Emily resumes her studies

Closing the door behind her Emily sat down at her small desk, overflowing with medical textbooks and notes written in her own hand, with a loud exhalation. She swallowed the last mouthful of her coffee, and with the staff resting on her lap she picked up where she had left off.

Unconsciously her fingers ran lightly up and down the gnarled wood as she read, and she found herself absorbing information and understanding the material that she had struggled with for so long with an almost uncanny ease. Symptoms and contraindications and pharmacokinetics suddenly made sense on an instinctive level, and her wrist became cramped as she wrote notes at an unprecedented rate, filling pages of her notebook with information.

So absorbed was she in her new-found understanding that she almost missed the alarm that told her it was time to endure the spiteful tutelage of Locke, the university's resident clinical professor of medicine. She was halfway out the door before she noticed she was still clutching the branch she had found on the bus, stopping and placing it with unusual care on the bed before making a dash for the class.