My apologies for being MIA on the forums.

It is nice to see some new contributors here. Welcome!

I was in the States over the summer on a sort of working vacation, which included some quality time with Caliburn (which we are currently too busy to talk about at the moment, but stay tuned).

A week or two after my return to Russia we were sent to western Dagestan to investigate a villager who had a natural gift of healing. We were returning from the village by helicopter when a distress call come in over the radio from a special operations unit in Chechnia. They were surrounded and running out of ammo - two of the five troopers were down to engaging enemy forces with their pistols. We decided to try to extract them. Our aircraft sustained heavy damage and the engine seized. We crash landed and quickly found ourselves in a lot of trouble. There was only one wounded trooper and we carried him hauling ass for higher ground.

We had a firefight which hit couple of our team, but we managed to repel the attack. We redistributed ammo and pressed onward up the hill. Alexander and I stayed behind to slow down another surge from below. I had inserted a full magazine into my weapon. It turns out the magazine I took out only had 8 shots left. I had given Alexander my last full magazine. The surge never came. They had sent up some feelers, however. We engaged the small 5-man patrol, using our position, cover, and concealment to make each shot count. We hit three, probably killing two of them. We also had a couple frag grenades from the specops guys and a yellow smoke grenade. We threw all three and head up the hill to hook up with the rest of the team. Gunships were about 1 minute away; they would our smoke to guide their attack.

Anyway, this healer was amazing.

In this post Caliburn told us about Demkina (a follow up story is here). This guy was different. He could not only tell what was wrong, but also cure it! We have the before and after x-rays along with video. We took a number of biosamples from the "old wizard" as the locals call him.

We were due to leave for Moscow tomorrow, but we have met someone else who apparently has supernatural powers, so we are staying longer to investigate that. More on that as the investigation progresses.

If anything interesting comes out of the old wizard's biosamples (which are being sent to Moscow tomorrow) I am not likely to be authorised to write about it here.

Stay safe everyone.

You are right, Demkina has potential. Her talent is real and natural. She is much like the little girl we met in Dagestan that caused us to stay an extra day.

Oleg, Alexander, and I went to a local market to pick up some trinket souvenirs or anything marginally interesting. A young girl bumped into Alexander's leg coming around the corner of a table.

This is the results of our investigation.

The young girl has a gift for speaking languages. We were able to verify that she can speak Russian, German, and English in addition to her native language. We know that through the use of magic, people are able to speak and understand 1000s of languages. We figured that this girl had learned this same spell. But we found that she was not using magic at all. She was speaking these foreign languages as naturally as she was speaking her native language. She neither expended nor emitted mystic energy while speaking foreign languages. She was not aware of her ability; it did not seem odd to her that she could simply speak many languages without ever learning them. There are no ley lines within 10km of the village.

Some PhD's and linguists are en route for more thorough investigations. We are headed back to Moscow in a couple of hours.