Annie strode with purpose back to her motel room and threw open the door, unbuckling her breastplate and tossing it along with her bloody jacket onto the bed as she made a beeline for her bag. Picking it up with her good arm, Annie brought the bag over to her bed and dumped out its contents. Various toiletries, tools, clothes, and rations tumbled onto the mattress and Annie rooted around briefly before plucking up a slim tin case and carrying it into the bathroom.
She’d put away most of her alchemy equipment before she’d left, but had left the handheld burner on the toilet and a pair of tongs resting in the sink for later. Annie set her tin down next to the sink and took a proper look at herself in the mirror.
She looked awful. The shoulder of her flannel had dozens of little rips in it from the shotgun blast and her side was crusty with dried blood from her fight with the demon in the mines. Her body was mottled with all kinds of bruises over every visible inch of skin, and there were several small cuts and lacerations across her cheek and along the side of her neck. Looking in the mirror brought with it a rush of exhaustion that crashed over Annie like a tidal wave. Every inch of her hurt, she had barely slept, and hadn’t even thought about eating in almost two days. She was tired. But, exhausted or not, the Stranger had to get to work.
Annie flipped open the tin and retrieved a thin pair of tweezers from the medical supplies inside and plucked a towel from the beside the sink. Biting down on the towel, Annie dug the scissors into the first of her shrapnel wounds. She wasn’t able to be as gentle as such a process might require, but she bit harder into her improvised gag and dove into the agonizing job of pulling shrapnel from her wounds piece by bloody piece, dropping each of them into the sink after extracting them.
She completed the work quickly enough. By the time she was done there were nearly a dozen bits of metal littering the bottom of the sink. She ran the towel under some water in the sink for a few seconds and then hastily wiped at the wounds she could see.. Now that the tedious part was out of the way, Annie grabbed the leftover bandages from when Connor had patched her up the second time and wound them tight across her chest and shoulder then pinning it into place.
Satisfied she wouldn’t bleed more into her favorite jacket, Annie returned to the bedroom and rummaged around her alchemy kit, pulling the vial of pearlescent fluid from inside and holding it up to the light to inspect it. It still shimmered with a rainbow of color across its milky surface, purified and full of alchemic potential.
Annie had three particular concoctions in mind: another ironblood elixir, a celerity elixir, and medical elixir. Annie had a feeling she’d need her best combat alchemy to grapple with the grey thread mage. And if that was the case, there was one more tool she should add to her arsenal…
Annie grabbed a short rubber chord and bound it around her arm in a makeshift tourniquet, then pulled a sterile syringe from her alchemy kit. Carefully, she pushed the needle into the antecubital vein in the crook of her elbow and withdrew some of her blood. Once the syringe was full Annie dabbed at the vein with a small blood-spotted cloth and swapped its contents with one of the vials on her bandolier.
With the simple preparation out of the way, she returned her alchemy equipment to their scattered places in the bathroom and gloved up. It was time she got to work.
