Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Fourteen. Everyday Heroes.

Harv looked at the carriage in awe as Jack pulled the cover off of it, storing it in the rear.

He'd seen some of the mechanical vehicles they had at Glacier Valley when he'd visited, but this was something else.

Dark blue metal reflected the sunlight, the color somehow seeming to have depth to it. Brightly polished silver accents flowed along the curves and edges.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jack asked as he activated a device in his hand, causing the vehicle to rumble to life.

"It certainly is," Harv breathed, while Elli cast a cautious glance at it.

"It's called a Trackhawk, and it'll be hauling our asses in style and comfort," Jack opened the door, gesturing for Harv to enter the vehicle, then did the same with the door behind that one, allowing Elli to climb in.

As Jack circled the vehicle, Harv marveled at the rich softness of the leather.

"Stars and stones, but this is something else," Elli muttered behind him.

Jack slid into the seat next to him, which looked much more complicated than his own, and reached over his shoulder, bringing a strap across his shoulder and hooking it across his waist. "Buckle up," Jack advised, "I didn't buy this thing to drive slow, I'll be putting the hammer down."

Harv fumbled with his own strap and found that it had a clever locking mechanism. Once both he and Elli and locked themselves in place, Jack reached down and pulled a lever back, and a split second later, the front of the carriage roared,and Harv felt himself being pulled back into the seat as the vehicle lunged forward, the terrain outside racing by.

"I fucking love the sound of a Hemi!" Jack shouted happily.

Harv found that there was a convenient handgrip upon which he could cling for dear life as Jack piloted the vehicle over the rough road, slowing only slightly as he twisted the wheel, causing the carriage to slide sideways as the rear end swung out before catching and sliding the other way as the roar grew louder. They had turned on to a black strip of ground that seemed much smoother, although Harv wasn't sure if that was a good thing as their speed increased.

"L.A., here we come!" Jack crowed.

Harv was wondering if maybe this hadn't been the greatest idea, and judging from the curses coming from behind him, Elli was certain it wasn't. All of this was because he'd had a bright idea.

One Month Earlier...

"Are those healing potions?" A voice asked from behind him, causing Harv to turn and look down at the care-worn face of a middle-aged woman.

"They are," Harv confirmed as he took in her clothing which marked her as being from Earth, "they're made with a combination of Alchemy and Animancy with a bit of Ritual Magic tossed in."

"What all can they heal?" She asked.

Harv motioned towards the table where Elli had already taken a seat. "Why don't you have a seat, and I'll answer any questions you might have," he offered

She held out her hand, which Harv shook, having learned this particular greeting from Bob. "Carol-Ann," she introduced herself.

"I'm Harv, and this is Elli," he said as they both sat down.

"So, how exactly do healing potions work?" She asked.

"Well," Harv began, "a general healing potion like this," he took one off his bandolier and rolled it across the table to her, "starts with a base of plant material from a Dungeon. Heart's Bloom root, inner bark from a Thorn Whip, and Cold Moss. You'll need to dry all three of them using a mana-fueled flame before grinding them to powder. Weight out a sliver of the Heart's Bloom root and the Cold Moss, with half a sliver of the Thorn Whip bark. You'll need to slowly add them, in that order, to a vial of water collected from the Dungeon, making sure each is completely mixed before you add the next."

Carol-Ann was listening intently as Harv took a deep breath and then continued. "At this point, with Ritual Magic and the Alchemy skill, you can dissolve a single Mana Crystal in the vial, and you'll have an Alchemical healing potion that will work as an effect over time healing potion and will slowly heal damage over the course of a few minutes." He shook his head and warned, "despite the duration, the laws remain the same; you have to take the potion with five seconds of being injured, or it won't recognize the injury."

"If you also have the Divine School of Animancy and Anima Blast, you have another option," Harv explained, delighted to have found someone who seemed to be legitimately interested in his craft. "Due to the synergy between Anima Blast and the potion you've created, instead of using a single crystal, you can instead spend the full one hundred required for a ritual, infusing your potion with that power as well. The true value lies in being able to infuse a significant volume of the healing potion you've created with that power. I'd recommend a hundred doses at a time, as I've found that's optimal for maintaining the efficacy of both the Anima Blast effect, which is lessened but provides instant healing and the enhanced effect over time of the alchemical part of the potion."

Carol-Ann had pulled out a pad of paper halfway through Harv's lecture, and she spent a few more seconds taking notes before she looked up. "How much does it heal for?"

"That variable is determined by your Alchemy skill, and if you've taken a speciality skill for healing potions, as well as your Animancy School skill, and your Anima Blast skill, all combined with your natural spellcasting value, amplified by any enchantments you have and your spellcasting focus," Harv replied. "Keeping in mind that I'm likely a bit higher level than you are, that potion," he pointed to the one in front of her, "will heal two thousand points of damage, and then an additional one hundred points each second for two minutes."

"Which is useful when you get in over your head," Elli chimed in with a bored expression. "A burst of healing to deal with the initial damage, and then a steady tick to keep up with any new wounds as you deal with the situation you've found yourself in."

"Two thousand?" Carol-Ann muttered weakly, staring at the vial.

"Yeah, Harv here is modest," Elli grinned, "and while most people don't talk about their levels freely, I can tell you that we are, as Bob said once, 'Heavy Hitters,' which I thought had a nice ring to it."

"If you don't object, and Star's know Bob never did, what level are you?" Harv asked gently.

"Level zero," she replied slowly. "I just came over, my boyfriend is a D&D fanatic, and he got me playing along with him, and there was this D&D convention in the desert..." she trailed off.

"What sparked your interest in the healing potions?" Harv nodded to the young woman who had moved to stand a discreet distance from the table.

"I'm a nurse," Carol-Ann replied, "I work in hospice."

"I don't think that word translated very well," Harv said, "because it sort of came across as 'not quite dead yet graveyard.'"

She snorted and smiled weakly. "That's not too far from the truth," she admitted, "Hospice care is sometimes called 'End of life' care. We take care of people who are just waiting out their time; they have either an incurable disease or condition, or they've simply aged to the point where they can't take care of themselves any longer."

Harv shuddered. "I think I'd rather die standing tall against a wave or a tide," he murmured, gaining a fervent nod from Elli.

"We don't have that option," Carol-Ann replied. "The reason I asked about the potion is that I was wondering if a potion could help my patients." She shook her head, "I know there isn't any way I can move all these people over here to be 'regenerated,' but I was hoping that there was something I could take back with me that would help them."

Harv tilted his head thoughtfully. "Technically, which is an amazing word, by the way, you could just prepare a vessel as a ritual completion trigger and hang a regenerate ritual on it, but you'd end up using a hundred mana crystals for the vessel, another hundred for the trigger, and then another hundred for the regenerate ritual, and even then, you'd have to be able to cast the regenerate ritual to set it off, and it would take a hundred mana to do so, which is a bit dicey on Earth, what with not being able to regain your mana and all."

"That doesn't sound like it's possible," Carol-Ann sighed.

"Well, regenerate is sort of a panacea," Elli replied, "if you can tell us exactly what you're trying to fix, we might be able to come up with something that more specific."

"Cancer is the big one," Carol-Ann said.

"Describe it for us?" Harv suggested.

"No wonder Bob prefers Thayland," Elli muttered to him as they staggered out of the vehicle hours later.

Their trip had slowed down once they'd reached an area where there were too many other cars for Jack to maintain his speed.

Harv could freely admit that the trip through the rolling hills and the winding road through the mountains had been gorgeous. It had also opened his eyes to just how many people lived on Earth. Holmstead must have seemed so tiny and provincial to Bob.

He looked at the building Jack had driven them to. It was made of stone blocks and was only a single story tall, but it was a large, rambling affair.

Harv called on the latent ability of his bloodline, the gift and the curse carried in secret by his family. He knew that his eyes had turned black as the darkest night for a moment, but the color bled away rapidly, and the sight remained.

He swept his gaze across the building again, and this time, he could see. Death permeated this place. He suppressed a shudder as he walked through two sets of doors that led into the building. It was bizarre to see such a flat patina of Death, but without the gentle flows of mana to carry it away and dissipate it, Death simply lay heavily, waiting.

Harv was surprised that the people that worked here couldn't feel it.

"I hate these places," Jack confided in a low voice, "call it a natural fear of my own mortality, but it just creeps me out."

Or maybe they could feel it.

"Excuse me," Jack said as they reached the desk, flashing his charming smile at the young woman seated behind it, "I'm Jack Scalligio, and I'm here to see Ms. Carol-Ann Strayer."

The young woman returned Jack's smile and reached for one of the devices on her desk, punching a few buttons on it before speaking into it. "Carol-Ann, you have visitors," her voice called from above him.

Jack leaned over the desk and spoke quietly to the girl, causing her to flush and smile more widely as they chatted.

Harv shook his head. Jack was a shameless flirt, a fact which had become well known in Holmstead. He never took advantage, but the man would flirt with a stone.

"Harv, Elli," Carol-Ann's voice called from a hallway to their left, and he turned to find her walking towards them with a smile.

He walked down the hallway to meet her and smiled, "We're pretty sure we have it," he said quietly.

Elli snorted and shook his head, "Harv's 'pretty sure' is basically a guarantee."

"Let's go test it out, I can guarantee that it isn't going to cause any harm," Harv assured her.

Given the nature of the potion he'd created, he'd tested it quitethoroughly in that regard. Necromancy wasn't the sort of thing that people normally infused into a potion, at least not in Greenwold.

He'd had to learn even more about the human body than he'd known before, and according to Carol-Ann, he was already nearly as well read on the matter as the Doctors she worked with. Targeting mutated cells was a step beyond anything he'd ever even heard of anyone trying, although in all fairness, almost all the necromancers he knew were family, and they made it a point not to hold meetings to discuss it. That sort of thing was frowned upon, which Harv had always felt was rather discriminatory. No one minded if a bunch of Animal School casters got together and shapeshifted into a pack of wolves to howl at the moon and hunt down deer in the forest, but get half a dozen necromancers in one place for a cup of tea, and the whole world was ending.

It had taken him a month, as targeting those cells and nothing else was a difficult and fascinating proposition, especially when he meant to do it with a potion, rather than just with a spell. Elli had become increasingly grumpy at the enforced inactivity. Still, he'd managed it, or at least he thought he had. Worst case scenario, the potion didn't do anything except make them have to piss.

Harv followed Carol-Ann into a nearby room where an elderly man lay sleeping or so heavily medicated as to make no difference. He'd been both horrified and intrigued by the techniques and medications Earth had developed in the absence of magic.

He laid his briefcase on a table beneath the blank television before opening it, revealing racks of potion vials. He picked one up and turned to her.

"Heart's Blossom petals, Luminous Moss, Corpse Rot root," he said quietly, "the first two quite poisonous, and the last has the odd property of altering the properties of other substances to target a particular system. The potion has been infused with a specialized Necro's blast that I created to target cellular abnormalities."

He took a deep breath. "I've used my own blood as the final regent for targeting the cancer cells; As I know I don't have cancer, having paid for a regeneration ritual, just to make sure," he smiled, "all that remains is to attune the potion to the user by placing a drop of their blood in the vial, and allowing it to disperse for at least one minute."

Carol-Ann nodded slowly.

"What Harv isn't saying, that he probably should," Elli said, "is that if you could keep the exact manner of the potions manufacture quiet, he'd appreciate it. There's a bit of a stigma around both Necromancy and the use of blood to target ritual effects back home."

"Of course," she agreed, taking the vial from Harv and looking over it carefully. She turned to the patient, who was easily identified as John Carson by the name tag written on the end of the bed in large block letters and pricked his finger, drawing a droplet of blood on the needle she'd used.

Twisting the cap off the vial with one hand, she deposited the blood with the other before recapping it and swirling it to mix the blood in.

One of the things that had absolutely floored Harv had been the perfection of the vials produced by Earth, as well as how many he could buy at once and how inexpensive they were.

After a slow count of one hundred, clearly veering toward the side of caution, she opened the vial and withdrew the potion into a syringe before inserting it into the tube that ran from a bag half full of clear fluid and into John Carson's arm.

"Alright, Mr. Carson, let's see if we can't get you back to your family," Carol-Ann whispered before pressing the plunger on the syringe.