Although John would have preferred to try on his suit before Aclysia got it home, this situation was more important than looking decent on a meeting that would be hostile either way. Therefore, they, Tamara in tow, went back to the Guild Hall before anything bad could happen. They successfully avoided any reporters outside, and inside John’s elementals and the Sentry Golems were doing their work at keeping people away from him.

‘Maybe I should just place the teleporter on the roof of the Palace or something,’ John thought. He had hoped that higher Tiers would allow other people outside of Collide to use it as well, but so far there was no indication of that happening whatsoever. Paying the money to move it over seemed like a logical step to take. ‘Would also make it much easier to have Scarlett sleep over at night in secret… I should consider that later.’

They made it inside and stayed on the base floor. Under John’s lead, they made it to one of the many chambers to be used for private conversation. It was decorated like it belonged straight into an old mafia mansion, defined by two colours, dark oak and dark red. The carpet and the walls were of the latter colour, same for the cushions and leather attached to the chairs, but the furniture itself was dominated by the wood, from the central table to the boards of the tall shelf, rows of alcoholic beverages lined between a glass door.

Overhead hung a small brass chandelier, small magical lights shining like bulbs but flickering like candles on the top of each of the many arms. It illuminated every corner of the windowless room. There were chambers that had a view to the outside, the glasses mirrored to make the reverse technically impossible, but John wasn’t taking chances.

Under the guidance of Eliza, Tamara once more took a seat and watched them all like a child expecting a reward very soon. “So, on the face of it, we have three choices,” John began, keeping a close eye on the blood addict to gauge her reactions. “Number one, we kill her and are just done with this topic. Quick, inhumane, convenient.”

Tamara didn’t even react to the threat of death, simply once more saying, “Bloodmother,” followed by a variation of her usual begging, “can I have more?”

“No, shut the fuck up, the grown ups are talking!” Eliza shot back, and the woman began to pout as if she got a breakfast consisting of hard meat on waffles and chocolate day. “Do I even want to hear the other two things you are going to pull out of your ass? This creepy slut can be axed and we can be done with this shit!”

“Well, yes, because I would rather not kill anybody,” John stated and caused the blood mage to sigh. By all the love he had for them, sometimes it was really easy to forget how many of his girls had a rather careless look towards human life. To be fair, many of them came from times or circumstances were murder was a lot more common. “Number two is that we look for a cure.”

Theoretically, there had to be one. If the blood of Thana could be refined, it also had to be removable somehow. Hopefully in another way than what Herman had used to revive Thana, since that had successfully separated the blood from its host by making the blood eat the host. Even that would have gotten lost with the traitor. Still, if it existed, it could be uncovered. There was just one problem with this approach.

“However, none of us have the technical know-how for that…” John continued. “Which means we will have to trust at least one Apothecary.” Rave made a sour face while Eliza just laughed crazily like he had just said ‘all the Lorylim need is a friendly cuddle’. Not that he could blame them, even during recent events, that class of Abyssals hadn’t been pleasant to deal with.

“Not gonna lie,” Rave spoke out. “I’m kinda getting on-board with option one right now.”

Tamara still sat there with something approaching a blissful smile on her face. There was certainly an argument to be made that whoever she had been formerly was already gone. Her appearing on her own before them properly meant that she had either escaped whoever had taken care of her throughout the ills associated with her condition or that there was nobody.

“The third option is to give her more blood,” John finally ended his explanation.

“No.” The absoluteness with which Eliza presented that answer made it pretty clear that she wasn’t even considering it as a potential answer.

“Well,” he scratched the back of his head. “Then we are stuck with option two.”

“How about option four, shut her the fuck out and ignore the shit out of her?” Eliza suggested, not about to start a debate on which she knew the Gamer wouldn’t cave.

“Not only do I not believe that that is going to work,” John stated, already seeing themselves getting ‘assaulted’ by this woman the next time they stepped out the door, “I also don’t want to have her out there, harassing people. I also have the suspicion that option four is just a disguised and long winded option one.”

“Fucking hell, okay, go take her to the Apothecaries then!” Eliza screamed and was ready to storm off. Two steps towards the door, Tamara hasted after her Bloodmother and grabbed her feet. “You creepy ass…”

“Don’t leave, please! I found you!” the addicted woman looked up from the floor with big, teary eyes. “You aren’t in pain anymore, Thana, I am so happy for you! I always saw it in my dreams! The cold, Bloodmother! I can still feel it, but now I see your happiness too. Your happiness and your hate for everything!” The tears were rolling in big drops over Tamara’s hollow cheeks, but she continued to smile widely, her teeth were perfectly white. “No more nails, Bloodmother, no more shattered you, only two shards, right? No more faces?”

The room was dead silent by the end of this. It didn’t look like Tamara knew anything of value, but the revelation of all the suffering she had been indirectly feeling was staggering. How many people out there were infected to this degree? Unlikely more than a few dozen, but that was already a worrying number.

“Fine,” Eliza suddenly spat out, “let’s get here to the Apothecaries… but I will hate every fucking second of it, you hear me?!”

_________________________________________________________________________

The blood mage was indeed very clear about it as they managed to get into the Apothecary outpost on Ellis Island. Since their last visit here, John had cleaned the place up somewhat. The extremely inhumane elements had been removed from the premises. Not by John himself, but by the justice system he had fundamentally been in charge of creating. Given that they were talking about ‘doctors’ that ordered ‘human resources’ from the Abyss Auction and disposed them like other people disposed of an old laptop, the Gamer wasn’t feeling bad about that decision whatsoever.

As a matter of fact, he wished he could have gone with execution in some cases. However, while ousting them was technically possible by only souring the relationship with the nebulous leading class of the Apothecaries, killing was going to get John in trouble in the long term.

The new policies also meant that there were less qualified people around than before. Under anarchic circumstances, the worst kind of people had flocked to this building and thus it was almost empty now. The pleasant side effect was that, since everyone had been investigated thoroughly, John could be relatively sure he was dealing with decent people here. Well, as decent as they came.

John had the feeling that, internally, his name was spoken with a fair amount of disdain. Since that was the general attitude he held towards them, he couldn’t be surprised. At the very least the Apothecary they eventually ended up with treated them to a lot of tongue clicking and rolled eyes as they presented Tamara’s case.

It was a man with a beard John thought was impossible in real life. Two long narrowly twisted and gelled strands of black hair that parted into a straight line underneath his nose. His chin, cheeks and the top of his head were bald, but what other hair he had formed something like a tall wall around his chrome dome. Literal chrome dome, the bald spot was replaced with a shiny metal piece. Similarly, his eyes were reddish brown, circular glasses directly implanted into his skull and peeking out like looking glasses. The eye rolling was still possible through the dots of light projected onto the surface, serving as the iris.

“Fine, okay, I get it, give her here,” the Meddling Nick waved from his stool, the other arm leaning on the table. Didn’t seem like he wanted to move his belly anywhere. Hissing, Eliza dragged Tamara towards the guy and then jumped back, infinitely uncomfortable being close to this clearly mad doctor. Medelnick grabbed a pre-filled syringe from some drawer and moved it towards the sheepish woman.

John grabbed that arm. It wasn’t a challenge whatsoever, he had several times the doctor’s Agility score. “What are you doing?” the Gamer wanted to know, not letting anything happen without his knowledge.

“Knocking her out so this won’t take longer than it needs to,” Medelnick wasn’t afraid whatsoever. “What, are you going to have me slammed against the wall like my colleague or do another search of my laboratory? Do it, see if I care, you blind ass.”

“Listen here, you sack of shit and fat,” Eliza growled, but John let the hand go and took a step back.

When looked at with questioning gazes, all John could do was shrug. “Well, I have to admit he has balls at least… well, no, he doesn’t actually. When did they sable off your member, Dokt?”

“Yeah, right, ‘they’, I did it myself. Annoying thing was continuously taking brain blood,” Medelnick pushed the syringe into Tamara’s neck with a steady hand, put it back down and moved his arms into position at the exact time he needed to catch her falling over. His attitude aside, the man clearly knew what he was doing. With a quick Observe, John himself made sure Tamara was only knocked out, not dead or anything.

While she was placed on the typical white hospital lounger, John took the time to wonder whether all these things were already widespread amongst the Apothecary guild, if the New York people just had some filter for his name or if it was Medelnick himself who was the odd one out. Whatever the case, the Meddling Nick quickly took a sample of Tamara’s blood, hair and eye fluid, of all things.

He did all of this quick, efficiently and, despite the fact that Tamara was, even in her withdrawal state, pretty, without any motions that could be interpreted as sexual. That he was a eunuch killed most of the interest to molest anybody, John could imagine. That he had a Libido of 0 underlined that significantly.

The taken substances were put into numerous tools that John didn’t know the purpose of. It all fed into an old computer screen, properly old, the kind that was built around a Braun tube. Units and signs John didn’t know appeared, fluctuated and swung back and forth a bit, to eventually lock at values he had no idea were good or bad. He also couldn’t figure it out quickly, which annoyed him.

All the Intellect and Wisdom in the world was useless if he had no idea what was even being talked about.

Medelnick, however, pretty quickly came to a conclusion. “Give her more blood,” he just informed them and then turned to them. The dots flattened for a second, his equivalent of blinking, then he just silently stared as if he was waiting for them to leave.

Instead, John had to ask, “So you know what’s wrong with her?”

“Urgh,” Dokt groaned but, realizing he had to answer to get rid of them, quickly got to it. “Essence mixing is nothing new. Dragons use it to create Kin, its essentially the basis for Demigods to be born and all that jazz. All we have here is standardized essence mixing with a blood medium. The mental connection is unusual, but I also can’t measure that, so that’s just your word and I don’t care about it.”

“If it’s so normal, surely you can cure it?” John asked.

“HAH,” it was less laughter and more a sound of outright mockery, “right, you know what a Dragonkin looks like?”

John did, actually, it had been the enemy that came his way in the Onyx One’s Lair, the Raid he still had to beat or even progress in. The one had been a massive mixture of centaur and lizard, with scales and everything. Nodding, he had a rough idea where this was going.

“Sure, I could rip that person apart and stitch the organs back together in something that resembled a humanoid,” Meddling Nick continued. “But I can’t undo permanent alteration to her DNA. This woman is already producing small doses of the addictive substance herself. Basically, she is keeping herself tripping, but not enough to get her fix. Murder her or get her all the way there, I don’t care which. If you do nothing, she is just going to stay a confused mess looking for her ‘mother’.”

“…Alright,” John nodded. “You have been surprisingly helpful and quick about it. I will remember you, Dokt Medelnick.”

“That better be a good thing,” the Apothecary grumbled after them. John was sure it would be. While neither friendly nor sane, John was highly certain that Dokt was ethical, competent and that his utter lack of sexual interest would mean he kept his hands to himself. An ideal candidate to be the Gamer’s go-to doctor.

Not the thing they had to contend with right now, however. “We’ll lock her away somewhere nice and secure for now,” John announced once they had made their way back to the privacy of their Palace.

“Hold on a fucking second,” Eliza stated. “You don’t want me to feed her more blood?!”

“Blood…” Tamara mumbled in her sleep, still knocked out from whatever Medelnick had injected her with.

“Not right now, no,” John answered. “I realized that we’re soon facing that whole separation issue, so maybe fooling around with your blood and related things should be postponed until afterwards.” There was no good reason for that. The worst case scenario, that Thana would jump into a different person that was infected with ‘her’ blood, seemed highly unlikely. Even when Eliza had died, the goddess hadn’t switched bodies and, essence sharing or not, normal people didn’t fulfil the condition of a shattered soul to even host Thana.

Nevertheless, there could be some sort of rampage by the affected. It was best to keep their powers low in that case. They could decide their ultimate solution, if the problem even persisted once Thana was no more, once this affair was done with. It was entirely possible that the entire blood thing would just disappear.

John explained his thoughts to the ladies at his side and ended the entire thing with, “So you have more than enough time to think about it.”

“Peachy as fuck,” Eliza’s dry tone was dripping with sarcasm.