"I still can't BELIEVE what you two did to that tree!" Rei complained. "It'll be lucky if it can survive the damage!"
Between the residual heat, Rei's bitching, and his initial reaction to the discovery of the potential zombie inside the tree, Mamoru had very little adrenaline, and even less patience, left for the journey back to the camp. Nonetheless, he and Alejandro were the only two men on the crew, so the duty of hauling the half-dead body back was defaulted onto them. The option of leaving her at the tree to fend for herself had earned him some hateful glares from the rest of the gang.
There was too much hair for them to carry back with the girl, so being the only one present with long hair, Rei had taken the liberty of chopping it off so it now fell around the girl's ankles. They'd wrapped it around itself into a kind of knot and piled it onto her lap so it wouldn't drag while they carried her. In order to keep the mysterious handicapped girl from unintentionally injuring herself while they walked back to the camp site, Mamoru and Alejandro were forced to carry one half of her body each. However, as Mamoru took another hit to the stomach from her violently writhing leg, he knew he'd chosen to carry the wrong half.
Meanwhile the girl continued to speak nonstop with growing intensity and volume. Ami was making a point to try and write down a version of everything she was saying so that when a translator for the right language was found, they'd be able to decipher what exactly she was so adamant about saying. The temporary block Ami had made on her worst injury had come loose twice from the girl's pinwheeling, and left them scrambling to secure it back in place.
As he took another hit to the gut, Mamoru let out a grunt of pain. He knew it was from the repeated abuse, but her kicks felt stronger each time they landed a blow, and if her intermittent outbursts were any indicator, she was far less dead than he had initially assumed. "Can't we tie her up, or at least gag her?"
"God you are SUCH a baby," Rei said as she shifted the burden of the extra backpack she was carrying. With Mamoru and Alejandro carrying the stranger, she and Ami were each given an extra bag to lug around. And since Ami was busy scribbling down every bit of nonsense the girl said and fixing her bandages every time she loosened them, Rei was left to take point on their journey back through the jungle, and she was less than pleased with the position. She saw another red tag up ahead, as she stepped over a rotting log. "She weighs what, half your weight?"
"I was talking about you," he ribbed.
"She's clearly blind, Mamoru, and possibly deaf as well. We may have saved her life, but to her, we are complete strangers. How would you feel if someone carried you off and then decided to tie you down and gag you as well?" Ami tapped her pen on the pad she'd already filled halfway.
"I'd feel lucky to be alive. I wouldn't feel like attacking the people who dug my sorry ass out of a tree! How did she even get in there anyways?"
"A better question would be how did she survive in there long enough for the tree to take root in her," Ami corrected.
"Who cares!" Rei threw her hands toward the darkening canopy overhead. It was approaching nightfall, and the nocturnal life was beginning to swell while the birds' cries faded. "We still have at least another mile to go before we get to the camp and we're losing light fast, so could we all just shut up about her and walk?"
"Man, I know you're an ecologist Rei, but don't you have some appreciation for human life?" Mamoru tightened his grip on the girl's leg as she tried to take a swing at his face.
"Of course I do. But I'm not going to get lost and die out here because I'm curious about who she is. Talking about it isn't going to get us any answers, or any closer to the camp site."
They continued the rest of the walk without speaking, listening to the mantra of the girl's words and the cacophony of life around them.
As Rei pushed aside a Reinhardtia frond, the clearing where their camp was set up came into view. "Finally," she breathed, tossing the backpacks into one of the tents.
She made a beeline for food. "I'd kill for a sirloin," Rei groused, prying the lid off of a can of tuna. Reaching into the battery-powered cooler, she pulled out a loaf of bread.
"I'm going to re-examine her," Ami ducked under the flap as Mamoru and Alejandro put down the girl near the edge of Ami's tent. She came out with a bigger bag of medical supplies. She tried to soothe the girl as she worked by explaining what she was about to do, but it didn't seem to help much. Ami shooed Mamoru away as she lifted the oversized and ruined shirt up off the girl to check the major wounds.
Mamoru helped himself to a bottled water, pulling out the jar of peanut butter from the cooler to make his own sandwich. "I'm going to be so sore tomorrow "
Rei watched Ami work, going closer and squatting down beside them. "She doesn't seem to be very comfortable around us," Rei noted.
"She's not. And I'm not sure how to calm her down enough to replace the temporary block I made for her puncture wound."
"Hmm " Rei took one of the girl's battered hands in her own, humming softly to her. The girl turned toward the sound, stilling her tongue for the first time since they'd found her.
"Keep humming Rei, she's starting to relax." Ami took off the gauze atop the worst wound to inspect the injury. Reaching into her medical kit she pulled out the necessary tools to put an airtight seal over the opening. "We'll need to get her to some kind of hospital as soon as we can," Ami said. "She won't be able to survive for more than a week in this condition." Rei nodded agreement, before returning to a random melody.
"How are we going to keep her from running off overnight?" Mamoru asked with a knowing look as he came over to inspect. Ami pulled the shirt back down over the girl to protect her privates.
"We'll probably have to restrain her someh-Oh I see what you are doing." Ami frowned at him. "Well, I doubt she has enough energy to get very far on her own, she's been flailing and struggling nonstop since we found her. First we need to get her cleaned up as best we can so these wounds don't get infected and then we should put her in a tent."
Reaching into the cooler, Ami pulled out a jar of honey. As she dabbed it onto the wounds, Mamoru grabbed another water bottle and a spare shirt before tipping the water onto the cloth. He handed it to Ami and she began wiping off layers of filth embedded into the foreign girl's skin. The dark impressions from where the roots had been were starting to heal, but the deeper perforations from where the tree had grown into her were still ugly and raw.
"Those will make some gnarly scars," Mamoru commented, and Ami nodded. "Shame, she'd have an alright face if it weren't covered in damage. Who do you think did this to her?"
"We won't know anything until we can figure out what language she speaks. Then we'll get a better idea for where she's from, and we might be able to find her family and return her to them without even involving local authorities." Rei snorted her skepticism in the middle of her song, but continued to hum a lullaby Mamoru vaguely recognized while Ami spoke. The memory of the name of the song was just out of grasp, a phantom in the fog of his mind.
"She isn't dark enough to be from one of the indigenous tribes," he noted. "Maybe she's from a different continent like us?"
"She must be if Alejandro didn't know her language. He speaks twelve different dialects from this country alone." Ami poured more water onto the cloth, pressing it onto the girl's face. The girl squirmed away from the wetness on her face. She seemed to be somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, too young to be an adult, but too old to be a child.
Rei noticed the direction of Mamoru's gaze and paused her singing long enough to mutter darkly "Men." Ami held in her laughter as she kept working.
Mamoru left before they could begin a tirade about the problems with his gender. Sitting down next to Alejandro, he offered the translator a fresh water bottle. "Like women are any better," he mumbled.
Alejandro gave him an uncomprehending look but took the water bottle from his hands. "She es alright?" Mamoru nodded. "Goud."
"Ami says we need to get her to a hospital though, so I guess this survey is over. And we were only two days in We'll just have to head back to civilization, and hope we have enough artifacts to get us funding for an excavation. With that find at the base of the tree though, we shouldn't have any trouble getting funding, we might even get sponsored." Alejandro nodded.
"There ees a estorry en my cultures, of la perrdita frrom tree." Mamoru had never been interested in superstition, but with recent events he was ready to put disbelief aside. "Eshe es of wood, borrn en a eseedling and grrown to be trree herself. Therre es only fibe like trrees en wourld."
Mamoru considered the words, only catching half of them, before brushing himself off as he stood up, "Its been a long day, and I'm going to sleep."
He picked up Ami's notepad as he headed towards his tent, skimming the words she'd written down phonetically in hopes he might recognize one. "Guess not," he said as he dropped the book down on the ground.
Ami finished wiping most of the sediment from the girl's skin. "I think I can handle it from here Rei, why don't you get some sleep."
Rei shook her head, "I'll stay 'til you're finished. I don't mind, I hate talking anyways." Ami hid her smile at the irony in Rei's statement. The foreign girl began fidgeting as soon as Rei stopped humming, but she was in a much more peaceful state than she had been earlier.
"We should lock her into a tent so she doesn't wander off in the night," Ami suggested. "I wouldn't mind sharing my tent with her so I can make sure she doesn't hurt herself at night," Ami added.
"Only problem is, we didn't bring any locks." Rei pointed out.
"Yes we did, there is one on the cooler. Put the cooler inside your tent so the animals can't get into our food supplies, and I'll use the lock to keep her in my tent." Ami helped the girl into a standing position as she guided her into the tent.
"Where do you think she's from?" Rei asked as she followed them.
Ami shrugged. "I haven't recognized a word she's said and she's been rambling since we found her. Alejandro didn't recognize anything she said either, which means it isn't Spanish, Portuguese, or any of the local dialects. It doesn't sound like any language I've ever studied either, its not oriental at all, and its definitely not a romance language. It could be an African vernacular."
"What if she's an alien?" Rei gave Ami a cheshire smile, knowing Ami wouldn't hear her sarcasm.
"The probability of her being an alien is slim to none. She has entirely human features, and is-" noticing Rei smiling, Ami glowered at her. "You and Mamoru have the same rotten sense of humor."
"Oh don't be be sore like that." Rei helped Ami lower the girl onto Ami's sleeping bag. "Where will you sleep?"
"I'm going to catalogue the artifacts we found today, start writing up a record for all the different symbols we found and see if I can match any of them." Ami pulled out a book from her backpack. Rei noticed their guest was starting to thrash again as she zipped up the sleeping bag. Taking her hand in her own, she started humming again. Ami clipped a book light to her notepad as she started to work.
"You're very good with her," Ami complimented, cracking open the textbook on ancient linguistics and carefully unwrapping the first ceramic Mamoru found.
"She's easy to get along with," Rei explained. "Its egotistical loudmouths like Mamoru I have trouble dealing with."
"You two get along well enough," Ami began replicating the symbol painted on the clay into her notebook. Rei's soft humming filled the cramped tent with an atmosphere of safety while Ami worked. "She should drift off soon, if she doesn't I can give her a sleeping aid."
"You brought sleeping pills on this trip?" Rei goggled. "You really are overly-prepared everywhere you go." The platinum-haired girl was already beginning to snore, despite Ami and Rei's quiet conversation.
"I have trouble sleeping sometimes," she admitted. "Besides, its better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it." Ami quoted as she pulled out another shard of pottery.
Rei felt a shiver creep down her spine at the words. She would later come recognize this as a premonition of things to come.