[WFRP2e] The Power of One - Part 2 - "Transire Benefaciendo"

[MrAbdiel]

Treating the ogres is certainly a learning experience. Their hygiene is poor, but frankly, you've been in battlefields where people have been ripped apart by cannonballs now; and before that, you had been in the skavenpits. Their muscles and bloodvessels seem to be mostly in the same place you'd expect them to be, just scaled up and out; but everything is denser. Most memorably is the blood, which oozes thick and slow instead of running fast. The comparison to gravy leaps unbidden into your mind.

They bleed red wine jus.

You take a look even at the arrow embedded in Tiny's head, while you're there. It's in deep - probably in brain - but the penetration through the skull suggests the arrow was a bodkin and not barbed. You remember a conversation you had with Antonuccia the physician, talking about war wounds like this after a cup or two of wine.

"Medical learning is a gift, and I cringe every time I see a village where the midwives wash their hands in a shared bowl instead of pumped water. How many lives are lost because people do not know things? But then you will see a situation, particularly with the brain or some other organ, where a knife or a bolt is imbedded. The wisdom given to soldiers is not to move such things because moving them may do more damage, or let blood out. But the end truth is, in most such cases, at some point you just have to pull the bloody thing out and try to deal with what's left."

Fortunately, pulling the arrow free does not take anything with it. It makes Tiny's foot kick up and send his loose boot spiraling through the air, kicking an outlaw in the chest and sending him wheezing and sprawling; but no lasting harm from that misadventure. You patch and bandage, and take note. Giorno's wounds are not severe, but they are in that unfortunate lacuna of medical capacity where they are not deep enough to require surgery but not superficial enough to ignore. You use some of the herbs you bought form town to make two huge dressings of poultice and wrap his mighty shins, and instruct him, as much as possible, not to overstress them.

"You heard her, boys! I'm a patient in recovery, I am. I'll lie here and you manlings can toss the food into my mouth, har har! To be Greasus for a day!"

With the excitement of the fight, the feast had almost been forgotten. And just when you'd gotten the blood off your hands...

Several the outlaws are experienced enough with butchering animals that they are helpful slaughtering and gutting and draining; one even very insistent about rincing the offal and stuffing it inside of itself to create what seems like a profane pocket of animal guts. Unappetizing, but efficient. And Bruk even spends time skinning the wolves, and leaving them to drain from a tree. "Not good for mans," he explains, tapping the lean and scarred muscle of one carcass with a huge but very sharp knife. "Orc beasts got worms. Little tummy not good." He gives you a wink, like he's doing you a favor by setting these aside for ogre consumption at a later time. He does offer you something, however - the jawbone of the alpha wolf you killed, stripped and red.

"Cook him up, but not for eat. Here; this." He demonstrates something, holding the jawbone with two fat fingers around the 'chin' with the hinged ends pointed out in a fork, his arm straight ahead, listing his grip loosely left and right. "Godspeak", he explains, and turns back to his work.

Giorno explains a little, when you ask him later on. "Bruk did some apprenticeship under the butchers. They're, err... Well. Like a priest, maybe. He put you on to the jawbone, did he? A Telling-Bone don't normally work in less than a man's jaw. Must be a good wolf."

Spoiler: OOC:

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I would like some Cooking rolls. These are poor, easilly impressed people and also ravenous, never unhungry monsters so whatever you roll will get eaten. But all the same, give me three Trade: Cook rolls at +20 each, to see how the feast turns out.

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