I was actually quite glad to be so far away from what was going on down below. The moment Hammer and Graywall, my two drill sergeants, had caught wind of their injured comrade, they'd sent a pair of their warriors-in-training to commandeer some equipment—from the lumberyard, of all places. As soon as I grasped why exactly they were making off with a spare axe and one of the improvised saws, I suddenly wanted to look anywhere else except down at Longshanks, held down by Hammer on a makeshift pallet while Graywall forced some kind of mushroom-based concoction down the semi-conscious scout's throat.
I knew some of the fungi in the shroomeries had anesthetic properties; I hoped the warriors' potion was made from those and not from the deadlier kind, though I wouldn’t have put it past them to confuse anesthesia with euthanasia. Either way, Longshanks would be in less pain, so that was... good.
Ket seemed just as horrified as I was, and had fallen mostly silent. To distract us both from the procedure going on below, I focused on Graywall and brought up his personal details in the Augmentary.
"Huh," I said. "Did you know Graywall has the Improvised Medicine skill?"
She huffed. "Of course. All the gnomes with combat-oriented vocations have that skill."
"Well, I didn't know."
"Think about it. It makes sense. How else would they have managed to patch themselves and each other up after the big battle?"
"I thought they just... did it. I didn't know it was an actual skill, like my abilities."
Now I thought about it, it was a miracle we’d survived this long without an actual healer among the tribe. Time to remedy that.
I chose one of my non-vocationed gnomes at random and assigned him the “Medic” profession. He immediately leapt up from where he’d been gathering mushrooms, cracking his head on an outcropping of rock and falling straight back to the ground. I sighed and assigned a second medic, who promptly scurried over to tend to the first one.
“Oh!” I remembered. “Speaking of new skills and things—take a closer look at Longshanks."
I felt Ket cringe.
"Will you see if it's safe first?"
I sighed, but steeled myself and risked another look. To my immense relief, Graywall was wrapping bandages around the stump of my lead scout's leg. The operation was over, and Longshanks was still alive.
"It's all right, Ket. You can look. Longshanks is fine. Actually fine. Though... I guess we should call him Longshank now, no?"
"Corey!" If she and I were corporeal, she'd definitely have just punched me on the arm.
"What? I wasn't joking!"
She muttered something about me being insensitive. "You could just call him Shanky," she told me.
I sighed again. "I'm not doing that."
Down in the barracks, Longshanks—no, Longshank now, I reminded myself—groaned and began to stir.
“Poor Shanky.” Ket moaned in sympathy.
“That’s still a stupid nickname,” I told her, hoping rehashing the argument would distract her from her concern (and from blaming me).
It worked.
“No, it’s isn’t," she snapped. "Anyway, I don’t care what you think. It's what I call him. If he could hear us, he'd tell us how much he likes it. And if you try to tell me one more time that it sounds like a ‘cutesy assassin’ name…”
I thought back to him stabbing the mole-rat over and over again. Perhaps Shanky wasn’t such a bad name for him after all.
"Ket, I take it all back. There was nothing cute about the way he dealt with that mole-rat."
"Really?"
"You should've seen him. It was brutal."
"Hmm." She didn't seem to like the sound of that. I rolled my eyes. Gods forbid I ruin her opinion of her precious "Shanky."
"So what was it like?" Even as she asked, she was pulling up the blesmol's blueprint. "Oh, it's actually kind of cute!"
"Are you blind?!" I abandoned my refuge on Binky's back and zoomed over to give her a mental poke. "How can you say that thing is 'cute' but still be frightened of poor Binky?"
Binky followed me down, bless him, descending slowly on a spool of silken thread until he was dangling just above my gem. Ket shuddered and hurriedly relinquished her favorite spot atop it.
"A fear of spiders is rational, Corey. You're the weird one here. Not me."
She went back to examining the mole-rat blueprint. I zoomed over again to point out certain things—like how disproportionately huge and disturbing the teeth were. After I'd described fighting an entire herd of them (yes, I may have exaggerated the number), she agreed that fine, maybe they weren't all that cute after all.
Done scanning the new blueprint for information, Ket was now flipping back through the other recent blueprints we'd acquired. "So how did you manage to beat it?" she asked.
"You'd have been so proud," I told her. "I actually used the Augmentary to help us. It was really difficult, but—"
"Ooh, was it the ghoul's bush?" she interrupted, still flipping through blueprints. "That's what I'd have done. Found a way to get its mouth open and—”
"Beard."
"What?"
"It's ghoul's beard, Ket. Beard! Not bush." I was already grumpy that she'd figured it out so much quicker than I had. And I'd told her about ghoul's beard on multiple occasions now, yet she still couldn't remember its proper name?
"Do ghouls even have beards?" she pondered.
"The man ghouls probably do. And I imagine lady ghouls have bushes—"
"ANYWAY," she said loudly. "What were you saying before about new skills? Why did you want me to look at Shanky?"
I smirked and stayed quiet.
"You big tease!" she scolded. "Fine, fine—let me have a look..."
There was a pause while she brought up Longshank's Augmentary profile.
“’Hunter,’” Ket read aloud. Then she squealed as
