- by Groveclearer
With the shielding to the blast furnace down, Aries could feel the heat blow on her eyebrows, scrunch back the fine fur of her muzzle, and send the short ruff of her nape dry and bristling like pine straw. She could feel these things but not smell the singe of burning hair or the overwhelming shortness of air that would accompany being this close to molten metal.
Instead, she leaned over the shield, her arm surrounded up to the shoulder by flame and red hot metal, and blindly swung her bare hand around inside the blazing furnace for a few seconds until her fingers met with the pair of tongs she'd dropped.
"There you are," she said with all the enthusiasm of having found a misplaced earring. Her fingers rolled over the tool, inching it closer to her until her palm could wrap around it and pull it out into the open to examine it. The tongs were made of a heat-proofed astrosteel but still glowed bright orange where they'd knocked against the inner wall of the furnace and landed conveniently right out of her line of sight.
She should be burning right now, she thought vaguely, she should have been set ablaze through sheer convection. Her skin should be boiling and her blue-gold fur should be singed grey-black. She should be screaming.
She couldn't feel much of anything in the upper registers of heat any longer. A hot shower was the most of it. Her flesh, hair, and entire nervous system seemed to ignore every adverse effect from fire. The only parts of her that stung with warmth any longer were the ones that always hurt; the bright red hellmarks across her arms, back, legs, chest, ears, and the bridge of her nose. Even then they were hurting less intensely and less frequently as of late. It was doubtful they were healing. More likely, she thought, she was just getting used to them.
"...great," Aries grumbled, noticing she'd been zoning out again and that the blast shielding had been down for at least fifteen seconds. She quickly deluged the tool in a nearby emergency water bucket and pressed the button close the furnace off. She may be fireproof but that didn't mean everyone else in this building was. The furnace shuttered with a grinding thump, and Aries was left to wonder where she'd been in the order before she'd dropped the tool.
- - -
"I know it was quicker than stopping process, I see ya there, but we've got these protocols in place for a reason."
Aries nodded along and waited to talk. Forsythe was a good manager, if a little wordy. It hadn't taken her long to internalize this. She'd seen the best and worst of middle management across her stints in the Nightwatch and on the job for the Mercenaries Guild. It would figure that the Guild itself would keep a good staff of such for its internal affairs, particularly ones that involved rehabbing its members.
"The last thing we want is any of us getting hurt. Well, more hurt anyway," he knocked on that prosthetic leg of his. "Product can be re-smelted. People don't usually get that luxury more than once."
Sensing he'd found a good enough line to stop on, Aries shot in what she wanted to say. "I'm ready to go back out on the field." Seeing his skeptical look, she added in quickly "Under supervision, of course."
"I'm…" she thought for a second before finding what exactly she thought she was. "I'm a lot better now. Better than I was before, even. I'm at least twice as strong, I haven't lost a beat, I'm getting a full seven hours of sleep each night, I'm..-"
"Fireproof," Forsythe added.
"Fireproof and ready to be out of here and back on the field," Aries concluded.
There was a lull of several seconds as Forsythe looked around the room beyond Aries.
"Aries, you stuck your arm into a blast furnace today," he said. "Really think about that for a second."
"I know," Aries said a little too quickly for even her own liking. "I know what I did. It was the quickest, most efficient fix to the problem. If I'd have turned the thing off we'd have lost an hour of production."
"You stuck your arm into a blast furnace," he repeated and let it hang.
“Yeah. That’s not crazy when you’re fireproof, you kno-“
"Aries, the point of this program isn't to rehab you physically or provide ingots and license plates for the Guild. House Laysaar takes care of that nonsense. We just play around with their scrap. We just... we work. It gets us back in the mindset of following orders proper. It's imperative you follow the rules here."
Aries sighed. She didn't have time for this social program bullshit, as well intended as it may be. Hers was a special case. She needed to get out of this rehab program, get her full mercenary license reinstated, and get back out in the field again. She had to. An eternity of suffering awaited her if she didn't. Didn't they understand that? Didn't they read her reports? Didn't they listen to the testimony of the demonologists? The only thing that could save her very soul was action... and here she was, getting scolded by a shift supervisor like she'd snuck an extra ten minutes at the end of her break.
"You're going to get yourself killed if you take shortcuts," Forsythe continued distantly. "You're going to get people under your command killed. And if you die, you're going to go back to hell and you're going to end up staying there this time."
Aries, snapping back to the conversation, cast him a glance that'd make most anyone not jaded by decades of Mercenary work flinch.
"That's the long and short of it," Forsythe said. "At least from my understanding. So you'll understand why I'm concerned by your sticking your arm into a blast furnace. You need to calculate your risks better seeing as how you're now playing for the full pot."
Aries inhaled and bit down. There were two options here, she realized. Keep fighting this point and never get a field commission again... or just take the criticism on the snout like she was back in boot and do as they say.
"You're right," she said, trying not to sound too stung. "I need to work on that. I just..."
"I know. I know."
- - -
Four months and two psyche evals later, Aries Passadar was cleared to return to active field duty.
No comments:
Post a Comment