"I need the... toilet," he asked huskily, his throat raw from the cold and everything else that he'd been through.
"I'll get a catheter," replied the nurse politely.
Lifting his head up, Flash shouted after her.
"I think if I can get up, I'll be alright to go by myself."
Both nurses burst into laughter.
"I think you must have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock, thinking you can go to the toilet on your own. Have you seen the state of your fingers? All of them are seriously frostbitten. And that's before we've even looked at your... wedding tackle."
Shaking her head, she wandered off with the other nurse to find a catheter, leaving Flash needing a new plan to free himself and get back to the dragon domain. Mulling things over something else occurred to him, something he hadn't thought of before.
'I got rid of all the nagas at Casey Station, but what if there are nagas here, disguised as humans?' Knowing he wouldn't find out until it was too late, he had to get out of here, and he had to do it now.
While dragons in general know about most, if not all, of the entrances and exits to their underground world in or around where they live, specialist dragons such as those in the King's or even the Crimson Guards that Flash belonged to, need a much broader scale of information, mainly because they have no idea where exactly their missions will take them. Fortunately for Flash, he was back at the point where he'd started the mission: Perth, Australia, and he was after all, like any good boy scout, always prepared. Assuming that he must have been admitted to the Royal Perth Hospital, as it was the best in the region and one of the best in the country, accessing his near perfect memory, he found it a lot slower and harder to retrieve the information he needed, than it would have been under normal circumstances. Eventually, he found what he was looking for. A bare bones, emergency kind of... list! There would in fact have been thousands of entrances to the dragon domain, if not tens of thousands, in and around Perth itself, but he didn't really think he could start breaking into houses on the off chance that they were dragons, asking to borrow their secret entrance. Standing out in his head, the list included the Swan Bell Tower. Built for the millennium, it stood 268 feet high and was home to twelve bells from the historic St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London, together with six new bells. The entrance here, he noted, was in one of the visitors' toilet cubicles. By pressing a certain sequence of tiles on the wall in the cubicle and then flushing it while sitting down, the toilet would flick the occupant over upon themself, through a gap in the wall behind that would appear for a very short time, and onto a steep, spiral slide, that eventually enters the dragon domain, deep beneath Perth.
Also on the list was the Old Perth Observatory, a stunning historic building dating back to the late 19th century, incorporating impressive architecture and fantastic period features, on which this particular entrance was dependant. To use this death defying drop entrance, a dragon first had to make their way around to the very back of the building, where a series of beautiful flower beds run around the building, below and adjacent to the outside walkway that skirts around it. One of the features of the walkways is the intricately carved handrails and spindles that run below them. To activate the entrance, a dragon must stand at a particular point between two of the flower beds, facing the walkway. With the spindles now at chest height, and preferably with no one looking, two of the spindles, three apart, need to be yanked back as hard as possible. All three of the spindles are sprung loaded, and leap back into place immediately. They do, however, need a lot of force to make them work. Once done, a small covering of grass disappears momentarily, just enough time for a human shape to disappear beneath the surface, with gravity playing a pivotal part in the whole equation.
Other entrances on the list include Perth zoo, only five minutes from the city centre and the Perth Mint, established in 1899, and Australia's oldest mint still in operation today.
Plumping for the closest, only half a mile away from where he currently lay, at least that's what he assumed, letting his head be enveloped by the soft, squishy pillow that had delicately been placed under his head by one of the nurses, he tried to recall every part of his journey on the stretcher since he'd left the ambulance. Images of a reception, patients sitting hunched on chairs waiting to be seen by incredibly busy doctors, brightly lit corridors and a quick trip in an expansive lift all swam by in an instant. Now sure that the room he lay in was in the south block of Perth hospital, adjacent to Wellington Street, catching his breath, sweat running down the side of his head, he knew the entrance he needed was so close he could almost smell the dragon poo from where he was. It was going to be tricky, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and just hopefully a contingent of King's Guards could sort out the mess after he got back and revealed the information he carried to the king.
After another prolonged attack on his back, Flash noticed that neither of the nurses had returned from rushing off to find him a catheter. Part of him was truly thankful for this. While he was a dragon and always would be, whatever form he took as a disguise, he still managed to feel very much how he assumed a human would feel in these situations. The very thought of a nurse inserting equipment... there... made him feel embarrassed, scared, ashamed, and yet it shouldn't have bothered him. After all, it wasn't really his body, was it? It was just pretend, or at least it should have been, but it never really worked like that, no matter how hard he tried.
Gingerly sitting up for the first time in many hours, he wiped the sweat from his brow. After only a few seconds, the dizziness that he'd felt vanished. And then it hit him... he was actually starting to feel better. Not better as in all of his dragon abilities had returned, but just... better. Inside, he could just make out the tiniest sliver of magic, waiting to be cast. His fever felt as if it was about to break, and he felt as though he could probably get off the raised bed, without any help.
'If I could use that little bit of magic to reverse the frostbite mantra, then just maybe I could walk to the entrance, plain and simple,' he thought, looking around to make sure no one else was lurking anywhere in the big, sterile room. With the room clear, he closed his eyes and with his mind, delved deep inside the human shell he currently found himself in. Marvelling at the complexity of the mantra that held his DNA together, he soon found cause for concern, stumbling onto the true extent to which the naga's poison had ravaged the body which at the moment he called his. From what he could tell, the poison was slowly attacking his DNA, changing it, damaging it and if left for much longer, probably destroying it.
Pure determination and will took over. Banishing any thoughts of failure, he found the words in his mind to reverse the frostbite mantra, and putting as much belief behind them as he could in his worn down state, he whispered them under his breath. A sharp prickling sensation overwhelmed his extremities briefly, and then it was done. Looking down at his hands, he found them... soft, smooth, nicely pink, almost brand new. Pulling his legs out from under the rough covers, he slung them over the side and dropped to the floor. His newly reformed feet felt cold on the mezzanine floor, and while he didn't exactly feel fantastic, he felt better than he had in a while, better than he'd felt since he'd been poisoned by that damn naga.
'Anyway,' he mused, 'no time to dwell on previous events. I have to leave as quickly and quietly as possible.' Checking the room for anything to wear, typically he found nothing. Remaining in his thermal base layers, a black skin tight top that had been cut off with a pair of scissors around the elbows, and black skin tight leggings that again had been cut off just below the knees, he looked like a ninja that had been in a fight with a combine harvester.