them to have worms.

...Leareth has to push through a lot of fatigue to think, which is unfortunate because at some point he's Trying hard enough to be alert that he triggers the stupid compulsions and suddenly can't do that and...has to sort of wander back to it sideways. 

It does make sense as soon as he manages to actually look at the thought properly. Healing-research in Velgarth did confirm that many, though apparently not all, illnesses are caused by...very very tiny animals of some kind that do look kind of like what Marian drew, though they probably aren't literally worms too small to see. And it...seems like they don't have Healing-Sight here? So would have to look at it outside of their body with their non-magical machines, apparently. He has no idea what the succession of little containers is meant to be though maybe that would also be obvious if he could hold onto more than one thought at a time. 

(Poor Leareth!  Karal will try not to bother him again while he's so tired.  Maybe they'll get lucky and there won't be any more urgent confusing things for a while.)

All right, that's-- well, still intensely creepy, but makes sense.  If Marian thinks he already has invisibly tiny worms in his blood (a faint shudder) then it's very reasonable that she wants to take them out to look at them with her artifacts.  And he doesn't need to understand what the specific containers are doing, except that they're apparently doing it slowly enough that it's helpful to be aware of the delay.

He projects understanding, and belatedly realizes how strange all this must have looked to Marian - him being obviously alarmed and confused, then waiting for something but without doing anything, and then understanding what she meant when he previously clearly didn't and had nowhere to get the sudden insight from.  But he really doesn't think he can usefully explain Leareth, and isn't sure that he should if he could.

Yeah, Marian is a little confused! She's not mainly focused on that, though, and - probably he's just groggy and out of it and so she accidentally confused and freaked him out before he managed to take a step back and put it together? 

She will slip out of the room - nab the resident on the way to the supply room to get an order for piperacillin-tazobactam - and go get culture swabs and supplies for dressing changes, sticking it all in one of the plastic basins for the purpose of carrying it back down the hall. She puts in the verbal order for the pip-taz, grabs a bag from the unit stock - it comes with a little vial of medication in powder form already attached to the IV bag, she just has to break the seal between the two components and shake it. ...Also it takes forever to dissolve. She shakes it a bit and then sticks it in her pocket, body heat helps, it should be fully dissolved by the time she finishes cultures. 

...Blood cultures first. She has to poke him twice to draw peripheral samples not from existing lines, one from each arm, and each one needs a pretty decent amount of blood to fill both flasks, for aerobic vs anaerobic cultures. And then she'll draw a third one from the central line (if it comes back positive there and not on systemic cultures, there's probably bacterial colonization of the line; if they were more worried they would d/c it and send the tip for culture and place a new one, but neither she nor the resident are that worried, the site looks fine and isn't red or tender or draining anything.) 

Leareth has dragged himself slightly more awake, enough to notice that that's way more blood than Marian usually takes. Possibly they just need more to be able to find the tiny-animals? 

That's such a lot of being stabbed with needles!  He makes no objections, but it is good to have some idea what it's all for.  He can't help squinting suspiciously at all the blood, as if he could see the possible tiny worms in it, although he's pretty sure he couldn't.

And Marian did bring a large bin back with her, so probably there are more things that need to happen - checking for the tiny-not-worms in places other than his veins, maybe?  He thinks that would make sense - he does have, well, rather a lot of wounds that various unfortunate things could be happening in, and he is of course aware that wounds can go bad, which is probably connected to the tiny-not-worms situation.  (He briefly considers all the other places Marian might want to stab needles into him in to check for tiny-not-worms.  Wow, that's a surprisingly unpleasant concept.  Probably she isn't really going to do that, and of course if she does he'll let her, just... augh.  He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, but manages not to project the augh, since that would be both unhelpful and just embarrassing.  He still does look more generally disquieted than she's used to.)

It's so understandable for him to be a bit freaked out! Marian will do everything slowly and carefully and calmly. 

They're going to take some pee out of the catheter bag using careful sterile technique, and she's going to set up a specimen collection container and suction him, and then - sorry! - she needs to set up her sterile field on the bedside table and get ready to change allllll of his dressings so she can swab the wound sites. 

Marian is very good and he does not mind her doing any things!  He gives her a rueful smile and sends embarrassment-about-being-pointlessly-uneasy and definitely-not-her-fault - it's not even about anything she's doing, it's just that the concept of tiny creatures being alive inside his body is really kind of a lot.

The familiar and distracting physical actions make him feel better rather than worse, really.  He puts even more effort than usual into coughing for the suctioning, because he extra doesn't want to have tiny worms in his lungs and would really like to be very sure about this.  The dressing changes hurt, as burns inevitably do, but he predictably makes no complaint.  He does keep lifting his head to look at everything that's going on more than he used to, but he pretty quickly stops looking suspicious (he wouldn't be able to see the tiny worms even if there are any, he does realize that) and starts just looking curious.  Wound care is something that it makes sense for him to personally know about rather than leave it as someone else's responsibility, and it's interesting, all the complicated things they do with it here.

He might have more specific questions about it if he wasn't also increasingly tired and having trouble focusing his thoughts properly, but between that and the communication barrier it sounds too complicated and exhausting to be worth it.  Well, that's how being feverish works - you do the things you have to, and you skip all the other ones.

None of his burns look particularly infected (they're ugly and oozing but in, like, the expected way for healing tissue) and his incision site appears to be healing well!

...Marian would find this more reassuring if she wasn't kind of hoping to find an obvious culprit for the infection sooner rather than later. She doesn't try to draw any pictures to communicate her reaction, but Karal will be able to pick up that she's both pleased with what she's noticing and also, in the background, feeling confused and uneasy. 

Karal will notice that he's feeling a little better by the time Marian is done. (The IV Tylenol is kicking in and his fever is down to 38.5° C.) 

...Leareth does not seem to be benefiting as much, though, he's still not really able to think. 

Karal is... a little worried about Leareth...

Probably he's fine and just needs rest.  But what if this sickness somehow turns out to be bad for Leareth specifically and Karal will have to explain that to Marian, and help her figure out how to fix it when she knows nothing about magic?  And do it all alone, without the ability to turn to Leareth for explanations whenever something in this confusing place makes no sense to him?

... Well, then he will.  And it'll be good that he's here, because otherwise Leareth would be sick and alone and unable to do even that much.

But for now he should really just wait to see if Leareth will get better with some rest, or with whatever treatment Marian thinks of.  Karal tries his best not to bother him, to stay calm and let Marian do what she needs, projecting subdued worry and trust at her.

...Leareth is too out of it to reason through anything complicated but he is tracking Karal's thoughts, if not particularly what's going on in their body, and he's still capable of emotional reactions. It's very good that Karal is here. He's glad and grateful and Karal should know that. 

Marian gets the clean dressings back on his burns and incision, hangs the now-dissolved antibiotic, and then ducks out again to send the samples. Tragic how it takes at least twelve hours to get results for cultures, that won't even be on her shift. 

...Her next mental todo item is a Serious Conversation About The Future and that sounds really hard and also not, like, the most urgent. She will perhaps let herself get distracted by someone asking her for help. 

Leareth has been very slowly letting his thoughts bump around the question of whether something is seriously wrong with him/them. 

He...suspects he's just going to be a lot more affected by anything that reduces their mental energy levels? Karal has decades' worth of engrained habits and reflexes for functioning even while badly impaired; he had to, on the Karsite border. Leareth does not have any of those, and hasn't even fully firmed up the connection between his soul and Karal's body. So the fact that he's...more impaired...is probably just predictable from them being in worse shape in general?

Which - does have the implication that they are in worse shape, even if Karal is able to push through it because he's used to working through exhaustion. But it's probably unnecessary to communicate this to Marian because it seems like she noticed even before they did? 

...That was very exhausting. Leareth is going back to drifting now. 

Karal amusedly recalls the time in his first year of service when he ignored hunger and a bleeding wound long enough to distress some people by abruptly collapsing in the courtyard.  Yes, he certainly does have habits like that - if anything, the harder part was building a second layer of habits on top of them, making him take exhaustion and weakness seriously enough to not do that.  He is sure, though he doesn't remember why, that Leareth in his normal state can also push through nearly anything - but this isn't his normal state.  He's newly alive, without most of his memory, unused to the new body, and on top of that unable to straightforwardly do things on purpose.  It's obvious to Karal how much work Leareth needs to put into basic thinking - no wonder it's easier for illness to disrupt it.  He's probably right that that's all it is, and he'll get better again when Karal's body does.

So yes, Leareth should drift rather than use his energy for anything unnecessary, and Karal might try to sleep to make it easier.  He's not going to push to have important conversations with Marian when Leareth won't be able to keep up with them.

... He can't sleep, it turns out.  He's spent half the day asleep already, and he's still feeling vaguely off and uncomfortable.  And... it's not that he isn't used to boredom - war is very boring nearly all of the time, and guarding doors in peacetime is hardly more interesting - but he's not used to uselessness, and not much used to helplessness either.  It's hard to call up the mindset of keeping his thoughts quiet and paying calm attention to his surroundings when his surroundings contain so many things that are confusing and frustrating and fundamentally unpredictable and he doesn't have something important to focus on.  This is the first time since his near-death that he's had more time than he needed, rather than having a pile of urgent questions and problems and barely managing to stay awake to deal with them.  That's... probably an improvement, really... just a frustrating one.

Marian left her room and was immediately recruited to three different fetch quests by nurses trapped in rooms with unstable patients. She was that person yesterday so she really wants to help if she can!  (She's repeating a list in her head: piperacillin-tazobactam for 112, art line tubing for 102, Foley kit for 109...)

- she does remember that her patient is probably not feeling great and so will pause, fresh pip-taz dissolving in her front scrub pocket and art line tubing stuffed in her pant side pocket, and try to wave at him from the doorway and gauge if he seems to need anything right now? (And check his temp on the monitor, but it's down to 38.3° C, which is not as much effect from the Tylenol as she might have hoped for but at least it's not going up.) 

His expression is, for once, the typical one of a patient stuck in bed with nothing to do, rather than his usual case of having something unexpected and strange going on in his head whenever he isn't too out of it to manage.

He's still sensing her whenever she's in range, so it's obvious that she's very busy, and in any case he doesn't consider keeping him from boredom to be in any way her job.  He gives her a half-smile and a go-back-to-your-important-things sort of wave. 

Her visit does remind him that he's supposed to pay more attention to his body, so he spends a while doing that, focusing on each body part in turn to think about how it feels and hopefully be able to tell a candlemark later whether it's better or worse.  Maybe he can manage to make it a habit if he remembers it a few more times today.  In between those times, he will... spend a while watching each of the strange artifacts in the room in order, to see if they're visibly doing anything in a short span of time, and to try to remember what they look like well enough that he'll be able to tell if that's different in a candlemark...  It's hard, and not at all the sort of thing he's used to wrapping his mind around, so he doesn't expect to get very far - but it might matter at least a little, so it feels like doing something, and that's enough to let him focus on it for however long it takes until something else happens or until he's sleepy again.

He will probably eventually notice that he has a headache again - not a backlash headache, it's different and less intensely wrong-feeling, and feels more like it's behind his eyes and face than deep in his brain. (It might be a recognizable kind of headache from pushing through illnesses, but then again he might never have paid enough attention to categorize that.)