To better separate them from gnomes, and because I dig the design, I've opted to adopt Lutro Draw's vision of halflings. That is - different ears, add a short tail, musculature closer to a dwarf, and voila!
Chapter Two: Compliance.
5/5/997.
Glyphstone Keep, as it happened, was also undergoing a remodel. The stone walls and floors were being covered by wood paneling and carpets, while light fixtures were affixed to the walls and hung from the ceilings. The administrative building, the only building completely standalone from the Keep, was the first and thus far only area to receive these benefits. Orientated to the south, it gave a spectacular view of the distant towers of Sharn, the sheer size of the Dagger River, and the budding settlement nearby.
There was a patio area outside the building, guarded by rails, where Trelib and Berlith had to wait while the keys to the building were retrieved. They stood in awkward silence while Berlith's mind spun like a Zilargo top to consider all the ways she could get out of the situation she found herself in. The option of simply throwing herself from the patio edge to drown in the conflux of the Howling and Dagger rivers was not thrown away, due to Berlith's need to be slightly dramatic.
The khoravar assistant that had been sent to fetch the keys returned, and unlocked the building. Trelib led the way through the halls, while the assistant tagged along behind Berlith as there were more doors in need of keys. While they ascended the floors of the building, Berlith got to discern what the House had aimed for in these remodels: the decor drew strongly from the influence of Morgrave University. Alumni from that school would be put into the scholarly mindset by the atmosphere alone.
"Patient files are kept in the viceroy's office," Trelib explained. "While the less interesting documents are kept in files and records - in the cellar."
Berlith didn't need to be told why she was being told such things - Medani protocol said to keep copies of everything in different locations. But in practice, the locations were connected for quick transport. In short: There was a secret passage from the viceroy's office to the cellar. Useful to know.
The Viceroy's office took up the central third of the top floor, with two faux-battlement patios on either side - possibly for cross-ventilation in the summer. It was an absurd amount of wasted space, in Berlith's opinion. She looked over the chintz chairs arranged around the south-facing window, the wind-chimes near the curtained doors, and the recessed bookshelves with disdain. The mechanical clock, however, was craftsmanship she could appreciate. "I can tell where the budget has been going," she remarked in a snide tone. She bypassed Trelib to begin her examination of the bookshelves for where the files were hidden.
The Mark of Detection, for which House Medani claimed a seat at the Twelve, was attuned to detecting secrets and danger. It acted as a tingling in the extremities and the back of the head when it automatically activated and granted those marked with its powers of keen intuition. Her hand displayed the telltale tingle as Berlith passed near the edge of a recessed bookshelf. With an appreciative nod, she avoided the trap and went to another shelf.
Trelib cleared his throat and indicated the desk. "Our copies of the files are here. The official documents were taken for our internal investigation." The paler khoravar ran his hand along the polished wood and pressed down on an otherwise innocuous section. A portion of the desk flipped up, and revealed a hidden compartment, with a mirror built into the other side of the desk, cosmetics laid neatly around the edge of the compartment, and a key hidden in a tube of lipstick.
Medani khoravar loved to incorporate hidden rooms, compartments, and puzzles into their architecture and furniture. It frustrated their enemies and exercised their minds. So Berlith watched appreciatively as Trelib took the key, inserted it into the mirror's frame, and pulled it open to reveal a cabinet hidden there.
Several leather folders were packed into the cabinet, which Trelib took and laid out on the desk. "Alyssa, could you wait outside?" The Medani Baron politely spoke to their key-toting tagalong and took a seat in a comfortable chair on the 'guest' side of the desk.
Berlith took the cue and sat in the viceroy's swivel chair. With ease, she reversed the process Trelib had demonstrated and laid the folders out on the desk for her review. "I'm guessing Alyssa is going to be second in command?"
The Baron nodded. "Yes, her skillset lies in the administrative side of things - however we have a shadow investigation of her ongoing, to see if she was involved in this… farce," Trelibe threw the word out after a moment's struggle to find an appropriate adjective. "Keep an eye on her around the patients, if you would."
Berlith wanted to correct him to 'prisoners', but she forced herself to stay silent and open the first of the files - the gnome she had healed less than an hour ago. His name stalled her momentum right away. Mankarr Tomraan. Hastily, she skipped a few pages to find information on his relatives and immediately had to drop the folder to pinch the bridge of her nose. "Not three minutes into this and already I'm seeing problems." Without looking, she took the folder and held it up. "You have the son of Xandrar's mayor in here."
"We can't help who the Citadel took for their experiments," Trelib said in a long-suffering tone. "It doesn't get better, I'm afraid."
Discouraged, but unwilling to abandon the mess she had already agreed to, Berlith returned to the file. On the opening page, it included a sketch of Mankarr before he had been snatched up. He looked to be a typical young gnome - green hair, mini-elf features, eyes bright and full of mischief. In the sketch, he had more piercings in his eyebrows and ears than at present, and his green hair was cut in a fade.
A bachelor and a bard - a dangerous combination, in Berlith's experience. There were clippings from local news sources about his band's performances in the city to keep spirits up during the war. There was even an interview, which Berlith would have to read through at a later date. However, there was nothing on how he had been acquired - he was a public figure in Xandrar, people had to have noticed his absence.
Berlith turned to the pages which documented his mark's powers. When it had first manifested, the mark had the power to turn blood into acid - which already explained why he had been in so much pain when Berlith arrived. Certain parallels had been drawn to similar magic used by Karrnathi necromancers, but the text noted that Mankarr's variant lasted significantly longer, and could target himself. However, during the experimentation, the Citadel forced his mark to expand and gain a new power - regeneration.
What followed was a plethora of depositions by Mankarr to the former viceroy about what experiments the Citadel had done to test his regeneration. Just from skimming, Berlith found it hard to avoid anger and dismay. Aberrants couldn't control their powers, and they were innately dangerous. But what she read crossed the line to outright torture from the outset.
She closed the folder, with a sigh, and picked up the next. "You said it doesn't get better, does it get worse?"
Without a word, Trelib reached for a folder toward the bottom and handed it to her.
She glanced at the name, and it felt like the seat underneath her had ceased to exist. 'HRH Aejar ir'Wynarn', one of Boranel's sons. Berlith set the folder down, unopened, and buried her face in her hands. "You know," she said, slightly muffled, "I think you were right. If you had said this wasn't a punishment after I found out all this, I would have hit you. Repeatedly."
"And I would have deserved it," the Baron readily agreed. "This is a barrel of alch-fire just looking for a reason to go off. The House, well and truly, has no one better at keeping a bad situation from getting worse than you." Trelib tried to look reassuring when Berlith looked at him again. But his eyes shifted to the left for a moment, as if he had recalled something, and it killed his smile. "And… well, there is no easy way to put it, their families know."
It was like an explosion had gone off near Berlith, all the minor background sounds were replaced with a high-pitched ringing. Absolutely stunned, she sat in silence for a few seconds to process what had been said. The running assumption she had gone with previously was that the Citadel had faked their deaths. Berlith shook herself from her stupor and tapped the prince's folder. "I kind of figured Boranel knew, at least. But what do you mean, their families know?"
"Boranel demanded we inform-"
Berlith cut him off, and rose from her seat and leaned on the desk to shout at her patriarch. "And you listened to him?!" She seized the folders, held them up, and shook them in front of Trelib before she threw them down on the desk again. "Any one of these cases, I'm guessing, could leave a stain on our House's reputation for decades. And if House Deneith finds out about this - they'll have kill squads out here, and make it look like bandits attacked!"
Trelib's expression was dour, like he did not appreciate the shout, but could not reprimand her for it. "Isn't it fortuitous then, that the settlement right outside is made entirely out of veteran soldiers?" He stood, so the light would catch the ridiculous ceremonial armor of the House patriarch. "Isn't it fortuitous then, that and it was the king's Citadel that did this to these people, not us?" The Baron leaned forward to meet his cousin's glare with his own. "And isn't it fortuitous then, that the previous viceroy in charge of these people's well-being was a Jorasco excoriate?"
Neither wanted to look away first, so they did so in unison, and both returned to their seats.
"Their families know. Boranel made sure they got full disclosure - don't you start, I didn't want that either!" Trelib pointed at her, a warning in his eyes when Berlith looked ready to shout again. "And, in light of the alleged abuse, he has promised visitation. The situation is bad, your orders are to make it better. In whatever way you can."
Berlith wisely chose to funnel her anger into the task at hand, rather than pick a fresh fight with her Baron. "I'll do what I can. This seems like a bit more of a problem than keeping Thrane from slaughtering civilians, but I'll try my best." She picked up the prince's folder and cracked it open to start on it.
"We'll see. The Citadel forced their marks to evolve - we assume the process has stopped, but keep us informed with regular updates on their control." Trelib steepled his fingers and he looked out onto the westward patio - the rain had started. "Your effects will be brought to you post haste. Alyssa can give you a tour of the facility when you're done here. And cousin?"
Berlith looked up from her examination of the prince's file to glare at Trelib with full force.
He didn't meet her gaze. "I truly am sorry that the moment you came home, you were given this to work on. The House will ensure you are appropriately compensated."
Berlith scoffed and went back to work. "One point five times my previous rate." She could practically hear the House accounts scream out in agony when her Baron deeply sighed.
6/5/997.
"Are you familiar with the Healer's Guild, Alyssa?"
The younger khoravar woman, possibly a grand-niece of Berlith's from the girl's hair and skin tone, shook her head while she helped Berlith don a white medical coat over the friar's cassock.
Berlith pulled on her personal leather gloves once the coat was on, then extracted her hair net from her handbag. "The Healer's Guild is the organization that runs House Jorasco's clinics and hospitals. It is also the organization that certifies all medical professionals from surgeons to orderlies." It always took a ridiculous amount of effort to get Berlith's mane of hair, three times the size of her head, into a hair net but after some decades of practice, she could do so while talking. "I got my certification with them, even though I'm not really a healing priestess."
They were in a lab, where the studies into the aberrant dragonmark had taken place under the previous viceroy. With Berlith as the interim viceroy, the lab was re-opened and the staff could return to their study of the previously collected samples. Or so they had thought, except Berlith had laid out a copy of the Healer's Guild standardized study guide from 933 for them to all share.
"So, to ensure we don't have any more mistakes, none of you are handling any samples or interacting with the aberrants until you read through this and can go off - individually - to get certified for a lab environment." Berlith smiled into the faces of a baker's dozen academics and clapped twice. "Get to work."
With that dealt with, Berlith left the room to meet the warforged orderlies outside. She handed each one of them a slate with a blank paper sheet and a pencil, then snapped her fingers for them to follow.
"How has the gnome aberrant been faring?" Their collective footsteps made quite the noise on the stone floors, but Berlith knew from experience that warforged hearing was keen enough to pick her voice out from the racket.
Coolander, the head orderly, answered. "Your orders have been carried out, and a potion rub is applied whenever his mark begins to affect him. A soothing tea has been supplied for his throat."
"Good, proactivity, I like that in an orderly." She paused to tap Coolander on the head. "Keep up that kind of thinking."
When her back was turned the other twelve orderlies looked at Coolander with envy, while the head orderly simply started walking again.
"We're going to run through each of the patients real quick, the gnome and the prince will be last. Take notes on my orders for each patient and jot down ideas on how to implement them." There was no need to worry about the warforged's knowledge of Healer's Guild standards - per the facility's purchase history, the warforged had trained as field medics by the Guild to increase their resale value. Now, it increased their wages and made them reliable. "We'll start with the elf."
Berlith ascended to the next floor via the stairs - all the aberrant's rooms were along the northern side of the building on the third and fourth floors. That would need to change - lest their marks interact with each other. Once they arrived at a heavily reinforced door, Berlith unlocked it without knocking and entered. The orderlies filed in behind her.
Chained to the floor by heavy shackles around her wrists was 'the elf.' She had the benefit of actual clothes, though they were all-white to match the hospital gowns of other aberrants. Covered head to toe in white silks, with just her eyes exposed, she was a warrior of Valenar. "Who is it?" The elf asked while she shifted in place. "It doesn't sound like the witch, come to play her games."
Berlith observed the aberrant while she observed the room. Like Mankarr's room, it was blank except for boxes around the walls. The room lacked a bed, however, and sported a roll of padded fabric near the aberrant's resting place. The aberrant herself still looked as dangerous as she would on horseback with her curved sword ready to remove Berlith's head. However, her eyes put doubt in Berlith as to her deadliness. The aberrant mark reached down from her scalp, crossed her eyebrows, lids, and extended into the eyes themselves when the elf opened them.
The Vales Tairn elf, once a mighty warrior, was blind.
"Vaedo?" Berlith asked, and didn't wait for a response. "I'm the interim viceroy for this facility. We're going to conduct a physical exam to ensure your records are up to date, and then you will be free to return to your previous activity."
"Waiting for death doesn't count as an activity, new witch," Vaedo spat. "Leave me to waste away, I will fight you every step until I am free." She rattled her chains, to highlight her defiance.
There was no need to make expressions, but Berlith rose an eyebrow all the same. "Well, if that's what you want." The khoravar woman produced the key ring again and yanked on Vaedo's chain. It went taut as the two women, neither geared for pure strength, pulled on either end. While this went on, Berlith unlocked the shackles from their shared lock, and let the elf tumble backward once freed.
Vaedo, in memory of when she was a mighty warrior perhaps, rolled to her feet and charged at Berlith. The Valaes Tairn would call her a novice were they witness to how she flailed and swung blindly, then found herself pinned by orderlies within moments of freedom.
"You will no longer be chained to the floor," Berlith said with a callous drawl. "And if you cooperate, you won't be confined to your room for much longer. Your kin will come to see you - but you are unwell. Until you learn to control your power, you will stay here. So use that as your motivation, perhaps?" Berlith watched as the two orderlies, Februhaha and Adjustus, barely struggled to hold the once mighty warrior down. "Are you going to keep fighting, or let me do the checkup?"
Vaedo's aberrant marked eyes looked in Berlith's general direction and squinted. "I will be free, someday."
"Someday," Berlith said and entertained the idea that Vaedo would devolve to the point where putting her down became necessary. "But not today."
The aberrant's mark arced with red electricity which lingered in her eyes for a moment afterward. "Then you may proceed without resistance."
Berlith found herself scrambling for reasons not to open the door to the next aberrant. As they approached, she stopped the orderlies multiple times to ask them about their notes and ideas. So far the only noteworthy suggestion came from Novembem, who suggested a section of the river be partitioned so the aberrants could swim without the ability to escape. Multiple times she stopped to double-check she hadn't forgotten someone in the rotation, only for the orderlies to correct her.
Until at last, she had no choice but to open the door.
The room was like other patient's rooms, except the boxes around the outside were opened, and the personal effects inside were scattered around. Toys, puzzles, colorful clothes, all covered the floor in a layer. There were clear spaces that so strongly resembled warforged footprints that Berlith became concerned with the habits of the orderlies.
On the smaller-than-normal bed was a pile of blankets huddled up near the top. From inside the breathing hole, she could make out a pair of eyes that watched her.
Berlith snapped her fingers, and a broom was handed to her, which she used to sweep a path from the door to the bed. "Nishi, I presume? You're much more lump-like than your picture would imply."
The lump on the bed closed its breathing hole and shrunk in on itself.
She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Nishi, I'm Berlith, I'm taking over for the doctor while he's away. I need to do an exam to see how healthy you are."
The lump expanded just enough for a single word to pass through the breathing hole. "No."
"This isn't a 'yes or no' thing, Nishi." Berlith gave the aberrant more patience than she wanted to, because of the unique circumstances. "It needs to happen, you're out of date for your check-up, and certain vaccinations. Plus, I'm told you've been having dental problems, so I need to look at that."
Once more, the lump expanded enough to say "No" and then retracted in on itself.
"Well, alright. We were going to add some fried bananas to your lunch, but if you don't want to be nice, we can give it to the dogs instead."
A much more panicked "No!" emerged from the lump.
"You want fried bananas with your lunch?" Berlith rubbed her temple as she noted how a generic head-shape rose from the lump and shook up and down. "Then you need to let me look at you."
"Okay," the lump said at length and began to wiggle. After a moment, a halfling in a hospital gown sat where the lump had been. While gnomes were often accused of being rat-faced, halflings were often compared to cattle. Their ears were large and stuck out from the sides of their head, and as they grew to adults they began to gain tails with a variety of hair configurations which mostly resembled tribex. Nishi was a brown-haired halfling and he had only just started to grow his tail, but even as a pre-pubescent he was equal in size to Mankarr by dint of how small gnomes were.
In between speaking aloud things for the orderlies to note down, Berlith chanted spells into effect. Vaccination spells against common diseases and renewals of long-time protection. Given that Jorasco, one of two halfling dragonmarked Houses, had all but abandoned their homeland Nishi was likely the beneficiary of more modern medicinal magic than anyone from his tribe back on the Talenta Plains.
For a while, she was almost able to forget the halfling boy was an aberrant. But when she saw the withered, unsightly scar tissue that ran up his back there was no ignoring it. And she couldn't forget that Nishi was the only aberrant who had the details of his mark's manifestation known. A Citadel agent witnessed him play some game with other halfling children, jump an incredible distance, and begin to seize up once he landed.
With the others, she could assume they had manifested in a fit of rage or a tantrum - but Nishi was an uncomfortable reminder that sometimes they just appeared from nowhere. While she examined the boy's teeth, she chided herself. It had come from somewhere, she just needed to help the academics figure out where. There was no chaos, only complexity. And when they understood the complexity, they would be wise.
"Alright, Nishi," Berlith said and forced a note of cheer into her voice. "All done. You'll get those fried bananas with your lunch."
It was hard to think of the boy as a monster when he looked so excited, but it dimmed soon after. "Can… can I go outside soon?"
Of course he wanted outside, Berlith forced herself to think. With his power, he could easily get away before anyone could stop him. "I'm afraid not, at least not yet. Be good, and maybe you can get a room with a window." 'With iron bars on both sides', she added to herself.
It was not entirely what the boy wanted, so he returned to his blanket lumpiness, but squinted at her before he left. "You don't want me to clean my room first?"
Berlith shrugged. "It's your room. You do with it what you want." Afterward, she stood and went to the door, where she paused. "Though, if you want chocolate sauce with your fried bananas, I would like your toys put underneath your bed before lunchtime."
The lump sat up in the bed just as the door swung shut.
With the aberrant not there to see, Berlith rubbed her eyes. At least the boy hadn't had a seizure during the oral exam. "Well, now we have the shifter, the senile woman, the prince, and the priest to look at next. Anyone have a preference?"
One of the orderlies, Mersh, raised her hand. "I am quite fond of Mr. Roole's positive outlook."
Without a better option, Berlith shrugged. "Priest it is, then."
Three of seven patients seen!