I barely got a breather after the kid left. I needed to restore my mana after the latest session, but I hadn’t gotten the chance.

“Hello!” A jackalkin entered almost as soon as I reentered my tent. “I was wondering if you could give me eyes in the back of my head?”

I gave him a skeptical look, but on the surface, his request wasn’t too unreasonable or unmanageable.

“Let’s have a long discussion about that.” I settled back into my chair. “I need to recharge my mana, and you need to know what you’re getting into.”

He frowned a bit, but took a seat on the other side of my table.

“I’m certain I know what I want.” He griped as he took a seat.

I shrugged.

“Sure, you might. I need to recharge my mana though, and going over the details will help both of us get on the same page. What if I thought you wanted black and white vision that could see underwater, while you were thinking of eyes that could withstand the sun’s high glare?”

“You can’t do both?” He asked.

I snorted.

“Everything’s a tradeoff. There’s no perfect eye. Look at an eagle’s eyes, and a deer’s eyes. One’s good for seeing far, the other’s great for a wide range. Eyes that can handle the pressure of the deep ocean are radically different from the ones that can fly high. Plus, we’ll need to reshape your skull to accommodate the additional orbital sockets.”

I was starting to get into it.

“Alright, unless you want your eyes dangling uselessly, they need sockets. Bone to protect them. Now, I can’t drill into your skull, your brain’s in the way, so we’ll need to extend the bone out, and drill a hole in your skull for the optical nerves to hook up with your brain. Weirdly, the occipital lobe is at the back of your brain, not the front, so we don’t need to wire the nerves around your skull, we can just hook them up. Now, the rest is fairly straightforward. What kind of eyes do you want? What’s needed? I can mix and match lenses, although I recommend an off-white sclera. Don’t go for red or anything, you’re going to look freaky enough. I can make your iris any color, and no, eye color doesn’t matter at all. I do recommend keeping it the same. Next, we have…”

I continued to go on in great detail about the eye while my mana recharged, my patient looking greener and greener the whole time as I talked about considerations like ‘do we include a fake nose to make things look better’ and ‘helmets are going to be difficult in the future.’

He eventually walked out without getting extra eyes. A shame, it was an interesting problem. As I went over all the parts that I needed to change though, I was suspecting I didn’t have nearly enough mana.

The patients kept coming. A crocodile beastkin wanted different colored scales. A smart kid, burning with passion, wanted improved muscle density and retention. He offered the entirety of his meager savings, and I was happy to help him.

If he didn’t die young, he’d go far in life.

A woman wanted to know if I could improve her color vision. After checking over what I knew on the subject, along with a deep scan of her eyes, I added in a fourth set of color cones, granting her a richer experience.

I noted that particular modification for myself. It was an easy addition, and the entire world would be more vibrant.

I hesitated at, then declined, making someone’s claws venomous. There’d be a lot of blood on his hands. Too many accidental deaths, and I didn’t want to feel responsible for it.

Turning down a modification I could do felt weird. I reflexively healed people all the time, and there was never a reason to turn down a medical request.

Armored scales. Extra nictitating eyelids, to keep out the blowing sand. I marked that one down for personal use as well, although I’d need to do some mixing and matching.

Someone wanted to be fat. I pointed out that I’d charge more per pound than she would spend just buying food and eating it. I happened to know a marvelous baker, just next door, if she wanted to spend her coins there…

Someone wanted to be skinny. I was a little more open to that request, since losing weight was hard. I wasn’t able to get too many pounds off of her, but she was delighted.

Allergies and fertility problems were hard. Each one required careful tracing to see what had gone wrong, then fix that. It was tiny, finicky detailed work, and I had some moments of quiet introspection where I wondered if I was out of my depth, and if the line about admitting when I didn’t know the answer to a problem was relevant.

In the end, after checking over my work, I convinced myself that it was a confidence issue, and not a knowledge or skills issue. [Smooth as a Baby’s Bottom] didn’t level up, bolstering my confidence.

I hadn’t had a confidence issue on my work in decades.

Someone wanted the ability to eat grass, and I happily pulled out my calculations on the subject, showing them that it just didn’t work.

“... as you can see, you’d end up spending six hours a day shoving grass down your throat. I get that if you’re starving, it’s better than nothing, but you could be spending that time doing something else to get food. Plus, I’d need to rearrange way too much of your digestive tract. It’d either need to work in parallel, meaning I’d need to shrink and modify almost every other internal organ to make it work - not pretty - or change your current system to accept it, at which point you lose the ability to properly extract nutrients from a number of other foods. Then we’re back at ‘spending hours every day eating’, which is no fun. Especially since it’d be grass. Or hay. And to cinch it, I flat out lack the mana to make the modifications.”

I got a pouty look at that, and I crossed my arms.

They left.

Making nails more claw-like was on the menu, with the patient in question already having related skills.

Silky hair. Perfect beard line. Fixing overbites and underbites.

Heterochromia. Giving, not fixing. She thought it’d look cool, and had the money to pay.

A dwarf entered my tent as I took a deep drink of water. He was classically stout, with a black beard in rings that practically looked polished. A deep green reflective layer to his clear eyes over a thick brow suggested a Forest element, and his shirt was tough and well-traveled. Practical and loved.

Hadn’t seen a dwarf the entire time we’d been here. Ankhelt wasn’t terribly close to Khazad.

The two weeks of the School being set up here were coming to a close. New students were admitted. Graduates who wanted to be dropped off here had left, and were going to their various homes.

I was pleased with my efforts and practice. I’d capped nearly all my skills, and felt ready to take on the larger, full-body project that was modifying myself and Iona.

I could afford to be picky about my patients at this point. I mentally made a bet with myself if the dwarf wanted to become taller, shorter, or have his beard modified.

I put my hands over my eyes, and dramatically called out.

“I can see the future!” I declared. “You want… BIOMANCY!”

“Nope.” The dwarf grunted, hopping up onto the patient chair. “Not in the slightest.”

“Oh.” I was a little disappointed at that. “Well, I think you’re in the wrong spot then.”

“Heh. You’d think that. Nah lass, I’m interested in you.”

I immediately grew wary.

“Why?” I asked suspiciously. There’d been more than one incident of someone getting the wrong idea of a high level healer in the School’s fairgrounds, entirely forgetting that the School was allowed to have Immortals and the like running around.

Not that people knew I was an Immortal, but the same idea applied.

“Ah, let me not get off on the wrong foot. I’m Goki Kotir the 523rd. Pleased to meet you.” He offered a coarse hand, and I shook it across the table.

“Elaine. What can I do for you?” I kept my generation out of it. I was tempted otherwise, but no.

His bushy eyebrows went up at my name, but didn’t comment. That, or he just thought I was giving my profession.

“Elaine’s my name, just to be clear.” I corrected anyways.

I should start going by Dawn. It’d save me a world of headaches.

He grunted acknowledgement.

“Well, we dwarves are the best craftsmen in the world.” He proclaimed, and I let a lopsided grin split my face. The more things changed, the more things stayed the same, and dwarves were still bragging about their craft. “I’m a biomancer myself, and I must say, your work is fantastic.”

I wasn’t great with people, but some quick mental math indicated he couldn’t have seen more than one or two patients. That, or he’d been stalking me for days before coming to say hi.

“Thank you.” I was wary.

“Now, I’m going to swing straight to the gem in the rock of the matter. No bantering about. This here’s a long shot, with you probably having some fancy patron or another you get back to, but are you at all interested in an apprenticeship after finishing up with the School?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Goki immediately plowed on.

“Now before you go collapsing the shaft on me, I know a few biomancer graduates from the School. No better place in the world to learn the craft, that’s for sure. It fails miserably at teaching you how to be practical about it. How to make the connections. How to sell your skills to those who can pay for it. How to establish safe circuits to ride on. How to handle nobility, and manage money. How to travel. An apprenticeship is solid for learning the ropes of the profession. Leave whenever you feel you’re ready! But it’d do ye a mountain of good. It’s a dangerous world out there.”

Poor Goki didn’t know what he was getting into. I was far from a shrinking violet, forget about the fact that I didn’t intend to be a biomancer long term.

But the situation was too perfect. Too well set up. My resistance was crumbling.

“I’d like to apologize. Let me properly introduce myself.” I had on my best cheshire cat grin. “My name’s Elaine. Elaine the 94th.”

He glared at me.

“Yer lying.”

My grin widened.

His glare slowly softened into horror.

“By every ounce of gold…” He gasped. “Yer not lying.”

He bolted out of his chair, the poor furniture crashing into the side of my tent as he sprinted out of the room.

I held it in a moment, then just laughed and laughed and laughed.

I needed to find more dwarves to pull that on.

A few more simple cases, a couple of people who just needed healing, not proper biomancy, and the most horrifying case stiffly walked into my tent.

A high, high level mess of a teenager, who had to be under 20. By a few good years.

[Laborer - 478].

I sucked in air between my teeth as I used [Elvenoid Visualization], an absolute mess appearing in my sight.

“How the bloody fuck are you still alive?” I wondered out loud, not caring about the lack of professionalism. What I was seeing was just… no.

“I’m too pretty to die.” He flippantly explained, not revealing a shred of the pain he must be feeling. He had to have pain-management skills. Possibly more than one.

My question hadn’t been entirely rhetorical.

“Right. Normally I’d give a great big speech about what was going on, and what I needed to do, but uh. I think you know better than me what’s going on, and what I need to do. Given the extent of… everything… I’m going to start operating on the most critical parts, then we’re hustling you over to the main hospital.”

He frowned at that.

“I can’t pay.”

“You’ll be a great case study. We have more healers than patients. You’ll pay us in a dozen levels apiece.”

He shrugged.

“Sure, I can be a test subject for healing. That’s fine.”

Great.

Without further ado, I got to work.

He had Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, which was a whole mouthful of words to describe an incredibly rare condition. Long story short? His body didn’t form scars in connective tissue. Instead, it grew new bones.

But not always. No, sometimes the tissue just changed into bone anyways. His body was a mess of random bones where bones didn’t belong. His spine was fused into a solid column. His shoulder blades were one with his shoulders. His elbows and knees still moved, but they had a jagged edge where he was clearly breaking them himself just to move around. A tendon in his neck had turned to bone, locking his head. He had bone spikes growing into his lungs, he was stuck looking forward as his bones grew into his extraocular muscles. One of those bones was creeping towards his eyeball.

My question of how he was alive hadn’t been a rhetorical one. I literally did not know how he was still alive.

I stopped counting at two dozen growths that could possibly kill him. There had to be some serious skills at work.

Ah. I bet he had a class dedicated to staying alive and fighting this. It’d explain his level - permanently stuck in a life or death fight against his own body? With a class solely dedicated to the fight? That would explain most of what I was seeing.

I went for the important parts I felt like I could do on my own, mostly hitting around his lungs and heart. I only managed to kill a few slivers, his own vitality fighting against my skills. With my mana pool mostly emptied - only leaving a bit in case of a medical emergency, like his aorta getting pinched between two bones - I scooped him up, and brought him to the hospital.

I descended back on one of the many ferries the School had going between the flying island and the fairgrounds they’d set up, wondering if I should start packing up. Our time here was coming to an end, and it felt like a high note to end on. I didn’t want some weird sex thing being my last memory of this trip, and working on somebody with a rare and fascinating disease, being able to improve their life?

That was a pretty good end to the trip.

Classes had continued their endless march while I was down here to boot. The professors understood wanting to get practical work in, along with all the benefits of visiting a city, and didn’t hold it against us. They didn’t stop assigning work and giving lectures though. I could use the time to start catching up on the missed work, instead of increasing my backlog.

First things first though. Raiding Auri’s stand for some food.

“Brrrrpt!” Auri called out from her high up perch as she saw me, a mage hand pointing down at the crowd. “Brrrrrrrrpt!”

“Wait, really?” I cried out as another hand appeared over me. I pushed through the crowd, Auri’s pointer finger moving as I did.

I got more than a few dirty looks and curses as I shoved through the crowd, but I didn’t care.

The ground rumbled, and a wave of dirt crested ahead of me.

With Artemis surfing on it.

She used the wave to finish pushing through, landing right in front of me.

She grinned.

“Heya healy-bug, how’s it going?”

I tackle-hugged her, throwing my arms around her waist.