The Search for Vanessa Hawthorne: Triciage

Achievement Unlocked! ~ “Just a Flesh Wound”
Survive lethal blood loss.
+1 Endurance.

For the first time in hours, John opened his eyes to see the real world and drew in a fresh, wonderful breath of real air. He stared up at the person leaning over him, past Tricia Gorbachev, or Danielle Kislev, or whoever she claimed to be today… and then down at his own body.

Why am I not wearing a shirt?

He was lying in his bed, in his room, with a strange blonde girl sitting over him, and his body didn’t hurt anymore. John held up his arm. It didn’t seem broken. As far as he could tell from the way his insides felt like they were in the right places, his injuries were gone, and his health had been restored.

This was not what he’d been expecting.

He had been ready for… for what? An evil monster planning to suck the life out of him? Mrs. Wentworth threatening him with another insane quest? Erica? Tryn? Vanessa? Okay, if he was being honest, John had no idea what he’d expected. But, it wasn’t this.

“Don’t move, I haven’t finished recalibrating your ribs yet, and if one of them ends up inside of your stomach because you were flailing about, I won’t take responsibility for it,” Tricia said in her intensely focused and eerily monotonous tone. Her eyes were fixated on his chest, his bare chest.

John followed the healer’s command and laid back in his bed, taking the opportunity to assess his surroundings. It looked like he was in his bedroom. This definitely felt like his bed. He was home. Good.

But what if he wasn’t?

What if this is all another illusion?

He wouldn’t put it past Mrs. Wentworth to fuck with him like that. She was the kind of person who liked to toy with her victims. He could easily imagine her healing him up and letting him think he was safe, only to pull the rug out at the last second. He needed to make sure. John tried casting Astral Observe. It worked, which meant his magic was functioning again, and his surroundings were as mundane as they seemed. He was home.

Finally. It’s over.

“Please refrain from using transmutive spellcasting. Deciphering your Pattern is a difficult enough task without you altering it without warning.” Tricia gave him a look that was too flat to be properly stern, “It is unusually mutable and ever-shifting, almost as if it were actively resisting my attempts to decipher it. There are no other personal enchantments you have active at this time, correct?” She looked away from her work to give John what might’ve been a questioning look, but it was hard to tell, considering her expression failed to shift at all.

“Oh, sorry!” he said immediately, before thinking about her question. It was possible that Gamer’s Body or any of the other host of passive skills counted as ‘personal enchantments’... but he had no idea how or even if he could turn those off anyway. “Uh… no? I don’t think so, anyway.”

Tricia returned her attention to whatever she was doing, and John followed her gaze downward to land on a dozen holographic windows that had been opened above his naked skin. The coloration, style and incomprehensible runes immediately distinguished them from his UI, and with the way they were angled away from his sight and towards hers, John could assume they were hers. His assumption was further validated by identifying the source of the projections, a beetle-like black robotic drone that hovered silently in midair behind Tricia’s right shoulder.

As he watched motionlessly, the ‘Scythian Healer’ gestured at one monitor that was showing a diagram of a human ribcage, his… he realized. The two lowest ones on the right had been snapped near the base and visible hairline fractures littered most of the rest. He was lucky that the impact with the Mosasaurus hadn’t just collapsed the entire structure inwards. Tricia tapped on one line, and the drone dispensed a red crystal that hovered over his body and into the palm of her hand. A tiny laser shot out of it and into his body painlessly, tracing a careful pattern over his skin. From the way that one of the fractures lit up and steadily vanished, John could surmise that this was how she had repaired his damaged ribs.

It wasn’t the only gem attending to an injury. A formation of green crystals spun in a circle near his lower left abdomen, pulsating rings of energy down to his skin. Two blue ones were embedded into his forearm, though he couldn’t feel them at all. Each glowed periodically as if they were measuring the pace of something. Most likely his heart rate, he realized.

Overall, the procedure was alien to the point that none of his medical knowledge aided him in the least in deciphering what the hell she was doing to him. Days ago that would’ve thrown him into a panic, and even with all his experience, John wasn’t fully comfortable with the situation, but…

I should be dead right now. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth or whatever. I’ll worry about things when I’m not going to die to blood loss. Hey, that was oddly lucid.

John blinked. He didn’t feel any of the pain from his injuries, but at the same time he didn’t feel the intoxication of the morphine he’d taken either. His vision was clear, his thoughts cohesive and he felt awake in a way the **** had denied him. Just to be sure, he called up his Character Screen.

The **** had been purged from his system somehow.

Thank god, or Gaia, or whoever. That stuff is literal poison.

John closed his eyes and laid back as Tricia continued the procedure in silence. He’d thought the girl was socially awkward when he’d first met her, but being alone with the healer for any length of time was oppressively quiet. The painful discomfort grew continually to the point he couldn’t bear it anymore.

“Hey, so… don’t take this the wrong way. I really appreciate you saving my life and all that… but why are you here?” he stumbled over the question. “In my house, I mean.” John decided to leave accusing her at that.

If she took offense, Tricia didn’t show it. Though, considering how little emotion she did show, it was impossible to tell. She held up a hand and pointed at something behind him, and John instinctively sat up to take a look. The window into his room had been shattered inwards. So, that’s why he felt a breeze.

“You broke into my house?” he asked.

Tricia nodded, “Technically.”

“What do you mean, ‘technically’?”

In response, the healer stuck her fingers into his chest. John flinched, sending the array of green crystals scattering, and tried to grab her wrist, but his fingers passed right through her skin.

“What the…”

She withdrew her hand and, as if she hadn’t just effectively impaled him, continued her work. “I am controlling this drone remotely, and I had no other choice but to break through your window. So, technically… yes. I broke into your house.” The scattered crystals were recollected by a beam that extended from the drone and stored them back inside of it. “Please lay back down, you’re disrupting my focus.”

John did as asked. Antagonizing the person responsible for saving his life seemed like a poor course of action, especially when he still had a handful of broken bones. Still, he couldn’t stand the silence.

“So. Um,” he struggled to find something to talk about until a cold breeze reminded him of his missing top. “Where’s my...?” John gestured lamely at his exposed chest.

“I had to cut the clothing off of your body. My apologies,” she replied dispassionately.

Wait, what? That was the only set of armor I had!

The cost of the day just kept getting more and more expensive… but he’d trade his armor for being able to breathe. Besides, it’d be a good idea to invest the resources into backup gear in case his main equipment was badly damaged. It was better to learn that lesson now than in the middle of a barrier.

John sighed, “That’s ok. You were only trying to help.”

The conversation returned briefly to awkward silence until a loud beep from Tricia’s drone signaled the completion of something. She retracted the red crystal she’d been using to repair his ribcage, and John started to sit up.

“Fortunately, you’re awake now. Please remove your lower armor so I can continue on your other injuries,” Tricia’s matter of fact request for him to strip off his remaining clothes was accompanied by her staring directly at his crotch.

“Sorry, what?”

This time he could detect the hint of irritation in her response, “My systems registered moderate damage to your hip and minor fractures in your left leg.”

“No, that’s not what I mean…” John wanted to wave a hand in front of the eyes that were still staring. “Why do I have to take off my pants?”

To his surprise, there was a long pause before Tricia responded and her voice seemed almost nervous. “I require direct access to the injuries to properly repair the damage. Any other implications that could possibly be inferred from such a request would be… preposterous.”

Okay… well, that doesn’t make this any less awkward.

John unequipped his Hydra Scale Greaves while doing his best to pretend that the person sitting next to him was not one of his more attractive classmates but was instead his doctor. His clinical, robotic, emotionless and frustratingly cute doctor.

Don’t think about it… don’t think about it…

In his haste, John hadn’t just removed his pants but his boxers as well. His lower half was now completely naked and exposed to the cool air, the surgical capabilities of Tricia’s drones and the healer’s wide eyes.

“Subject appears to have experienced a form of… penile enhancement,” she muttered to nobody in particular. “No traces of chemical or magical enhancement detected to explain this change in physiology…”

As if having Tricia staring at his dick wasn’t enough, removing his pants had the effect of massively heightening John’s awareness of every little detail that he’d been conveniently ignoring before. Namely the way that Tricia’s outfit seemed to cling to her skin wherever it could, giving him a view of the curves of her moderately sized chest. There was also the way that her tiny skirt did almost nothing to hide the view of her socks and black, clingy panties… hold on.

The Ashcroft Academy uniform was nothing as sexual as the mockery of it that Tricia wore and that he was certain she hadn’t been wearing before. It didn’t come with gloves either, but her arms were covered up to the elbows in what looked almost like black latex. It was spreading further as he watched. His growing boner did not know how to react.

“Hey. Uh, Danielle? Tricia?” Using her real name seemed to snap the healer out of it. “Is that… supposed to do that?” he asked nervously.

Tricia looked at him, then down at her clothes. The skirt had completely retreated, leaving her with latex stockings that had almost reached her upper thigh and panties that had spread out from her cameltoe to cover her hips in the same material. Her red shirt had compressed to the exact shape of her cleavage, and no bra could hide the pinpoints of her nipples in the darkening fabric. He could even make out the shape of her belly button in it.

All at once, the outfit flowed back over her skin, the gloves vanishing into her fingernails, the blazer unsealing itself from her skin and the skirt growing from her waist to conceal her underwear once more.

“Please pay no mind to that. It is a… malfunction,” Tricia said, as though having ‘malfunctioning’ transforming clothes was a normal, everyday thing. It was clear she had no intention of explaining anything. At least his dick had finally decided that this was not the time for a boner by the time she turned her attention back to his crotch.

Another one of her red crystals popped out of the drone and began the task of fixing his hip fracture. Her hands kept passing mere inches away from John’s cock, and by the third time he decided it’d just be best to lie back and wait for the healer to finish her work. The situation was just too much for him to deal with right now.

Thankfully, it didn’t take ages for her to fix the last two broken bones.

When the procedure was finally over, John immediately re-equipped his boxers, then his armor and sat up so fast he nearly knocked the drone out of the air. The hologram of Tricia tried to lean out of the way but wasn’t fast enough to avoid having her face pass through his right shoulder.

“Sorry!” he tried to apologize to her, but to his surprise the healer acted as if nothing had happened. At this point, he was convinced that her stoicism could not be fully human.

Tricia stood up, her feet passing straight through his bed as the hologram recalibrated to the floor of his room. She made a show of dusting herself off, although it wasn’t quite appropriate for the situation, “My sensors detect no further damage. Provided that your body is fully working to your satisfaction, my work is complete. There is just one further matter. Protocol requires I-”

John blinked and missed the last thing she said, re-opening his eyes onto an entirely different scene instead… and an entirely different Tricia.

Accessing Event N.K.B.18: -ntr-d-ct--n

The girl standing in front of him showed signs of her first real emotion: shock. Her eyes widened just enough to notice and she unconsciously took a step back from him.

“Is… I mean, I’m… that’s what it says. I don’t really know… if that’s-” he sputtered in an attempt to salvage the situation. All he’d said was her name and her title, surely that wasn’t such a big deal?

This isn’t… no, I know what this is. Why am I seeing it?

“Do you think I’ll let this security breach vanish before me, Moira? No, he certainly needs to come with me.” Tricia did her best to seem authoritative, though the gesture looked more like a puppy standing up to the rottweiler of a Warden in front of her. “My name and place in the Opekuny should be a secret known only to your family in this town. If they’ve let it slip to someone like him of all people, then an investigation will be demanded. Otherwise, if he’s being honest… well, we’ll need to extract exactly how he learned this. The Blood will accept nothing less.”

He did not like the sound of that. “E-extract? Wait, I’m-”

This can’t be it. I’ve already made that mistake. There has to be something more.

Flash-forwarding to N.K.B.21: Thr-- -y-d

No less than five more machines attempted to poke or prod him on the way to the center of the room, where, at Tricia’s command, the floor rose in massive stone blocks to create an uncomfortable arrangement resembling tables and chairs.

This is new.

“We will conduct an interview first. Depending on how forthcoming you are with your answers, we may or may not require further…” she gestured at the machines behind them, “probing… to discover whatever truths must be uncovered before you leave. I would appreciate your cooperation.”

Flash-forwarding to N.K.B.23: V-rg-n-ty

“You expect me to engage in sexual intercourse with you… for science?”

Whoa, hold on that escalated way too quickly! Rewind, rewind!

“Fine,” Tricia sighed as she threw up her hands in resignation. The holograms drifted away from her as if blown away by her gesture of frustration, and he could only watch in wide-eyed wonder as she stood up and closed her eyes. “I just need a moment to prepare. To be clear, it was only so you would lose your virginity, correct?”

That’s the opposite of rewinding! What the hell am I supposed to do with this information?

Access Terminated

No, no! Come back and explain-

John futilely grabbed at thin air, as though it would make Planning reactivate and this time he would understand not only what it wanted him to see… but why. Predictably, nothing happened. He closed his fingers with a sigh.

Tricia gave him a look that he found surprisingly easy to read as confusion and asked, “What was that just now? The spell you just cast.” Four separate windows of her unreadable font popped up surrounding her, and Tricia momentarily consulted each one. “The formulae resembles precogniscent clairvoyance but the targeting matrix is missing entirely and my systems briefly detected a second, independent instance of your parameters. This doesn’t make sense, what did you experience?”

Great, now how the hell am I supposed to explain things. ‘Oh, not much. I just witnessed a possible future in which you help me lose my virginity.’

John pressed the fingers of his right hand against the bridge of his nose. Fuck it all. This day was just going to be a mess no matter what. I’m too tired to fight it now. “Can I at least put on a shirt first?”

“Granted.”

He dug around in his closet and grabbed the first thing that seemed appropriate, tossing it into his inventory in place of the destroyed armor, then turned around and said without hesitation, “I saw you saying you’d have sex with me.”