Interlude / Synopsis

(( A recap of events not blogged because work has been eating my time and nearly my soul. As they are also old news, the whole post is OOCly done and just telling rather than showing in the interests of brevity. It’s about IC events, yes, but not ICly told. That comes next, when I get the current part of the story. ))

About 7-8 weeks ago now, Adri was out mining (as she often has). This time, though, the hazards were not the usual bandits, centaurs, or Risen. On a plateau above the southern end of Lake Bounty, collecting a bit of exposed iron, she barely felt a disturbance in the air behind her before something large pushed her over the edge, almost scooping her away, and falling toward the rocks and water below. Having been completely unprepared, she angled to try to turn her fall into a dive, aiming for deeper water as best she could. Shots rang out from above, from two different positions (and two different sizes of guns). Her armour was better than it looked, and she was mostly only bruised, but then one shot, probably technically a miss, got inside the tails of the outer coat, creasing her hip and hitting her in the back. Controlling her dive became much more difficult, as her legs were no longer responding to her will – but it was late enough in the process that she made it fists first into the lake.

Swimming in a lake with skale and barracuda in it, while bleeding, and with no use of her legs, was a trying thing. Fortunately she had her Pact-issued rebreather still, and her usual collection of weapons. After a lot of fighting off the lake’s denizens, and leaving more blood and easier pickings in her wake, she surfaced in a cavern complex, and pulled herself up onto the rocks with her arms, dragging her useless lower body along. Trying to catch her breath, she realised that her communications devices had been lost in the fighting, or perhaps even just in the first impact in the water. She started watching the local skale (and fighting more of them off or killing them when they decided she looked like lunch), trying to find patterns enough in their movements that there might be a good time to try swimming back out. It took a while, and a fair amount of eating raw skale, and trying to bandage up what she could reach of the injuries they did to her useless legs, after long enough, she found a time that worked well enough.

Without too much additional injury or fighting on the way, she made it to the shoreline as close as she could get to the roads by the southern-most bridge over the lake, and eventually got the attention of a Lionguard patrol. They weren’t sure what to do with her, but they did use her coat as a sort of stretcher to get her to a nearby waypoint, which she used to take herself to Baroness Sharo’s Kessex/Brisban border estate. It wasn’t long before Rose found her trying to pull herself up the stairs of the front portico, and from there a near army of staff was mobilised into getting her inside, and examined.

After seeing just how bad it was (multiple fractures and septic wounds in her left leg, bullet extracted from the a crushed vertebra), Rose told her, “However this turns out, know that it was worth it.” An explosion of magic around her later, Adri was shaking her head and trying to piece it all together, when she realised she could move her feet – and that she had no pain. She turned to see Rose crumpled up against the wall, and looking rather grey. She took the risk of moving, and found she could. She revived Rose (eventually, and with the help of Rose’s staff), and discovered that she wasn’t just – somehow – fully healed from her recent injuries, but that she had no scars at all any more.

A few days of recuperation for both of them, and Adri was caught up on correspondence – including the letter from Luna Lancastir dumping her, and exchanges with her friend Alyssia Dore (who had been looking for her). When she could, she looked for clues in the area where she’d been attacked, but couldn’t find anything. Later, in discussion with Rose over such things, she felt forced to promise not to go out alone like that any more, at least until the perpetrators were caught or dealt with. Given that she nearly lost Rose as the price of her own healing, she’s not arguing, even though it does make trying to find the culprits a lot trickier.

In the meanwhile, Alyssia Dore has taken it upon herself to investigate on her friend’s behalf.