Steel Trim
patreon
Engineering, Magic, and Kitsune: Ch. 2
🕑 Added 2024-11-19 17:05:50 +0000 UTCJohn froze when he saw her imposing figure through the open gate, towering over him with a malicious-looking toothy grin. The angle before made it hard to notice, but she must have had a foot and a half, or maybe even two, on him, and the kitsune was so close she could reach out and touch him even without lunging. His attacker would already be upon him by the time he could bring his gauntlet up to defend himself, and his muscles tensed, prepared to fight for his life. He still had a trick or two up his sleeve—
The towering fox stepped through the gate, giving him another shallow bow as she did, closing the door behind herself and hefting the bar back into place with no further prompting on his part.
His heart thundered in his chest as he let go of a breath he didn't know he was holding. Right. Everything was fine. He was just helping an unusual traveller who was actually willing to talk to him, and he got paranoid. That's it. He had already decided to afford her a bare minimum of trust and stood by that choice, no matter what demons his hyperactive mind might conjure.
He shook himself out of his stupor and gestured for her to follow him as he turned to walk away, ignoring an urge to constantly look over his shoulder at her giant figure, looming over him as she trailed a few respectful paces behind, almost silent as a whisper on the worn cobbled path. Strange. He had heard her from rather far away on the gravel outside, right? A frown crept onto his face. Sure, it was a different material, but even accounting for that, it was incongruous. Was that her way of announcing herself to the expected defenders of this place so she wasn't shot?
John led Yuki to the secondary warehouse and slid the door open to let her go first, the kitsune stooping low to fit through, carefully drawing her fanning tails inward so as not to brush him or catch on the frame. Scanning the room, the attentive fox took in the myriad sturdy shelves built over the grooves where low beds used to lie. Boxes, pots, boxes, bags, and more boxes lined each shelf, interspersed with sealed pots of various supplies and reagents, with a wooden sign written in English on each subsection.
Without a word, the man closed the door behind himself as he entered and strode to the third shelf on the right, grabbed a small sealed pot from the first tier, another from the third, and one last large cooking pot from the fourth before heading to the tap in the far corner. He filled the pot with water, grabbed some firewood and kindling from the shelf next to it, and tossed the fuel into the nearby fire pit. Lighting it with a quick point and gesture, he realized his error far too late. His eyes snapped to Yuki, but the kitsune wasn't looking at him.
Her gaze was thoroughly fixed on the faucet, staring as if she were trying to burn a hole through it. Slowly, haltingly, she walked over to it as if it would get up and run away like a skittish cat. She crouched down, put a hand underneath, and opened the faucet, slightly jerking as the cool water poured down onto the black pads of her palm and down the drain. She turned it back off, then on, her brow furrowing before cupping her hands to gather some and take a large drink.
"I suppose you weren't expecting a tap?" he hoarsely inquired, even though he felt stupid for asking like he expected an answer a moment later. Still, Yuki had surely seen this before, even if indoor plumbing in the modern sense wasn't present in this land. It was not hard to rig up with a decent well; some aqua-aligned enchantment work for pumping, a sand filter to deal with most of the contaminants and some careful application of a bit of raw entropy-aligned magic to kill any leftover bacteria. All things considered, it was probably clean enough to use for wound cleaning without boiling it, but he wasn't risking it.
She hesitantly tore her gaze away from the tap back to him, giving him an ear flick that he couldn't even begin to decipher with a curious glint in her eye. Grabbing another sheet of paper, he wrote, "Please lie down. I want to tend your injury now," before drawing a picture of her lying on the ground and elevating her leg. It was a very, very poor drawing, admittedly. He blamed nerves.
Mischief flashed across the kitsune's expression, and she opened her mouth to respond before snapping her jaws shut with a small click, annoyance taking its place. With a quiet huff, she grabbed one of the spare bed rolls, lying on her back and stuffing it under her injured leg.
John mused that it was strange how much she trusted him as he washed his hands. Perhaps the damage affected her more than it seemed, and she didn't have a choice, or even now, she might be confident in her ability to defend herself should he try something. A quick glance into those golden eyes revealed no hint as he settled by her side. Maybe the rules of hospitality were magically enforced in this land, and he had seen no mention for the same reason none would note that gravity made things go down.
Regardless of the cause, it made it easier for him to do his duty.
John shivered at the sight as she pulled the edge of her kimono back, the sickly sound of half-stuck fabric pulling away from the wound and the smell of old, half-dried blood sending a chill up his spine. It was even worse close-up. It didn't look infected, bizarrely, but the whole area pulsed dull red beneath thick layers of dried blood around the edges, the strips of cloth covering the site long since reached capacity and bled through. He popped open the first pot, withdrawing a pair of tweezers, various strips of fabric, and some alcohol for cleaning up outside the wound. It was mighty convenient that low-level bursts of unfocused entropy magic worked just as well for sterilizing sealed containers as for water.
It was too big to stitch, so he left the needle and thread in the container and hesitantly unwrapped the bandage slowly and carefully to prevent the cut from bleeding anew.
Again, as he unpacked the thoroughly used gauze, he reflected that she should have been dead. The wound was several inches deep and wide, just short of likely hitting bone. He was no doctor, but he was sure there should have been an artery here that led to her bleeding out in minutes at most, and even if by some miracle it stopped bleeding, everything below this point should have been dead by lack of blood flow, never mind be something she could walk on. Yet still, the great rend carved into her form wasn't bleeding.
Below the now-removed gauze, stones, dirt, and even a shard of copper were left behind, half pressed into the exposed flesh. He cringed, looking over to the kitsune, but she seemed unbothered. No, her golden, slitted eyes were firmly locked on his hands, watching in what appeared to be fascination without a hint of distress even as she watched him grab the tweezers and reach into the tear.
It had to be some sort of innate magic keeping her alive; there was no other explanation.
He wouldn't be surprised if this wound care was all self-done, too, with how little she seemed to care for paltry things like debilitating pain. He reached in and started pulling debris piece by piece from the site, hands steadied to avoid scraping the sensitive flesh with the steel tweezers. It all came out quickly. Easily. Even the pieces of stone embedded in her flesh were trivial to free with minimal effort, even if some spots started to bleed surprisingly lightly once the debris was removed.
John supposed it was all part of the natural healing process, but this felt too easy. John knew he shouldn't be thinking something like that when he was ostensibly saving a life, but he couldn't shake the feeling that this should feel like a desperate struggle to prevent her from bleeding out instead of like cleaning out a scrape.
He removed the now-boiling water from the stove and left it to cool for a few minutes while he cleaned up all of the larger pieces, circling back around once he finished, and it cooled down to about lukewarm. Slowly, he poured the pot over the wound, ignoring the kitsune's complete and utter lack of reaction aside from a slight twitch, and very gently used a cloth to clean any remaining dirt from the injury, using a corner he soaked in alcohol to clean up the dried blood left around it and down Yuki's leg. Once satisfied, John grabbed the second jar, unsealing his secret weapon.
It felt like gel in his hands, but it was almost entirely water, other than a pea-sized arcane focus embedded in its core that kept it unnaturally viscous and the concentrate of a herb that local books described as having potent regenerative factors. After that incident where a monster that looked terribly like moss until one stepped on it took a chunk out of his leg, he could certainly vouch for it. Sure, he had never tested it on a kitsune, but it was a far better option than just packing this with mundane gauze and hoping for the best, even given her unnatural constitution.
He gently poured the gel into the gouge to her naked interest, the extra turning into naught but mundane water once he pinched it off with his fingers. Doctors would kill for this stuff back home; whichever companies made hydrogel dressing could eat their hearts out. Once he finished wrapping it up nicely with the extra, thin cloth strips used as bandages, he scooted back, and the kitsune rolled her kimono back down.
John took a deep breath to center himself, jolting out of it when Yuki quietly cleared her throat. He snapped to look up at her and saw she was pointing at the paper he had written on before. Nodding, he got up and grabbed a spare set of writing implements he had in the store room before handing it over along with a few sheets of paper. The kitsune quickly wrote a short message before turning it over to face him.
"What was that medicine?" it read in a smooth, clean script with nary a flaw.
Now, that was an annoying question; his vocabulary was far too limited to do it justice, even without answering questions he'd prefer not to. "It is half solid water combined with the extra fiery shrubby sophora root," he responded, slightly annoyed that he didn't know how to indicate that it was a concentrate. Would it be the same word modified by another character or entirely different?
A mild frown creased her features, and she wrote, "Do you mean," followed by a new series of characters he didn't understand. He merely pointed at the unfamiliar string, shaking his head.
"I only understand 'do you mean'."
She drew a plant entirely different from what grew in his garden. Shaking his head once more, he sketched a rough image of the actual herb that went into it, making sure to add an arrow pointing to the many tiny flowers along the long stem and labelling them red.
She curiously tilted her head, adding, "Isn't that medicine weak?" No, it was more like, "Is that not weak medicine?" That was it, more formal.
"No. The roots aren't medicine. The roots have medicine. I took medicine out of many roots and put it together." And wasn't that a pain and a half? Thankfully, it boiled off at a pretty low temperature, so if you crushed it into a fine powder, left it in water for a while in a sealed, clean container, and distilled it a few times a week later, you got something valuable.
At that, she perked, her ears standing tall and her muscles subtly tensing. She quickly scribbled, "How did you deal with the poison? There's less than the medicine, but too much can hurt."
"The poison is another thing in the roots. They don't boil well," John replied, sure that sharing at least this tidbit wouldn't hurt: "The medicine boils off before water and toxins." He sketched a quick drawing of his distilling setup below, omitting the magical heat source that made it consistent enough, and showed it to her. "You capture the boiled-off medicine and boil it more, just in case."
Confusion crossed her brow as she slipped deep into thought, tension disappearing from her muscles as she settled back down. No reply was forthcoming as she stared off. "I will be back," John wrote before standing up and walking out of the room, heading back to the main building and, more importantly, the kitchen, where he prepared a dinner of thinly sliced roast duck and steamed veggies with some ingredients from the icebox.
Still, his thoughts couldn't stop swirling, even as he worked. Why did Yuki come here? It stuck in his brain like a thorn.
Of course, the fact that she was operating on outdated information was almost guaranteed, but that didn’t answer the question of "Why here?" Nothing he came up with made sense. Again, unless the injury affected her worse than she let on—and he was starting to doubt that with how she stared him down without a hint of worry as he worked—she could have decided to head to the nearby village once she saw this place was only manned by some strange creature.
Unless she would not be welcome there.
John frowned as he took the meal from the oven and the fried veggies off the stove. Now, that was a heady thought. He reflected as he started slicing the duck, barely paying enough attention to his work. It was true that he hadn't seen anything like her amongst the villagers before, but they were xenophobic. Was there a chance it wasn't like that everywhere? Or was her society parallel, occupying much of the same space but not overlapping, hidden in plain sight? Her silk-looking robes and the gold inlaid upon them pointed to a developed society capable of supporting mining for gold, dedicated clothiers with tools for making complex weaves, farming silkworms, and more.
Well, either that or she was some sort of disliked, distant nobility that would get torn apart down there, and, despite a lack of loyal troops, a strange monster was still a better alternative.
He sighed as he went over a thousand ways this could all go wrong, from angry mobs to pursuing monsters, different ways to mitigate some coming to mind and the others staying unanswered. Short of betraying the kitsune, the only way out he could figure was through, and the former was off the table as far as he was concerned. Perhaps he'd even get rewarded in that case.
John chuffed, shaking his head as he scooped up an extra quilt and pillow under one arm on the way out, carefully balancing a legged tray bearing plates and a mug with the other. It was no use getting hopeful before anything materialized; he might as well be happy if he was proven wrong.
The air outside was chill, and a softly cascading wall of grey rain loomed to the west, fast approaching. As the sharp scent of ozone rolled over him on the breeze, he hurried along to avoid soaking the bedding, sliding into the room with his offering… only to behold his guest not only already sitting up but meditating with crossed legs. He took a sharp breath, and the kitsune's eyes bolted open and locked onto his, tensing like she was about to bolt up before stilling. As she drifted down to behold what he brought, she smiled before lightly nodding, shifting to a kneeling position as he dropped the bedding down and placed the tray in front of her.
"My thanks," she wrote. "Your," the following few characters weren't clear to John, although he had seen them in magical maintenance guides, just not in that order, "Is very nice. Will I be staying here for the night?"
"Yes. Are your wounds fine?" John replied, perhaps a bit bluntly, "The," he paused, not sure what to call his invention outside English, "Water-gauze is flexible, but I worry about tearing."
Yuki's smile was gentle, like that of one talking to a child who just asked why you couldn't just turn the sun down in the summer if it was too hot. "I will be fine. Will you be joining me for a meal?"
Was it normal to eat with others in this land? It had been so long. He remembered eating meals back home, sharing dinners with long-lost friends in a dingy diner. The food was trash, yeah, but that wasn't the point. It was never the point. His lips pulled tight as nostalgic longing washed over him before he ruthlessly crushed it deep down.
He couldn't.
"I'm sorry, I have a few things I have to take care of with the storm coming," he lied, "I will be by to check on you later. Please have a good rest." The man set her bedding amidst a storm of roiling emotions before hurrying from the room in silence and out into the rain.
He was weak. It was genuinely pathetic that something that mundane bothered him. Five years. You'd think he'd be over it by now.
Once he installed motion detectors on the workshop and main building doors, he'd have a dinner of trail mix and jerky.
