In Bharncair, a home is not earned, but inherited through misfortune. The roof leaks, the walls weep, and the prior tenant rarely leaves without protest. Squatters shuffle in like worms to a ripe corpse, and once inside, they cling harder than rot.

Should you find one in your bed, do not shout. Offer tea. Wait patiently. Eventually, the poison or the cold will make space. And if they linger past the third frost, it is you who has become the squatter.

– From 'The Genteel Art of Urban Survival' by Author Unknown, Inked in Mold on a Cracked Cellar Wall

A month had passed since the chaos of Sallow Hearth—two months since the clinic started going to war against the Myrmurs—and despite all the effort they'd put into prettying the place up with new stained glass windows, new walls, new floorboards, and even glowing crystals outside the building, time still passed painfully slowly.

As was the natural state of Bharncair, Gael supposed.

The work wasn't really paying off. While they had been getting more patients the past month—about five or six a day on average—they were always Repossessors with gashes, bruises, and broken bones from whatever turf war they were fighting up in the northern end of the ward. They never paid him anything, as per his agreement with Lorcawn, so they were just a permanent drain on their monthly income. Not to mention, their presence naturally kept away any 'normal' patients looking for help… and they weren't the only ones keeping people away.

As he'd expected, he couldn't fix the three-headed hounds. Their original bodies weren't preserved well-enough for him to attempt returning the extra heads where they belonged, so all he could do was stabilize their current condition with a few daily doses of graft-suppression drugs. As of right now, there were four oversized 'hellhounds' patrolling and guarding the clinic outside. It was definitely nice to have them wandering around the neighborhood and keeping the clinic safe from 'something', but not only were they expensive to feed—only the Saint knew how much they'd been spending on dog food the past month—he suspected they, much like the Repossessors, were at least half the reason why nobody visited the clinic.

Because who the hell would wanna visit a clinic frequented by the most violent gang in the ward and guarded by hellhounds?

So, one afternoon, as Gael sank into the worn-out sofa in the surgical chamber while guzzling down a bottle of alcohol, he stared at the ceiling and watched the cracks in the plaster stretch and warp like his thoughts.

Then he muttered to no one in particular.

"Boring."

Everyone in the room glanced at him. Maeve was sitting by the center surgical table, performing her usual maintenance on her umbrella. Cara was at the accountant's desk near the bedroom door, flipping through some old notes. Then there was Fergal, lounging casually on the backup surgical table shoved into the corner of the room—-and Gael scowled, jabbing an accusatory finger at him.

"It's all your fault."

"You're telling me," Fergal grumbled back, eyes still closed, arms still crossed behind his back as he tried to doze off. "If you want more patients, you should take off that mask."

"If I want more patients, you bitches should stop treating my clinic as a gang clinic. How the hell are you guys getting injured so often?"

"Watch it. You still haven't beaten me once in our daily hour-long sparring sessions."

Gael snorted, snapping upright and tossing his bottle away. "Go back to your warehouse. It's all fixed up already, ain't it?"

"I don't want to. Am I not allowed to rest here every once in a while?"

"You're here every day for four hours a day. Go sleep in your own crib."

"No. My boys are noisy as fuck in the afternoon. This place is quiet."

"And who do you think I have to thank for that?"

"Take off the mask," Cara grumbled.

"Stop soliciting patients off the street in the middle of the night," Maeve mumbled.

"Who's side are you on?" he snapped back. "Look, we gotta do something big. Something big enough that it'll get people to come despite all you gangsters coming and going as you please. Something like…"

He trailed off, his eyes wandering to the ceiling again. Cara stopped scribbling into her notes as well, and then their gazes snapped to each other, nodding at the same time.

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"Let's go there and get that," they both said.

Maeve raised an eyebrow at the two of them, but Gael and Cara were already shooting to their feet, hastily skipping around the surgical chamber and rummaging through its floor compartments, ceiling compartments, and double-hidden wall compartments. Oh, they'd stuffed all sorts of things into them, but Gael was sure they had forest-traversal gear and hiking tools somewhere.

Just gotta find them.

And as the two of them rifled through drawers upon drawers of unmarked vials, half-used bandages, and a whole assortment of equally pointless miscellanea, a small gust of wind whooshed by the surgical chamber.

Through the open window, a young girl with giant wings landed lightly on the windowsill. A flower-patterned mask obscured her face, but those courier clothes and the excitement in her was unmistakable.

Evelyn peeled off her mask and beamed at Gael, her eyes wide with pride. "I did it, Mister Halloway!" she said, practically vibrating with energy. "I delivered this week's medicine to Old Banks all on my own!"

Gael didn't look at her, still rifling through the chaos of supplies. "Good job for finally being able to do the bare minimum as a courier," he muttered, "but there's still more I need you to do. Go downstairs to the storage, find a box of drugs labelled 'Howlbinder Suspension', and deliver it to Old Banks. Tell him it's a stronger version of the anti-Vile medicine I've been giving him the past two months. Then fly to the Cleaner and tell him to come by every two days to keep this place in shape. Oh, and also start sending Miss Alba some neural equilibrium meds every day. I'm slightly concerned she'll get parasitized again, given how tired she's been looking recently."

Her wings fluttered slightly in excitement as she tilted her head. "Okay! I can do that! But… are you goin' somewhere, Mister Halloway?"

"Yep. Look after the clinic for about a week or two."

"Feel free to eat out of the pantry and do whatever you like," Cara added.

Evelyn's face lit up, her eyes wide with hope as she eagerly asked, "Wait! Does that mean I can sleep outside the storage room now? Can I sleep in your bed?"

Gael was about to shoot her down with a flat, "No," but before the words could leave his mouth, Cara threw an accounting book at the back of his head and knocked him to the floor.

"Actually, there are three storage rooms just beside this surgical chamber," she said, glancing around the room and pointing at the rusted chains that sealed off two separate doors. "We only bothered cleaning one out to turn it into an extra bedroom a month and a half ago, since Maeve wanted her own room while I kept sharing my double bed with Gael—"

" —our double bed, dear sister—"

"—but there's too many years of junk in the other two rooms, so we never bothered cleaning those out. But, if you want, you can clean one of them up and turn them into your own bedroom."

Evelyn blinked, her excitement building. "I can do that?"

Cara nodded. "Sure. And if you like, you can use a bit of the clinic's money and ask the Cleaner for help. I think he's been around enough to know how to help you deal with all the mess. We should've given you your own room earlier, anyways. Sorry for pushing it off."

"It's okay! The storage room ain't bad! It's big enough for my hounds to come in through the backdoor and sleep at night, anyways, but…"

Evelyn was practically glowing. The idea of finally having her own space made her ramble on and on about all the things she'd do with the freedom of a proper bed, so while she did exactly that, Fergal broke the silence again.

"So, where are the two of you planning on going?"

"So far, we've obtained a sponsor, refurbished the foundation of this sad excuse for a clinic, managed to get a Vile Eater to clean the air in here, and even got ourselves a courier and some hellhounds acting as security guards," Gael said, still shuffling through old hiking gear and forest supplies. "But we didn't start out looking for hellhounds and a courier. That wasn't the plan. We want patients—real patients—coming through those doors, so to attract them despite you fucking gangsters, we need actual, genuinely attractive features. We need something big and... and flashy enough to draw them to the clinic. What's the best way to do that?"

Maeve and Evelyn spoke at the same time, spouting off random thoughts. Gael only sighed.

"Wrong." He rummaged around in his floor compartment for a bit longer before pulling out a small, glowing green stone etched with wavy, spiralling patterns. "More of this is what we need."

Maeve furrowed her brows. "What's that?" And Evelyn, quick to be curious as always, zipped forward and plucked the stone from his hands. She held it up to the lantern, watching the faint green glow pulse with a rhythmic hum.

"It's pretty," she murmured. "It's also… singin'?"

Gael grinned. "It's called an aero-resonating stone," he said. "It gives off imperceptible frequency waves that makes people relax and reduces mental stress. I bought just the one from an exotic travelling merchant a year ago, but if we can get enough of them and scatter them around the outside of the clinic, we can probably form a resonance of aero-resonating stones. The whole neighborhood will have soothing sound waves filling the air, which means people will wander here subconsciously."

Cara piped up from the side. "We could even add benches outside the clinic and prettify the block around the clinic. Make it look like a little park. If people start hanging out in the area, they'll get curious eventually and come inside where the resonance is strongest. Word of mouth will spread, and before long, we'll have ourselves a proper business."

As Gael slapped a high-five with Cara as she passed by, Maeve's voice cut through the moment.

"That sounds nice," she said, "but where, exactly, are we getting these stones from?"

Gael didn't hesitate. "Right from the source. They're insanely expensive even in bulk, anyways, and we could use a little retreat, right?"

Maeve arched her brow. "You're not answering my question—"

"And while we're there, we'll also get ourselves stronger. The place is crawling with Myrmurs and other Nightspawn. It's a real hotspot of points, so if we're gonna keep running into bigger, stronger, enemies, we can fell two birds… multiple birds with one stone, yeah?" He said, grinning from ear to ear. "I'll also be able to gather some herbs I don't have to whip up a new batch of symbiote elixir. I'm all out after using three vials on the girl, so—"

"I will shoot you if you don't tell me where we're actually going."

Gael laughed. "It's a little dangerous, alright? But how about this: first, we eat the three Myrmur carcasses we've been storing in the back. We've been sitting on them for a month now, and we could probably use a new mutation or two."

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