The Cure - II [Exemplary]

[Proto Man]

Proto Man found himself in Darkshire a few hours after exiting the Dante Verse.  The guards at the gate seemed almost nervous as they ushered him into the city.  Were they new?  They were present in his records of the town’s active guardsman, and they didn’t seem comfortable after he stated his identity.  He didn’t bother to ask them questions, because he rarely got anything out of anyone in uniform.  The only people who seemed to know anything in this town were Dobson and whoever he had swirling around him on a given day.

As he walked down on the larger and more central streets of the city, Proto Man glanced around and realized that the place looked a little deader than usual. The sun was still high in the sky overhead, and despite the perpetually cloudy weather, there still should have been people milling about.  This was prime time to the street markets to be open, but there was barely a soul to be seen wandering down the cobblestone path.

After a few more minutes, Proto Man arrived at the small building that served as the closest thing to a medical clinic that Darkshire had within its battered walls.  Essentially, the place was just the house of someone who specialized in herbal remedies and anatomy.  Most societies would have called the woman an apothecary or a healer, but in Darkshire, she was just one of a few individuals with better knowledge about treating wounds and mixing chemicals.  Proto Man wasn’t sure why Darkshire lacked anything close to a modern medical treatment facility, especially given its history of being the center of a perpetual warzone.

A knock on the door summoned the young-looking woman who tended to the wounded.  It took her a few moments, but she eventually smiled at the preteen machine.  “Hello, Blues, I haven’t seen you for a while.”

“I was at that contest thing,” he replied as she ushered him into her home.

The remark caused her to furrow her brow.  “I don’t recall hearing about you.”

“I didn’t make the cut,” Proto Man muttered, shrugged his shoulders as he was lead through the woman’s living quarters and into the back half of her house, which doubled as the convalescence and treatment area.  “I guess it’s for the best…I don’t think you should be killing people for sport.”

“You got a good head on those shoulders,” the healer said with a smile as she pulled away a piece of carpet that doubled as a privacy veil.  The curtain slid away to reveal Mireya Vasquez, her eyes glancing out through the window at the little side street that stretched out behind the apothecary’s home.  At hearing the cloth shuffle away, the half-night elf twisted and grinned at the sight of the red robot.  “Blues!”  She shouted, swinging her feet over the bed and hopping down to embrace her companion.  “I heard you got into a scrap with a giant beastie.”

“Something like that,” Proto Man replied as he reached into his bag and retrieved the scale from the defeated Tarrasque.  “It was called a Tarrasque… some type of giant monster with lava for blood.”

“Is it dead?”

The android shrugged his shoulders.  “We all saw it plunge into a fissure in the earth, but there wasn’t a corpse or anything like that.  Just a bunch of pieces of its shell, like this one.”

“Explains the quake a few weeks ago,” Mireya responded as she strode over to a small cabinet and threw it open.  “Did you just return?”  She asked, glancing over her shoulder at the boy as she pulled out her repaired armor.

“Haven’t been her more than ten or fifteen minutes,” Proto Man answered as he watched the woman quickly don the mixture of leather and chainmail armor.  When she finished, she swiftly stowed over a half dozen knives across various parts of her anatomy.  The manner in which she moved bordered on the erratic.  “Are we in a rush?”

Mireya grabbed her glaive and slid it between a pair of hoops.  “This town hasn’t been the same for the last week and a half,” she whispered, her eyes glancing around the open curtain to confirm that the healer was gone.  “This place hasn’t been the same… a town champion was murdered a few days ago, and his head was left in the town square.  I heard they’re trying to pin it on Dobson and some other members of the town guard.  People are whispering about a possible coup against the mayor or a possible liquidation of the garrison.  Can you believe it?  All the darkness outside this town, and they’re on the verge of going at one another’s throats.”

“Should we help?”  Proto Man asked, his expression growing grim as he walked over to the woman’s window and peaked outside.  Her words certainly explained the changed atmosphere that had fallen over the town.

“Your girl is, but I haven’t heard about her in days.”

“My girl?”

“The one with the plague.  Whirda.”

Proto Man nodded his head.  “So you don’t know if she’s okay or not?”

“I heard she met with Dobson a while back, but the drama is all behind closed doors for now… I don’t know if you and I marching up to Town Hall would do any good.”

“So what’s our move?”  The android asked.  Ever since failing to defeat Cindy, he felt as if he was slowly starting to lose control of his life.  First he’d been imprisoned, then he had been left in the facility, and now he was arriving back at Darkshire to find that yet more things were out of his control.

“I say we finish what we started,” Mireya said as she rested one of her slender hands upon the circle of runes etched around the android’s wrist.  "It won't matter how the situation in the Town Hall plays out if the entire Moors are destroyed."