"Hm..."

The barricade blocking the path up to Clinic Hill was a tad-more-extensive than the one built by Ziki to deter humans.

"What do you think, Sund?"

Bricks high enough to not be able to climb over where one could plant a secure foot up the hill.

"I think that we might have to continue into the village."

And metal fencing where one could not find secure footing. It was strangely built, the metal equivalent of cobbled together, but it was sturdy.

"We can always get over it with magic," said Cter while motioning to the angled wall smoothed out with mortar to hinder any and all grip to be found on its overhanging bend. It was a remarkable display of masonry, worthy of applause and a mastership to whomever made it. Smooth as lacquered wood, and with most of its weight hanging while being embedded inside rather-loose path-gravel. Still, even with Cter leaning her weight into it, the wall didn't shift in the slightest. Truly unwelcoming, but unlike Cter's intentionally sloppy crystal magic the brick wall was a sight to see, almost enticing the ones on the other side to try and climb over to conquer it. "Just a conjured staircase and then we'll be over it." Cter was enticed indeed.

Sund shook his head at that while keeping his eyes on the large plums of bitter smoke billowing high from the top of Clinic Hill. His earrings didn't settle as his head did though, as his quick sigh had them bouncing again. "Call me clairvoyant, but I think that even if we manage to get over the wall and meet with Bonny Sallus that he won't really make time to see us right now.

His loose robe hung in the air for a brief moment as he lifted up his arm to point at the large brick buildings. "That smoke has been churning ever since we got here, so to say that things are busy is to put it very mildly. I have a haunting from the way that Ziki spoke that all the adults from Clinic Village are up there." A silent pause had him closing his eyes. "Those that are still alive, that is. In whatever stage of alive to boot. Perhaps those that have regained their strength through Bonny Sallus' medicine are tasked to help those that haven't." His arm moved to the side of the hill. "See there?"

Cter didn't really. "What do you mean?" She took a few steps back from the brick wall with both her flattened hands over her eyes to give shadow. "What's there?"

"Another road up the hill."

But how could… "How are you so sure about that?" wondered Cter while peeking out from her hands' shadow to her colleague stood still enough that the wind could play whatever with his robes, hair, and earrings. "Did I miss someone go up it?" She couldn't have, could she?

"There is a gap in the grass if you look at it more carefully." Sund pointed more precisely, spreading his fingers while he did. "It's thinner than it would've been had it been undisturbed. Imagine that you're standing a few steps of one of the paths in the Royal Garden, Cter. You can easily tell that there is one there just by the way that there is missing foliage."

He spoke with such confidence and ease that it had to be true. "I helped with overseeing the last major changes to the Royal Garden after King Asgore had expressed interest in my project with the flowers around Time's Square. He even came with me one day in...disguise...to spend a day tending to them. He was immediately recognized as all he wore was an old, dark cloak that obscured his form. Didn't do anything to his pleased whistling and humming though as he lost himself in the gardening."

"I don't mean to interrupt you enjoying your memories," Cter felt bad to say even if she had to. She didn't hold anything against Sund wanting to disappear for a brief moment to a much-more pleasant time, but she needed him next to her and not back in Jarasevo tending flowers. What he said about the grass looking thinner didn't strike her initially, but after looking at the spot where Sund had pointed to, it started to make a bit more sense.

...Maybe.

Could just have been that she was seeing what she wanted to see.

After another shake to shove away the memories that he almost lost himself in for a bit, Sund thanked Cter, "Don't apologize for keeping focus when we need it," and then put his loosely hooked and sleeved finger up to his mouth. "My guess would be that the road will be unusable to us."

"How so?" There wasn't one there last time Cter visited Clinic Hill, so it had to have been constructed in her absence. Obviously it had to, but it was just a thought to spur her mind to think more. It was strange that they didn't use it if it was available, but then again with what Ziki had said about the communications breaking down and messages from the Royal Guards being slow to the point of not existing at all…

Still, Xoff hadn't been under the plague's grip for the entirety of Cter's absence, so if it was meant as an official road then Dr. Sallus would surely have mentioned it in his letters back to the castle during the peaceful times.

"Guess you figured the same as I," said Sund with a slight chuckle after hearing Cter think. "Must be a temporary road built for the sole purpose of ferrying patients up and down Clinic Hill without gracing by Clinic Village." His sleeved hand followed down where he imagined the road went. "Since Ziki seemed to be in the dark about it I'm also gonna guess that it is staffed by members of the Xoff military. Another reason not to use it, I'd say." He returned it to point between him and Cter. "Two of the highest rank in the Monster Country military asking for passage will call for communication that's impossible in Xoff current situation. Confirming out identities will be easy, and we do have a signed invitation by Dr. Sallus himself." Finally he extended just his index finger. "However, with the Xoff military we don't have any leverage, and to try and push a decision up the shattered chain of command whether or not we're allowed to take the road will result in us having to wait longer than we can afford."

Which just left the road that they were standing on blocked by the brick wall.

"I'm still not sure that we should just climb over and surprise Dr. Sallus with our visit," continued Sund with his jaw jutted to the side and his lower lip bitten in thought. "We outta send a message to him that we have arrived and that we are able to provide assistance in Clinic Village while he prepares to have his magic changed." He turned to Cter with a returned neutral expression. "Sounds good to you?"

"Maybe we can ask the kids for more infromation, if not just Ziki?"

Her thought was sound. After all, the children of Clinic Village would be the ones that knew most about the situation. However, it hadn't really struck with Cter fully about what was going on around her with the humans of Xoff and Clinic Hill. As she and Sund turned away from the overhanging brick wall after a couple of pats on it from Sund, Cter's mind was still back at her first visit to Clinic Hill with Kurant.

Of how welcomed she was by the humans and how in awe they were of her display of magic. Same with the nurses and doctors that she saw on top of the hill. How they radiated knowledge and diligence in their craft and with such warmth towards those that were in their care. Part of it was from the brief interaction she had, but most of it was from the memories of that one nurse monster that healed her bleeding ears.

As Cter and Sund neared where she and Kurant had been met with a flock of eager humans, the silence began to slink through her like a cold vein of ice. The wooden houses who's doors had been wide open without any thought or worry were closed so shut that they bent inwards in their frames. No window was open to let in the warm breeze, boarded up to boot so that the pleasant sunlight couldn't grace the inhabitants.

Cter and Sund's footsteps echoed harshly on the empty street, their steps sounding louder than the path should have allowed for. With a curious look Cter glanced down to see why, and discovered that the gravel hadn't settled properly. Mounds and valleys as if looking at the northern part of Hjearta from up in the sky created a landscape of untouched road, with only the heavy tracks of the carriages showing any form of...anything.

"It's not been used," Cter whispered through a sharp exhale. "No one's walked here for...I don't know how long.." She looked to Sund who mirrored her troubled face. "The houses too. Hollow." For they were so. Sunken and uncared for and in need of someone to look after them. Some of them looked to try and reach out for the two Monster Mages to help. Compared with the rich luster and boastful wood of the carriages parked at the town square the houses looked dilapidated.

Compared to the children that stood behind them though…

"Oh God!"

Gravel shot out from Cter's heel as she flinched from the sight that greeted her like a nightmare on the other side of the quiet carriages being unloaded and reloaded by Ziki and the driver. Fear gripped at her collar and tugged her back up again to disallow her to look away from the flock of crooked and shivering humans huddling together for support to be able to stand up. One of the warm breezes carried with it a smell of weak and sick, forcing Cter to pull her mantle over her mouth and nose to protect from the miasma.

She wasn't the slightest bit monster in that moment.

"No..."

She was only human.

Through disheveled fringes of hair crisp with dried sweat the group of early teenagers turned their sunken eyes to the sound of Cter's muffled voice staring at them with eyes as pale as their skin were. The golden tinge of their Xoffian heritage was nowhere to be found, instead replaced by a sickly white that not even the most northern Hjeartian would have.

Cter turned away, her eyes watering to try and cleanse her of the sight, but to no avail.

"Turn back," said Sund with some stern in his voice among the scared quivering fluctuating his otherwise-clean tone. "We're here to help, Cter. We can't–" He was interrupted by a heave that he forced back down with a balled hand to his mouth. "We have to help."

She knew that.

And she wanted.

She just…

"But how?"

She just needed a moment to collect herself.

"But how, Sund?" Cter asked the air in front of her with her watered eyes moving up to the dark plumes stretching high up on the grassy hill. "They're just kids. Where do we begin?" He needed to take the first step so that Cter could follow. She recognized some of the faces that looked at her so weakly from when she first visited, but only just barely. Despite it being years before they looked frailer than how they were when they stood in awe of her drying the dirt road with fire magic.

Before she could even begin to help she had already failed them.

"We don't begin," Sund told Cter with a hand on her shoulder. "You do." His eyes were steeled when she turned to meet them. His body was as troubled as hers were, but his soul wasn't. It shined through his eyes secure and determined. "Give them something else to think about rather than the plague, Cter. Give them some magic to play with. They look like they have forgotten how it was to have hope, and the happiness that it brought. You need to make them remember it, Cter." With an angled furrow he emphasized. "Give them back some hope. They need it more than any monster has ever needed it before. We can't heal them, but we can give their souls the means to." His other hand, his naked, gripped at Cter's sleeve. "Make them play again. It's what they need."

A sense of distant loneliness washed over Cter as Sund let her go to address Ziki. "Let us go over what you have at your station after this. I'll help with the last." His focus was then on the last, heavy pieces that needed unloading from the carriage leaving Cter with the unfocused attention of the sickly children. She still had her back turned to them with her hands balled at her sides and her teeth clenched. Their footsteps were so weak. It sounded like they were stumbling on each tiny piece of gravel as they neared her.

She…

She didn't want them to nea–

"The...Delta...Rune?"

It was a weak voice that spoke. So weak it was that Cter was unsure if it even was a human that spoke it. The only sure proofs she got that it indeed was a human were the heavy coughs that followed. They were deep, tired coughs that pained not only the child that coughed them, but Cter as well as she heard them. She winced with each heavy one that hit the Delta Rune on her back.

"A Monster Mage?" another child's voice spoke with a bit-more clarity but with more-raspier coughs that followed. "Are you...are you the one that visited before?" It took effort for the child to ask it, that Cter felt inside her soul.

Once it reached that deeply though, once all of it had sunk as deep as it could, Cter felt a strange calm upon her. It was bad. It was really, really bad. Clinic Village was as if abandoned, and the only remaining humans left alive inside it were only children sick as sick could be.

But it couldn't be worse, could it?

Cter felt almost insane resting on that, but it...worked? It had her turning back around to meet the sunken faces looking at her through feverish blinks and stumbles. None of them should even have been out of bed! All the wrongs before her somehow made a right though. Among all the wrongs, she saw that she could make right.

"Yes, I am."

Make right that only she could!

"I am the Fourth Monster Mage Cter, and I was here a few years ago with the Second Monster Mage Kurant," she began with a slow and soft voice to the sick children. Her sleeved hand moved to point towards Sund. "That there is Sund, the Third Monster Mage."

"T-The Monster Mage that first discovered h-his own magic?" asked a little girl with cheeks that were almost bent inwards. Her lips were chafed and drained of all color, but despite all that, the little girl still managed to turn up the slightest of smiles. "Is t-that him?"

Cter kneeled down with a nod. "Yes, that is him. That is Sund, and he's here to help you as best as he can. So will I. We are here to help you humans."

You humans…

Cter let that echo inside her for a bit to see how she felt about it. Was she able to be a bit more monster again? It...felt like it? Good, good. It meant that she could focus once more.

"Could I ask you a question, little humans?" Cter waited patiently for the children to weakly shift between each other to figure out who should answer. It wasn't the oldest that did, for he looked to be one of the weakest. It was the second oldest that would answer. A girl with hair longer than Cter's dirtied to hell and back who nodded while quelling coughs from the strained effort. "I am looking for Manny. Is he up with Bonny Sallus at the clinic?" She had to choose her words carefully as to not imply that Manny was…

She shook the thought away.

"Manny is working with Dr. Sallus as an apprentice," said the second-oldest child while pointing a weak finger up the hill. "He was good with healing magic so Dr. Sallus said that he needed his help." The finger came down to the girl's ragged side with her other arm clutching at it and looking away. "I wasn't as good with healing magic so I wasn't chosen." The clutch turned into a pained grip. "If I had then maybe..." A pain from deep inside. "Then maybe..." As deep as it could. "Mom..."

"So what magic are you good with then?" replied Cter quickly before the building sob could take hold tighter on the girl than the girl's grip on her arm was. "There are plenty-more useful types of magic than just healing." She lifted up her left arm with her spiraling line running slowly with colorful magic like a lazy river.

The Delta Rune on the back of her hand she made a beautiful sunset color as if peering out the window of her castle tower. The children took steps forward to look closer, and Cter had to fight her body's screaming urge to lunge away. With the wind blowing away from her the miasma wouldn't reach her. If the wind changed she could conjure up a wind away from her to replace it. It had to be subtle enough to not have it be obvious for the children what she was doing though, but luckily it didn't come to that.

"M-My m-magic isn't s-strong at all, M-Monster M-Mage," the long-haired girl said down to the dirt. In a way she looked a bit healthier with her bashful squirm and rocking on her heels with her arms behind her back. "N-Not l-like y-yours." The other children around her felt the same, a mix of both awe in being in the presence of a Monster Mage, and bashfulness in being asked to show their weak magic which they had just figured out and not really had any training with.

Good.

Excellent, even!

Childish embarrassment was inarguably better than despair due to the plague! That the children were still standing meant that they had survived the illness, but they still had to come back to life. The hollow and drained cheeks managed just the tiniest of blushes though, so there was still a seed of hope that Cter could nurture and make grow.

"Would you want to become a Monster Mage in the future, little girl?" Cter urged the girl with another nod. "And you others, would you also want to become Monster Mages?" She received dozens in return, each one the same, but each one different. They all wanted to become Monster Mages, but there was a slight difference in why they wanted, Cter figured. "Being a Monster Mage means a lot to everyone, most of all to yourself. You may wield the most powerful magic in the world, but you are also tasked with using it as best as anyone in the world can." Cter extended her sleeved arm across her chest. "Would you like to know what my own magic is?"

"Y-You k-know you own magic too?" a smaller boy blurted out. "I t-thought it was only S-Sund."

Cter threw a sideways glance at her colleague wearing a smirk having heard it. Before she could correct the sickly child though, another did it for her.

"It's not o-only Sund who knows his own magic, Jirgo. The Fourth M-Monster Mage–"

"Just say Cter," Cter interrupted. "When I'm at Jarasevo I'm the Fourth Monster Mage, when I'm here with you I'm Cter. Sounds good?"

The correcting boy nodded quickly before turning back to Jirgo. "Cter knows her own magic too."

That she did. "Would you like to see it, Jirgo?" the Fourth Monster who also knew her own magic asked the recently unknowing child. "And you others?" Nods that would have prompted heavy coughing just a minutes or so before instead brought eager air to replace the stench of miasma that had overtaken the children. "Then you," Cter again addressed to the second-oldest. "Tell me what your preferred magic is?" She was a younger generation and a native to a magical hot stop due to Clinic Hill's position in relation to Mt. Ebott and Mt. Ymmet, so Cter was a bit intrigued to how strong the magic would be.

The children looked to the second-oldest girl who's blush flared with the amount of eyes upon her. Not hollow ones, but excited ones flush with color and eagerness. "I..." she said before hiding her face inside her hands. Had Cter not orchestrated the situation she would've thought that the girl was about to cry tears of despair. In fact, Cter felt Sund turn her way with an anxious fling to his aura as he saw the girl pushing her thin fingers against her thin face. Cter nodded to her colleague that things were fine, reinforcing it with the calm in her aura. Sund returned to talking with Ziki without the anxiousness, and Cter returned to the little girl with her seriousness melting away to her friendly and encouraging smile again.

After a few seconds the girl let her hands fall from her face. "I'm good with..." It was a starved face. "I'm..." A face that had been wrought-upon with emotions that no child should ever feel. "I like..." In that moment though, as the veil of ten thin fingers fell off and dangled with abashed rocking back and forth. "I'm good with fire magic." Hope shone like the heat from the fall Xoff sun. "That's the magic I'm good with." Even if that hope shone down into the ground via the bent-over head muttering the answer with mild embarrassment.

Cter couldn't have been happier. "Fire magic?" she said with her voice almost breaking into a happy sob. She cleared her throat against it. While it was an extraordinary feeling it wasn't one she could really bring out without also shattering the finely balanced hope she had managed to unearth from beneath bitter and horrid soil. "Fire magic is a wonderful type of magic, don't you all agree?"

"I'm good with ice!" exclaimed a boy with his small arm in the air waving for Cter to notice. At first when Cter saw him he had trouble staying on his own feet. "I once made a snowflake in my water once. Dr. Sallus said that it was really good!"

"I once made my toy move with stasis!"

"I made an apple fall with weight magic!"

"I beat Hanti in arm wrestling with orange magic!"

"That was cheating!"

"It wasn't!"

"It was! Monster Mage, it was cheating!"

Cter wasn't gonna interfere in politics in a foreign human country, so she gave no answer to that. "How wonderful that you all have such a variety of magic," she instead put focus on. "That way you can learn from each other so that once you grow old enough to attend Soul's School you'll already know enough to attend the more advanced classes directly." A bit of jealousy leaked through, but not enough to make any dent in the hope, luckily. "Now that you've told me yours." Cter paused for effect. "How about I show you mine?"

The children all went silence with anticipation, clutching at their dirty clothes and leaning in with the colors that had returned to their eyes as Cter's spiraling line fluttered into a glow of liquid crystal. Her hand didn't clutch to summon her magic though, but instead it did so that she could have her index finger raised. "Before I do it though, I want you all to hold hands. A long circle, with the ends taking a hold of my sleeve."

Even while her words spoke of nothing about the illness still present around their small bubble of hope, Cter still reached out as far as she could with her arm while leaning back slightly as the small, thin hands came to touch at her sleeve to complete the circle of children holding hands in hope.

"You know, perhaps me showing my magic isn't the best idea," Cter said while doing her best to sound neutral about it. "In fact, why don't you show it?"

As the confusion peaked among the children Cter struck while it was hot, and let two spirals of temporary Cooperative Connections flow along the arms of the ragged clothing that the children worn, turning them into colorful sleeves that shone differently for each child. The smaller ones were afraid for a moment as the magic moved towards them, but as they saw their friends awe they still held their hands to receive it.

For they had hope.

Hope that Cter had gifted them.

"You are all Monster Mages now," she said while standing up from her kneel. "Use my magic to understand yours better."

And play like you had never played like before!