epidemiology | Closed: Eye eye baby baby eye eye

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Closed: Eye eye baby baby eye eye

CHARACTERS: Evan, Laedo, and Sieglinde
DATE: A day after Laedo's return to Oska
WARNINGS: Possible discussion of disfigurement
SUMMARY: Evan's been promised a replacement eye and he's gonna collect

The most upsetting part was that Evan was growing used to his situation. The patch went on every morning and stayed on till he had to bathe or sleep again, and he no longer really felt it. The mess of scar tissue that ruined one side of the eyelid underneath was well healed over, and although it was still pink it was no longer tender. There were times, solid hours at a time when his missing eye wasn't a consistent backbuzz in his mental processes. More than anything else, that was disturbing.

Generally Evan was the sort to politely step back and wait rather than impose upon a person, particularly for a favour as serious as the one he was leveraging from Laedo, but the dragon wasn't back a day before Evan had pinged him about it.

They'd set the time for the next day. Of course, that had lit the young man up in a tizzy of nerves, which he had spent the day trying his best to ignore with limited success. When the appointed hour came, Evan was waiting in his room, the spot that Laedo and he had agreed upon as a place with some privacy where Evan felt safe. He had slept badly, but just then he barely felt it, abuzz as he was with nerves. He'd tidied his room, laid away some provisions that would keep until tomorrow, and brought in a small pile of books from the library, expecting to have to den up for a couple of days.

There was one last thing to do, and Evan was feeling a little like he was regretting the offer he'd made to have Sieglinde come along and watch. What if it hurt? What if he embarrassed himself in some form? He'd have to hold it together particularly, for even if his twelve-year-old audience was particularly mature for her age, she was still twelve.

Still, he'd made the offer and he'd make good on it. He pulled up the network from his wrist bauble, keyed in Sieglinde's username.

"Hey," he started off, a little quick with nerves. "If you still have an interest in observing how Laedo's healing magic works, um, he's due to show up at my room in about ten minutes. I'm on the top floor, three doors in from the back staircase."

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The sensations were gentle enough that Evan was legitimately not certain if he was imagining them or actually feeling the pulses of pressure around, through and behind his eye. Visits to the optometrist had been more unpleasant than this, if he were honest, but the stakes were so much higher here that he sat stock-still, on alert, his heart pattering away behind his ribs.

"No," he reported to Laedo, uncertain, "it all feels alright. You don't need me to... to look anywhere? Move it around at all? I don't know if it matters, but I still feel... I guess, muscles moving in the other... socket, when I move the eye that's still there." His lips pinched into a straight line as he admitted as much. It irked him to talk about his injury, foolish and miserable thing that it was, but what good did silence do him now?

"It isn't necessary, though allow me to do some adjustments to capture fluidic densities," Laedo allowed, a faint grin quirking one corner of his mouth. He wouldn't want to discover that an asandus-appropriate eye would bulge in the weakened muscles of a human eye-socket.

Once this was all done, he pulled back and actually sat himself, just as the eyeball template pulled away from Evan's face, a ghostly echo like a 3D X-ray hovering above the asandus man's hands. Laedo held this diagram to Sieglinde for a few minutes as she furiously scribbled. "This kind of imaging is useful for the student," He explained, "and for the warrior. We occasionally make examples of our enemies, looking for weak points throughout the body--but it is vastly more useful for the practice of healing."

He gestured for Evan, as he held the hologram steady for Sieglinde. "More tea, and find something comfortable to do for roughly half of an hour. I will be building the construct to within a few fractions of being done before we solidify it within your socket and ready the receptors to connect with it."

"Do you want to be left alone while you work or can we observe?" Given permission, Evan was already standing. His nerves suffused him with a kind of effervescence, one he did not much like, and he immediately bustled to the teapot. Tea generally could be fetched from the kitchen, but Evan, accustomed to long study behind closed doors, had prepared his own stash. He had a small tin of teabags and a larger metal pitcher of water on a coiled mat: after fishing out the old teabag from the now-empty pot and dropping in a new one, he picked up the pitcher and held it between his hands.

Heating the water to boiling took about thirty seconds, all told, although from outward observation very little could be divined of what he was doing until the water began to steam. He poured, lidded the pot, put the pitcher back down on its mat; all told the operation took a little less than a minute, but it let him have a moment of breath.

He turned and leaned against the desk rather than sit again, looking with his good eye between his guests. Sieglinde's notes were fascinating things, and despite the holographic projection having been a clearer representation of what it was showing, the sketching and note-taking was beautiful in its own way. He exclaimed. "What language is that? I almost recognize it."

It actually took a moment for Sieglinde to realize she was being addressed, too deep in the world of observation to think of being spoken to. But she did finally notice, a beat or so too late, lifting her head from a very detailed sketch of his eye in Laedo's scan form.

"Ah- This?" She looked back down at her notes, then right back up, blinking a bit owlishly.

"High German. I am told it is a more antiquated form." To her it was normal, but... she'd had difficulty with those who spoke "modern" German, so it seemed only fair to say if that is what he might expect to see.

"And this is Theban." The language of witches, used mainly in quick labels around the sketches.

"Hm," Laedo grunted. He was well into the process already, full concentration taken up on the foundation layer as he considered solving the problems inherent with mating non-natural material to what would be a very complicated nerve bundle. It was either an 'I don't mind if you stay' or a 'leave me alone', though if things were so dire he probably would have spoken up more thoroughly.

Casting about for the new cup of tea without looking for it, he finally fumbled it to a grasp and then, forgetting to drink it, held it to his chest. Neither German nor Theban meant anything to the askan; he was running into some issues with his own experience in such complicated operations and he did not want to lose face with either of these clever people. The only saving grace here was that neither seemed to understand the process entirely.

In any case, after about five minutes of intense frowning, one hand extended as the hologram faded away, Laedo gave a hiss of understanding--a problem with how to anchor the foundations of the physical aspect of the eye while it was still in progress--and set his cup down on the edge of the desk. Cupping both hands together, a spark of light radiated out from his loosely clasped fingers, and as he drew his hands apart, something like a small glass stone hovered between his pinkly iridescent fingers. Around it, seeds of the eye he would eventually insert into Evan's head began to take form, veins of light dimming as they formed and lost the luster of half-formed magic. Something was looking wrong with it, however: he had not filled the eye with fluid yet.

The retina and its encasing flesh were sagging, the iris barely visible without aqueous humour to puff up the cornea. Laedo had begun a low, measured hum as he worked, like he was spinning a thread and needed a rhythm to keep his intricate little gestures well synced. "Evan," he eventually gestured. "Find a comfortable place to lay. We should begin the operation."

"I'd love to look at them again later," Evan admits to Sieglinde. "I don't read modern German either, but your sketches are fairly telling themselves..."

But when Laedo begins to work on the eye proper, Evan's attention is implacably drawn back to watching that distressingly vivid process. It sends fingers of fascinated disgust to know that he's seeing from the outside something that will soon be inside his body, hopefully permanently... hopefully as a part of him.

He does not realize, as Laedo works, that his shoulders are coming further and further up with tension, that he's biting the inside of his lower lip hard. When Laedo instructs him to go lie down, though, that tension comes to a head and Evan slowly pales. There's no escaping what's to come, and Evan is still in no way convinced that this won't hurt as badly as getting the eye removed had. That sagging, empty shell... he's caught by vivid imaginings of how it's going to have to slide between his ravaged eyelids, how it's going to have to re-inflate inside his skull.

The process has gone from fascinating to terrifying.

He stands, taking delicate care, and his look to Laedo is agonizingly uncertain in a way he can't quite conceal. "Alright," he says, nervous speech at best, and heads to his bed, fingers fiddling with the fabric of his pants. He lies down on his back, and immediately feels about ten times more vulnerable. "Alright. How's this?"

"Acceptable," Laedo had been watching the human pace, and now that he had most of the trappings of the prosthetic finished, he was free to note the mounting anxiety he had spotted. Looking to Sieglinde, thinking of her brusque, careful diagnoses of the Nalawi that he'd been fortunate enough to see training with her--or more importantly, seeking her for aid--Laedo waited for a moment or two until she'd finished up the brushing lines of the newly constructed eye.

"Would you join him, please," he suggested. "The notes will have to come later. I may need your help as I will be focusing my efforts on the connective process. He will need distracting." He had briefly considered putting Evan under for this, or some kind of numbing spell... but it was too important by far to ensure that he was connecting the eye to the socket. He needed the feedback, and not in a 'better or worse' sort of way.

Cupping his hands around the prosthetic, Laedo approached the bed and, looking down on Evan, gestured with his chin. "Pull up some pillows, elevate your head. Sieglinde, bring that chair for me, please."

[Access to her notes Evan could have- for all that they would be unreadable to most people, (she had yet to meet anyone yet who could speak her native tongue beyond the Servants, who were aided by a magical fluency), her drawings were indeed detailed enough to belong in an anatomy text.

At Laedo's call, though, she reluctantly left them behind, sliding carefully from her own seat and onto bound feet, taking a moment to balance properly, holding onto to her chair arm before her distinctive swaying, unsure gait took her to the chair the askan wanted, awkwardly pushing it over in short spurts. She might have trouble with stairs but she could do this much, jilted as it was.

Sieglinde took a position at the bedside, ready for directions, but also with eyes glued to the artificial eye itself, memorizing what she could by sight.]

He felt a spike of reflexive embarrassment at being referred to in the third person as someone who would need distracting, shame that magnified itself as he knew the assertion was probably valid. Wide-eyed, he fought back a grimace and mostly succeeded, busying himself with pulling one of the pillows from the wide bed's other side to prop himself up.

Though he opened his mouth with every intention to ask if he should take the eyepatch off, Evan found his throat try enough that the noise did not come easily. It was a stupid question anyways, he reasoned, and with a careful, too-careful hand he reached up and slid the patch of leather from his face, pulling the cord up and over his head. It ruffled his shaggy hair upon removal, and he clutched it tight in his palm as he settled back against the pillows.

God, he was going to get out-composed by a twelve-year-old. Laedo was too daunting a prospect to look at just then, standing there tall and golden and gorgeous with that looming prosthetic floating above his hands, so Evan flicked his abbreviated gaze to Sieglinde, offering the girl a very nervous smile.

"So, so how does it compare to a sea serpent eye? I mean, so far?" It was a poor attempt at grim humor, but it was what he could manage.

"One should hope it is decidedly more human," Laedo quipped. "Thank you," he added, noting Sieglinde's efforts despite her bound feet.

Sitting over Evan, he kept the unfinished eye out of the young man's immediate sight for now, instead suggesting, "take several steadying breaths. I will be scanning your injured eye--that should feel much like the scanning of the healthy one. Would you rather know when I begin the second half of the procedure, or not?"

Don't worry, Evan. This twelve year old out-composed a lot of people, it wasn't just you.

"Most definitely far more human. Your view will not be nearly as wide, nor as curved, I am quite sure." The large lens of the sea serpent accounted for quite a fish-eye, though perhaps the water could be blamed for most of that.

But that was beside the point. Her gaze continued to flick slowly between the other two, jotting things down mentally to be recorded later.

Evan grins unsteadily at Sieglinde's assessment. He'd been fully prepared to volley back a dose of sass, but nothing comes to his tongue in the face of Laedo's impending procedure. So he bites the inside of his lower lip, nods, and slides his gaze back to the healer preparing to scan him again.

"Um," he says to the question. "Um, I guess." In all honesty he isn't sure the answer to that question should be yes, he's not sure he wants to know in detail what's going to be happening to his face as it's happening, but he's not likely to get another chance to learn about this procedure, right? Getting squeamish now would be a sign of weakness, right?

Clinging hard to the idea that he can do this, despite the cold pit opening his stomach, Evan begins to take those deep breaths. They only relax him marginally.

"Very well," Laedo replies, taking Evan's half-answer for what he thought it was worth. He casts Sieglinde a grateful grin, hearing the particularly dry sense of humour behind the literal qualities of her response, before he steadies his hand. "This should be over with sooner than later," he attempts to soothe, though in truth that might not be the case. Whenever he's had to mend his own wounds he's often been in such a dire state that he's in no place to complain about the feeling of knitting flesh and bone.

The scanning, at least, takes very little time; Laedo is only getting a feeling for how and where Evan's eyesocket has been damaged. Aside from some fatigue of the muscles and the obvious damage where the eye had been pulled, he's unable to find any onset of infection. "Sieglinde, you work here was quite thorough; I am impressed," he speaks with some distraction, while Evan might feel the ghosting pressure of Laedo's focus as it probes around inside his head. For a moment he goes quite quiet, then he casts a second, precise little spell for cleansing--a light flashes from within Evan's ruined socket.

"Nothing should interfere with the settling in of the new eye," he justifies; "I've just ensured that stray bacteria are removed from the equation. Evan, we'll begin the next part of the procedure shortly. If you find yourself uncomfortable, give me a rating from one to ten and we can pause as necessary." Not that Laedo is likely to pause or remain especially gentle, but he can see the way the redhead's practically bugging out from his remaining eye and that, he thinks, is not going to help anyone. "Just think of the benefits of being whole and healthy again," he adds, knowing what a blow such a dire injury can be.

"My work is never anything but, of course." Sieglinde had her share of pride in her work, and though she could be humble about her other capabilities... healing and magic she certainly could crow about.

Even that which she'd performed with no magic, with limited supplies, and in a dank, foreign bacteria laced island.

But that's all she says, much more focused on watching Laedo's work, fairly humming in interest even as she absently gave Evan a pat on the shoulder.

Steady on, man.

At the very least, all of Evan's deep breaths seem to be doing something. The young man doesn't feel much calmer, but in some cases knowledge of autonomic functions comes in handy: his worries may not be alleviated, but he at least can acknowledge that his body is reacting as it mechanically should to the calmed breath.

The flash of light is a strange experience and he winces, and it takes him a few more breaths after that to get himself back in order. Sieg's pat barely registers at first, but he does glance at the young woman and nod when it finally sinks in. The sight of her focused interest, oddly, does help; it's all the interest he'd be showing if this wasn't so damndably personal.

"Okay," he says, voice tighter than he'd prefer it to be. "Okay, I, I think I'm ready. Let's get this done and over with." It's more bravery than he feels, but at the very least the last part is true: he really wants this to be over.

"Very well," Laedo replies, sparing a glance for Sieglinde and her true determination, and for Evan and his feigned bravery. If he had any hope in the world to remove and replace the Zenite-sodden eye he struggles with, himself, Laedo would have been in Evan's place... but a curse is a curse. In some ways he'd seized the chance to perform this procedure to live vicariously through his gift, and that may not be a healthy reason, but it makes the asandus very determined, himself.

The procedure itself is time consuming, moreso than the dragon had let on. The replacement eye slips into the ruined eye socket without much trouble, though surely the sensation could not have been comfortable. It is when Laedo begins to fuss with filling it: creating a swelling bundle of magic that puffs up before it settles into a clear, jelly-like liquid that marks the beginning of a very uncomfortable experience.

The first nerve connection between the eye and Evan's own body is like an electrical zap. Laedo had preemptively placed one hand on Evan's forehead to keep him still, the other hand moving in a complicated cat's cradle that the magically gifted would see as a complicated bundle of magical knots and surges of light or perhaps pressure. The rest that follow are just as uncomfortable, but there are many of them... and in fact, Laedo's magic does not play as well with Evan's hidden fire-elemental nature as the spell-casting would have worked with a human. It's not long before the askan's own brow is beading with sweat--this is much more complicated than he'd expected. "Do not move," he orders, "we're almost through here... any major movement will require us to start again!"

From the first moment the uninflated eye begins to slide between his ruined eyelids, Evan knows his bravado is entirely false. It evaporates, and he turns slowly as white as a sheet, the blood draining from his face as he tries as hard as he knows how to try, to ignore the awfully wrong sensations happening within his skull. General anaesthesia, why couldn't they have looked into general anaesthesia?

Silently repeating over and over to himself that this is worth it, this is worth it, two eyes, no eyepatch, this is worth it only goes so far as a mantra. The sensations are too invasive to ignore, and the best he manages is kind of a sightless staring and a frozen stillness.

It's a good thing that Laedo puts his hand on Evan's forehead when he does, even if it makes the young man's anxiety spike, because that first stab of sensation makes him yelp. His hands fist in the blanket and his pallid complexion positively greys. Laedo's admonition hits home and Evan goes positively rigid, good eye fixed forward, thankfully missing the strain on Laedo's expression and saving him an even worse spike of anxiety. He opens his mouth to speak, but the words will not come: he snaps his mouth closed again and quietly hyperventilates through his nose as those nasty zaps continue.

"Deep breaths, human," Laedo adds, distracted as ever as he finally seals up the last of the bonds. They're delicate, over-sensitized things, these fresh magic connections that are forming into the semblance of human organic instrumentation. They're not tailored perfectly... but finally, they're in place.

Laedo keeps the flat of his palm on Evan's forehead for a moment or two longer, waiting for the man to realize what he's seeing. Then he says, "what are you seeing?" He has some initial adjustments to make, ones that will have to be further refined in a couple of days. Evan isn't the only one whose expression has gone a little off hue.

Evan actually lets slip a whimper as the procedure carries on, unable to quite hold in all of his distress, and he does not for several moments realize Laedo is done. It still feels strange, wrong, bizarre to have something in that socket again, almost as wrong as it had felt at first for the socket to be empty, and so the end of the procedure isn't quite the sense of relief that he had hoped it would be. Had he ever noticed before that he could feel his eyeball all the way back into his skull? Had he ever been able to before?!

He gasps when Laedo asks the question, because it's only then that he does realize that he's seeing -- he's seeing something from the missing eye, some warmth of light through his closed eyelit. His optic world had been flashes of light and the static of intense distress to the point that when the vision in his new eye had begun to blink in and out he had taken it as a doubling of vision more than new input: his brain, unaccustomed to the doubled vision, had been tricked. But now he carefully, oh so carefully blinks.

And then he hisses as the light from the room, even so dimmed as it is compared to daylight, stabs into his skull like an ice pick. Still, with that stab had been vision, had been a watery and blurry impression of the room around him.

"Oh, god," he says, voice high with stress and with excitement. "That -- I mean, I could see!" Not, strictly, useful information. He gasps, bringing his hands to his face, touching his cheek and around his eye socket, not quite able to bring himself to touch the newly filled eyelid again. "Oh, god, it hurt, was it supposed to hurt? Is that bad?"

"It was never going to be comfortable, if that is what you're questioning," Laedo replies, loosening up for a moment or two in his amusement at Evan's spouting. He glances from the man to Sieglinde for a moment, then back to his patient. "I need to make some adjustments. Can you see out of it still? Is it dark, or bright? How are colours coming through?"

If you had asked Sieglinde if she'd ever anticipated being able to witness something as interesting as this, she wouldn't have said yes.

She probably should have been better at comforting Evan, and she did manage a good pat or shushing hum of comfort, but... it would be wrong to say she wasn't primarily focused on what Laedo was doing.

Reconnecting nerves... if she could do that, then theoretically she could possibly repair the dead nerves in her bound feet, if she ever chose to-

Sieglinde forced herself to stop right there. To instead hold up her hand in front of Evan's face and begin helpfully holding up fingers to provide a sample of something to see.

"And your perception of motion?"

"It's -- ahh." Having the both of them there, hovering over him, was deeply off-putting and Evan took one glance and then closed his eyes again. Only, however, long enough to shake his head like a dog ejecting water, and rub at the aching muscles at his temples and forehead. "It's really, really light-sensitive."

Admitting that lets him gather himself enough to try again: he opens his good eye, and then very slowly cracks the bad one. He hisses again at the light, but presses on. The pupil's dilated, only slowly constricting, and the eye begins to water for the brightness. "Ahh, um, I can see motion fine. And... and colour, though it seems blown-out, I guess."

Putting that together felt like a valiant effort to the shaky redhead.

"Hm," was his only response, at least from the askan. Laedo placed one hand at the back of Evan's head again, then, other hand coming up over the human's new eye, he spread his fingers out to place delicate fingertips at brow and temple, thumb over the center of his forehead. He gave another little sweep of a gesture, barely enough to bring his fingers over the eye properly, then a twist, as though cracking a safe. All that, and Evan might feel something twisting faintly, dimming the vibrant fizz charging between eye and brain. If he needs it again, Laedo will make another minor adjustment, but ultimately he says, "it will take a few days to adjust. Try what you've been given for forty-eight hours, and unless you are given to splitting headaches or a sudden loss of vision, we will convene again."

He then looks over to Sieglinde, finally finding it in him to grin, if tiredly. "I apologize if I wasn't outlining that as I worked. It has been a while since I last performed such a complicated operation. Do you want to adjourn to the library for more paper? I can talk out what I did, in time."

What did a new eye feel like? It wasn't something Sieglinde could easily imagine, having never lost a limb. She had always tried her hardest not to think of what it would be like to regain such things, because it tended to just remind one of what was lost.

But it must be a strange one. Curious, Sieglinde kept watching Evan's reactions closely until Laedo addressed her directly.

"If Evan will be alright alone than I would appreciate the chance, yes-"

After all, her rather detailed note-taking was at the moment cut off midway, and they hadn't even gotten to the good part yet. Notes were something of a formality for her, considering her capacity for memory, but it helped cement them better when she put them down in her own hand.

"Evan, are you in need of anything? I've pills for dizziness if you need."

"I'll be alright," he quickly answers.

In all honesty, having the two out of his room sounds like an incredible relief just then. Turning off all the lights and hiding under his covers is about the only thing that Evan legitimately wants to do just then, but not even he's enough of a wuss that he'd admit to as much while they were there.

He shakes his head, and then regrets it as his eye aches so strangely. "No, go ahead, I'm just, just going to take it easy for a bit."

"In that case, rest now, and contact me over the jewel network if you feel anything suddenly change," Laedo reiterated. He brought Seiglinde's crutch near, but, thinking better of it, offered her an arm as well. "Let us retreat to the library... or perhaps the kitchen. I'm half-starved from all of that..." But, making no lies about allowing the human to rest, he was already ushering Sieglinde from the room, hopefully to give Evan the respite that he needed to adapt and endure.

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Closed: Eye eye baby baby eye eye

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(Feel free to see this as a time-skip; if you guys want to chat a bit that's cool!)

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everyone down for an endcap here?