The next morning, after my run, the three of us head over to the build-site. Cyril is already waiting there for us with a handful of people. Their ages range the gambit from mid-twenties to even older than Cyril, and they each have some form of disability.

"Well, it looks like you work fast." I greet the ex-merc with a wide smile. "Hello, everyone. I think I recognize some of you from the healing fair, sorry I wasn't able to do more then."

"Don't be." Cyril waves my apology away. "We all understand that you had to marshal your efforts in order to treat everyone."

"Mhm. Well, why don't you introduce yourselves? This is Amelia and Apricot, by the way. Amelia handles the coin, so be nice to her, and Apricot handles whatever she thinks she can get away with, so watch out for her." I get twin smacks and a round of laughter for my introduction of them.

"This is Stan, Toni, Fawne, Gen, and Hughes." Cyril handles their introductions. "Stan is the only one from my old crew, but everyone knows what they're doing."

Stan is older than Cyril, and has a stump in place of his left hand; he also had several poorly set bones, but I dealt with those during the fair.

Toni is around thirty and she looks to have taken a blade the same eye that Cyril had. The damage is a lot worse on her though, but it looks like she got to a healer shortly after it happened, so I at least have something to work with.

Fawne is a beastkin and just slightly older than Toni. And, as her name suggests, she has deer-like ears. She is also missing her right arm from just above the elbow.

Gen is the youngest, and worst off of the group. He must have been nearly bisected by a sword that only stopped when it hit, and shattered, his spine. He is also missing a kidney, part of his liver, and a small chunk of intestine.

Hughes is a middle-aged half-elf and is missing a leg from just below the knee. He has quite a few burn scars on that side of his body too.

"Welcome aboard everyone." I lock eyes with each in turn. "I hope you don't mind if I start with Gen. He needs the most work and the sooner we get him on his feet, the sooner he can start rebuilding those wasted muscles. The eye and the scars I can deal with, and I promise to look into limb regrowth soon."

I also promise silently to move the elevator to the top of my to-do list. We can't be having a man missing part of his leg hopping up and down three flights of stairs, after all. I already slotted a space in the building for one, but making one was low priority.

While they're processing my words, I conjure a large cup and fill it with healing sap. "Do you want a sippy straw?" I ask sarcastically when the young man hesitates. "I have a lot of work to do today, patching up your spine is just the start."

He takes the cup and downs it while glaring at me the whole time; I fight not to roll my eyes and just get to work. Tracing out the spinal cord and how all the nerves connect isn't exactly easy, but using myself, and the other security guards as examples helps quite a lot.

...

"Oi! Play with yourself later; there are ladies present." I bop the little shit on the head when he grabs his crotch right after I reconnect/rebuild the last of his damaged nerves. I was saving that area for last just in case there were any unwanted 'reactions' like that.

"..." He just looks at me in a way I don't want anyone looking at me, especially not when they're holding their junk.

"And, get that stupid look off of your face." I bop him again. "I guarantee that you're going to hate me by the end of the day. Cyril, you're in charge of his rehabilitation. Push him as hard as you want, I'll patch him up in between rounds. And, make sure he drinks plenty of this." I bring out a dozen prepared smoothies, including a large one just for me.

"My pleasure." Gen pales at the grin that fills the old man's face, and even more so when I materialize my entire home gym for them to use.

While he's torturing his subordinate, I finally get started tearing down the old warehouse. I can reuse the old stone, but the wood of the roof is starting to rot so that all has to go.

"You really don't like praise, do you?" Amelia sidles up next to me with a smirk on her face. "You do know that there's probably less than a handful of healers on the entire continent that could do what you just did."

"It was more tedious than truly difficult." I grumble.

"I suppose that's one way to describe tracing out the nerve signals of half a dozen people to fill in the missing pieces of his spinal cord." Stupid perceptive pixies.

"Mhm." I just grumble and focus on the teardown.

...

"You didn't think getting your legs back would be that easy did you?" I ask Gen when he collapses, begging for a break. "Is this pain any worse than what you've already lived through? If you want to walk, let alone run again, you have to get up and earn it."

"Can't you just magic the muscle back?" He whines but climbs unsteadily back to his feet with the aid of the parallel bars I set up for him.

"Hah! Don't I fucking wish." I strip down to my underwear with a snap of my fingers and shapeshift all of the muscles I've gained recently into my vines. "This is what I looked like a week ago; I've had to earn every single muscle the hard way. Made even more so because I have the metabolism of a beastkin." I drop the shapeshift and will my clothes back into place with a thought.

"He's telling the truth." Fawne backs me up. "I have friends in the guard and he runs them into the ground every morning." Seeing that gen is motivated to push himself again, I go back to excavating the basement so I can lay down the foundations.

I don't anything about buildings, but I got a good look at the 'roots' of the tall apartment buildings when I was laying out the fire hydrants, so I'm just copying what they did. I figure that this place will probably be getting more floors sooner or later, so I might as well be prepared in advance.

"That was the shapeshift spell, wasn't it?" Hughes asks as I make chunks of soil vanish as quickly as I can. My tree on wheels from yesterday made a reappearance along with a couple of friends, but there's a lot of soil to suck up.

"Yes, and yes it could probably do what you're thinking of." His eyes go wide when I say that, but he wasn't exactly subtle when staring at his stump after my demonstration. "But, I can only cast it on myself. You feel like you have enough magic to handle it, but you would need to be very, very skilled to use the spell like that. Oh, don't go getting all down just yet. I meant what I said about looking into limb regrowth, and until then. Let's get you set up with a better prosthetic than an ill-fitting peg leg."

I bring out the materials I was using to make bow limbs a couple of days ago and spend a moment to make a prosthetic runner's blade. We're both the same height, so I shapeshift my lower leg to fold up out of the way in the same spot where his ends. This way I can try the prosthetic on myself to get a feel for it, and what needs changing.

"Ugh, please warn me when you're going to do something like that." Amelia groans when she looks up from her book to see my leg bending the wrong way. "And, what is that?"

"They're called running blades." I explain while walking around to work out the kinks in this one. "We had better prosthetics back home, but I don't know nearly enough about them to be able to recreate one here. Maybe after I get a lot more enchanting experience under my belt, but I hope to have that regrowth spell before then. Alright, Hughes, sit down so I can get this fitted."

"I warned you not to be surprised when he does something impossible." Cyril laughs at his peoples' stunned faces. "The man has already fixed Gen's legs, what is making a fake one compared to that?"

I just roll my eyes and point Hughes to a chair. Once he finally sits down, I remove his old prosthetic and knit a proper liner for his leg before fitting the running blade in place.

"Up." I order and take his hands as he gets his feet under him. "Walk as normally as you can." I make another set of parallel bars for him to practice with, but he soon doesn't need them. "That's a little better now, isn't it?" I ask, but the grin on his face is more than enough answer.

"Thank you!" The man puts his whole heart and soul into those two words.

"Thank Apricot." I say, not at all comfortable getting that kind of look twice in one morning. "If she hadn't pestered me for a crossbow, I wouldn't know how to make the wood springy enough for this."

"Crossbow?" Cyril asks, but they all perk up at the word.

"I'll issue you some just in case, but I would very much prefer a non-lethal approach whenever possible." I.E. Don't fucking kill anybody. "You're security guards now, not mercenaries."

"Yes, Sir!" Cyril snaps to attention and salutes, fist to chest. Everyone else following suit right afterward. "But, uh... could we see it?"

"Hells yeah, you can see it." Apricot hops up from using Amelia's lap as a pillow and brings it out of her inventory to show off. "This baby can outshoot even Sorrel himself."

"Well..." I fight not to laugh when she glares at me. "What? Did you really think I wasn't going to give Blackie an upgrade too?" I tap the cane at my waist and he springs out into bow-mode.

"I hate you." She pouts, but without any heat to it.

"You shoot?" Fawne asks, and the look of longing she has for the bow in my hand makes me think that she must have been an archer before losing her arm. "That's odd for a mage."

"It's an old hobby that I took up again recently." I reply and let Blackie take his normal staff shape. "And, I haven't always been a mage; I learned to shoot when I was a kid. Can you shoot left-handed? I can't give you much functionality with a prosthetic, but I should be able to manage something that can hold onto a bow."

"Nnh. I think I'll wait for you to figure out that spell instead." She shakes head with a complicated look on her face. "After seeing what you did for Gen, I have to hope that it won't take you that long."

"And you, Stan?" I ask the oldest here. "I can't offer much, but a simple grasper shouldn't be too difficult."

"... Let me think about it." He says after a moment.

"Alright." I nod and return to work.

The basement is nearly excavated now, so I can start laying the foundations soon. I'm going to need a bit more stone than I have left, but I should be able to convert the dirt I just dug up.

"Whatcha doing?" Apricot asks when I scoop up a handful of soil and focus most of my magic on it.

"Giving myself a headache." I've already bent my draw matter spell to work with a looser image of carbon. Now, I'm trying to do the same, only more so to remove all organic material from the dirt so I can compress it down into stone. "I need to work past this stupid mental block and I understand organic matter the best."

Then, with a grunt for the mental effort, I draw the living and once-living component of soil away from the rest. This goes slowly at first, and the pain is most definitely not worth it, but I refuse to stop until I can handle it with ease.

"Are you doing alright, Baby?" Amelia says with worry in her voice. "You're looking a little green... well, greener than usual." She adds with a laugh.

"Yeah, I think I've got it now, but ugh." My brain feels like it was just pushed through a fine mesh screen before being reformed. "I also think I should have just made the foundation from pure quartz; that was not worth the headache."

"Just think." Apricot says with a giggle. "Now that you've taken the first step, you just have to keep doing it, over, and over, and over again until your brain finally catches on to how you want it to work."

"Definitely should have just gone with pure quartz." I groan.

***