Ninjas of Love

Kitchen Nightmares

Like a police officer busting through a door to commence a high-octane drug bust, Charlie burst into the living area, from which the kitchen could be seen. A quick glance told him that there was only one person in the kitchen, and that- unlike his original prediction- it wasn't his half-sister. "Kerian!" The call from his team leader snapped Kerian out of whatever trance he had been lulled into by watching the potatoes boil. Potatoes, of course, were Em's specialty- as she was so in touch with Patchian culture. It was a renowned fact that a couple of centuries prior, Patch had lost a quarter of its population to starvation and emigration when the potato famine struck- and still hadn't fully recovered. "Yeah?" The fox boy asked, furry ears poking up still. "Where is she?" Charlie's question was relatively simply and easy to comprehend- you would think. "Who?"
"My sister." Kerian continued to wear a look of utter confusion on his face, so Charlie continued. "My sister Emily who you were cooking dinner with."
"Oh, her!" Kerian stamped his foot in excitement as he had quite possibly the most pathetic possible Eureka moment in the history of such things. "Yes. Her. Where?" Charlie kept things even simpler by keeping not only his words, but his sentences, to a strict monosyllabic pattern just to be sure Kerian knew what he meant. "Oh. She cut herself or something and she's gone now. Went out."
"She what?" Charlie muttered something to himself about "fucking Faunus thinking they deserve rights" and practically tore his scroll out of his pocket.

"Pardon me a minute." Emily said to the older, kindly-looking gentleman as she felt her scroll vibrate against her side. She stepped outside of his office, and accepted the call. "Where are you?"
"I was in the doctor's office until you called me, you absolute pillock." Emily's response was cutting but not actually wrong. "Kerian said you cut yourself making the dinner. Is everything ok?"
"Cut myself? Mo Día, na mhichumas na buacháill."
"And in normal?"
"Is our teammate actually mentally challenged?"
"Why?"
"I'm not here because I cut myself. I'm here, brother dearest, because-"
"Why? What's wrong?"
"I was getting to that bit. My hand is kind of at ninety degrees to my arm."
"Is that meant to happen?"
"Yes, it's the peak of human evolution. No, of course it fucking isn't, that's why I'm at the doctor's."
"Will you be home for dinner?"
"Yeah, probably."
"I'll tell Kerian to do some more potatoes then."
"See you in a bit, Charlie."
"See you in a bit too."

"My dearest apologies." Emily said, taking a step back inside the office of Dr. Schwarzkopf, who simply looked up and down her at his patient. Despite the fact that her right hand was quite clearly not sat where it should be, he seemed almost entirely unfazed. "Please, take a seat again." The Doctor was in his mid-fifties and had only recently began working outside of his native Atlas, so his accent was harsh and thick. "So, let's take a look at the scan of that hand, yes?" Emily nodded silently and waited nervously as Schwarzkopf pulled up pictures of the magnetic scan he had performed on the joint. He placed one on his desk, facing towards Emily, and placed another- though it seemed to be of a pudgier, squarer hand- next to it. "Ok, Miss Kostova, to your left, you will see an image of what a normal joint looks like. The one on the right is yours. You see the patch of what looks like television static in yours?" Emily nodded, and pointed the index finger of her healthy hand towards it. "Ja, that." Schwarzkopf said, a slight smile peeking through the wiry silver hairs that sat unkempt upon his face. Even his lips were grey, adding to the stony, austere look he carried about him. "You know what that is?" Emily shook her head to show she didn't know what it was.

The doctor stretched out one of his fingers that looked fat and round like a Richmond sausage, and pointed toward the actual bone at the base of the wrist. "That is absent on your scan, yes?" Emily simply nodded. "Then the mess in your wrist is what's left of that bone."
"I'm confused. I was cutting herbs, how could something like that happen on that level?"
"Well, you experience problems with chronic pain and joint security down to what I'd like to think is a connective tissue disorder- so we'll send you off to test for that sometime. It's likely that wrist has been cracked and just about in place for weeks or months, and whatever happened today dislodged it, and lit a touchpaper." Emily had number of looks, but Schwarzkopf could now say he was one of the few people in the world who got to bear witness to a visage that told a story of pure hopeless dejection. "It's not fixable, is it, Doctor?" Schwarzkopf met Emily's look of a world shattered before her eyes with one of utter bewilderment. "Of course it's fixable, Emily. Wait here, I'll be back in a second." Emily simply nodded.

As soon as the most homeless-looking doctor in all of Vale left the room, Emily reached for her handkerchief with her healthy hand and held it up to her face. Not only did she want to catch any tears she could feel burning at her eyes like flames, but she felt comforted and protected by it's warm, musky smell. A smell that to anyone else would have just signified used handkerchief, but to Emily, the ingrained stench meant love, meant home, and meant safety. As she folded it away again, with eyes redder than a baboon's arsehole, she saw the door begin to open.

"Miss Kostova, please give me your wrist again." Emily reluctantly put the hand out and Schwarzkopf carefully forced it back into its position, with a sickening sound of bone shards displacing and shattering. He then strapped on a steel and leather brace. "It is imperative," he began to warn his patient, "that you wear this every moment of every day for two months. No exceptions." Emily nodded softly. "We hope new bone will grow in the right place," he continued, "but you will have to come back in two months time to the day for us to check."
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Well, either we'd look into cleaning up the bone surgically and replacing the wrist joint with a titanium one, or- if it really hadn't worked- amputation at the line of the brace. But it'll work. That's all. I have other patients, home now. Go." Emily left the room, ugly brown brace on her wrist, and prepared for the long trek back up to her dormitory for whatever hot mess Kerian was about to plate up.