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st_ingofthehundredArriving straight from a battle with two fire giants, Kash doesn't hit it off with Caroline, bounces off Joanna back into Caroline, flees her only to get called out by Rey, which doesn't go well, and finally to almost collide with River Tam, which strangely does. River manages to get him to his room and then Kash shoos her off on an errand. It doesn't take long for Welcome Wagon round two to show up.
Butters hadn't quite believed the few people he'd talked to in the months he'd been at the hotel about what a force of nature Caroline was, but for somebody who looked like a high school cheerleader she did disappointed-face nearly as well as his mother.
Not that she'd really needed to. Butters wasn't sure what kind of magic interdimensional kidnapper brought this many people to a hotel and included no actual doctors, but if he was really all they had he'd just have to step up, finally. Starting with Spear Guy. 197, she'd said. Just down the hall. He hoped Spear Guy's bathroom wasn't as pink as his was. Butters knocked.
As soon as he'd gotten rid of the girl--really, she'd gotten rid of herself, but who was counting?--Kash stripped down and used the ingenious indoor toilet." His body ached for a soak, but it only took feeling the heated water against his palm to convince him this would do. In theory, he could heal himself first, but he still felt it might be best not to expend what little energy he had on them until after he'd had a sit down to cast a few rituals and try a Sending to Z.
So instead, he stepped into the closet-box with the hot water, the "shower", and learned the third of the joys of indoor plumbing. "Oh, gods, that is good," he groaned to himself and made a mental note to ask someone to diagram how it worked so he could show de Rolo when they were back in Whitestone.
Fortunately, he'd poured himself out and into a convenient "towel" that he'd wound around his waist when he heard the knock at the door. Sighing, he grabbed his holy symbol, and then, rolling his eyes -- of course she'd run the entire way there and back -- he went to the door and opened it--not to the girl.
"Who the fuck are you?"
Okay, so the guy wasn't as bleeding to death as the drips in the hallway had suggested, but this was rapidly turning into a full Dresden here. From the look of the bruising, Spear Guy was going to be very lucky if he didn't have a kidney or liver rupture, and that shoulder was going to swell past usability any minute. Which didn't count the general scrapage and cut-ness, or the scars on his arm, where it looked like... "Holy shit, did you lose an argument with a woodchipper?"
Butters shook his head.
"Never mind. Waldo Butters. Caroline in the lobby sort of shoved me your way." He held up his bag for evidence. "I have medical supplies and training, and you look like you could use some."
Honest to fuck. Kash dragged a hand over his face, while still shaking his head. Everyone in this entire damned inn had some kind of healer complex. It was like they'd never gone to a temple for healing.
Which, considering the "shower" and the toilet and the lights (which he'd discovered entirely by accident, and, no, they wouldn't be talking about how he'd all but fallen on his ass when the first one came on), actually made sense.
Sighing, he answered the guy, "No. I won an argument with two fire giants," and then closed his fingers around the symbol, lay his other hand against the bruise on his ribs and spoke the words of the spell. A golden glow rose around his splayed fingers, outlined by a strange and unsettling black light that appeared to fight with it. The tension between the two subsided only when the light faded away.
Point to remember: curing wounds = good.
His eyes rolled back in his head at the well-being, strength, and lack of pain washing over him, and he had to steady himself with a hand against the wall. When he pulled his hand away to do so, the bruising, cuts and scrapes on his abdomen was gone and his shoulder looked considerably better.
Butters blinked. Then blinked again. "Oh, you're a wizard!" he said. "No wonder you weren't in a hurry to get that looked at. Wow, I have a friend who would make all our lives so much less complicated if he knew how to do that trick. I didn't know healing mojo worked that fast."
"Cleric," Kash corrected in a grunt that only sounded human on account of the sudden lack of pain. His brain scrambled too hard trying to catch up with the healing to be really disdainful. Not that he generally was. He tended to prefer wizards to sorcerers. At least they had the intelligence to understand the dangers of fucking around with the raw force of the Weave. Not that it stopped them from doing it. "And it's not mojo. It's magic."
Butters nodded. "Okay, cleric. Where I'm from wizard is sort of the catchall for anyone who can use magic--and knows what they're doing with it, anyway, there are club rules and everything--but your religion is your business, man. And mojo is just... well, the people I talk to about magic most often tend toward the informal, so." He squinted at what were definitely not anymore life-threatening injuries. "God, that's cool. So much handier than setting buildings on fire." Butters loved Harry Dresden like a brother, or did when the guy wasn't being the creepy reanimated Knight of Winter lurking alone on his evil haunted island lair, but as the person most often responsible for gluing the big idiot back together, Butters wanted nothing so much at this moment as to drag him in front of Spear Guy for lessons.
Since this Butters guy didn't seem likely to stop talking any time soon, and Kash wasn't dressed to leave his room, he sat down on the couch instead. And made sure that nothing about his face could be read as saying c'mon in and stay for awhile. "Don't knock setting things on fire." He wouldn't be here without it. "Nothing else kills green dungeon slime."
"I have never been in a position to need to kill green dungeon slime, so I'll take your word for it. I hate to think what happens in the drains where I work, though." Butters blinked and looked around at the doorway he was still standing in, with the sudden distinct feeling of Andi rolling her eyes at him. "You, uh, you probably want to put some pants on. I can go."
"The only pants I have to put on are torn and bloodstained. I'll be taking advantage of the towels for awhile," Kash replied with a sudden burst of exhaustedly wry amusement. He ran a hand over his face and shook his head. "Thanks. For coming down here to check on me. Unnecessary, but good to know there's an apothecary in the house."
"Oh, there's a gift shop. I mean, technically it's a shop but you don't really have to pay. I'm not going to recommend it for fashion but you can probably get a clean pair of pants if you're not picky about what they look like." Butters grinned sheepishly. "I think technically I'd be more of a surgeon, as far as that goes, except surgeons where I come from all think they're God and anyway I mostly work on dead people. I'm glad you're not going to die. I'm the creepy hermit in 149, if you want directions to the shop or it turns out your mojo didn't work all the way." Butters turned to go, possibly a bit more abruptly than warranted, but he'd just realized that Spear Guy--and way to not ever actually get the man's name, Butters--might not be as used to conversations mostly-naked as someone whose in-person social circle consisted primarily of werewolves, and didn't want to prolong the awkward. More than he had, anyway.
River had kept the key because she'd been planning on coming back, and because she didn't exactly have any real sense of personal space, but the door was open when she approached - but not unblocked as a man different than the one she'd left there turned to exit.
"You are obstructing my path," she told him, because of course she was standing about six inches away when he turned to leave. Her arms were full of all manner of supplies, many of them a shocking shade of pink, but that could not be helped.
"Sorry, just leaving," Butters said, nearly on autopilot, and stepped out of the barefoot girl's way. "Oh hey," he said, cataloging her armful, "that's a decent scrounge for first aid supplies. I don't think he needs any now, though, he fixed himself with some very nifty magic."
"I can use them." Not now, but you never knew when you'd be tapped out and injured. "What did you find?" he asked, barely giving the Butters character another thought. He wasn't planning on being stuck here long enough to need another pair of pants. And if he needed a surgeon, things had gone very very very wrong.
River surveyed the little man and cataloged him as amiable and helpful, that didn't make magic real but she didn't tell him it didn't exist. Instead she half smiled at the compliment to her arm load of supplies and then thrust a jar at Kash.
"Liniment." A pause. "For horses." Another pause. "I do not believe you will notice a difference."
Though he smelled less like a horse now that he had bathed. Also in her arms was a change of clothes, a carton of milk, a toothbrush and other sundries from the shop and a paper bag of cookies from the woman at the bakery.
Kash took the bottle, stared at the top a second, and then made a tight, pinched face of frustration. "How do you get the stopper out?"
"You twist." She laid down the other items on a convenient table and then offered a hand in case twisting was too difficult for him. You never knew. She narrowed her eyes, assessing.
"Twist?" Although he looked confused as fuck, he didn't offer the bottle to his hand. He could figure this out. It took him a moment to see that the place where the top separate from the bottle was the place the strange material changed from the amber color of the bottom to the black of the top was where the two diverged. After that it took only another few seconds to twist off the black part, and identify the grooves as the same sort of threading you saw in mechanisms some times.
"It's not a stopper," he said of the black part in his hand. "What is it called?" Kash wasn't Percy to need to know everything. He just hated to be wrong.
"That is a lid," she told him matter-of-factly. "It is a successor of the stopper. You are not incorrect, just not educated as to modern technology."
Was a lid technology? She shrugged, it didn't matter. She assessed him again and offered the clothes she had scavenged from the shop; the jogging pants at least were grey (albeit with the name of the inn emblazoned on the leg), the top on the other hand...
"The colors available are limited but I believe these will fit you."
"Is this what people actually wear in this world?" he asked, trying not to sound plaintive as he took the garments from her. There had to be something with a little more...structure? But the fabric between his fingers was undeniably soft. Softer than any fabric he'd ever felt before, including silk. It would be comfortable, at least.
"What's the rest of that?" He gestured to the other items she'd brought with her.
"Armor is not required," she told him seriously, though with her deadpan face it may come across as sarcastic. "There are a number of toiletry items that you may need, as well as sustenance."
She proffered the bag of cookies and bottle of milk.
"Less nutritious than other options, but their flavor is superior."
"Toilet tree? I thought that was what the chair in there--" He hitched a thumb back toward the room with the "shower". "Was for," he managed to get out before his stomach rumbled loudly to inform him he was hungry.
"We'll see about the armor, but whatever those are, if they're food, I'll take them." The white stuff in the bottle looked like milk. He couldn't remember the last time he'd drank some, but the healers he'd learned from thought well of it. "What are they?" he asked as he drew out a flat biscuit with brown spots in it. It smelled good, so he didn't wait for an answer to bite into it.
She didn't roll her eyes, but her face clearly showed what she thought of his intelligence. He was maybe one step above Simon. Seriously.
"They are cookies. The woman who made them assured me they would be.. welcoming."
Butter burst over his tongue, sugar, and flour and something sweet and velvety. He groaned appreciatively and grabbed another before he'd come near to finishing the first. "They're good." And then he was silent almost a full minute while he chowed them down.
Then he began pawing through the things she'd brought. Soap was obvious. The word shampoo was unfamiliar, but between "hair" and the smell, he figured out it was soap for the hair. "Conditioner" was mystifying, but it also said "hair," so he worked out it was similar. "Toothpaste?" he said aloud and then opened the twist-off (without hesitation this time). It smelled minty and tasted it too. For cleaning the teeth, gums and breath, he decided.
"But what's this?" he asked, puzzled, holding up a little brush.
"A brush for your teeth. You apply the paste to the bristles, wet the head and brush your teeth."
There was a pause as she mimed the motion.
"Do not forget to do the back. Sugar can cause decay." And there was plenty in the cookies. She reached into the bag and obtained one for herself.
"Huh," Kash said about the brush. Not the decay. He knew that. "We don't have these where I'm from." They had other ways of cleaning their teeth, but this was a clever idea. When he got back, he'd see about getting them made. It would spare the elderly a lot of pain.
"It is a method of long standing, and it works sufficiently well when used correctly to reduce decay." She ate her cookie and perched on a chair like a bird on a wire, as though she could take flight at any moment but also strangely as though waiting for him to tell her to go.
She would stay of course, until he was adequately settled and had his questions answered.
"We have something similar, but the angles are different." And less useful. But now was hardly the moment to be jawing about the finer details of mouth health.
"Do I pay you for these items or the man at the desk?" Kash asked, glancing about for the coin purse that--ah, there. He had plenty of gold. Enough for a stay far longer than he intended.
"There is no payment. We are provided with the necessities; room, board." She let her hair fall forward, this was the part she didn't care for. The being stuck part.
"We cannot leave, but we have not been harmed." yet, she still worried about that.
Kash held his opinion of "necessities" and "cannot," instead focusing on the girl, on River, to ask, "How long have you been here?" Although the healer in him wanted to know if she'd been off this way when she arrived or if it was a consequence of her captivity. The marks of trauma in her movements and her eyes were as obvious to him as a knife wound would be.
"Time is a construct. Relative to location." So how could she describe in a way he was sure to understand? A day, if that was what he called them, may be far longer or shorter than he was used to. Still after a brief pause she gave an answer.
"One hundred and thirty five solar cycles." Another pause. "I arrived... broken."
Solar cycles. Probably days. A significant number of them, too. After she left, he'd worry over that. It was the other thing that caught his attention. His gaze narrowed, healer's gaze sweeping over her physical form. "Broken how?" And had she heard his thought or just guessed at it?
"Went in," her hands flailed slightly, uncoordinated like birds taking flight before a purposeful movement a finger drilling in to her temple was obvious. "Took bits."
"Why?" Kash could hardly contain his horror at the thought. How incredibly barbaric.
"They did not share their reasons," she frowned, and pressed her hands to her eyes before letting them flutter again. "And I did not ask."
She knew of course. She'd learned what they wanted soon enough. From what they'd trained her to do. From their minds.
"Wanted a weapon. Not a girl."
That, Kash understood. A life for rent, belonging to those who made her what she was. Not so different from him being Vesh's balance with no say in the matter. "At least you got away." Since she clearly had. "Is there pain?" That he could help with.
"Simon came." Simon would come for her now, she had no doubt, even if he was slow about it. He'd told her she'd been a dummy to think he wouldn't and she wouldn't doubt him again.
"People feel and think all the time, it is.. tiring. Not painful." She had headaches, sometimes, but none of it was as bad as what had been done to her.
Kash sorted out her words to mean that she was like a mystic who couldn't stop being a telepath. He didn't like hearing himself think or dealing with what people said out loud. Hearing what they didn't say would suck.
He ran through his spells and decided a restoration would probably help more than a healing spell. "If you're tired now, I can help some."
She shrank away, for all that she knew he meant well, she doesn't exactly trust people trying to help who aren't Simon.
"Don't make me sleep again."
"Sleep? No. Just...refresh." Since she was apparently using telepathy, he thought about the Lesser Restoration and how it felt clean and refreshing like a bath in a mountain spring and a pool of sunlight with a nice breeze.
She relaxed, his image of what he was offering was almost as good as it would probably be itself.
"Okay," she said finally, though she was supposed to be helping him. "Do not make me hurt you."
Kash nodded once, curled his fingers (as always) reluctantly around the holy symbol he wore, stretched out his other hand placed it very lightly on the back of her hand, and then spoke the words of the spell as quietly as he could without rendering it ineffective.
It tingled. Like effervescent water and bubbles on her skin. It really was refreshing, even with all the noise in her head. But the effect was less important than another question.
"If you do not like doing it, why do you?" She'd caught the reluctance before the bubbles.
He scowled mildly, but there was no point in being angry for her being her. "It's the goddess who originally gave me the power I don't like."
"Didn't ask if you wanted what they were giving you." Hard to tell if she meant him, or herself. And maybe she didn't know either. "Wanted you to be what they needed. No choice."
"Yes." And although this day had been fucked up on more levels than he knew existed, that made perfect sense. "Exactly."
She considered that for a moment, considered him, and then offered the bag of cookies.
Butters hadn't quite believed the few people he'd talked to in the months he'd been at the hotel about what a force of nature Caroline was, but for somebody who looked like a high school cheerleader she did disappointed-face nearly as well as his mother.
Not that she'd really needed to. Butters wasn't sure what kind of magic interdimensional kidnapper brought this many people to a hotel and included no actual doctors, but if he was really all they had he'd just have to step up, finally. Starting with Spear Guy. 197, she'd said. Just down the hall. He hoped Spear Guy's bathroom wasn't as pink as his was. Butters knocked.
As soon as he'd gotten rid of the girl--really, she'd gotten rid of herself, but who was counting?--Kash stripped down and used the ingenious indoor toilet." His body ached for a soak, but it only took feeling the heated water against his palm to convince him this would do. In theory, he could heal himself first, but he still felt it might be best not to expend what little energy he had on them until after he'd had a sit down to cast a few rituals and try a Sending to Z.
So instead, he stepped into the closet-box with the hot water, the "shower", and learned the third of the joys of indoor plumbing. "Oh, gods, that is good," he groaned to himself and made a mental note to ask someone to diagram how it worked so he could show de Rolo when they were back in Whitestone.
Fortunately, he'd poured himself out and into a convenient "towel" that he'd wound around his waist when he heard the knock at the door. Sighing, he grabbed his holy symbol, and then, rolling his eyes -- of course she'd run the entire way there and back -- he went to the door and opened it--not to the girl.
"Who the fuck are you?"
Okay, so the guy wasn't as bleeding to death as the drips in the hallway had suggested, but this was rapidly turning into a full Dresden here. From the look of the bruising, Spear Guy was going to be very lucky if he didn't have a kidney or liver rupture, and that shoulder was going to swell past usability any minute. Which didn't count the general scrapage and cut-ness, or the scars on his arm, where it looked like... "Holy shit, did you lose an argument with a woodchipper?"
Butters shook his head.
"Never mind. Waldo Butters. Caroline in the lobby sort of shoved me your way." He held up his bag for evidence. "I have medical supplies and training, and you look like you could use some."
Honest to fuck. Kash dragged a hand over his face, while still shaking his head. Everyone in this entire damned inn had some kind of healer complex. It was like they'd never gone to a temple for healing.
Which, considering the "shower" and the toilet and the lights (which he'd discovered entirely by accident, and, no, they wouldn't be talking about how he'd all but fallen on his ass when the first one came on), actually made sense.
Sighing, he answered the guy, "No. I won an argument with two fire giants," and then closed his fingers around the symbol, lay his other hand against the bruise on his ribs and spoke the words of the spell. A golden glow rose around his splayed fingers, outlined by a strange and unsettling black light that appeared to fight with it. The tension between the two subsided only when the light faded away.
Point to remember: curing wounds = good.
His eyes rolled back in his head at the well-being, strength, and lack of pain washing over him, and he had to steady himself with a hand against the wall. When he pulled his hand away to do so, the bruising, cuts and scrapes on his abdomen was gone and his shoulder looked considerably better.
Butters blinked. Then blinked again. "Oh, you're a wizard!" he said. "No wonder you weren't in a hurry to get that looked at. Wow, I have a friend who would make all our lives so much less complicated if he knew how to do that trick. I didn't know healing mojo worked that fast."
"Cleric," Kash corrected in a grunt that only sounded human on account of the sudden lack of pain. His brain scrambled too hard trying to catch up with the healing to be really disdainful. Not that he generally was. He tended to prefer wizards to sorcerers. At least they had the intelligence to understand the dangers of fucking around with the raw force of the Weave. Not that it stopped them from doing it. "And it's not mojo. It's magic."
Butters nodded. "Okay, cleric. Where I'm from wizard is sort of the catchall for anyone who can use magic--and knows what they're doing with it, anyway, there are club rules and everything--but your religion is your business, man. And mojo is just... well, the people I talk to about magic most often tend toward the informal, so." He squinted at what were definitely not anymore life-threatening injuries. "God, that's cool. So much handier than setting buildings on fire." Butters loved Harry Dresden like a brother, or did when the guy wasn't being the creepy reanimated Knight of Winter lurking alone on his evil haunted island lair, but as the person most often responsible for gluing the big idiot back together, Butters wanted nothing so much at this moment as to drag him in front of Spear Guy for lessons.
Since this Butters guy didn't seem likely to stop talking any time soon, and Kash wasn't dressed to leave his room, he sat down on the couch instead. And made sure that nothing about his face could be read as saying c'mon in and stay for awhile. "Don't knock setting things on fire." He wouldn't be here without it. "Nothing else kills green dungeon slime."
"I have never been in a position to need to kill green dungeon slime, so I'll take your word for it. I hate to think what happens in the drains where I work, though." Butters blinked and looked around at the doorway he was still standing in, with the sudden distinct feeling of Andi rolling her eyes at him. "You, uh, you probably want to put some pants on. I can go."
"The only pants I have to put on are torn and bloodstained. I'll be taking advantage of the towels for awhile," Kash replied with a sudden burst of exhaustedly wry amusement. He ran a hand over his face and shook his head. "Thanks. For coming down here to check on me. Unnecessary, but good to know there's an apothecary in the house."
"Oh, there's a gift shop. I mean, technically it's a shop but you don't really have to pay. I'm not going to recommend it for fashion but you can probably get a clean pair of pants if you're not picky about what they look like." Butters grinned sheepishly. "I think technically I'd be more of a surgeon, as far as that goes, except surgeons where I come from all think they're God and anyway I mostly work on dead people. I'm glad you're not going to die. I'm the creepy hermit in 149, if you want directions to the shop or it turns out your mojo didn't work all the way." Butters turned to go, possibly a bit more abruptly than warranted, but he'd just realized that Spear Guy--and way to not ever actually get the man's name, Butters--might not be as used to conversations mostly-naked as someone whose in-person social circle consisted primarily of werewolves, and didn't want to prolong the awkward. More than he had, anyway.
River had kept the key because she'd been planning on coming back, and because she didn't exactly have any real sense of personal space, but the door was open when she approached - but not unblocked as a man different than the one she'd left there turned to exit.
"You are obstructing my path," she told him, because of course she was standing about six inches away when he turned to leave. Her arms were full of all manner of supplies, many of them a shocking shade of pink, but that could not be helped.
"Sorry, just leaving," Butters said, nearly on autopilot, and stepped out of the barefoot girl's way. "Oh hey," he said, cataloging her armful, "that's a decent scrounge for first aid supplies. I don't think he needs any now, though, he fixed himself with some very nifty magic."
"I can use them." Not now, but you never knew when you'd be tapped out and injured. "What did you find?" he asked, barely giving the Butters character another thought. He wasn't planning on being stuck here long enough to need another pair of pants. And if he needed a surgeon, things had gone very very very wrong.
River surveyed the little man and cataloged him as amiable and helpful, that didn't make magic real but she didn't tell him it didn't exist. Instead she half smiled at the compliment to her arm load of supplies and then thrust a jar at Kash.
"Liniment." A pause. "For horses." Another pause. "I do not believe you will notice a difference."
Though he smelled less like a horse now that he had bathed. Also in her arms was a change of clothes, a carton of milk, a toothbrush and other sundries from the shop and a paper bag of cookies from the woman at the bakery.
Kash took the bottle, stared at the top a second, and then made a tight, pinched face of frustration. "How do you get the stopper out?"
"You twist." She laid down the other items on a convenient table and then offered a hand in case twisting was too difficult for him. You never knew. She narrowed her eyes, assessing.
"Twist?" Although he looked confused as fuck, he didn't offer the bottle to his hand. He could figure this out. It took him a moment to see that the place where the top separate from the bottle was the place the strange material changed from the amber color of the bottom to the black of the top was where the two diverged. After that it took only another few seconds to twist off the black part, and identify the grooves as the same sort of threading you saw in mechanisms some times.
"It's not a stopper," he said of the black part in his hand. "What is it called?" Kash wasn't Percy to need to know everything. He just hated to be wrong.
"That is a lid," she told him matter-of-factly. "It is a successor of the stopper. You are not incorrect, just not educated as to modern technology."
Was a lid technology? She shrugged, it didn't matter. She assessed him again and offered the clothes she had scavenged from the shop; the jogging pants at least were grey (albeit with the name of the inn emblazoned on the leg), the top on the other hand...
"The colors available are limited but I believe these will fit you."
"Is this what people actually wear in this world?" he asked, trying not to sound plaintive as he took the garments from her. There had to be something with a little more...structure? But the fabric between his fingers was undeniably soft. Softer than any fabric he'd ever felt before, including silk. It would be comfortable, at least.
"What's the rest of that?" He gestured to the other items she'd brought with her.
"Armor is not required," she told him seriously, though with her deadpan face it may come across as sarcastic. "There are a number of toiletry items that you may need, as well as sustenance."
She proffered the bag of cookies and bottle of milk.
"Less nutritious than other options, but their flavor is superior."
"Toilet tree? I thought that was what the chair in there--" He hitched a thumb back toward the room with the "shower". "Was for," he managed to get out before his stomach rumbled loudly to inform him he was hungry.
"We'll see about the armor, but whatever those are, if they're food, I'll take them." The white stuff in the bottle looked like milk. He couldn't remember the last time he'd drank some, but the healers he'd learned from thought well of it. "What are they?" he asked as he drew out a flat biscuit with brown spots in it. It smelled good, so he didn't wait for an answer to bite into it.
She didn't roll her eyes, but her face clearly showed what she thought of his intelligence. He was maybe one step above Simon. Seriously.
"They are cookies. The woman who made them assured me they would be.. welcoming."
Butter burst over his tongue, sugar, and flour and something sweet and velvety. He groaned appreciatively and grabbed another before he'd come near to finishing the first. "They're good." And then he was silent almost a full minute while he chowed them down.
Then he began pawing through the things she'd brought. Soap was obvious. The word shampoo was unfamiliar, but between "hair" and the smell, he figured out it was soap for the hair. "Conditioner" was mystifying, but it also said "hair," so he worked out it was similar. "Toothpaste?" he said aloud and then opened the twist-off (without hesitation this time). It smelled minty and tasted it too. For cleaning the teeth, gums and breath, he decided.
"But what's this?" he asked, puzzled, holding up a little brush.
"A brush for your teeth. You apply the paste to the bristles, wet the head and brush your teeth."
There was a pause as she mimed the motion.
"Do not forget to do the back. Sugar can cause decay." And there was plenty in the cookies. She reached into the bag and obtained one for herself.
"Huh," Kash said about the brush. Not the decay. He knew that. "We don't have these where I'm from." They had other ways of cleaning their teeth, but this was a clever idea. When he got back, he'd see about getting them made. It would spare the elderly a lot of pain.
"It is a method of long standing, and it works sufficiently well when used correctly to reduce decay." She ate her cookie and perched on a chair like a bird on a wire, as though she could take flight at any moment but also strangely as though waiting for him to tell her to go.
She would stay of course, until he was adequately settled and had his questions answered.
"We have something similar, but the angles are different." And less useful. But now was hardly the moment to be jawing about the finer details of mouth health.
"Do I pay you for these items or the man at the desk?" Kash asked, glancing about for the coin purse that--ah, there. He had plenty of gold. Enough for a stay far longer than he intended.
"There is no payment. We are provided with the necessities; room, board." She let her hair fall forward, this was the part she didn't care for. The being stuck part.
"We cannot leave, but we have not been harmed." yet, she still worried about that.
Kash held his opinion of "necessities" and "cannot," instead focusing on the girl, on River, to ask, "How long have you been here?" Although the healer in him wanted to know if she'd been off this way when she arrived or if it was a consequence of her captivity. The marks of trauma in her movements and her eyes were as obvious to him as a knife wound would be.
"Time is a construct. Relative to location." So how could she describe in a way he was sure to understand? A day, if that was what he called them, may be far longer or shorter than he was used to. Still after a brief pause she gave an answer.
"One hundred and thirty five solar cycles." Another pause. "I arrived... broken."
Solar cycles. Probably days. A significant number of them, too. After she left, he'd worry over that. It was the other thing that caught his attention. His gaze narrowed, healer's gaze sweeping over her physical form. "Broken how?" And had she heard his thought or just guessed at it?
"Went in," her hands flailed slightly, uncoordinated like birds taking flight before a purposeful movement a finger drilling in to her temple was obvious. "Took bits."
"Why?" Kash could hardly contain his horror at the thought. How incredibly barbaric.
"They did not share their reasons," she frowned, and pressed her hands to her eyes before letting them flutter again. "And I did not ask."
She knew of course. She'd learned what they wanted soon enough. From what they'd trained her to do. From their minds.
"Wanted a weapon. Not a girl."
That, Kash understood. A life for rent, belonging to those who made her what she was. Not so different from him being Vesh's balance with no say in the matter. "At least you got away." Since she clearly had. "Is there pain?" That he could help with.
"Simon came." Simon would come for her now, she had no doubt, even if he was slow about it. He'd told her she'd been a dummy to think he wouldn't and she wouldn't doubt him again.
"People feel and think all the time, it is.. tiring. Not painful." She had headaches, sometimes, but none of it was as bad as what had been done to her.
Kash sorted out her words to mean that she was like a mystic who couldn't stop being a telepath. He didn't like hearing himself think or dealing with what people said out loud. Hearing what they didn't say would suck.
He ran through his spells and decided a restoration would probably help more than a healing spell. "If you're tired now, I can help some."
She shrank away, for all that she knew he meant well, she doesn't exactly trust people trying to help who aren't Simon.
"Don't make me sleep again."
"Sleep? No. Just...refresh." Since she was apparently using telepathy, he thought about the Lesser Restoration and how it felt clean and refreshing like a bath in a mountain spring and a pool of sunlight with a nice breeze.
She relaxed, his image of what he was offering was almost as good as it would probably be itself.
"Okay," she said finally, though she was supposed to be helping him. "Do not make me hurt you."
Kash nodded once, curled his fingers (as always) reluctantly around the holy symbol he wore, stretched out his other hand placed it very lightly on the back of her hand, and then spoke the words of the spell as quietly as he could without rendering it ineffective.
It tingled. Like effervescent water and bubbles on her skin. It really was refreshing, even with all the noise in her head. But the effect was less important than another question.
"If you do not like doing it, why do you?" She'd caught the reluctance before the bubbles.
He scowled mildly, but there was no point in being angry for her being her. "It's the goddess who originally gave me the power I don't like."
"Didn't ask if you wanted what they were giving you." Hard to tell if she meant him, or herself. And maybe she didn't know either. "Wanted you to be what they needed. No choice."
"Yes." And although this day had been fucked up on more levels than he knew existed, that made perfect sense. "Exactly."
She considered that for a moment, considered him, and then offered the bag of cookies.
