What!?

[Jarik Taran]

As the two of them walked his symptoms did not seem to be getting any better, unfortunately they seemed to be getting much worse. Nomi had stopped for a bit and mentioned something about him wanting dessert and water and he of course nodded and assured her that he definitely did. Dessert seemed like a weird thing to be offering a head injury patient, but he chalked it up to him misunderstanding her entirely. He assumed she was offering him some healthy alternative but was too embarrassed to ask and talking sometimes made the blood in his head sound louder than it normally was so he just nodded and said "Yes, lets go." That was good, once they got there he was going to have some water and some healthy food that couldn't hurt his current situation, but what was hurting his current situation was the light from the sun and the over stimulation of the ever changing environment as they moved forward. He scrunched his eyes closed for a moment but continued on.

Then she had mentioned something about their dueling next week and called sturdy ....that was another interesting word like stub-born....was it like Stir Dirty....dirsty....he was thirsty. Water would be good now. He felt her helping him down to the bench and he lay down with one leg draped over the side and planted firmly on the ground to keep him from rolling off the bench. He looked up at the sky and between the light and the clouds he forced his eyes closed again as the feeling of nausea came back with brute force. It could not have been long after that it felt like it wasn't but time wasn't fully making sense, in truth he barely remembered the duel at this point.

Then his eyes opened, his pupils had dilated and the sunlight burned as it his eyes, but everything was delayed. It took a moment for him to blink and look away as he heard an echoed voice and something about a story. It was MASTER WINTERHOLD. Immediately the young Jedi Knight pulled himself to his feet and bowed to the......................................bad idea.

As he jumped the scenery followed behind very slowly, everything was moving in slow motion in front of his eyes, he tried to use the force to compensate and his sheer force of will but between the sudden movement and the feeling detachment from his body. Everything started spinning. He dropped to his knee catching himself with his arms braced against one knee, the other knee hitting the rocky ground, not overly hard but enough to send a delayed pain response to his brain in 5.......4......3.......2........1. He winced but tried to play if off as if it was part of the bow.

"Master Summer...Hold....on. Sorry Master.....The story?"

He turned his head and glanced towards Nomi, his eyes struggling to focus on the young woman, his pupils slow to respond.

"I......went......to find Nomi....Niom.....Nomi....? To ask her...something.......oh.....to ask her on a date.....because....she's a Jedi like me......and she's pretty.....like me...........and Guardian or....something.............then she.......tried to kill me I think......or no......something.....maybe? It is okay though........we're doing it again......next Tuesday at noon........"

He paused.

"The killing me.....part......not the dating me part......I think?"

He looked toward Nomi with a genuinely confused look on his face, his eyes looking slightly glazed over with a pleading expression of a young child wondering if he had done the good thing and explained everything properly.

[Erril Winterhold]

Erril stood with the two younglings and listened, casually draping an arm around the crossguard of his sword like the shoulder of a friend while the newly knighted Jedi whose trials he had taken part in blundered on about some interaction that sounded more like a quarrel than a duel. He glanced at Nomi a time or two for confirmation while Jarik made his painfully slow way through recalling the ordeal. He felt as though a few of his own brain cells died in sympathy to with Jarik’s struggle.

At the end Erril nodded slowly, glancing between the two young Jedi and carefully concealing the amusement on his face. ”Sounds like a… physically and emotionally dizzying encounter. Muric, Eyla, Prognosis?”

The human and vurk children glanced at each other, then nodded and turned back to their teacher. “Concussion-“ “-Concussion!”

”Agreed. Eyla, go check for symptom severity, and here – “ The elder Jedi took the water skins from her and shook one of them a few times, causing the molecules in the liquid to slow down as he did so that the water immediately became very cold. He stooped down to the human girl and spoke quietly to her. “ – have him drink this too. Most patients try to mask their symptoms, but his reaction should give you a good idea of his nausea. Don’t be surprised if he throws it back up okay? Go now.”

As Eyla strode off eagerly to inspect Jarik, Erril traded waterskins with Muric, shaking the gravel-filled one as well until frost formed on it. ”Now, Miss Jonan appears to have rendered some first aid. Inspect her work, clean it with that water and this cloth, and then… take this gravel and give it to him. Make sure there’s cloth between the wound and the waterskin, we still have to drink out of that once we’re done don’t we? Off you go.”

Muric raced off with his hands full and came to join Eyla. The young girl had already prodded at Jarik in a few places and was now testing his responsiveness to stimuli, starting by having him follow her finger to a few places, then she switched tracks.

“Look over here please, Master Jarik?” She pointed to a spot near-but-not-exactly the sun, and then watched his pupils like a scientist inspecting a bug under a microscope, her face almost lemon-twisted with concentration. Ultimately satisfied with her findings, she handed Jarik the bag of mountain-cold water and instructed him to drink. Meanwhile Muric inspected the gash on the back of Jarik’s head, made a disgusted face, and then began carefully mopping the drying blood away while the gravel-filled waterskin still hung from his shoulder.

Erril left his sword in the ground and drew near to watch the children so that they could show off their competence to the fullest degree possible. He pivoted on his heels after a moment though and turned to face Nomi. ”I’ll need your help in a moment as well, I think. But in my experience training injuries usually come in pairs at least. What’s that shallow breathing about?”

[Nomi Jonan]

Watching Jarik stumble and then try to summarize events was… a combination of painful and a bit impressive. He’d managed to pull himself together and function shockingly well on that walk, judging from what he was feeling like now. The eighteen year old’s dark eyes darted back and forth from Jarik to Master Erril a few times during Jarik’s, um, report. Nomi glanced at the master with a slight shift of her shoulders, and then another shrug, a grin she managed to mostly suppress, and a nod. Jarik’s rendition missed a few key details in the middle… She felt they were relevant, but she wasn’t about to start criticizing him in front of others while he couldn’t think straight; especially not Muric and Eyla.

“It was practice. We haven’t trained together before, but we weren’t as ready as we should have been. That was st—not smart... of us.” That left an unsatisfying taste in her mouth and she wasn't happy about it, but it was accurate enough. Nomi knew that she would have knocked Jarik down either way, but she suspected he might not have slammed into the ground as hard without the distraction factor. “We’ll do it better another day.”

Nomi stood up and moved a few paces away from the bench to give everyone room while the two younger students crowded close around Jarik. She knew that Zhi and Luka were both especially proud of how well those two younglings in particular were learning. Eyla had even helped Nomi once or twice before; although that had been last Fall before Nomi and Aero had gone to the south prairie.

The tanned young woman habitually rolled a non-existent kink from her neck, though a bit more gingerly than usual while she avoided engaging her core more than necessary. The twisted bun was slipping out of her hair, so she deftly reached behind her head and undid it to let her usual thick braid fall down the center of her back and the thinner padawan braid settle back into its place of pride behind her right ear. Erril spun back to ask her a more directed question about herself and she straightened up carefully, but reflexively.

“Oh. I knocked his footing out. He kicked me in the stomach from the ground to try keeping me from diving and pinning him. I had the impact almost deflected off my side, but it didn’t quite work. His boot caught my ribs… and the low left two are cracked. It’s pretty bruised… but nothing seems too internal.”

She glanced at Jarik’s gear with mild envy that her feet hadn't been done growing yet when they landed here. “I miss those boots. They were really sturdy.”

[Jarik Taran]

Everything was still a bit of a blur, right down to following the finger of the young student around. He could feel his eyes lagging behind his head or was it his head lagging behind his eyes? He wasn't sure and he wasn't sure he cared. Moments ago the two children had shouted "Concussion!" in unison and he was not quite sure that he liked the sound of that or at least the sound waves reverberating against the lining of his ear canal and pounding against his ear drums which he was pretty sure where now direct wired straight to the most bruised part of his brain. Why would anyone ever want kids? He thought silently to himself as the two young students did their thing.

He paused and took a drink from the waterskin, the crisp cool mountain water hit his lips and rolled down his throat with tantalizing results. He placed his other hand on the water skin and tilted his head back and gulped as much water down as he could in a single breath. Bit by bit the waterskin became lighter and his stomach grew fuller. He handed the empty vessel back to Eyla and smiled the best he could at the young student.

"Thank......yo...."

His stomach began to twist itself into knots, tighter and tighter, while at the same time his head felt like it had been submerged in a bucked and placed on a centrifuge, around and around everything seemed to go until.....he gagged and tried to hold it down but instantly he vomited up what appeared to be water mixed with bile. He bent over and vomited once more onto the ground, hoping that he did not manage to soak poor Eyla with the previous regurgitation. As he retched, his heartbeat pounded in his own head with crippling results. He fell forward, but rolled away from his own mess. The world around him spinning as he grabbed the earth and tried to stop it.......he blinked rapidly for a moment.

"I'm.....fine.......going to lay here.....sleep maybe.......breakfast......undercooked......yeah."

[Erril Winterhold]

The seasoned Jedi examined Nomi's posture and body language with a critic expression as she spoke - she surely had her mother's threshold for pain.

At last Erril motioned upward with his hands and mimed the spreading of arms. "There you go. Now take a deep breath for me - use your diaphram, go until it hurts." The Jedi ignored his eyes for a moment and listened with his ears. There was no subtle grinding which meant the presumed cracks were minute at best. He didn't like to leave misshapen ribs alone for too long, but this could wait.

"You know -" Erril said, glancing back up at his sometimes-niece, "- I can count on my hands the number of distinct cultural groups in the galaxy who, as a whole, don't get worked up about broken ribs. And yet I find you nuts everywhere I go!" He glanced over at Jarik and the younglings for a moment, and then turned a sly grin back on Nomi. "By far my best patients. No complaints, just a strong drive to recover. Take this guy for exa-ooh-catch-him!"

It was too late. Muric was in no position to try and stop Jarik's descent, and after dodging the water-vomit, neither was Eyla. Nevertheless they both sprang forward in sympathy as their patient toppled to the ground and began to mumble about breakfast. Eyla was immediately down in the dirt beside him, gingerly craddling his head to keep the newly-cleaned and now exposed injury out of the dirt, but when she glanced up at her mentor, the concern was evident in her eyes. "Master Winterhold he's trying to go to sleep."

Erril was there in that moment as well, kneeling opposite Eyla beside their downed companion. "I heard him. Help me set him up here... there we go. Listen here, Sir Jarik, you can't go to sleep right now."

So saying, the veteran healer raised his hand up to Jarik's face, his fingers curling into a careful shape - and then flicked the young knight in the nose. Just the sort of annoying pain response that would prompt any sleeper back to a state of alertness. "You're not allowed to die until my students are done with you."

[Nomi Jonan]

The eighteen year old sighed inwardly when Master Erril made an upward motion with his hands, but there wasn’t any sense stalling or feeling annoyed about it. He certainly hadn't done anything to her ribs. She glanced away to a random point on the edge of the treeline and overrode her body's initial self-guarding instinct to keep her limbs down, raising her arms as instructed. Nomi wasn’t strictly sure if ‘use your diaphragm, breathe until it hurts’ was a challenge about when she should stop, or just more of a general… But it wasn’t a big deal.

She listened to Erril's healer chat and inhaled until a degree or so past when a few tears sprang into her vision and her nervous system sharply told her to knock that activity off. That was good enough, yes? Nomi blinked her vision clear and her gaze flicked back to Erril’s sly grin and joke, which felt like permission to lower her arms. She pushed back a chuckle because that wouldn’t have been fun for the ribcage in question, but her smile agreed with him anyway when she glanced toward Jar—

Oh! That wasn’t good. Nomi would have moved toward Jarik whether her torso protested or not, but she’d been distracted with Erril. She crossed the yard a bit slower than Master Winterhold did and watched the situation.

[Jarik Taran]

So much was happening in the moment, he tried to keep his eyes open but they both eyelids weighed at least sixteen and a half metric tons each. He felt himself being lifted and steadied. His eyes felt like they were going in two different directions as he tried to focus on the Jedi Master kneeling before him. He heard his voice sound like an echo as it reverberated off the sides of his ear canals and bounced around his head creating a pulsating pain that was in and of itself nauseating.

Then Erril flicked his nose and Jarik quickly moved his hand to grab his nose, but missed and smacked himself in his upper lip. The young Jedi tried to focus he breathed in threw his nose slowly, the incoming air felt cool and he tried his hardest to steady his gaze.

"Sure. I'll just die later, that sounds....nice."

He closed both of his eyes and raised his eyebrows in unison and slowly shook his head. He opened his eyes again and his pupils which had widened when he shut his eyes were slow to constrict and he put a hand in front of them as the light seemed to come in and bounce around his his head. It was really disorienting. This was stupid.

He glanced at Nomi trying to get his eyes to focus on her.

"That was a terrible date."

[Nomi Jonan]

The tanned eighteen year old flicked back her padawan braid with an unconcerned shrug as she caught up with Master Erril, the younglings, and the knight. She crossed her arms gingerly.

"I'm not gonna complain about it."

[Erril Winterhold]

Of all the… the seasoned master was about to open his mouth and say something about the regrettable things people say when concussed, but Nomi offered a much more satisfying comeback, and as the two younglings stifled their giggling, Erril decided to let the matter be. Jarik was old enough to learn from natural consequences. Hopefully.

The subject of natural consequences weighed on Erril’s mind as he pondered what to do just then. He could bind the two up like he might have done when he was their age, or he could patch them up good as new and send they on their merry way. The desire to let this particularly ill-conceived sparring bout be a learning moment led Erril to settle on something in the middle. After all, as comfortable as the Jedi had grown, living in this valley that they’d claimed for themselves, they were still undeniably surrounded by hostile territory. He glanced up at the man-high sword standing in the dirt some thirty paces away, and then at the waiting eyes of the two younglings, and made up his mind.

“Alright you two, prognosis agreed. Low-grade occipital concussion, mild laceration of the scalp. Any chance of infection on the latter?” He glanced at Muric, who had cleaned the cut.

“Well since he has hair, debris could gather more easily, and it’s a high blood flow area as well, so I’d say reasonably high. I’d suggest stitches and maybe trimming the hair away from that spot so it can be kept clean until it closes.”

Erril nodded and glanced at Eyla. “Treatment for the concussion?”

“Light activity and lots of rest for the next week, or probably two just to be safe.” Eyla prescribed, looking at Jarik’s disoriented face.

“You here that?” said the master healer, fixing Jarik’s gaze as best he could. “Under less favorable circumstances this little oversight would have cost you two weeks of boredom and a really high and tight haircut from my padawan. And-“ Erril’s gaze turned back to Nomi for a moment “-I’d probably give you at least that much time on light duty; probably have you chewing on those awful Lambda roots your mother’s been cultivating as well to keep the pain under control so you don’t reflexively fall into shallow breathing and develop pneumonia.

“But we don’t really have time for that, and as you two have never sparred before I’m willing to agree with Miss Jonan that things have gone about as well as they could have. Now, bow your head forward if you please – Muric come help him stay steady?”

Concussions and cracks were about like scrapes and bruises at this point in Erril’s career as a healer. He’d dealt with enough of them in clinical settings and field conditions that he knew the ins and outs of them pretty well, but that had never granted him any leave to be careless or dismissive of their gravity. As Muric helped Jarik forward and Eyla drew near with interest, Erril reached up with one hand and carefully pressed his fingertips to the back of Jarik’s head surrounding the visible injury. The Jedi’s mind settled into the swift slowness of a light healing trance with practiced smoothness, and his internal sense of awareness was carried away on the currents of the Force as it streamed through Jarik’s body. The energies flowing through the tissues around the dermal laceration were stark and inflamed, but Erril moved past those and followed the conflicting streams to the point where he found the muted and compressed tones of the deeper tissues. There were fewer sensory nerves here to scream aloud, but the contrast to the healthy flow of energy in other places was just as notable.

The wound was fresh, and the tissues still recalled precisely what they were supposed to be doing, which was the reason for the neural distress he perceived in the Force. Outwardly, Erril’s skin illuminated from within very mildly, and the light coursed down to his palm where it cascaded out in pulses of aquamarine glow that suffused into Jarik’s skin. The tissues were stimulated and fortified by careful application of universal energy that heightened their function, and allowed them to accomplish in the course of a few moments what would have taken weeks unaided.
Starting at the deepest points of the injury, Erril worked his way out of the concussion, mending the impact trauma as he went. He began next with the laceration, but paused before the work was complete, nor did he attempt to stabilize the lesser functions that had been affected by the existence of the trauma. There would still be a headache, and there would still be a scab and a scar after that, but the concerning damage was gone.

Two minutes nearly to the second after beginning, Erril took a deep breath and rose back to the surface of himself, rubbing the back of Jarik’s head. “There, that should do I think. How do you feel?”

[Jarik Taran]

He listened to Erril speak, something about a haircut. He didn't need a haircut now he needed his head fixed, how did Master Orspach ever learn from Erril? Honestly....why was the Padawan suggesting a haircut? This new generation of Jedi were doomed, he thought dazedly to himself. If the healers are more concerned with his personal grooming choices and...he bowed his head down as Erril had commanded. He felt the blood pumping through his skull, each heartbeat pulsated throughout his head and made him want to be sick again.

He felt the healer begin to go to work, he had been healed before and the odd sensations never ceased to amaze him. He became keenly aware of different sensations in his head, slowly his thinking became less of a draining task that caused frustration and more clear. He blinked several times as the feeling of nausea started to dissipate and the entire situation seemed to return to a bit of normalcy. As soon as it had begun it was over he lifted his head and shook it again, it still hurt a bit, but there was no remnants of the awful feeling of confusion and haziness that he had felt just a few moments ago.

Jarik took a deep breath in, for the first time in awhile it didn't hurt to breathe, he couldn't count every single heartbeat by the sound his blood vessels made in his skull. This was a relief, nodded at Erril quietly before looking at the other two Padawans.

"Feels much better, but my head still hurts a bit, I don't think you quite finished Master."

The young Knight said rather a matter of factly.

"I mean I'm definitely in fighting shape, it's just a bit annoying. I could totally take Nomi on again though."

He smirked with a mild trace of arrogance at Nomi, he might have been joking, he might have been taunting her playfully, it wasn't overly clear.

[Nomi Jonan]

Nomi had grown up in a home of healers. She had tremendous appreciation and respect for them, but she was already quite used to exasperating them with her daily existence. For the most part, neither the practical work and words of healing students… nor witnessing a master of the art… or the lessons on scarring and infection, or on natural healing times, or the rendering of medical aid—all of which she did have quite a practical interest in!—nor the threats of any particular consequences of boredom or embarrassment or tedious unpleasantness (she obviously didn't want pneumonia either, so if it was two weeks of bitter roots and breathing exercises, then that simply was what it was).. or lessons… or chores…. or quirked eyebrows… or most other variations of whatever assistance any physician in her life had ever seen fit to offer… None of it had especially phased her over the years. Practical experiences and information changed her strategies just like any other formative experiences, but for the most part none of it had much effect on Nomi continuing to do what she was already doing.

But she felt grateful for Erril and was relieved that she and Jarik hadn't actually been more than an hour or two's slow walk away from the help. One way or the other, they had been careless and this could have been a much worse day. As for recovery and rematches, Jarik's remaining scab and his comment about soreness had given her a fair amount of information.

"Absolutely not." she informed the knight with a shake of her head and gingerly crossed arms. Firstly, no. She wasn't beating him again until he was perfect. Second, she didn't have any expectation that she was about to be perfect either, and she enjoyed her ribcage too much to risk it on the unnecessary.

"We'll try it again when you're ... we're.. perfect... But I could show you some things with those spears again tomorrow if you'e not busy."