i'll be good / joining

ROSEMARY ROUX

Her whiskers twitched at the boy's answers, not recognizing his name - not even possibly origins. But she didn't dwell long on this, as her four orange-amber eyes analyzed the kid's wounds. She couldn't smell any sign of infection (likely, she supposed, from the saltwater splashes against the wounds the entire way here) and his breathing seemed clear. She dealt with too many cases of half-drowned people washing up on their territory not to rule out fluid-filled lungs when she first healed a newcomer.

"Well, Junji, you should be fine with some rest," she told him, meeting his gaze with her own but not returning the smile. Expressing emotion came increasingly difficult to her these days, and her voice remained tartly neutral now as a result of her odd problem. "I'm Rosemary, the head soothsayer here - which means you should seek me out if those cuts of yours start smelling bad," she explained, remembering her manners and introducing herself to the child. Even if she found the trust in his gaze almost... unsettling. Ever the sexist, Rosemary only ever liked one male child - Coldblue, her nephew, and only because of Coldblue's charisma and interest in magic.

She didn't quite know how to act around this one: an unrelated male child that seemed to trust her more than Pincher. Usually, the captain was far better at dealing with children than she was, and so this situation never happened before.

Flaring her nostrils with a quick exhale, she turned her head and fished around in her leather satchel. Light cracks from her metal tins moving sounded from within the bag, and odd aromas escaped its mouth. Rosemary kept a small collection of emergency herbs and pre-made ointments in here, so the scent of bee's wax mixed with various spices was saturated into the very leather itself. After a few moments, her rummaging came to an end, as she pulled out a small tin of goldenrod-marigold ointment.

Placing her right paw atop the tin, she murmured, "Wash off your cuts quick, then come back." She glanced at the nearby ocean as she spoke, showing how she intended for him to do that. Of course, if other Typhoon members wanted to help, that would make sense - but Rosemary didn't want to deal with it herself. Male children seemed like odd little aliens to her.

© MADI