Normally she stuck to Florence when she needed more living research materials. Kidnapping people was obnoxious enough on its own with all the squirming and screaming they tended to do if she didn't hit them right, but taking them through the portals in the academy sounded worse. It was a lot farther to walk, and increased the odds of some goodie-goodie mage ranting to her about how unethical all this was and what-not like she actually cared. All this concern about ethics was holding back scientific progress and had for centuries. In her time, people weren't even supposed to experiment on dead bodies, and hell, even in the modern era they still wouldn't take the organs of dead people to save living peoples' lives if the dead person hadn't said it was okay while they were alive. It was all completely absurd and she didn't want to hear about it. Her mundane skills relative to people her age in the information age was all she needed to prove how much their ethics were holding them back. It was one thing to read about the heart in a book. It was another thing to open someone's chest and look at it. To see everything that connected to it. To see how it moved. To poke it and see what happened.

Unfortunately, finding good targets in Florence was getting hard. Not because there weren't people, but because she could never tell when they were actually working for Vieri. After hitting one construction foreman and slowing down progress on one of the labs, Diana figured she should start looking elsewhere. Fortunately, she didn't even need to do much research to find a good spot. A lot of the big cities in the information age had crime problems, but one of the portal cities really stuck out. There were some pretty nasty pockets in Los Angeles, which meant that no one would really notice if a few people periodically went missing, and the odds of someone making a scene if she got caught were pretty small. There was also a sizable homeless population, which made it even easier for her. At first she was concerned about the possible effects of the drugs that were common among the homeless, but she was pretty sure her power could fix most, if not all, of it, so it'd probably be fine.

Her power was extremely useful for stuff like this. Not just for healing and keeping all of her test subjects at a reasonable baseline, not just keeping them alive through anything that might kill them, but also for testing various things. It was interesting because her power could be applied to very broad things, but it could also be very specific. If her power was given to anyone that didn't know as much as she did about the world or peoples' bodies, it'd be completely wasted. She could do so much with it because of what she studied. It was pretty much how all of her research into the brain went. Increase the response in this part of the brain, increase the susceptibility to this particular hormone, then wait and see what happened. Right now, she was going for something else though. Even though her power only increased existing abilities, occasionally she could induce an effect that wouldn't happen on its own. The most obvious was regrowing lost limbs or repairing spinal damage. Humans couldn't do that normally, but under the influence of her power they could. So she wanted to see if she could induce an autoimmune response so she could study it. That seemed like the most likely cause of Vieri's eye issues, so if she could actually understand what caused it she would be one step closer to fixing his issues.

But first she needed more people. Even if she was good at keeping them alive it didn't always work out, thus ensuring that she'd need to go out periodically for more. It didn't take her too long to find someone sitting alone in an alley, probably high from the look on his face. Diana struck quickly, shoving her spear through is back just above the waist, ensuring that his spine would be broken so he couldn't do too much squirming. If she needed it fixed she could do that later. He was bleeding enough that he'd probably pass out soon enough, plus he seemed too out of it to scream properly, so she didn't worry about knocking him out completely. It sounded like he was trying to shout, but it just came out in louder than average mumbling. With a shrug, she slung him over her shoulder, not caring about the blood that was now seeping onto her shoulder and down her shirt, and started making her way back to the academy. It was always nice when things went smoothly. She only hoped that it'd continue that way as she got closer to the portals.