Chapter 30: Chapter 29 - Exams: Round 2

The quiet scratch of pen on paper filled the classroom as Thalos looked down at the exam with heavy-lidded eyes. Beside him, Percy mumbled something under his breath, tapping his fingers deliberately on the table. Thalos ignored the noise, labeling each bone on the skeletal diagram. For their first exam, the Medicine class had focused more on first aid and basic, functional healing, but now that they were halfway through the term, the content had shifted more specific. It wasn’t exactly difficult, but there was a lot of memorization – what’s the name of the largest artery in the leg? How many ribs do humans have? What are the stages of infection? At a glance, a lot of it seemed somewhat useless to Thalos, but mash all of the bits of information together, and he found himself with a pretty complete understanding of the human body.

One of the inherent limitations of the Medicine class was that they had to rely, largely, on theoretical learning. One feature of the standard healing nodes that were used at the academy was that they only functioned on living flesh – the explanation he’d always heard was that the PMT healing nodes worked by magically enhancing and tweaking the body’s natural healing processes. Something about that didn’t make perfect sense to him – why, for example, did healing with a PMT not leave behind scars if it was based on the natural process?

He shook his head, dismissing the distracting thoughts as he moved on to the next part of the exam, specific situational responses. A couple were red herrings, he knew – large cuts could just be healed as they were. Bone’s had to be set before they were healed, though, and he indicated as much on his test paper. Reading over one of the questions, he paused to consider. It described a gunshot wound to the stomach on the battlefield. Now, for most gunshot wounds, there were three possible responses. First, you could take the bullet out and then heal the wound. Second, if the doctor believes that the bullet won’t cause any lasting damage if left inside the body, the wound could be healed without removing the bullet – the thought of walking around with a little chunk of metal inside his stomach made Thalos a little queasy, but that was the procedure. Third, and perhaps most grisly, you could heal the wound on site and then cut the bullet out later when the setting was more appropriate. After a moment of thought, he chose one of the responses, scribbling it onto the paper as well as his reasoning for choosing that course of action.

It was an odd feeling, taking a test that reduced these situations to these abstract, theoretical prompts. One of the questions described a stabbing, and Thalos felt a bit of phantom pain in his stomach and hand. He knew it was all in his head – there was no scarring or lasting damage from his encounter with the Spike Spitter – well, besides to his and Loria’s PMTs – but still, he found himself pressing his palm to his stomach, rubbing away an odd sense of itchiness that seemed to spring from nowhere.

He had just finished checking his answers when Dr. Harkin slapped shut the paperback he was reading. “Alright, pencils down,” he called, rising from his desk, “Pass your tests to the end of the row. We’ll take a five minute break before we start the practical portion of the exam.”

A hand shot up, and Dr. Harkin raised an eyebrow. One of the members of the class, a seminarian, stood up, wringing her hands. “Professor, I forgot my PMT in my room – can I go get it?”

The doctor stared at her, dead-eyed, for a moment before huffing an annoyed sigh. “You have until I call your name – the order’s random, so you might be first.” The girl stared at him with wide eyes, and he raised an eyebrow. “Funny. If I heard that, I’d be hurrying.” Another second of shock, and the girl was all but sprinting out of the room.

Thalos watched her go with a pitying eye, handing his paper off to Percy. “Think she’ll make it?” Around them, all the other students in the Medicine elective, about thirty-five in total, mostly seminarians, broke out into quiet conversation during their break.

“Yes,” Percy said definitively. He glanced at the front before leaning towards Thalos, speaking quieter. “The Doctor wouldn’t like to hear me say this, but his gruff personality – it’s all fake. Even if her name does come up, he’ll keep shifting it back until it looks like she just barely made it in time.”

Thalos looked between Percy and Dr. Harkin skeptically. “I guess you’d know,” he finally said. He knew from first-hand experience that their professor was pretty grumpy, even when treating someone, but it was easy enough to imagine that the grumpiness was just a mask. The man was a doctor, after all, he had to care at least a little, right? He turned to Percy, leaning back to stretch some of the tiredness out of his limbs. “What’d you think of the test so far? Easy for you, I’d guess – you’re Dr. Harkin’s apprentice, after all.”

Percy shrugged. “I definitely mixed up some of the bones, but I think I did pretty well on the rest of it.” He sighed, frowning slightly. “The apprenticeship is strange. There’s almost no overlap with what we’ve been doing in class.”

Thalos hummed with curiosity. “What do you mean?”

Percy scratched at the stubble on his cheek as he thought. “His research mostly deals with trying to enhance the efficiency of healing nodes – it’s one of the big problems of Magetool medicine. We’ve got to make the healing node smaller to optimize PMT use more, right?” He shrugged. “He has this big theory that you can bake a lot of the healing node function into the base PMT and thus drastically reduce the cost of having a healing node in your PMT. As a result of that, a lot of the stuff I help him with is mostly mixing his blood with monster components and seeing how they react.”

Thalos blinked, scrunching up his face. “His blood?”

“Yup. He seems to have a nearly endless supply of the stuff.” He smirked towards Thalos. “Lots of chicken liver and spinach, I’d imagine.” Thalos made a noise of disgust. “Still,” Percy continued, “I’ve definitely learned a lot, even if it’s not all especially practical.”

Thalos made a noncommittal noise, and the pair chatted casually for a few minutes more until Dr. Harkin started calling names for the practical portion of the exam. As Percy predicted, the girl who’d forgotten her PMT happened to get back to class right before her name was called – Thalos shared a look with him, and he made an expression that said, “I told you so.”

Soon after the girl’s turn, Thalos was up. He made his way to the front of the classroom where Dr. Harkin was seated behind a desk that had a plaster imitation of an arm with a gruesome cut across the wrist – there was no blood, but the inside of the wound had been painted a grisly red.

“PMT,” Dr. Harkin demanded, holding a hand out. Thalos gave over the gauntlet, and the doctor made quick work slotting in the ‘training healing node’ – a node that was designed to imitate the function of a healing node on models like the one on the table in front of him. Even from Thalos’s relatively limited experience with the healing node – mostly cuts and scrapes on the trail during the Hands-on – he could tell that it felt nothing like the real thing, like molding clay compared to stitching together flesh.

The diagnostic tool flashed green, and Dr. Harkin handed his PMT back, pulling out a stopwatch. He gave Thalos a countdown, and, as quick as he could, Thalos healed the ‘cut’ on the plaster arm. Dr. Harkin hadn’t told them what the cutoff time for passing was, but gossip from the second year students said it was somewhere around ten seconds. Thalos managed it in five.

“Well done,” Dr. Harkin said, though his tone hadn’t shifted from its normal coldness. He scribbled the time onto his roster and looked up at Thalos. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Thalos said, taking off his PMT and handing it back to his teacher to remove the training healing node. “No dizziness for the last few days.”

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Dr. Harkin nodded. “You didn’t go too wild for your welcome-back party, did you?”

“Despite your apprentice’s best efforts, no,” Thalos replied – telling the teacher was his little bit of revenge on the other boy for the fifteen times he’d asked Thalos if he wanted another beer after the first rejection.

The doctor’s eyes narrowed slightly, flicking behind Thalos. “Well, It’s good to hear you’re doing better. Let me or Roose know if you have any health issues, though hopefully it’s mostly behind you. You’re free to go, and good luck on the rest of your exams.” He returned Thalos’s PMT and gestured for him to leave before calling out the next name. With a sigh, Thalos waved a farewell to Percy, making his way out of the classroom – that was one exam down.

***

Dinner in the dorm was quiet, even by the dining hall’s normal sparse standards. Everyone had their nose buried in a textbook, even as they navigated precarious spoonfuls of chowder into their mouths. Thalos had one of his own textbooks in front of him, though he’d hardly looked at it since starting his meal – in theory, it would be productive to spend his dining time studying, but in practice, everything he tried to go over ended up messy and half-remembered.

“Say, Thalos,” Cliff said from beside him, “Would you say that magic functions more as a solid or a liquid?” He didn’t have a textbook in front of him, but he was frowning down at his plate like it held all sorts of dark secrets, and he kept muttering half-formed sentences under his breath, so Thalos figured he was at least thinking over something important. He hadn’t expected the topic to be so esoteric and vague, though.

After processing the question for a moment, Thalos shook his head. “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific – magic, as we understand it, isn’t like either.” Some early scholars had understood magic to be like ‘vapor in the air,’ but that was wholly inaccurate – magic flowed through solids just as well as liquids or gasses – better, even, in certain cases.

Blowing a long sigh through his lips, Cliff tapped his spoon on the edge of his bowl. “It’s like this – basically, my research project with Brother Paolo – he’s my advisor, you remember – it involves trying to isolate magic in an area. He’s cooked up a theory that rapid pulses of magic might be a method to getting it done. I’m just trying to figure out how, so I can get a better understanding.”

“You can’t ask him?” Thalos said.

Cliff made an uncertain noise. “He’s – busy, I guess is the right word for it – stressed, rushed. I don’t want to sit him down and get an hour-long explanation on the bare basics of this stuff to up my comprehension, though I think I’d do better with the engineering if I knew how everything worked.”

“And your Gift isn’t giving you anything?”

“C’mon, Thalos, just – in my experience, my Gift needs some kind of baseline understanding to get the cogs spinning. I don’t even have that bare minimum, here.” Cliff raised an eyebrow. “Well? How would you characterize the flow of magic – you’re good with this theoretical stuff, right?”

Spooning the chowder into his mouth, Thalos thought for a moment before answering. “I am, more or less, but – my grandfather worked more with magic in relation to humans. The heritability of gifts, the human limits of magic, things like that.” He shrugged. His grandfather had considered himself a philosopher of magic, though Thalos had always thought that title was pretty snooty. “But, from what I understand – and this is patchwork, at best – we’re actually pretty good at isolating magic in solids. Prime Stones, for example, are isolated magic in a solid. Liquids, too, like – well, I don’t know if it’s used as fuel for anything, but blood, for example, stores magic very well.”

“And spit,” Cliff added, nodding to himself.

Another pang of phantom, itchy pain. “Right,” Thalos said, “lucky for me.” He paused, grasping the train of thought and pushing forward. “Anyway – it’s a little different when it comes to gasses. Now I’m not sure if there have been any experiments done to try to isolate magic in compressed air, but the problem, if you want to call it that, is that magic flows very freely through gas. We’re not sure what, exactly, dictates the magical pressure in any given area, but whatever it is, it seems to demand stability. Magic equalizes pressure extremely quickly – if you manage to seal up air from a high magical pressure area and bring it to a low magical pressure area before releasing it-” He snapped his fingers. “It only takes an instant for that magic to dissipate into the local atmosphere.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Cliff said, “But – it doesn’t explain why pulses of magic might fix that problem.”

“Well,” Thalos said, eyes roaming around as he tumbled the idea in his head, “If I had to guess – and this is cobbled together from random anecdotes from my grandfather – in the instant before the magic dissipates into the atmosphere, there seems to be a brief moment of, ah – surface tension, between the two bodies of magic.” He bridged his fingers in front of him, pressing the fingertips together. “As I understand it, when two bodies of magic meet in the air, they sort of-” He pushed his fingers together, “-press against each other before they blend.” After a moment, he allowed his fingers to lock together, like he was praying.

Cliff made a noise of understanding. “I see. So – for our machine, it’s trying to essentially rapidly create that surface tension to stop magic from getting into our area.”

“Right,” Thalos said with a nod before frowning to himself, “well – maybe. I’m just guessing. You should probably ask Brother Paolo if you want any more information than that.”

A pair of hands came down, one on each of their shoulders, and Cliff and Thalos looked behind them to find Roose standing there, grinning. “Fascinating conversation, boys – though I’m not sure how relevant it is to your exams, hmm?”

“Just you wait till our scores come back,” Cliff said, “We’ll be fine.” He glanced at Thalos. “Well, I’ll be fine, at least.”

Thalos frowned towards his roommate. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Cliff.” He turned to Roose, “What can we do for you?”

“Well, pass your exams, of course,” Roose said with a concerned look for him, “but, more immediately, could you point me in Loria’s direction?” He released their shoulders to tap at a case tucked under one arm. “I have her replacement PMT, and I want to give it to her as soon as possible.”

“I think she’s in her room studying,” Cliff said, “If not, I know Jenna is – you can drop it off with her, and she’ll get it in Loria’s hands by the end of the night.”

Roose nodded. “Wonderful! Ah – Also-” He looked at Cliff. “I’ve got the materials for your personal PMT Basics exam prepared, Cliff – just show up at your normal time, and while the rest of the class is doing the practical portion of the exam, you can do yours.”

Cliff grinned. “Oh, really? Were you able to get everything we wanted?”

The Magepriest’s smile dimmed slightly. “There were a few, ah – adjustments, but nothing I think you can’t handle!” Cliff clicked his tongue, a thoughtful expression on his face. Thalos had no idea what they were talking about, but he was sure Cliff would fill him in soon enough. “And – this one’s for both of you,” Roose continued, glancing between them, “The disciplinary committee has decided to move to the next step. I know you guys have a lot on your plate, with exams and everything, but they are really pushing to get everything resolved before the harvest festival, so you can expect to be called in for an individual interview about the second Hands-on sometime over the next few days.”

“An interview?” Cliff asked with a frown, “what was the point of the written statements, then?”

Roose hummed for a second, pinching at his chin. “Well, I suppose the statement was a preliminary kind of thing, and now they’ll try to get a read on your intentions and state of mind, you understand?”

“Are we still on probation?” Thalos asked. It wasn’t like he spent a lot of time doing much outside of the dorm, but it had been a while since he’d gotten dinner with his auntie, and, despite the fact that she was headmistress, she couldn’t just make an exception to the rules for him. Well, she probably could, but she didn’t want to, for equality’s sake.

“Yes, sir,” Roose said, “If you could make sure Loria and Nym know, too – if she’s in her room, I’ll tell Loria, but I don’t want them to be caught off guard.” Thalos and Cliff grunted their understanding, and Roose nodded. “Good – thanks, you two, good luck on your exams – oh, and Cliff, make sure Brother Paolo doesn’t work himself to death – he’s not good at recognizing his limitations.”

“Right,” Cliff said, waving a hand after their professor as he walked out of the dining hall. Thalos watched him go, frown on his face, and his roommate turned to him. “What?”

Thalos looked at Cliff. “I’m just thinking about the interview – it’s going to be pretty short, I figure. ‘I got hit in the gut, and passed out.’ Not much to say.”

Cliff breathed a sigh, shaking his head. “You have to understand, Thalos. It’s all about the drama. Every good story has an explosion, so you better believe I’ll be adding one.”

Thalos’s head tilted. “I thought there already was an explosion in the story – Loria’s PMT, right?”

“Good point,” Cliff said, “that doesn’t mean the story wouldn’t be better with two.”