Jace was doing up the leather laces of the new black boots Verna brought back from her shopping trip. Yes, boots; he finally caved and made himself a prosthetic lower leg. When planning their assault on the keep, there was one thing they kept coming back to. Jace was deadweight if he couldn't use his hands. So he began working on a prosthetic almost immediately. It actually took 8 days 23 different experimental leg designs, a night of pain and blood he’d never willingly live through again and a great deal of assistance from Verna to make it work right, but it had a somewhat functional ankle, and a springy tension from the ball of the foot and toes. He still wasn’t sure how effective he had been in making it, currently he couldn’t run effectively on it, and he couldn’t expect to play competitive sports on it, or be a world class swordsman, but who knew what the future might hold.

Jace actually got the nugget of the idea from something he saw on TV. He wasn’t a huge TV fan, mostly watched sports or the Simpsons when he did. Eventually he was old enough his father didn’t mind him watching late night cable, and stumbled onto a show late one night on cartoon network called Fullmetal Alchemist. In it, a young kid lost an arm and a leg, replaced with metal prosthetics. He never really watched much of the show but he remembered a part about the arm being attached with the “nerves” in the body, basically making it a type of bionic arm.

Jace had a lot of time to himself on the sailing voyage to the mainland, and spent a lot of time thinking about how to replace the missing leg. When he had finally started to accept a prosthetic like a peg leg, he had a spark of inspiration from one of the more painful encounters with a sword during his training. ‘How did that wizard repair my hand?’ His hand had been smashed. He suspected fingers might have been cut off. So how did the wizard repair it in a wave of a hand yet Verna couldn’t fix his leg which was still attached? The thought stuck with him so he asked Verna during their sessions on magic.

“Verna, I had a hand smashed almost as badly as when that rock landed on my leg. Yet a wizard was able to repair it. Why were you unable to repair the leg? What are the limits to healing?”

She thought a moment then answered slowly, “I don’t know what condition your hand was in but I suspect all the pieces were recoverable. ‘Heal’ is limited by the parts still there. It’s closely related to the glyph of ‘regrowth,’ which we cannot work and the glyph ‘past.’ It can rearrange shattered parts if the pieces are big enough. Reconnect separated parts if the pieces are big enough, or close enough, but when too much is missing it cannot rebuild what is not there. Too much of the leg was simply gone. The bone basically reduced to powder, the muscle gone, the nerves smashed. There was enough skin to repair that, but not enough of the rest.”

Verna had no way to know she had set Jace down a road of what she would later consider absolute madness with that answer.

So began his ‘Leg Reconstruction Project,’ the first step was to secure a good base of operations. So he located, with Verna’s assistance a moderately sized cave on a bluff overlooking the ocean, almost 10 miles outside of the city. It was simply impossible to approach from the cliff, unless you had wings. Jace created a teleportation array between the cave and his room in the inn, and a second matching circle on the hill above the cave.

He then acquired some live experimental subjects. Jace thought long and hard about this and in the end decided he needed to experiment on what was possible and what wasn’t. He could take Verna’s claims at face value, but he learned quickly she never really researched biological creatures in any way whatsoever. Neither had Jace. In fact, one of the things that scared him the most about the LRP, was he simply didn’t know anything about biology you couldn’t learn in sex-ed or watching Discovery. So he had to do some live experimentation. Humans of course were out of the question, as were other ‘intelligent’ beings. This was where he ran into the first problem. He learned quickly when questioning Verna, that general scientific classification of species wasn’t done here. She didn’t know any ‘dumb’ creatures physically similar to humans like there were simians on Earth. That didn’t mean there weren’t anything like that here, that was more a reflection on the lack of a serious field of biological studies. To the people here anything that swam was a fish. There never was any type of natural studies conducted. So finding a human substitute was impossible on short notice. As a result, he decided to work with size, and chose an animal with a nice and large leg to ease his studies.

His experimenting with the heal spell began on three live Harkan. He wanted to know if simple amputation and swapping of limbs was possible. He was so engrossed with his questions he didn’t really think about what he was going to do. As a result, after taking the first leg off the first two Harkans, he was greeted with the creatures screams of pain, blood spraying everywhere, and Verna getting enraged. Verna had tried to tell him over and over again his first experiment would not work. She was furious he didn’t listen and did it anyway. Before he could regain control over the bloody chaotic situation Verna left the cave after cursing him out. Apparently she rather liked the scaly bear-lizard monsters, a fact he didn’t appreciate until she left in a rage that frightened him, making him feel even guiltier then he already was for harming the creature in such a callus way, he actually used to be a bit of an animal lover. He probably would never had done such a thing to a horse, or a dog, or those weird furry armadillo looking creatures people seemed to keep as pets here (he had to admit they were sort of cute if weird looking). But the monstrous and frightening looking Harkan were both plentiful, easy to acquire, and docile enough for him to work on them with this grizzly experiment. Now, seeing that monstrous Harkan screeching in pain, he finally woke him up to the cruel nature of the experiments he had planned. He didn’t blame her for refusing to speak to him (or even looking at him) for the rest of that day.

Due to the guilt he felt toward upsetting Verna, and parts of his conscience that didn’t like the distressed calls from the Harkan, he started trying to reattach the old limbs to the original bodies. This step worked as Verna had told him it would. He was able to reattach their legs without too much issue. Next he put the two poor animals back to sleep, and took off a different leg from each and switched them. This time the reattachment didn’t work, again as Verna told him. However he felt something strange during the attempt. Almost as if it almost melded but couldn’t find a connecting end that was ‘perfect’ for it. This almost success gave him a hint and he started trying to change the condition of both the stump and mismatched leg. The more he messed up the connecting parts, the more likely the magic almost triggered to reconnect it. However, all that happened is that feeling he was ‘close’ but not quite there. With nothing else to try he decided to break the dead leg down into its parts. Bone, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and nerves. Then he broke down the materials in the stump, leading all the way up to the body.

This step was grotesque. He never realized a body had a ‘smell’ beyond blood when butchered live to this extent. The feel of the warm blood pulsing on his hands as he worked apart bones, tendons, muscles, and nerves from the stump he had just made. Feeling a bit like a monster for this particular experiment, he found himself desperately hoping this would work, so he could justify his actions to himself. To his surprise it worked, to a point. The bone connected to the bone. Then the rest of the parts connected as well, one at a time. Finally, he was able to heal the whole sloppy pile of parts back into a leg.

Holding his breath, he woke the monster up. He knew immediately it didn’t work. The monster woke up pretty quickly and started screaming. He could see clearly that parts of the leg didn’t really work right. Blood flow was damaged; it simply was impossible to reconstruct the leg properly with this method. He could tell the animal was in extreme pain as well, eventually it cut off his study of the problems with the graft when it ripped its own leg off. Out of mercy and feeling queasy at the grizzly experimentation he was performing, he put the Harkan down.

Never the less, with that experiment somewhat successful, he continued the bloody experiments on the other two Harkan. However, nothing he did could make the legs work when transplanted onto a different body, the blood flow and nerve damage was far too great. So, he tried replacing parts of the leg with inorganic and organic material. Eventually hitting on a formula, which, while not successful for the last two Harkan (which he put down as well), might be successful for himself.

They had spent a lot of time practicing it between trial builds of the leg on different organic and inorganic material until he had a model ready for his new prosthetic. The core of the new prosthetic was made out of a type of plant material which actually would craft into replacement bones. Using his strengthening magic and plenty of the Aghod plant membrane, he created a skeletal lower leg. The bones in the shin were pretty close to identical in design to what was in his right leg (reversed of course), the foot was a simpler design. In order to make a good enough model of the leg bones and maybe get Verna to be a little less livid toward him, he had her put him unconscious and open the leg to get a good measurement for the model he would use. That step was painless if gruesome. Ultimately he made two sets of leg bones, as he didn’t want to drag out the attachment process in the event one of his experiments failed.

Once he had a lower leg stronger then steel, yet made out of this Aghod, he swallowed his moral outrage and went shopping in butcher shops looking for “likely” human parts. That he found all the parts he’d need "Fresh" at the very first shop he went into (after flashing a silver Tal), only underlined in his mind Verna’s warning about the meat that humans will eat.

Then came “the” night. Jace and Verna laid down every single magic circle Jace would need before starting. He couldn’t buffer the pain much else he’d cloud his own mind. For the same reason alcohol wasn’t an option.

They started with a tourniquet on his left thigh. Jace was already sweating. The painful ache caused by the tourniquet clasping on his thigh was pretty extensive. Next was the first part he was dreading, Verna cutting the bottom couple of inches off his stump. His ‘stump’ had consisted of at least 4 inches of leg under the knee. She used her sword, and bisected almost three inches of flesh and bone off the end of what remained of his leg, his leg had been healed improperly for a prosthetic anyway, so Jace reasoned this step was necessary. Because he knew he’d need to do this anyway, he came up with a second and what he believed to be better theory on how to graft the prosthetic on. This first attempt would be with this second and completely untried theory.

Jace then used a swift blade of air to slice the healed end of the stump on the three-inch piece of meat Verna had chopped off him, exposing the bone and bloody meat. Seizing one of the prosthetic bones, he cut it to match the end of the bone in the ring of meat, then squashing the surreal feeling of grabbing a chunk of his own body, he then activated the first circle. He felt the ring of meat connect to the bone instantly, just as bone and this Aghod merged in his past experiments. He shifted his grip to the bone, touching his still warm flesh and blood was threatening to make him throw up. He set the horrible looking piece of himself into the first circle. He couldn’t blame Verna for the sick look on her face. This was hideous what he was attempting.

Feeling light headed and wondering just how crazy he must be to do this to himself, he seized the parts he had made from the human meat he had purchased. Tendons, muscles, veins, arteries and ligaments all enchanted into a material no longer human or really all that biological, and an additional part, a spongy plant tissue, one after another being fused to the bone. He connected the material to the ankle, then to the foot (those bones much less complex then in an actual foot). His concentration was wavering by the time he was fusing the leaves of the Chogha plant as a type of skin for the new limb. The Chogha plant was something used for burn patients here, when a healer wasn’t available, he fused it all together forming an enchanted material which was almost leather like, and if he was lucky with some of the enchantments he implanted in it, it would be self healing.

The penultimate step was connecting the new hybrid lower leg to his body, which was bleeding profusely despite the tourniquet. To his surprise the magic reconnected the leg without objection, not only did it reconnect, the healing circle spread the effect to the fake leg and merged it together with his body as he had hoped it would. This completeness was a sensation he did not feel with the transplant experiments with the Harkan. That his theory was confirmed was the lone bright spot in the series of horrifying steps.

The final step was performed with the final magic circle. This circle was something they had worked on for days. It was more complex than anything he had ever made before. Verna actually came up with the theory based on some of the magic golems the Dragon King had. Igniting this final circle took both Verna AND Jace to pour in every ounce of power they had for almost a full half hour.

The pain was like nothing Jace had ever expected. It was like every nerve in his body was lit on flame. He almost stopped channeling into the circle just because he almost forgot to do it, the pain was that intense. What he was trying to do was merge a fake nervous system with his real one, and to spread his flame of life into the limb. A step he knew was absolutely necessary or else the biological material would rot. The flame of life was something Verna convinced him existed. It was something he discovered himself during his experiments on the Harkan. One of the reason his experiments failed in transplanting the limbs was because he failed to extend the flame of their life into the limbs.

His shrieks echoed in the cave, until he screamed himself horse, and they didn’t stop. His left knee exploded in a pain he didn’t think he would ever be able to classify. What was worse was the pain in the hip and knee just grew greater and greater as time ground on. Finally, the pain started to subside, the feeling like his soul was splitting in half stopped, and he actually felt something akin to warmth from the leg.

Jace had created a fully biological, if not entirely human and not entirely plant lower leg. Ultimately it didn’t look much like a leg, it had the rough shape correct, but the color of the skin was grey, bordering on a grey-purple and its skeletal appearance looked more like something from a zombie flick, but when put under a pant leg and with a high boot providing some support, it looked no different from his other leg and actually worked in a way. He had very little sensation in it. In fact it felt a bit like a seriously asleep limb might feel. It was sort of there, almost dead. He could feel his warm blood in it, but almost nothing from the skin. He had fused a number of circles into the leg in the final step, they did things like clean his blood from infection. His deepest fear something ‘unnatural’ from the android/plant/zombie leg he just made killing him, so he went overboard with the different spells to prevent that from happening. He suspected if something poisonous bit him on that leg, he would be pretty safe. He probably would be pretty safe from any type of poison in his blood as it would only be a matter of time before it passed through the leg and was neutralized.

Till this point he had been treating the missing leg like it didn’t matter. But standing on the fake leg, which actually provided something resembling an earth level prosthetic level support (he assumed) or better, he couldn’t help actually shedding a tear of delight. The loss of the leg had terrified him when it happened. But because it was nothing he could fix he just forced himself to ignore it. What he couldn’t ignore was how much harder losing that leg would make getting back to earth. Being unable to walk far, being unable to fight, run, flee, hide. Basically being deadweight and at the mercy of those who were helping him. It was a heavy concern that no longer was weighting on his shoulders.

He spent half a day recovering from the procedure, Verna left to shop. He spent most of the morning resting, worn out from the horrid night before. He finally stood up on his own, without a cane or crutch, and found he could walk, all be it with a limp. The ankle worked. The toes and arch seemed to work in the foot. His stride was not smooth. The lack of tactile feedback from the leg made it very difficult to walk without looking down. He kept feeling like he was going to collapse, and his knee was a bit unsteady. So he made himself a cane out of the stone in the wall of the cave, dressed himself and teleported back to the room.

Just in time for Verna to return from shopping. She had a lot of clothing. Remembering all the varied clothing she always had on her he started to wonder where this woman kept all her clothing, as she never seemed to be carrying much in the way of baggage. However, he refrained from asking when she tossed a bundle at him.

He dropped the cane, and caught it, wobbly standing on two feet. He was just praising himself when Verna tossed another, heavier item, a pair of tall boots. They proved too much and he ended up on his butt on the bed. She simply laughed a mocking laugh, then grinned a wicked grin.

“Don’t be too satisfied about that monstrosity you made. Until you can stand up steady you went through all of that pain for nothing, as I think someone on a peg leg could have managed to keep standing just now.”

He nodded seriously. “I know. I’ll figure it out. It’s just a matter of trusting it.”

She beamed a big smile at his answer and then nodded. “I knew you were strong. Not many men can hear good advice and take the advice when it is given in a mocking tone. It takes a strong and intelligent person. Now, because you are this person you must let others know it. Those clothing are made for you. I’ve long thought you dress like a vagabond. Just like all the other humans. You are not like them. Do not try to fit in but show it. Besides my master must look better than me. It will be hard because of your plain face. But I think we can do something to make you stand out better than me.”

He actually started laughing, the weight of the missing leg no longer weighting on his shoulders, he found her attitude hilarious. Curious about what she wanted him to wear he unbundled the large buddle of clothing, and stared. While he wasn’t a huge fan of fantasy clothing, he had to admit, Verna had taste.

He quickly dressed in the clothing. Black dyed with silver needle work tunic, the emblem of a silver dragon in flight on the left chest made him frown. However, the needlework was astonishing, as was the material of the tunic. When held up in the light he realized the black shifted from blacks to dark greys, this material felt almost like that material Verna’s seductive underthings are made of, making him suspect the material being from the same source, only different treated. He knew if this ever made it to Earth the cotton industry would be out of business.

He tossed the tunic on, it was clearly tailored for him, fitting like a glove. His arms were bare. She had prepared silver arm bands to be fastened above his biceps. It was a strange silver like material, but what surprised him were the magic circles on them. He looked at her curiously and she smiled then said.

“Those were my betrothal gift to my Husband for agreeing to marry me. They’re an enchanted item which provides some fairly formidable protection against physical attacks. No human hand could harm you with a steel blade. Nor could a crossbow. Now, don’t get too confident. A spelled crossbow bolt or enchanted sword will cut through that protection like a knife through parchment.”

A black pair of pants made of the same material waited for him as well, as well as a black leather and silver belt. The black and silver leather boots matched the almost liquid silver and black lined hooded cloak, which was was something from a CGI filed fantasy movie. It appeared to be liquid metal, like mercury, formed into a cloak. The Flying dragon emblem in black on the cloak was flashy, he realized when he spun it around it was a REVERSABLE cloak, now black with silver lining, and a silver dragon. Ultimately he felt the silver dragon was far less showy then a shiny silver cloak and wore it reversed.

Last of all was a sword identical in size to the one he lost on the island. It was silver and black not red and white. It was also a bit lighter than the old one had been. One glance at the blade showed it to be enchanted like the last one. Jace actually felt the weight seemed almost perfect for him so he hung it from his belt.

He looked at Verna and asked the question. “Well?”

She frowned then suddenly smiled. “Good but not quite right. Sit down. I need to trim your hair.”

“Wait, why?”

“Have you seen it recently? Don’t worry I won’t shorten it too much, I do like to run my fingers through it you know.”

He looked at her suspiciously, but decided to let her do as she will. They were going to knock on the door to the keep tomorrow, he supposed he needed to look his best.