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A cloaked and hooded figure limped through the summer downpour. Its haggard breathing forced it to stop every dozen steps, but it kept pressing onwards. A painted sign, faded and cracked, swung over its head, bearing what was once a white heron struck through with a spear.
The figure struggled onwards, towards a large building in the distance. It stumbled, once. It took a long time to get back up.
The rain washed away a dark red stain from the place where it had fallen.
Knight struggled through the rain. She needed help, and badly. The fight - and subsequent emergency ejection when her reactor went critical - had, by her estimation, broken her leg, at least two ribs, given her what felt like one big whole-body bruise, and based on the coughing fit earlier, a non-trivial amount of internal bleeding. She was forced to estimate because her internal diagnostics had been messed up by the fight, too, so add that to the list.
Still. Five to one odds. She grinned. Then she nearly slipped and ate shit on the cobblestones again. Focus on getting real medical attention before collapsing, gloat later. She had no idea where she was going, but there was some kind of big castle up ahead, which seemed somewhat more likely than whoever lived in all these muddy houses in the farmland. They seemed to be avoiding her - she hadn't seen a single other person pass within her severely limited shouting distance. Her stims were going to wear off soon, too.
She felt her vision tunneling, tried to shake it off, nearly fell over again. Had the castle always been that close? Her makeshift crutch kept tempo against the road unevenly, time passing by in dollops. There was a light in front of her. Had someone opened the door for her? Her wife stepped out from the door, smiling, her arms open wide. Renna reached out for her, dropped the crutch. Slipped on the wet stones. Pain cracked through her skull, and everything went dark.
"Merry, Naunt, it must be morning soon, for the knight hath gone to bed!" Quipped Quinn.
"Thou hast more wit than sense, fool! Quickly, bring her inside, and let us have the leeches tend her wounds."
Quinn breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the guards moved Knight past her. Her wounds looked pretty bad, but the doctors here would be able to keep her alive. She queued up "punctured lung", "concussion", and "cybernetic shock" into the cache of the local diagnostics machine, just in case. Her eyes flickered rapidly as the data flowed between systems, and when she saw the Baroness looking, she rolled one eye separately from the other and pulled a face.
Despite her earlier rebuke, the Baroness smiled at her, a hand covering her laugh. "Dost thou take anything seriously, oh fool?"
The download pinged, and by habit Quinn erased her digital footprints. She canceled the search daemon she'd put out on Knight, and checked the one for Empress - nothing. Quinn forced a smile, plastering a goofy grin across her face. "As little as possible, my lady!"
