The Restoration of Taforashia
Written for dqbunny at Livejournal for himitsu_santa 2010
The main hall of the castle of Taforashia was large, but not airy. It had been built in the style of castles of an older time. The walls were thick and heavy, with wooden flying buttresses lining the cavernous interior to bring the height of the hall to almost twenty meters. The furnishings were solid but old and tired. Their designer had perhaps known that the kingdom could fall on hard times, and had opted for sturdy wood with few decorations that would not wear out. These heavy benches lined the central aisle, and held equally aging courtiers, their lined faces reflecting the sorrow and hope that filled the kingdom.
At the end of the aisle, which was lined with red carpet - a new installation, a concession to necessity for appearances - there was a dais with the royal throne. Here sat King Taforashia, himself also aging rapidly. It had been twenty years since the kingdom was awakened after a decade long magical slumber, and the people cured of the terrible Duram plague that had nearly destroyed them. The lost decade had cost them, but the price would have been far higher had they not been cast under a spell by Rezo the Red Priest. The great sage's actions had saved the kingdom and the people within it, even if Rezo's motivations had not been quite pure.
A newcomer to the kingdom might not notice the second throne on the dais, unless it was pointed out. The throne, which was nearly identical to the great throne upon which the king held court, was of such a miniature size that it might be mistaken for a toddler's chair, or even a toy for a doll. The latter description was not that far off. The second throne belonged to the prince, the heir to the kingdom, who due to a variety of circumstances, inhabited the body of a stuffed animal.
No matter - he was the legitimate heir, and it was through his courage and bravery that the kingdom of Taforashia still stood at all. The kingdom owed him its very existence. He had sacrificed his body to save them, and had worked tirelessly through the lost decade to find Rezo and rescue them all. But for him, and for the royal family of Taforashia, there had been no happy ending.
As far as they could tell, he was immortal. He had not aged or matured much. The physicians of the temple said that his spirit had been frozen in time, and without the influence of a physical body's hormones, he would not ever grow to a true adulthood. Not that he had a body that could really be grown. At best, he could be repaired and even augmented, but his form was comfortable enough that they dared not experiment too much.
Prince Posel felt that he had grown a little mentally, but he knew they were right - by all rights he should be approaching forty years old, but his voice had not changed, and there was a certain lack of maturity about his reasoning. His father was quite sure he would be an excellent ruler, and the people accepted that much, but there was a private sorrow that the Taforashia line would end with Posel, and a serious concern about the potential wars of succession should anything befall the enchanted heir.
All in all, despite his official age and date of birth, he was really not that much older in his mind than he was when he had lost his body. Ten? Fifteen, perhaps? Twenty, if one was pushing it. Yet there were things that one should have experienced at those ages - the heady rush of first love, a mild sense of rebellion, the desire to push off into one's own world - that Posel had not felt. He would probably never feel them.
For him, every day was a day to exist, but not a day to really live. He hadn't felt alive in the truest sense of the word since his body had been surrendered to sleep by Rezo.
Today had been a typical day in the court. The aging officials, most of whom would be retiring in a few brief years, had argued with each other over trivial things.
One said, "We must focus our resources on restoring the levee that was worn down."
Another countered, "Nay, twill hold up for another year. Instead we should till more fields so we can recover the reserves we lost last year during the drought."
Debate ensued, and after listening to their arguments, the king came to his own conclusions.
"It is winter time." He nodded to the doors near the front, which had opened to let in a visitor to the castle. That person was speaking with the guards, and if he was important, would be introduced in turn. "Let us focus on tilling the fields for the new few months, and then switch to shoring up the levee before the spring floods arrive."
The courtiers mumbled among themselves about the wisdom of their ruler. Prince Posel looked out on them sternly from his tiny throne, nodding in agreement with his father's decision, but no one really paid attention to him. He couldn't really blame them - how could they see him on his tiny chair?
There was a minor commotion near the front doors of the great hall. The visitor stood there, clad in a long white cloak and hood, shielded against the winter weather outside. The person was rather short in stature, and something about the cut of the cloak seemed to indicate a feminine air. She talked softly to the doorman at the post in the atrium, who in turn nodded to her before turning to face the interior of the hall.
"A messenger from the Kingdom of Seyruun has arrived!"
Pokota sat up in his chair, interested. Seyruun and Taforashi were close friends, as far as kingdoms went, and they frequently sent couriers back and forth, usually with glad tidings, but sometimes with sad ones, such as the death of old King Martin a few years ago. The courier kept her face cloaked as she walked up the hallway, her stride firm, her bearing straight and tall. It was only after she reached the end of the aisle just before the king that she carefully took off the hood of her cloak.
For a moment, Pokota felt his heart leap to twenty years ago, but then he realized he couldn't be right. Princess Amelia of Seyruun had settled down and married and had many children. Although this girl looked much like her, her hair was too light and was cornflower blue. Her eyes, however, shone with the same confidence, and her bust-line more or less gave her away as a member of the Seyruun royal family. Pokota noticed this last detail with an uncritical eye - without hormones, there was nothing in his body to react to the famous bosom that could not quite be hidden even beneath a thick winter cloak.
She had to be the oldest daughter of Amelia. There was no other explanation. Azalia, he seemed to recall. He had been genuinely happy to hear of her birth many, many years ago, just a short time after Amelia and Zelgadis had invited him for their wedding. He had declined at the time, not wanting to leave the sanctuary of the kingdom.
She knelt gracefully before the king. "Greetings from the Kingdom of Seyruun. Does the Kingdom of Taforashia welcome this messenger?"
His father gestured to her to stand again. "Yes, you are most welcome."
She smiled, and the chill of recognition struck Pokota again. She was the spitting image of her mother, aside from a mole on her cheek.
"Thank you," she said, her voice low and pleasant. "I am the Princess Azalia dis Morgan Seyruun." She executed a flawless curtsy to the king, and then turned to Pokota and gave him one as well.
He liked her immediately, for that simple gesture alone. He was so used to being ignored that for someone to recognize him of her own free will immediately impressed him.
The court was abuzz at this announcement - she was no mere messenger, but a visiting royal. The Minister of the Court immediately dispatched a few pages out to the rest of the castle - no doubt there would be a feast in her honor, and some poor chambermaids would be harassed to make sure their best guest bedroom was ready for her use.
She continued, ignoring the hubbub her last statement had caused. "I come bearing a letter from my kingdom. "
"Our allies in Seyruun have something to say? I pray it is good tidings." The king spoke carefully. Sending a member of the royal family was very unusual.
She smiled again, and glanced at Pokota, who stared unabashedly at her, still entranced by the similarity between her and her mother. "It is, your majesty, but this note is not for public ears. Is there a place we might retire to discuss my news in private? "
The king drummed his fingers on the armrest of his throne, obviously curious. "Of course. We may retire to the library at your convenience." To his courtiers, he said, "Court is adjourned."
"Wait," she said, and then turned to Pokota. "Prince Posel, you must also come, but no one else. This is a matter of secrecy for now."
She must surely have been coached by her mother, a forethought for which he was grateful. It was the sort of thing Amelia would have remembered and impressed upon her representative.
"Is it a matter of great urgency?" the king asked. "Or would you rather rest for now?"
She waved him away, although there were dark circles under her eyes and she surely must be exhausted from traveling so far. "I'm fine, and this is a matter of utmost urgency. The only thing I may say here is this: 'What was once done, cannot be undone. But what was done, can also be done anew.'"
With that cryptic sentence she fell silent, and allowed herself to be escorted by servants to the side hallway off the great hall, down to the heart of the castle.
The central library of the castle was the last room before the great building bled into the temple beside it. Their hallways and layers in their respective east and west wings were intertwined. If one knew the way, one could travel easily from the castle to the temple without setting a foot outside, but many of the doors were sealed with magic, and few knew the necessary enchantments to open them.
A large table was in the middle of the room, surrounded by rows and rows of books on all sides. Taforashia's library held unique tomes from almost a thousand years, and was one of the last few truly great things the kingdom could lay claim to.
The courtiers had hastily set up Posel's modified high chair, but Azalia and the king were escorted to the normal comfortable chairs that lined the table.
Once they were settled, the king leaned forward, his hands clasped on the table before him. "So what brings you here, young lady?"
She looked at him, her face serious but also earnest. "It is a long story, your majesty. Perhaps you should read this letter first, Prince Posel."
She handed the letter over to Pokota, who accepted it gingerly. It bore the seal of the royal family of Seyruun, but there was a smaller script on it that was indicative of the Prince Consort - Amelia's husband, Prince Zelgadis.
He broke the seal, wondering what was so important that Zelgadis would send him a letter entrusted to his own daughter, rather than a normal carrier pigeon or magical courier.
A glance at the first few lines gave him his answer.
He actually heard himself gasp. "This is...!"
Azalia smiled knowingly, and then turned back to face the king. "As you know, my father Prince Zelgadis was turned into a golem by Rezo the Red Priest."
The king nodded. "I had heard such things."
Pokota looked up from the letter to comment, "It was so hard for me to believe Rezo could do such a thing..." But it really wasn't. Rezo's methods and motives were only altruistic when they suited his purpose. He could heal the sick and save the blind, but in the end, all that he did was toward a selfish end. He had saved Taforashia, but he had stolen Pokota's body. His legacy was tainted by his final act of self-interest - knowingly allowing himself and the spirit of Shabrinigdo to be resurrected, all so that he could see the stars once more before traveling onto the next world.
Azalia leaned forward onto the table, her chin in her hands, giving away her youth. She couldn't be much older than sixteen. "Such was the power of Rezo's spells that no magic in the world could undo the spell. So my father sought an alternate solution."
Pokota held up the letter, which was long and covered many pages. It didn't matter; he had read enough to know the answer. "He found one, didn't he?"
Azalia smiled again, her eyes glittering with joy. "Aye. It happened not too long ago, when he was inspired to try something new. He decided to start with the source - Rezo. It turns out, Rezo's mage name came from a peculiar variety of magic he studied for his senior thesis at the magical academy, not just his clothing. Red magic has been all but lost to time - it isn't part of the broad category of white magic or black magic."
The king's eyes widened. "Red magic?" Although the ability to use magic ran through the bloodlines of most of the monarchs of the continent, King Taforashia had never taken the time to study it, unlike his son, who had been recognized as a prodigy early on.
"The categories of magic we use are inexact anyway." She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms, in another gesture that echoed her parentage. She had gone from mirroring her mother's unbridled enthusiasm to channeling her father's cooler attitude. "Red magic does not call upon the power of the gods or the demons, nor does it call upon the elements. It calls upon energy from another world entirely."
Now Pokota was curious. "How is that possible?"
Azalia shrugged. "How is any magic possible? There are four worlds, after all, and we don't really know what the others are like."
Pokota stared at the letter, a tendril of hope beginning to spring forth from within him. "Zelgadis said that Rezo told him there was no cure for his condition."
"Rezo said no cure exists in this world. Red magic... is not of this world." Azalia glanced at her fingernails. "I honestly can't say I understand it completely myself. My father has tried to explain it, but even he doesn't know quite how it works. White magic and black magic call upon the powers of the gods and the demons - red magic calls upon the gods or demons of another world."
The king nodded, accepting that answer. "May I see the letter?" he asked his son.
Pokota reluctantly passed the letter to his father, who broke out a pair of reading glasses. There had been nothing in there that was something he needed to hide, even though the letter was addressed to Prince Posel directly and not to the king.
"You'll want to look at the third page, your majesty," Azalia said, helpfully.
The king shifted the papers and read, one eyebrow raising up, his lips pursing, at one point sounding out a difficult word. "Ah," was all he said.
"That is our offer." Cool Azalia left, and she returned to the mirror image of her mother, her eyes shining in excitement at the prospect of justice. "In exchange for copies of your library here, we will provide you with the method to restore Pokota to his human body."
Pokota held his breath. The library, the sacred treasure of Taforashia, had until then been the envy of every other kingdom. It was not something to be bargained lightly.
But his father didn't hesitate. "We accept without conditions," he said firmly.
Azalia clapped her hands in delight. "My own services will require their own fee - the whole process will take me about a month of my time, and and I am highly skilled mage in my own right." She had the audacity to wink at Pokota as she said this. "I promise to be reasonable in my demands.
Pokota's tiny tendril of hope wilted a little. The library was all they had to barter; Taforashia itself was broke. "But we have no money!" he cried.
She waved away that concern, just as she had waved away the king's offer for rest: She was very casual, for a royal. "Oh, don't worry, my payment will be but a trifle. I am a collector, you see."
The king looked up from the letter again. "Oh, of what?"
She looked away, perhaps a little embarrassed. "Odds and ends. I know what I want when I see it. I will ask for just three objects from your castle, and I can assure you, they will be things you won't really miss."
Pokota's hopes began to rise again. "Are you absolutely sure this is going to work, Princess Azalia? I know Zelg- Prince Zelgadis tried for many years, but not even Rezo was able to give him the cure."
Her face turned serious again. "Yes, this absolutely works. My father has the ability to change back and forth between his golem form and his human form any time he wishes now."
After that stunning pronouncement, Azalia had said she was tired and wished to eat and rest a bit before they continued their discussions. The king had sent her to the guest room with a bevy of maids, who had taken her travel-stained clothing and given her a bath and hot food and a freshly pressed dress that had belonged to Pokota's mother. Due to the distance between the kingdoms, she had not been able to Ray Wing the entire way, and so she had opted for the more conventional method of horseback. Even so, the journey had taken her almost a week, and she had hidden her exhaustion due to the gravity of the message she bore.
They had held a minor feast in her honor, and she had appeared at dinner in the dress. She was shorter than his mother had been, and a bit pinker, as were all the folks from the southern parts of the continent, but she wore the elegant dress well, and she had gone from a casual messenger to a proper lady in the space of a few hours. Her hair was shoulder length and a simple band of gold wrapped around her head to indicate her royalty. She wore no jewels, and Pokota got the impression that she was a practical sort who eschewed unnecessary ornaments.
After dinner, she had put on a set of borrowed mage work robes, and insisted on being shown to the laboratory where she would be working on this huge undertaking.
Pokota had been tasked with showing it to her, as the king was often too tired to stay up much past dinner.
She was discussing the experiment. "The issue, of course, is that you cannot undo such drastic changes to the body as was done to my father."
Pokota floated next to her as she walked down one narrow hallway, engaged fully in the conversation. "Rezo said it was beyond his abilities, even though he was the one who did it."
"It's the effect of entropy." She swirled one finger in the air. "Once you combine things, it becomes much harder to separate them again. Like putting a drop of cream in coffee."
Pokota had read the entire letter while she slept. He knew where she was going with that comment. "So instead of trying to separate his body, Zelgadis made a Copy version of himself, and transferred his spirit over to it with the Hellmaster's jars."
Azalia smiled and looked at the ceiling, as if imagining her father. "It worked. And Father says we can do the same for you, too."
"But my body wasn't altered or changed. It was just... destroyed."
"I have heard the story." She stopped, and looked directly at him. "You were amazingly brave. My mother holds you up as a paragon of royal virtue. She didn't mention how cute you were, though."
Cute? Pokota blushed immediately. That was something no one had dared say to him before. "Hey!"
"Take it as a compliment, since it was meant as one."
His blush didn't fade, although she resumed walking. "So I have no source body for a Copy."
"Through the power of red magic, we only need a sample of your tissue. It doesn't have to be big... did you do any blood sacrifices as part of a holy ritual, or anything?"
"Um, no."
"What about filling a jar with urine to transform it into amon-"
"No!"
"Well, hmmm."
"I didn't spit in anything either." He thought on that for a moment. "Well, nothing that we kept. It HAS been twenty years." His eyes began to brim over with tears. To be this close to a cure... "I can't think of anything. Even my clothes were lost with Rezo's spirit."
The girl looked away, thinking, then snapped her fingers. "What about your hair?"
"Huh?"
"Mother said you had very pretty long hair. Did you brush it regularly?"
Amelia had thought his hair was pretty. That was something he would not have thought about, and he'd have to digest that information another time. "I did...I had to brush it several times a day."
Azalia smiled again, which seemed to be her default expression. "Do you have the hairbrush?"
"I don't know..." He thought of his room, with the large tester bed that had remained in its made state for thirty years, with a smaller nest he actually used in the center of it. There was the wooden vanity, that had belonged to his grandmother. His mother had given it to him when she had gotten a new one, and sat him before the precious mirror, letting him watch her brush his hair. She too had said how pretty it was, and how she didn't want to cut it since it was so lovely. The hairbrush was still in the top drawer of the vanity.
"Wait, I do!"
"That will work, as long as someone didn't pluck out all the hairs."
"I doubt it." The maids avoided his room, except to dust occasionally and change the linens. He had no chamber pot to empty, as the tasteless food he ate went into the infinite black hole of his stomach.
He gripped her borrowed cloak with one of his ear-hands, and pulled her in the direction of the upstairs. "It's in my bedroom, follow me."
The significance of having a girl in his bedroom for the first time was not lost on Pokota, but he shoved the thought aside in favor of business.
"It's in this drawer," he said, and indicated the shallow top drawer of the old gilded vanity. Azalia carefully opened the drawer, and peered inside it. "It belonged to my mother.."
Azalia let out an audible gasp as she pulled out the hairbrush. Her eyes had widened, and she held the old silver hairbrush out at arm's length, staring at it. Her gentle face had changed into something harder, and fiercer, and there was a gleam in her eyes that had not been there before.
"Princess Azalia?"
"Such a wondrous sight!" she said, almost shouting. Pokota winced. "This is genuine Hallmere silversmithery!"
"And...?" he prompted, wishing he could cover his ears with his hands more effectively. He cringed as she continued at full volume. She was like a completely different person.
"This is a veritable work of art!" She shook the hairbrush in his face. "They only created twenty hairbrushes, and all but one have been accounted for - and here it is!"
"So...?" He gingerly reopened one eye, staring at the object.
"And you just had it lying in a drawer! For shame, Prince Posel!"
"Well, I couldn't exactly use it," he muttered, looking away. The tuft of fibers on his head didn't need to be brushed.
The visiting princess held up the hairbrush like a scepter, her eyes glittering as if she were her mother giving a speech on justice. "I must have it."
"Huh?"
"This shall be my fee!" she cried in triumph.
"But that belonged to my mother!" Pokota found himself shouting back, wondering what had happened to the girl he'd met hours before, and who had decided to replace her with a combination of Lina Inverse and Nama the Enchanted Armor.
She dropped the brush and clutched it to her chest defensively. Her eyes narrowed. "Do you want to have a real body again or not?" she said craftily.
He sighed. There was no winning against a crazy girl like this and he'd be better off giving up now. It's not as if he had any real attachment to it, considering he had forgotten about it for twenty years, and she had immediately recognized its value.
"Okay, but ONLY if this cure of yours works."
She wasn't listening. She was stroking the silver brush, and talking to it like it was a baby. "Oh my precious Hallmere brush, oh yes, mama will take you home soon... first, let's get these hairs off you!"
Just like that, The Collector was replaced with the cool, collected Azalia from before. She pulled out a pair of gloves and a specimen bag, and began to delicately pull off strands of his hair from the brush.
He watched her, fascinated. "That's all you need?"
"Well, that's all I need from here," she said with another one of her brilliant smiles. The gleam in her eye had been replaced with the gentle sparkle. Whatever craziness ran through her mother's side of the family had already been supplanted by her father's calmer state. "We can go to your laboratory now."
"Okay," he said, and led the way, more than a little disturbed by the incident but afraid to say anything. She had said she was a collector, but he was only beginning now to understand the implications of her obsession with shiny things. It was the same single minded pursuit of a cure that had led her father to success, and he was not in a position to argue with his potential savior.
The laboratory, like the library, joined the temple and the castle proper, but like any good secret laboratory, it was several levels underground.
Rezo had stored the bodies of the people of Taforashia in the ceremonial central lab, but for Azalia's purposes, the smaller medicinal lab a few rooms back would be better.
"I'll need a chimera vat, the serum necessary to feed it, and about a month to grow it," she explained as he showed her the rooms in the laboratory.
"The medicine lab has all those things." He paused, confused. "I thought chimeras grew faster."
"This isn't really a chimera. It's an entire clone, a copy of your original form." They entered the small room, and she looked around at the equipment in approval. "And it will be very small and weak to start, but with the power of red magic, we can keep a false spirit from entering it and let it remain an empty vessel."
With that, she started pulling out the chimera vat from where it had been stored next to a closet - really, it was just a giant glass tank - and rummaging around on the shelves, looking for the ingredients for a nutrient bath. Chimera experiments were both illegal and also conducted by most of the major kingdoms. Rezo had been the only mage capable of transforming a human into a chimera without the labs and glass tanks and vats - he had transformed Zelgadis with a flick of his staff one day on a whim.
Pokota also began pulling down the ingredients she'd need - every mage learned the list of nutrients a body needed for growth and repair at some point, and he had done not a little experimenting of his own trying to recover his body. "Does that actually happen? A new spirit going into a growing body?"
Azalia began stacking glass test tubes and sorting ingredients on one table in her precise manner. "Yes. Copy Rezo - I'm not sure if you heard about him but he was a failed clone of Rezo from long ago - had his own spirit that formed alongside his body. It did not have the necessary protections on the body to prevent a new spirit from developing."
Pokota dropped one heavy tub off on her table, then dropped onto the container like it was a chair, thinking. "That's actually rather sad... A spirit would grow in this body if you didn't stop it? So by blocking it, are we killing someone's spirit?"
She shook her head, her expression serious. "A spirit is something that is born from the gods, not something that can be killed by humans. It enters the body at first breath." She took a deep breath to demonstrate. "All things that are alive have spirits that form naturally. We're merely blocking the passageway - instead of settling in this body, like a seed bouncing off rocks, the spirits of the unborn will just continue on to more fertile ground."
The answer was a little flowery, but she seemed to think no ill of what she was about to do, and Seyruun was the capital of spiritual and healing magic, not Taforashia.
He lifted off his makeshift chair and floated next to her, wishing he could be of more help. "So what else do you need?"
She held up the bag with his hair. "This should do. Give me just a few minutes to get started. Again, it will take a month before we know whether we had enough of your essence left in your hair to recreate your body."
"Essence?"
"Hmmm," she said, and pursed her lips thoughtfully, evidently trying to think of an explanation. "In Rezo's writing, he called it a very complicated name from another world. It's so complicated even the other world shortens it to just three letters - DNA. It's the building blocks used to create life at all levels. The tiniest little bugs all the way up to the mightiest dragons all use it." She started measuring chemicals into a titer, casting spells on them to blend them into perfect solutions. A research magician was part sorcerer, part chemist. "We can distill your essence from your hair, and from that, rebuild your entire body with it."
He watched her work, and found himself wondering if something in the chemistry lab would trigger her into the crazed kleptomaniac from earlier. But she remained focused on her work, and before long, she had a small droplet of... something, floating in a ball of light.
"I think we're good! But we need a catalyst, in your case." She stared at the ball of light. "For my father, we already knew that his essence was still the same on the inside, as me and my brothers and sister are all normal humans. But in your case..." After another moment's thought, she pulled off her glove and picked up a knife. Pokota held his breath as she carefully pricked the end of one of her fingers, and collected a precious droplet of blood into a tiny vial.
"We'll use my tissue as a matrix to start - there are all sorts of things in a body besides the essence, after all. Blood probably isn't the most suitable thing, but I should be able to make it work." She dropped the blood into the glowing ball of light before her, and it flared for a moment before turning a pinkish shade.
"Is that it?"
"No. The real show is about to begin." She winked. "You and I are about to make a baby."
With that cryptic and disturbing statement, she closed her eyes and began to chant. It was a spell unlike any Pokota had heard, in a language he didn't understand. But a familiar magic circle, in a deep blood red, began to form around her, and the invisible winds from the spell lifted her hair.
She was no Lina Inverse, and the effort for her to control this magic was great. His respect for Rezo went up another notch. The great sage had tossed off high level spells like this without any apparent effort.
As she continued chanting, she broke out into a sweat and she began to shake. But finally the spell reached a crescendo, and the glowing ball of light in front of her changed from a pink to a greenish blue color.
She collapsed on the stone floor, a triumphant look on her face. "I did it!" she said, breathing heavily.
"Azalia! Are you all right?" He floated in front of her, ready to go fetch assistance if she required it.
"No," she admitted, but forced herself to stand. "I'll be out of it for a few days. But it worked." She poked the glowing ball, and then gently cupped it in her hands. "This is merely a beginning. It takes a lot to grow a whole human being, and these early stages cannot be rushed."
She took the ball over to the chimera tank, and gently shoved it through the glass wall, as if the barrier were only air. Then she began to fill the tank with the serums she had mixed earlier, a slow process but one, at least, that Pokota was able to help with.
They sealed the top of the tank with a heavy lid, and Azalia staggered again, still greatly weakened from her magic use.
"I'm going to fetch the servants," he insisted, and this time she only nodded numbly. She was fading fast. Pokota should have thought to bring the temple priests in to help her out during the experiment, but she would have probably not wanted them around in the name of secrecy.
She waited outside the door for him, and then insisted that the door be locked and only she given the key, in the interest of national security, even as she was too weak to stand on her own. The temple priests, unaware of the nature of her experiments but probably sure of her expenditure of enormous amounts of magic, could only mutter and grumble amongst themselves as Pokota gave the door a royal magical seal on top of the physical lock.
The girl was carried upstairs, given back to the care of the team of maids that had pampered her earlier, and that was the last Pokota saw of her for several days.