Aliases are alternative forms of a reference. They can include actual aliases for characters, nicknames, gendered variations of the some [Classes], plural variations, and even typos.
“It was a wagon, not a cart. Lot heavier. And I didn’t know anything about it! Fals would have stopped it—most of us didn’t know anything until it happened. I found Ryoka at the [Healer]’s…the rest of the Runner’s Guild was horrified. This was the work of Persua’s friends. Not that anyone can prove it. They say it was just an accident and Ryoka tripped.”
“So? What about a healing potion? How good was that [Healer]? We have [Bone Healers] in the House of Minos well above the grade of local ones. Although even I can set a broken bone.”
“Healing potions just accelerate the body’s natural healing. But this is far too complicated for a potion to fix. Maybe a high-grade one…worth a few hundred or thousand gold pieces. But that’s out of anyone’s pay unless we were Gold-ranks or Miss Ryoka were a Courier. In situations like this, time or magic is the only solution. Either that or a high-level [Healer], and the cost is hundreds of gold too. Let alone getting to one.”
Magic. She sensed it in the cloth bindings. They’d been what—ten gold coins? More expensive than the healing potions, even. But they had magic in the stitching, or so the [Healer] had claimed. And she felt it. They were the only reason she could move about, let alone keep her leg…intact.
The [Healer] had told her it was still attached, still living flesh so long as she kept healing it with a potion, but it wasn’t about to start healing on its own. It was too badly damaged.
Ryoka put her face in her hands. Garia kept suggesting better [Healers] or treated her injuries as something that would heal given time. But Ryoka didn’t have any time left.
Medically, the answer was simple. Until the modern era, there would have been no chance any other way. And even then—her legs wouldn’t have ever been the same. Ryoka knew what had to be done. They’d told her as she sat in shock as the [Healer] poured potions on her leg and tried to save her flesh.
For a while, she’d hoped it was just her imagination. She’d bought the bandages from the [Healer], scraped together all the money she’d earned so far to buy enough healing potions to last until now, and prayed that her leg would start to heal. But each day passed with blood and pain and no relief.
Waiting, unable to do more than suffer. Clinging to hope that—what? Someone would produce a magical potion, a real one, and fix everything? Hope that the [Healer] found her and said they had some kind of idea?
That might not mean much further north with big cities like Invrisil, but it mattered here. She just wished—he could help Ryoka, but no one could, no [Healer] in any of the cities she’d visited.
“Right. About that. I know Ryoka broke a few rules recently, but she is a good runner. And we need all the Runners we can get. I hope the [Healer] can sort her out, I really do.”
