Chapter 56 part 1

Amelia couldn't help but groan as she was shaken gently awake. She would have rather continued in the dream conference and learned more about what had happened to Charlie, but if whatever it was, was serious enough for them to wake her up, that likely meant that it was time for her to do what she'd already determined to do when she first entered that quarantined house.

Opening her eyes, she saw Cinder's face in the candlelight. Though, even after she'd opened her eyes, he continued shaking her awake. Amelia wasn't sure if he just didn't notice her eyes open or if he just didn't have that great of eyesight to begin with, she just knew she was getting a little annoyed by it already.

"What is it?" Amelia asked, a little surprised when her voice croaked. When she heard it, she couldn't help but wonder when the last time she'd drank any water had been.

"I'm not sure what to do about our latest patient," Cinder said, his voice thick with unease, as he stopped shaking her. "He's throwing up again and since he's nursing, I don't think that's good for the milk he's producing."

Amelia sighed. While there were certain things that she'd come to accept about this world, men breastfeeding the infants wasn't something she'd yet gotten used to. At least not yet.

"I'll take a look," she said, pushing the blanket off of her.

Cinder stood up and backed away from Amelia as she stood up. While she doubted it would have any serious health risks to the man's milk itself, she couldn't deny that the fact that the person was throwing up probably shouldn't be in contact with the infant to begin with. As she had a feeling that the infant probably wouldn't have as strong of an immune response as it would as it got older.

Which, while she hardly thought of it was an emergency, she couldn't find fault with Cinder for waking her up. Besides, he was actually very good at his judgement calls most of the time. He rarely sought her out for things he'd already been shown what to do and it was almost like he had been born to assist others. Like being a nurse had been his calling to begin with.

While Amelia had essentially became the de facto doctor, or healer, at the marquis' residence, she hadn't yet been given a place that would be convenient where she could sleep near her patients. Outside of the rare case of spotted plague that would be directed to the quarantine house. Though, with what she'd been able to do in regards to that plague, it seemed that there was even talk about getting rid of that house.

Which merely meant that it took Amelia much longer than she'd have liked to reach the patient. Who lived with the servants wing. While she was confident that the illness wasn't serious, she was wanting to experiment a little with her magic on this case: to see if her magic would prevent her patients from producing antibodies to fight future infections.

She would like to just wield her magic and cure everything, but she knew that might not be good to do. Such as if her magic prevented her patients from producing antibodies, that it might create problems for them later on if the illness returned. So, she had a feeling it would be better to learn about this sooner rather than later. Especially since she knew that the technology on this world wasn't anywhere close to that on Earth, and so their medical knowledge was likely rather insufficient to answer her questions on this topic.

Which was why she was letting this person deal with the illness on their own, since she hadn't yet verified exactly what it looked like when they developed antibodies when she scanned them, since she couldn't very well tell what didn't get developed just by the absence of the illness when she used her magic to cure it.

Still, it was a situation that required a bit more delicacy than this world seemed to allow at the moment. Likely from a lack of understanding of things like this more than anything else.

When Amelia arrived at her patient, she checked their vitals before asking them some of the basic questions she knew doctors asked. She suspected it was whatever this world had in place of the flu, but since she couldn't very well be certain of it, she felt it was better to at least take a little more care in what she recommended.

"Cinder, please let whoever is in charge that this man is supposed to be on bed rest," Amelia told Cinder. "He can continue to nurse his child, but if the child starts showing symptoms of catching his illness, I'm to be notified immediately, okay?"

The man who was Amelia's patient sat up in alarm as Cinder was nodding in response. "I can't stay in bed. That's not allowed," he pleaded.

Amelia gently pushed him back to laying on his bed, which was pretty much just a straw mattress, again. "Don't worry about that. If your boss has problems with it, then they can talk to me about it, okay? I'm sure of what I'm doing," she said, trying to sound more confident than she actually felt.

Bed rest was a simple staple of recovering from an illness. If he hadn't been throwing up, she might have thought it would be fine to let it go, but since he was, she had a feeling that regardless of what his job in the castle was, that if he threw up while he was working, that it would just make things worse. Besides, she'd already had a few run-ins with some of the supervisors of the few servants that she'd already directed to have bed rest. They felt that her giving those directions would make the others 'lazy' and would create problems for them with other's wanting to be put on 'bed rest' themselves.

While Amelia understood their concerns and couldn't deny that there'd be some people who would try to game the system by doing just that, she at least assured them that she was the one who gave the direction and it wasn't a request by those she'd put on bed rest.

It also might have helped that she knew that she could talk to the marquis about it if she felt it was necessary. As the first time she dealt with this issue, she had to suggest that they took the matter before the marquis. Which naturally, given whom Amelia was supposed to look like, drew a quick change of tone.

Not that she cared. She hoped that she might be able to find out if her magic would still allow the persons body to produce antibodies quickly. If her magic still allowed that to happen, then she was confident that she'd be able to just use her magic whenever she could to cure any illness possible.

However, she had a feeling that her magic wouldn't be able to do that. It merely felt like it would be too good to be true and would just be hoping for too much overall. Maybe she was being rather pessimistic about it, but at the same time, she felt like it would be too good to be true if her magic could do that. Like it would have been something that would have been able to eliminate illnesses altogether if it could.

Making sure that her patient was as comfortable as she could make him, she briefly checked the infant sleeping in a crib nearby. She didn't expect to find anything different from the check she'd performed earlier that day, but did so anyway out of an abundance of caution.

When she was satisfied with what she'd found, she quietly left the room and directed Cinder to stay outside the door, just so that if whoever was in charge took issue with her patient not showing up for work, that someone would be able to act as a buffer to keep her patient's rest from getting disturbed.

Rubbing her eyes as she returned to her room, Amelia couldn't help but wonder how long that had taken. It never felt like it took as long as it always seemed to take her. Part of it was the fact that she had to walk so far to where her patient was housed, but part of it was also the fact that using her magic always distorted her sense of time.

Scanning people with it always seemed to take longer than she felt it should, but it wasn't like she could complain about it. As just like recovering from an illness, it always took as long as was necessary. Rushing it would only help her miss things that could potentially turn out to be more problematic than catching them earlier could be.

Not to mention how being tired when she conducted the scans didn't help. In addition to how she seemed to always feel so tired here to begin with. Which also never helped when she had to deal with the marquis himself.

While she knew she could take matters to him, in order to help her patients to the best of her ability, she still didn't like dealing with him. Not because he was a bad person or because she felt like his judgement was off, but more because of how she looked like his wife.

Milyah was assumed to have been killed, but when Amelia had looked into the matter, with a little help from Tim and Hannah, she'd learned that Milyah had actually gone missing when the soldiers she'd been patrolling with had been attacked by bandits.

Milyah's body wasn't recovered, while all the soldier's bodies who had been with her had been. When no word of her being held captive or demands for ransom or even any hint that she was still alive, it was assumed that she'd been killed.

As such, Amelia felt rather uncomfortable when the marquis made his interest in her quite apparent. While she wouldn't mind having a relationship, she had a feeling that the marquis was wanting more than what she was willing to give right then. Not to mention how she felt a little uneasy about how much she already felt drawn to the marquis in addition how she didn't really think this was the best time to start a relationship. Especially when her parents couldn't meet the marquis.

Plus, dealing with his daughter was another issue altogether. Not only did she seem to not really understand that Amelia couldn't be related to her, but she'd even started insisting on spending time with her, as if she hadn't already gotten herself busier than she had expected to have been here.

Although, she at least accepted the need to endure the literacy lessons from Kystia, which she seemed to handle rather well. Even though the girl seemed to try to use that as an excuse to try and engage in physical contact with Amelia. Such as how Amelia would with her younger brother and sister when she'd read to them.

It was more of a headache than anything else, though Amelia hoped that it wouldn't get worse. She hoped that Kystia wasn't at an age where she really wanted to be with her mother, but she also couldn't say what to expect with how their culture was. Which really only added to her headache when she tried to think too much about them.

Though, Amelia couldn't help but wonder if she was just letting her mind stress about things that weren't anything she really needed to concern herself with given how tired she was. While she hoped to return to Charlie's dream conference, she doubted that she'd be able to do that. Simply because she didn't think that she would be able to use her magic to essentially jump back in. That she'd likely need Charlie to send out her 'invitation' again for her to rejoin and she was well aware that Charlie wouldn't know if she was ready to rejoin or not.

As Amelia finally entered the hallway where her room was, she couldn't help but feel relief. Largely because it wouldn't have been the first time she'd gotten lost while roaming these halls while half-asleep. Although, as she was almost at the door to her room, Tim's door opened and he stepped out, making Amelia wonder if he was a threat if she'd have let him hurt her before she would have reacted. For some reason she wasn't sure if she'd have cared right then.

"Another 'house call?'" Tim asked as he started to yawn.

"Yeah," Amelia replied. "It can be a pain." She paused for a moment as she took a deep breath, ready to learn whatever she could about what Charlie had had to say after she'd left the dream conference. "Though, how'd the rest of the dream conference go? I was at least hoping to hear myself more about where Charlie might have ended up."

Tim looked at Amelia in confusion. "Dream conference?" he asked, before he shook his head and held up a hand to keep her from saying anything more. "Amelia. I have no idea what you were talking about, but you should know as well as I do that Charlie left us and isn't likely to reach out to us until we find her and make amends."

Amelia couldn't help but stop and stare at Tim. "Seriously? She pulled us into a dream conference because she needed help with something," Amelia replied, certain of this fact. What that 'something' was, she didn't really know, but she was confident that she wasn't imagining it. "I was only pulled out because I got woken up to deal with what you termed a 'house call' and not because of anything else."

"What makes you think that it wasn't just a dream of yours?" Tim asked, his tone of superiority making Amelia seriously consider kneeing him in the nuts.

"Well, for one, I guess we can wait for confirmation on this, but Beth did buy several other slaves when she wasn't able to save Charlie, and they went to look at some griffin canyons they learned about in some mountains to the north, I think," Amelia answered.

Tim sighed. "If that's the best you have, then we'll need to assume that it was just a dream of yours until we can confirm what you just said."

Amelia couldn't help but roll her eyes. She didn't expect anything else from Tim, so it felt almost redundant for him to say what she knew he'd say anyway. She was at least confident that Hannah would believe her even before they were able to get any confirmation about that.

"Oh, by the way," Tim asked. "Assuming it was a dream conference, did Charlie say where she was?"

Amelia couldn't help but to start giggling as she remembered what she'd said. "Yeah, she said it was an 'undisclosed location' or something like that."

Tim chuckled. "Yeah, that does sound like her."

"Oh, while we're on the subject of Charlie, apparently she also was auctioned off with two kids. Apparently they adopted her, though I can't think of what their names were."

Tim nodded. "Well, I'm sure the others will remember something if it was a dream conference."

"Well, you didn't," Amelia remarked, as she opened the door to her room. "And I know Charlie waited until all of us were there. Even Ralph."

Tim sighed. "Well, as I said, we'll just have to wait for confirmation from the others. I'm sure I can't be the only one who forgot if there was a dream conference and even if you're the only one who does remember it, some of what you'd learned in that I'm sure would be verifiable regardless."

Amelia entered her room at that moment, closing the door securely behind her. She didn't care for the toe with how Tim had spoken to her, though she couldn't deny he kind of did have a point. She didn't understand why she remembered it while the others didn't. After all, it wasn't like there was any reason for the others, Tim included, to not remember the conference.

Was there?

Amelia stopped and stood above the straw bed she had. It was pretty much just a pile of straw stuffed inside a cloth bag. Sometimes the straw poked out of it, but it was clearly of high-end material for this world. While it wasn't the most comfortable mattress she'd ever slept on, it was at least more comfortable than the ground had been. Especially when they didn't use their sleeping bags, which had occasionally occurred on the expedition.

As she stared at her mattress, she couldn't help but recall what little they knew about the dream conferences altogether. Amelia couldn't remember if they'd had another one or not since the first one where Charlie overused her magic, but from what she did remember about them, time did flow faster while they were in the dream conference. Though, she wasn't sure if it was a natural phenomena of the dream conference or just from the nature of them otherwise being asleep for it.

Knowing she wasn't going to get anywhere if she tried thinking too much about it, she crawled under her blanket on her mattress again, hoping to get some decent sleep. She could imagine herself keeping herself up if she thought too much about the dream conference and what they did or didn't know about it. Though, she did wonder if they should have tried working with Charlie on their expedition, while she was still with them, to see what they might have been able to have learned about the dream conferences.

It might have given her some insights to the current situation. Though, as she felt herself quickly sliding back into a deep slumber, she also found herself caring less and less about that. What was more important for her right then was sleep.