Emily Grey, struggling medical student

For Emily, becoming a doctor was her life-long dream. A sickly child herself, she had spent more time than most in and around hospitals during her formative years, and the idea of becoming a healer, of being able to cure the sick had taken root in her imagination, and she had pursued that dream with almost feverish intensity.

The sickly young girl had grown into a short, thin young woman, with a pale complexion and washed out, mousy hair who seemed to carry an almost permanent air of tiredness with her. She had found that despite her dreams, the pressures of studying medicine weighed heavily upon her mind and body, and she had found herself falling behind in her studies.

After yet another all-night stint studying the dry, impenetrable medical text-books, she had left her student digs to get some coffee and caffeine pills to fuel her through the gruelling day ahead. Riding the bus back to campus, she was startled from her exhausted fugue by the feel of a slim metal case sliding from under the seat to bump against her heels.

Looking around, she saw no-one else on the bus that the case might belong to, and there was no name or identification that she could see on the outside. Curiosity compelled her to open the box, only to find what looked like a twisted branch, about as long as her arm. Jagged at one end as if it had been roughly snapped from the tree, the wood was almost black, covered with a soft, grey-brown bark that was oddly warm to the touch.

She took the branch from the case to inspect it further, the tired student feeling a little more awake than before, no doubt as the coffee and pills took effect. On a whim, she took the strange item with her when she got off the bus, leaving the case behind.