Some Girls: People do love to talk about their magic powers without the slightest provocation

 Courage is still the only real magic there is

'So you just touch someone and find out everything that's wrong in their body,' says Mara. 'And then just take it away. Yeah I see why you'd like to warn them first.'

She walks along the river with the Doctor, on a street called Riven Promenaden. Whoever puts names on things in this city have a mystifying or terrifying sense of humor, she decides.

'Yep, it's pretty privacy invading. And I don't even sense just everything that's "wrong," it's everything that's out of the norm. Whatever base template condition for the human body that my power has decided is the norm. Like sexual desire chemicals, that's basically everyone all the time. It feels like, well, like when you're horny for no reason, at the most inappropriate time, and you can't stop it.'

'Oh gross. You can't stop them? Heal away the lust?'

'It's sort of complicated but no, basically, I can only heal bad stuff. Disease, wounds, toxins, alcohol.'

'Wild. So, just help me understand here, or you can stop me if you don't want to talk about stuff.'

'No, it's nice to see someone so curious. What is it you're wondering, Mara Milton?'

'The way that you describe "feeling" what's going on in your patient's body. Is it like, physically, or empathically, you experience it yourself?'

'That's a good question. On one hand, yeah, I'll share your sensations for myself to a degree. It makes sex amazing. But it gets weirder. There's synaesthesia, like diseases have colors, and also, you know the sense you have for your own body, what's it called, proprioception? For me that extends to your body. It's like having four eyes, four lungs, four arms.' The Doctor stops suddenly, for just a short moment, eyes flickering like she thinks about ten different things at the same time.

'That sounds, uh, hard to get used to. Are you well, Doc?'

'Ah, would that I could heal myself. No nothing to worry about, just recalibrating my personality shells. Mmmara Milton. Yes. I still know who you are.'

'Dang, you have a lot of stuff going on do ya.'

'It's a little stressful to make a new friend actually. Would you like to come with me to a bar and probably meet some people I know? I crave familiar ground.'

'Why, that sounds lovely.'

'It's not far from here actually. So, what's going on with you? First night in town and you got sexiled?'

'I mean I had to have a look around. Next time I've got to drag them with me. It's such a great place, this. So unlike everywhere else. And such good kind citizens.'

Mara jumps on a stone bench at a bus stop on the side of the street, where she can stand face to face with the Doctor. There they kiss, briefly, the Doctor urging Mara to do it to balance out her unfair knowledge of Mara's body. It has a crazy kind of logic, thinks Mara, as she presses her lips to the Doctor's, colorless under the soft yellow glow of the streetlight, but very full and warm and awkwardly tender and hesitant. And it seems she does learn about the Doctor's body in turn, as she feels her heart race in exactly the same time as her own, and hears a little moan that perfectly goes with the tingle in her own spine. The Doctor tastes like smoke, it's unpleasant, but it feels wild and dangerous and all those things she went through with her near death experience just before. And, it occurs to Mara, she must taste much worse herself.

'So what drives you to Hearthstown?' says the Doctor, when she's caught her breath. 'Attracted to inexplicable natural phenomena?' She gestures to herself, as if to say that's a rhetorical question.

'Oh, it doesn't hurt.' Mara nods. 'But really we need the money. My girl Ako, she has special needs.' Nine thousand calories a day for example.

'Ah, the housing initiative. Funny isn't it? They pay us to live here and yet there's whole abandoned city districts.'

Maybe it takes a peculiar sort of person to be comfortable in this peculiar place, but so few people even try to move here. It is funny, they conclude, joking about which kind of funny it is.

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Disclaimer: The Doctor is neither inspired by "Doctor Who" (it isn't even her actual name) nor meant as a representation of real Dissociative Identity Disorder.