Xaviers!

Ashlie's blood fluid loss is slow enough and too unidentified to really be considered an emergency. Besides, she's conscious and walked at least part of the way to the medical center, so she patiently finds a bed to lie down on while she waits and tries to assess her whole situation, bullet-wound and everything else that led to even being able to acquire it. The signals she's getting from her body are frustratingly vague and the most she's managed to figure out is that they're coming from an entirely new sub-system that, when queried on her physical status just keeps spitting back an unhelpful 'Body Maintenance in progress'.

"Well then Headmistress," Doctor McCoy says as he comes in with a cart of equipment, "I daresay you've topped the time you disappeared into the timestream."

"I'll try to plan my next sabbatical better."

"Our more pedestrian medical equipment was getting some confusing readouts, so I am forced to improvise," he says as he starts to set up around her.

"Yes, I'm not sure I would call this... situation a fully biological one. If you need any help..." she says, making overtures to get up from the bed.

"We do have the benefit of significant studies done on Miss Denisov's body, but I must say you've deviated considerably even from that template."

"In my defense, I did not know what I was doing. Quite literally. I set an organically corrupted nanite swarm to provide a stable environment for my algorithms."

"It seemed less preposterous at the time."

"We're the X-Men, Headmistress. The preposterous is normal to us."

"Well then what are you waiting for? Tell me if I have a lung and how punctured it is." she says, faintly amused.

The array of equipment Doctor McCoy has set up is an eclectic collection of instruments. Sensing that perhaps magnetic imaging was ill-advised, he starts with an ultrasonic wand he starts waving around the headmistress' body to start to build an image.

The ultrasound readings are surprisingly crisp, structures being more distinct from each other as far as composition goes which illustrates a number of things that might otherwise require more sophisticated instruments. The more structural parts are all roughly where they're supposed to be, bones, tendons and muscles. They all show up as more dense as well and the bones definitely have some internal structures that are too geometric to be purely organic. At the same time, the ultrasound still penetrates tissue more than it would metal. There's lungs (or at least a large diffuse area where they should be), a heart beating in a slow and abnormal rhythm. From there it gets a little harder to assign corresponding organs. While different shapes and tissues exist, their purpose isn't immediately clear.

"You have lungs, Miss Minamida. You have a heart. You have a few organs that I'm honestly not ready to classify. You're not simply a cyborg, or a mutant. You're something quite else."

"I suspected as much. I believe the Nanites took it upon themselves to form an autonomous nervous system to govern all of... this. I suspect the complexities would otherwise be beyond me, but it means I have little insight into my inner workings anymore. I may have to answer a number of very basic questions. Beginning with the fact that oxygen intake doesn't seem to be a huge factor at the very least this perforation would have probably caused issues by now. Instead it is merely painful."

"If the nanites are still active in your body, I suspect you may have a rudimentary healing factor, or its equivalent."

"I realize the lack of precise feedback from your body may be frustrating, but I think you'll find the rest of us soldier on without it."

"Considering the substantial effort that has gone into designing machines to off-set that I'd venture a guess that the sentiment is shared more than you let on. But I see your point. But what's more frustrating right now is not being able to explore this mystery myself, because somebody thought it was a good idea to perforate my chest cavity and test out my new and improved pain receptors."

"We can attempt to see if painkillers will even work on you, but what I'm finding so far on that is inconclusive. We will of course start with some fairly tame sorts."

"Exciting. The experimentation and data collection that is, not the prospect of narcotics."

"We're starting you out with children's Tylenol, young lady." He chuckles as he retreats to fetch some more supplies.

"After a decade of longing for higher resolution sensory input I made it a mere couple hours before seeking a way to dial it down already."

Tylenol seems to do little, but a small topical injection of Novocain around the bullet wound seems to do the trick enough for Ashlie to soon be up and about, going through readouts of the medical equipment, commandeering one of the staff to bring her a cell-phone to start catching herself up on what needs to be done administratively to extract the school from government control. All the while going back to occasionally check her vitals and search for the bullet with the ultrasound wand. Ultimately the best she can find is a crumpled up piece of metal that looks significantly pock-marked but could feasibly be the remains of the projectile. What seals her suspicion that the nanites are doing something to the foreign body is the fact that a scab starts to form over her injury which is a reddish-grey metal that is suspiciously close to the material composition of a standard bullet.

Even though it feels unnecessary to some extent, Natalie's avatar materializes outside the med center and walks in through the building to Ashlie's room where she politely knocks on the door and waits.

"Come in." she calls, sounding distracted as she pours over a medical monitor of some kind.

Natalie slips into the room, closing the door behind her. "I came to see how you were doing. I heard you were injured."

"Yes." she says, sounding way too excited about it. "A very uniquely unpleasant experience."

"I imagine it would be. Given that you are up and around, I take it that it was a temporary condition. Not exactly how I imagined you using your first few hours using my building blocks."

"Once I realized the lab where Lippincott was holed up had an escape route everything was already in motion and I couldn't just let him get away."

"On the upside, do you want to see something incredible?" she says, pulling her hospital gown's collar down to show the grey-ish colored scab. "Fibrinous lead extracted from the bullet."

Natalie took a closer look, "That is amazing. So you're using the materials from it to 'heal' as it were?"

"That's my working theory at the moment. The nanites integrated a number of autonomous functions I don't seem to have direct access to at the moment."

"And may never have, depending on how 'human' the system they built is." She moves, giving Ashlie a closer look, "It looks largely human in construction."

"I'm not sure built is even the right word. Reconfigured? Infused?"

"Regrown, evolved, but reconfigured is good. Reconfigured pretty well. How are you doing other than the bullet wound?"

"I'm feeling incredible. Like the thick lead wall between me and the world has been reduced to being paper-thin. I no longer feel like a deep-sea diver wading through a world I'm never quite part of."

"I imagine you'll be wanting to explore that world as much as you can. I can manage the Point, with your permission of course."

"I do have a duty here that I've been rather derelict in. That comes first. I trust you with the Point. There are areas where school network and other systems intersect but we'll sort that out. I can no longer interact directly with the network, so some restructuring is in order anyway."

Ashlie's phone pings with an email with some image attachments. "I had Clarion send you some pictures that I took when you re-emerged. I thought you could use some 'baby' pictures."

"I'm thinking those won't go on the mantlepiece." she says, chuckling as she pulls up the images on her phone. "But thanks. As strange as the circumstances were, it's... a treasured memory."

"I imagined it would be or at the very least was something not to be forgotten," she said, "I'll store copies should you lose them. Should I instruct Caretaker to begin extending the crystal matrix to Lippincott's lab? I wasn't sure if you intended to keep it or demolish it."

"Go ahead and expand to where you can without disrupting anything. As for the lab, I'll have to take a look at it myself first. We're certainly not keeping technology to rip out mutations, but until everyone has safely reclaimed theirs I'm not tearing down what might be needed to solve any potential problems."

"Shouldn't be a disruption, by Caretaker's estimates. We'll get started on that immediately. Is there anything I can do for you now?"

"You have plenty on your plate, even if you're apparently already juggling sub-processes to delegate." she smiles. "But I mostly just need to sort out a lot of administrative things that can't wait. Especially if I have to do it manually. Solving that limitation is high on the list though."