Third Quest: Prepare For Operation Carbuncle

[lightnovelexperiences]

1 - I wish I had a faster therapy / I'm here to mind control your needs

Deedee and her employees are busy, busy, busy as Imperial middle management and low-level officers flock to a warm bath in the face of the chill. The bathhouse stewards are absolutely pampering their subjects so they'll let slip all the gossip that's worth reporting to the higher-ups in the Corsairs, then upselling their patients on pedicures, manicures, shaves, haircuts, and massages.

And, of course, providing such comfort and sometimes medical aid to visiting Corsairs as they require. Deedee is always happy to do her reports while giving someone who badly needs it her unique healing combination of bodywork and Breathwork, of massage and magic.

She invariably starts such treatment by warming a neutral oil in her hands, and asking her patient, "Tell me where you're keeping your tension right now?"

2 - Blinding lights, thunder tremble pack / muddy hearts, beanie babies lies

If there's one thing the casualty count impressed on Deedee, it's that the fighting is only going to get harder, especially if the mad plan that's starting to form in her brain is to have any chance of success.

So she's procured a halberd and is practicing, on the beaches and in the Vault, both the magical and the martial arts - and how to use them together.

She goes through all her old techniques - the whirlwind flurries of the Nine Tail Lash, the devastating air-to-ground missile that's the Gryphon Talon Kick, the conjured cutting winds of a Gale Blast, various body reinforcement techniques. It's quite a spectacle if anyone is looking on.

She badly wants sparring partners or - after meeting with Atom and the reminder of how much about magic she doesn't know - magic tutors. Which is how she finds herself bouncing on her heels and stretching, getting ready for instruction, of one kind or another.

"Right," she asks. "What's your specialty? How will we go about this?"

3 - Wildcard

Or seek out Deedee for something else! I'm not your mom. Surprise me!

Comments

[spacetogrow]

"Right." Ilphyl isn't particularly shy about their body -- taking off their shirt shows a sleeve tattoo of steel-gray elven runes and decorations covering their left arm -- it's just a little unsettling for a woman they barely know. (Old instincts die hard, and matriarchies require different survival strategies than patriarchies.)

But they settle in to the chair. "All right. I'm ready."

[lightnovelexperiences]

"Okay, thank you. This means I can use massage oil."

Ilphyl feels Deedee's hands drape over his shoulders, gently at first, then with increasing downward pressure.

"Oh, yeah, I can tell you keep your tension here," she says. "Let me know when enough pressure is enough. Shapeshifting during the hunt caught up to you?"

[spacetogrow]

"Ah... there's good. And... yeah, I kind of have a bad idea of what my original body feels like if I push myself too much." This gets a kind of rueful grin that Deedee can't see. "Which means I don't realize if I'm tired, or moving badly."

[lightnovelexperiences]

“Both of which make things worse,” Deedee notes with a flattened rueful note. “Being out of Breath, magical energy I mean, can’t help either.”

She finds what she hopes is a trigger point under her palm. “Do you feel like you’ve got knots in your muscles anywhere around here?” she asks.

[spacetogrow]

Ilphyl tried to nod, but lying down doesn't really help with it. "Yeah, right there."

[lightnovelexperiences]

"Got it. This might hurt for a bit, but it will feel a lot better afterwards."

She finds the trigger point with her thumb and presses in hard, then puts her palm on the area and rubs in circles to 'smooth out' the pain, ending with a gentle vibration to disperse it.

She wasn't lying; there was sharp pain for a second. But the knotted sensation and the aching is gone.

[spacetogrow]

It is perhaps useful to know that Ilphyl has a muted outward reaction to pain. Deedee can probably tell that they felt that pain based on the touch, but they didn't do more than a slight intake of breath.

"Yes, that does feel better. Thank you."

[lightnovelexperiences]

“Hardly even flinched,” Deedee noted. “Please let me know if anything I do hurts or is uncomfortable - I might be able to tell, but let’s not leave it to chance, okay?”

[spacetogrow]

"Right, sorry. Old habit." Ilphyl flushed, feeling a bit caught out by this, despite knowing from the other side why a healer might need to know that something hurt.

[lightnovelexperiences]

"Stoicism: great idea in battle or hiking to camp. Bad idea after the battle in camp in the medic's tent."

She says it lightly, as she works.

"This scar here - can you feel this?" she asks, gliding her fingers over what looks distressingly like a healed bite from a dog.

[spacetogrow]

"Yeah, mostly... do I have a scar there? I can't really see it normally." That... is probably is not the correct answer.

[lightnovelexperiences]

"Iphyll, it looks like you survived being a wolf's chewtoy," Deedee says.

Definitely the wrong answer.

[spacetogrow]

"Oh, right, that," Ilphyl probably shouldn't sound that casual. "Werewolf, and I stupidly fought them with spells rather than shapeshifting. But we made it to a cleric in Waterdeep whose church owed us a favor before the next full moon, so it was fine."

They are laughing it off, but it actually was somewhat harrowing at the time. Ilphyl is comfortable in the form of animals, even predators, and the idea that this would become something beyond their control, complete with the cursed mindset that took things out of their control was not comfortable.

Thankfully, it had only been bad dreams in the two weeks it took to get back to a major city. Admittedly, Ilphyl didn't actually dream all that often, given they didn't normally sleep, so less experience with nightmares.

But they didn't generally think too much about the incident. (It's fine. They're fine.)

[lightnovelexperiences]

“…look, I can understand the idea that you're piloting a walker made of meat, believe me, especially for a shapeshifter. Hell, I was under that misapprehension for…”

Whatever Deedee was going to say about how she knows that feeling dies, strangled in her throat. How the fuck can she explain years of dismorphia before getting plugged into her Assigned Female At Character Creation body from Mundus to a stranger? How could someone who survived the Screaming Twenties in America dare admit it to a stranger?

“…just keep in mind you don’t have an eject button, okay? Sheesh, I’m not even sure why I’m getting this worried about you.”

[spacetogrow]

This does cause Ilphyl to twist a bit to try to make eye contact with Deedee. "Are you okay?" they ask. "I know why I am... the way I am, but that's not actually reassuring me about you."

The issues with Ilphyl being observant and prone to introspection is that Deedee's lecture actually did cause them to stop and think, and remind themselves to consider this more later, alone. Deedee stopping right as she was about to tell Ilphyl something about herself was interesting.

[lightnovelexperiences]

"I - don't know what brought that on," Deedee says.

She doesn't break contact but she does kind of want to step back.

Deedee takes a deep, square breath.

"Little bit of the salty healer in me, I guess. 'Don't stand in the glowing runes' was a running gag on Mundus for a reason."

[spacetogrow]

"It's fine," Ilphyl said. "Though the cause and effect might be the other way around. I chose to focus on shapeshifting rather than casting spells better, because of prior experiences in my life that mean I need to be mindful about my body."

Maybe they would have still chosen to focus on wild shape for other reasons, like loving animals or just being sick of being a dark elf on the surface -- no way to know -- but Ilphyl does realize some of the appeal was that it put their form under their own control to a far greater extent, and turned 'sometimes feeling off in their own skin' into an asset.

[lightnovelexperiences]

"Right. Makes sense," Deedee says, with a nervous laugh.

She sighs.

"Let me know if it's anything medically significant. Or... even if you want to get it off your chest, really."

It's strange, she thinks, what inspires trust.

[spacetogrow]

"Nothing medically significant," Ilphyl said quickly. After all, they ahd taken the healer lecture to heart. But they had to think about their words carefully. It wasn't like someone was writing books about this. At least not that Ilphly had found. And this was another world, and Deedee was from a third. "Where I come from, some elves have the ability to just rest and wake up as a man, or a woman, or in between. It's supposed to be a divine blessing. Dark elves don't get that blessing, but my mind kind of does that on its own. Not like, daily. But enough that sometimes I just feel a bit... disconnected. I couldn't pin down why until I started learning how to change into animals."

Well, and unpacked a crapload of internalized sexism from their birth culture. When women were the people in power, there were other reasons one might want to be female sometimes, and not exactly space to opt out of the gender binary.

But if other people are remarking that Ilphyl is acting a bit disconnected from their body, maybe time to check in to see if they need to start presenting more feminine to be a bit more comfortable. Or it could just be too much time in wild shape. Minds were complicated.

[lightnovelexperiences]

Deedee laughs.

It becomes clear after a moment that it's not at Iphyll; it's self-directed.

"God, that would have saved me so much trouble," she says. "I didn't figure my dysphoria out until my first offworld jaunt forced me to, and I had time to wonder why piloting this felt so much better than the old model from Earth."

She indicates herself... well, her chest really... with her hands.

[spacetogrow]

"Ah, well, you look very good," Ilphyl said. "Keep in mind, elves age slower than humans, so I had a lot of time before becoming a druid to be confused. Still not sure what I'm doing about it, until I get good enough to figure out shapechanging into other humanoid forms."

[lightnovelexperiences]

"I wouldn't have thought Namer forms to be more difficult than animals, but the Gods sometimes have very strange agendas to mortal minds," Deedee says. "Then again, I learned Mundane religion the hard way. Each of my spells is a vow kept to Sylphan."

She parts Iphyll on the back. "Unless I've missed something, and please let me know, I think you're good to go. How do you feel?"

[spacetogrow]

"Much better, thank you," Ilphyl said. They pull themselves up into a seated position.

\"And it probably comes from druid magic focusing so much on nature. My patron god has some rites that lets devotees change their sex, but I was still figuring things out the last time I was staying in that community, so I didn't learn them."

"Sylphan is your god?"