072: Drifted Dimension – Three
The smell of the chemicals used to sterilize the medical training equipment at her university was the first thing Rhea became aware of.
The next was the sensation of her hands and forearms under warm water.
She blinked and the scorching white that had clouded her vision fell away, and she was left staring at the lather sliding down her arms as she stood in front of a sink.
This had been her constant at one point in time, decades ago, when she was back in med school.
What was she doing back in med school?
"Come now, we haven't all day."
A voice she hadn't heard in just as long, Doctor Yamini Jagtap, one of her favourite teachers. The woman had been pushing eighty when Rhea was finishing up her doctorate, the wear and tear of age keeping her out of the operating room, but her decades of experience invaluable in a teaching environment.
There was no way she could be here now, wherever here was.
Rhea finished washing and drying her arms, turned around and asked, "What are you, and where is this?"
Dr. Jagtap looked the same as Rhea remembered her - slim, slightly hunched, her hair more grey than black in the braid she always preferred to where while in the classroom, hands clasped behind her back as her dark eyes twinkled in amusement.
"You always were a quick one," Dr. Jagtap said, her slight smile falling away as she added, "That skill will be invaluable now. There is much to learn, and little time available to us."
Dr. Jagtap began walking away, but Rhea caught up to her in two strides, the woman barely coming up to her shoulders. "I can't be here, I have people dying on my hands, and I need to get back to them."
"They'll die if you go back as you are," Dr. Jagtap told her, not unkindly, "You've already been struggling with aiding them, haven't you? Your research into psionic disentanglement was not going as you had hoped."
Shame flared through Rhea at that. As narrow and specialized a field as psionic abilities were, she was a doctor, she should have the skills to come up with some kind of solution.
Dr. Jagtap arched an eyebrow at her as they continued to walk. "Would you expect a horticulturalist to know how to repair a subspace engine? Psionics is just as different from your own field of expertise."
"And it would be from yours too," Rhea shot back, "Or rather, it would be if you were actually Yamini Jagtap."
That got a laugh out of the old woman. "I am her! Mostly. A facet at least, pulled out of retirement for one last tutoring lesson. The dean was most insistent."
Before Rhea could ask what that meant, the doors to one of the student operating theatres slid open, and everything went white.
The hand she threw in front of her face did nothing to block out the sudden light, so white that it burned away any trace of colour in the room, so bright that Rhea could swear she could hear it, a resonant roar deeper than the sea.
Next to her, Dr. Jagtap tutted quietly, stepping up to where Rhea remembered the controls for the room were. A moment later, and blinds lowered over the windows, cutting off the worst of the glare.
"The dean," Dr. Jagtap said with a long suffering sigh, "I've worked with their type before, micromanagers who try to butt in when they should stand back and let those with the actual qualifications to do so handle the matters at hand."
Even with the blinds down, Rhea could make out the shapes of two glowing spheres of light beyond the windows, like twin suns.
Or eyes.
In the nation where she'd been born and raised, the myths of gods and titans had permeated every aspect of her culture - her parents going so far as to name her and her sisters after some of them - but they'd always been nothing more than stories to her, a primitive people's way of explaining the mysteries of a world they barely understood.
But under the light from these suns, Rhea felt as if she were staring into the eyes of a God.
And It was staring back at her.
"Come, come, we haven't the time to dawdle." Dr. Jagtap said as she stepped up to the gurney in the centre of the room, a sheet draped over the unmistakable shape of a body. She seemed completely unmoved by the presence beyond the windows. Old habits kicking in, Rhea was quick to follow after her.
Pulling over a tray of surgical equipment, Dr. Jagtap gave her an apologetic look as she said, "Unfortunately, we don't have the precise tool you're going to need for this operation. It will be delivered by the time you're reunited with your patients, so for your practicum we will just have to make do with what we have on hand."
Dread had her pulse roaring in her ears as Rhea stepped up to the gurney - to the body. During her actual university days, she'd worked almost exclusively on synthetic cadavers, everything from their bone, their flesh, even their blood was printed from a fabricator, a teaching tool made to be as realistic as possible, and all without the need for the actual dead. For the sake of making operations easier to see, everything about these simulacrum had been in varying shades of grey, only being coloured more in line what an actual living body would be when it came closer to exam time.
She had no idea what to expect beneath this sheet.
"There's no time to be squeamish now, we've much work to do yet." Dr. Jagtap chided her.
"You never used to be able to read minds, you know." Rhea couldn't help but snap back, anything to delay the inevitable.
"I'm not wholly myself, as I said. An unintended perk, given my state." Dr. Jagtap replied, the twinkle in her eye so achingly familiar that Rhea felt the years she had spent in Thalatte captivity fall away.
"Now, as I said, there is no time to delay."
And with that, Dr. Jagtap pulled back the sheet, revealing…
A grey, synthetic cadaver.
The laugh of relief that sobbed out of Rhea did so involuntarily.
"You've grown soft in your old age, have you?"
"When it comes to the people I care about, yeah!"
Dr. Jagtap smiled at that. "Good. Smart as you always were, I did worry about you. So caught up in your studies, you barely had time for a life of your own. I worried that you would lose yourself to your work, so I'm glad to see you've broken that bad habit." She reached forward to tap the vedja pendant around Rhea's neck to emphasize her point. "Now, you will have to pay attention, as this procedure is going to be somewhat different from the operations you've performed in the past."
Glancing down at the synthetic cadaver, for one heart stopping moment Rhea swore that it had been a deep, navy blue, but it was smooth, featureless grey flesh that lay before her. Dr. Jagtap picked up a scalpel from the tray at her side and handed it to Rhea, and as she glanced up to take it, the cadaver appeared white in her periphery.
"As I said, we will have to make do with the tools we have on hand, so you'll have to keep that in mind when it comes to performing the procedure." Dr. Jagtap told her, motioning down at the body.
It was still grey, only now there was a yawning wound in its torso, as if a massive stalactite had been used to stab this thing in the chest. But instead of the synthetic organs Rhea expected to find within the wound, there was a vast empty void so deep that it seemed like an optical illusion, the gravitational lensing of a black hole reflecting the room around them. She felt herself pulled to the border of its event horizon, the suns in the window staring intently.
"Pay attention now, because we haven't the time for more than a quick lesson." Dr. Jagtap said before she grabbed her by the wrist and pushed.
It wasn't spaghettification that befell her, but the mundane sensation of tipping over too far and losing her balance instead. For an eternal instant, Rhea plummeted face first through a howling torrent of chaos, before she felt the ground catch under her feet.
Rhea had no idea where she was, beyond the fact that it was in some type of building. From the bare walls and the stacked equipment lining the room, she'd hazard a guess that it was some kind of prefabricated structure.
Beside her, Dr. Jagtap nodded her head towards the door and said, "The first part of the lesson is through here."
The doctor walked up to the door, but when it didn't automatically open, she simply passed through it. Squaring her shoulders, Rhea follower after her.
Passing through the closed door felt like stepping through an icy sheet of water, but what she saw inside was what actually had her blood running cold.
The usgaisjan woman from the log Viatrix had managed to restore from the Hyttan vessel they'd found Viatrix on, but much younger. She was standing stiffly at attention, and at her feet was crouched a child, no older than ten.
"I am your sword, your shield." The child recited, "Your word is my law. My life is your tool. Thus bound, V'tala Fext will serve."
"Thus bound, you rise." The woman responded, holding her hand out before her like she was bestowing a benediction, before clenching her fist and holding it to her heart.
The much younger V'tala obeyed this command, her eyes, a mossy yellow colour, were vacant as she stated at her dryhten. Not yet subjected to the effects of stasis, her skin was the bluish green of verdigris, her hair deep emerald, while the crown of horns along the back of her head were a pale sage green. Young though she was, she had the lean, athletic build of a martial artist, one who had been in training for a long, long time.
Rhea clenched the scalpel in her hand so tightly that her entire arm shook.
"They did this to her as a child?!" She hissed out between clenched teeth, "I'm really glad this fucker gets her brains blown out in the end."
Dr. Jagtap snorted out a humourless laugh at that.
"A sentiment the dean and I share. This barbaric practice could cost their people more than they realize, if you fail here. You will need to keep your temper in check for a while yet, I'm afraid. This is the knot you are going to have to untangle, after all."
The scene before them lurched, and once again the young V'tala was on bended knee before the usgaisjan woman. Rage rose like bile in Rhea's throat, but she pushed it down, focusing on the scene before her, at whatever it was that this shade of Dr. Jagtap had brought her to see.
Time seemed to slow, then, V'tala's words taking shape in the air before her. Though she didn't move, her vow rose like some great clawed hand, driving into her chest to tear the heart out of her, tossing it carelessly to the woman she was kneeling before.
Hand raised to catch this offering, glowing with power, Rhea watched as it made contact, the woman's fingers crushing around this piece of V'tala, the child herself standing as if tugged up by marionette strings.
"Commit this to memory." Dr. Jagtap told her, and though the light didn't change, Rhea could swear she felt two burning eyes staring at the back of her head.
Standing there, puppet and puppet master, Rhea could see the strings that bound the two together. Dozens of sickly silver threads looped around V'tala's limbs, all of them leading to a coiled mass held tightly in the usgaisjan woman's palm.
But this wasn't just a haphazard tangle, it was the predictable tracery of veins and arteries. The psionic bond laid out like an organic system.
This was something she could operate on.
Beside her, Dr. Jagtap made a displeased noise in the back of her throat. "An atrocity that should have never been allowed to exist, but this is what a healthy system should look like. You will need to keep this in mind."
Without another word, Dr. Jagtap tugged her by the wrist once more, and again they fell.
Stomach lurching like she missed a step in the dark, Rhea's breath caught in her lungs as she tried to get her bearings. No longer in the room where a child had her autonomy stolen, she and Dr. Jagtap were in some kind of cargo hold.
No, not just any hold. This was where they had found V'tala not that long ago.
In this memory, she watched as she and Malakh and Pryseia duck and wove their way to where V'tala's stasis pod was, the crew of the Briddbragnan raining fire upon them from between the stacks of equipment that would never make it to Lichhaemleas. Removed from the immediate danger of the situation, it really was apparent how piss poor at cooperation the now ex-Kith were. With their greater numbers, they should have not only been able to keep them pinned, but they should have been able to gun them down before they got halfway through the cargo hold. She and the others had been so set on thwarting their erstwhile enemy that they'd all but ignored the direness of the situation.
"This is certainly not where I could have imagined your medical career taking you," Dr. Jagtap said as they walked down the centre of the room, the weapons fire of this memory incessant as it whizzed past them, "A far cry from the hospitals the rest of your graduating class ended up serving in."
"The hours and pay are a lot better." Rhea tried to joke, but it came out flat, her mind still caught up on how young V'tala had been when she'd been forced to surrender herself to another.
Stepping up onto the platform where Lauter was frantically trying to activate the Storlayacas, Rhea was treated to a different angle of the events she'd already lived through - the satisfaction of Lauter taking a bullet to the head, and the horror of the now pure white V'tala binding herself to Pryseia.
"We will need to be closer for this." Dr. Jagtap told her, nodding for Rhea to follow.
As the pair of them stepped up to stand beside Pryseia and V'tala, the memory rewound itself, and again slowed down so that they could observe.
V'tala's vow once again rose out of her as a terrible hand, tearing out a piece of her before throwing it to Pryseia. But the deupazing had no knowledge of what this ritual was, no telekinetic powers with which to catch what was being offered to her, and so rather than catching the metaphorical handle of the marionette she was being tossed, it thudded into her chest like a knife, Pryseia rocking back on her heels like she'd been physically struck. The silvery strings that had bound V'tala to her first master instead turned an inflamed red at this wounding bond she'd inadvertently created between herself and Pryseia.
Rhea watched as V'tala stood, confusion writ large on her features as Pryseia's helmet pulled back, revealing herself to not be usgaisjan, despite how her crown had given her the illusion of having an usgaisjan's band of horns. Between them, rather than the tidy capillaries that had fed from V'tala to her former dryhten's controlling hand, thick, inflamed veins linked V'tala and Pryseia heart to heart, and even as this memory came to a halt, Rhea could see white and blue energy beginning to bleed out from them.
"A bit of literal imagery for what a psychic bond like this has been doing to them," Dr. Jagtap said with all the solemnity of someone delivering a eulogy, "Rather than a clenched fist holding closed an open valve, they instead have holes punctured in their proverbial kegs, with no tap to stem the flow."
"You need me to remove the weapon and cauterize the wound," Rhea said as she turned to her, "Metaphorically, at least."
Dr. Jagtap nodded, a sad smile upon her lips as she said, "A delicate operation, on which more than you know hangs in the balance. Now come, we must practice before the real thing."
Rhea was directed by the shade of her former teacher step by step, the procedure half pantomime as it was practical. She knew she wouldn't be able to repeat the process outside of whatever this metaphysical realm was, but in here she had something that could approximate an usgaisjan's telekinetic abilities, allowing her to hold the bond that burned like an infection between the two.
She could feel them through it, the cold prickle of Pryseia, the electric snap of V'tala, or at least an echo of them caught in this moment. As she carefully followed Dr. Jagtap's guidance as she made precise incisions through the bond, she had a passing wonder if this is what Elytra could feel coming off of them all the time.
It was the work of minutes, but it felt like years before she disentangled the wound in Pryseia, and returned to V'tala what should never have been taken from her, her hands steady even as she felt a shudder crawl up her spine.
"Well done," Dr. Jagtap said, a look of relief on her face as she placed a hand against Rhea's back, "Perform as such when you return, and your friends will be fine."
Rhea let out a breath, turning to hand back the scalpel, but it was already gone from her hand, the room around them starting to blur around the edges, everything brightening as the white light from the twin suns began to burn through the room.
"Not that I'm not grateful for what you've shown me here, but what is that?!" Rhea asked, even as the roar of the light became almost too loud to hear.
But Dr. Jagtap's voice came through as clearly as the last time Rhea had heard her after graduation as she said, "A question I haven't the time to answer. You'll have to learn it in your own time. Now go, your loved ones need you."
The light grew too bright to see through, searing even against Rhea's closed eyes, and then-
Silence.