Ten Forward NPCs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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ten_fwd2015-01-23 08:45 pm
ten_fwd_npcs) wrote in ten_fwd2015-01-23 08:45 pm
[Sickbay]: Round Seven Scans and Vaccines
If this is your first trip to Sickbay, you may be surprised to see that it's a fairly ordinary-looking hospital. There are no terrifying devices or humming machines you might see in a sci-fi thriller. The biobeds along the walls are equipped with biofunction monitors, but look fairly standard. Instead of silver trays filled with metal tools and sawblades, there are an array of small devices that look as harmless as cell phones. As for the staff, they're all well-groomed and friendly. As a matter of fact, all personnel look harmless. Well, perhaps excluding the sun avatar, but Trance Gemini is as skilled as the Starfleet officers.
If you're new to the ship, no doubt you've been escorted here by the security team. Nothing to worry about, the doctors just want to make sure you aren't carrying any viruses or are vulnerable to terrible space disease. Once you've been checked over — a quick scan from a tricorder and any necessary vaccines — you'll be free to go. Lollipops are optional.
"All right, step on in," one of them calls out as you enter. "Don't be afraid. It's just a scan and a hypospray, nothing to worry about."
[ooc: Sickbay is, as always, OTA! For new characters: tagging isn't mandatory but IC going to sickbay is. If you'd prefer to skip threading with one of our doctors, you can handwave that your character got a clean bill of health and a shot and were sent on their merry way. For those who are tagging: if you have a preference which doctor sees your character, please specify in the subject line of your tag who you would like (Simon Tam is not available this time). There is a post up in the OOC comm with more details if you have any questions.]
Any doctor!
Prim bit her lip and walked into the medical area. Katniss was here... Well... here as in... on this... whatever they were on... but not here at the moment. Prim still didn't fully understand Everything, but... Katniss was safe. And wherever she had gone, Prim would see her again soon. She had to be content with that.
She was told she had to go see a doctor to get checked out. She wasn't used to that. Of course their mother kept an eye on their health, made sure they were well, but there was no rules about it in District 12. Those who needed help came to their house, those who didn't... didn't. So being told she had to was odd.
But she was determined not to make any trouble that could put Katniss in danger. So... tail of her shirt sticking out of her skirt on back, holding a cat against her chest with one arm, and holding onto the bow around the neck of the goat that walked beside her, Prim bit her lip, and looked around the large odd room. It looked nothing like their kitchen, and suddenly.... she had no clue what to expect.
have the latest of late doctors!
When he sees the frightened-looking girl off to one side, her cat clutched close her, he can hardly walk on past her. So he stops, picks up a tricorder, and goes over to her.
He's no veterinarian, but he's been told how to do the checks on animals, too, and his work in sickbay is the one constant thing he can do here, one thing to hold onto against everything else that's so confusing.
"Hello. Would you like to come with me?"
Re: have the latest of late doctors!
Here... This could be a doctor, or an herb man... or a Peacekeeper. Of course a peacekeeper could always lie... but she still felt safer for asking.
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He knows that fear in her voice, and it hurts to hear it. She's not River, but any child who's that afraid of him reminds him, inevitably, of her. Something the Academy had done to her: she'd never been afraid of him before. And any child who is makes him wonder, now, why they are.
At least any child as afraid as this one is.
"It's all right. I'm just going to do a quick check to make sure you're healthy, and give you a vaccine so you don't catch anything that your immune system's unfamiliar with."
He takes a deep breath, making himself smile.
"Is that all right?"
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Maybe if she hadn't been raised by her mother, maybe if she hadn't worked so hard to help her patch together people, get people to recover from accidents that never should have happened, through illnesses that a single vial of medicine from the Capitol could have cured... Could have prevented...
"And I can tell you what you'll find," she said, her voice quiet still, but there was some steel in it, some anger. All the people who could have been so easily helped, that she and her mother could do nothing for...
"I'm as healthy as anyone from 12 can be," she said simply. "I need more nutrients than I get, and if I don't die of starvation, which I probably wont now that my sister is a victor and Peeta brings us bread, then I will probably die from lungs choked with coal dust."
The official cause of death that the peacekeepers wrote was never starvation... but that was what it always was. Even with Katniss hunting, Prim always figured she would be one of those people herself... because she knew that if it was a question of eating or giving her food to someone else who needed it... she knew who would go hungry.
And for all Katniss had always said she would never get married and have kids, Prim was sure she would some day, and then she would move out, and Prim would stay at home, helping mom take care of everyone. And without Katniss there to watch over them....
Prim had no eagerness to die, she was just realistic. She knew herself. She looked at him with that knowledge in her eyes. She was not going to accept any capitol lies. Not here. Not anymore.
Katniss was here, and Katniss needed her to be strong.
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He doesn't know who she is or where she's from, or what her Districts are, but he knows that much. None of the new arrivals are where they first were, though the girl, clutching her cat as she is, seems reluctant, or perhaps unable, to accept that.
Simon's matter-of-fact tone fades, his next automatic assurances stopping, unuttered, as the girl goes on. He'd thought, from what she said, that her Districts were some sort of equivalent to the Outer Rim, and the more she talks, the more he learns it's closer than comfort would have it.
People starve on the Rim, it's true. Whole settlements fail. He hadn't believed that, once, but he's seen it now. But this girl's talking like she has no hope of forging a life for herself, none of that fierce struggle he's seen in the captain and so many others.
"That's not going to happen here," he says, his voice firm, and he holds her gaze, as disconcerting as it is to do so.
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She looked up at him seriously, holding Butter cup a bit more tightly. "Katniss says this isn't the Capitol. But that doesn't mean you have any reason to care, it just means you're not the ones we've lived along side all our lives, it just means you're not the ones who rule us. But that doesn't automatically make you good. Just... different."
And she would protect Katniss this time. She would be the one who would learn what needed to be learned, so she could take care of her sister. She would take care of her.
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He knows, to some extent, the attitude she's giving him, the assumptions she's making. He's a Core-trained and Core-born doctor working on a ship that serves the Rim. Of course he does. People look at him in his tailored clothing, hear his carefully enunciated speech, and assume they know who he is and what drives him.
They're wrong.
He glances away, but it's only for a moment, and his expression is earnest when he meets her eyes again.
"I do have a reason to care," he says. "I'm a doctor, and you're my patient. I'm a medic aboard this ship, and every member of the crew and every passenger is now under my care."
He takes a deep breath.
"I don't make any claim to morality or correctness. But I'm your doctor, and that's all the reason I need to care."
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But his words... they were so close to what her mother said, to what she said, when seam families came to them for the first time, whenever someone new needed help. They always asked, why did they help? What pay did they expect? Especially the rare times when they were able to send food home with someone.
They didn't do it for pay. They did it because something in them called to heal, to help everyone they could.
She looked down to Buttercup, trying to pull together her thoughts, trying to figure out if she could afford to trust. With that reason... she wanted to. But it wasn't just her here. She needed to help Katniss, she needed to learn... for Katniss. She couldn't just blindly trust that he wasn't trying to use her to hurt her sister.
To learn. Maybe... Maybe that was the answer.
"Would you teach me?" she asked, looking up, meeting his eyes with as much strength as she could muster. The expression on her face was all District 13 Prim, a Prim she had not yet been, bit from the neck down, she was still clinging to Buttercup for comfort and support, still holding herself like that little kid from 12.
An odd moment of growing up, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
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Gabriel wanted it because it was a fitting career for his son, a way to see Simon maintain his place as one of Osiris' elite. Simon wanted it because he wanted to help people, because looking after River had taught him how rewarding that could be.
The money and prestige didn't hurt, but when it really came to it? It was about helping.
"I'm hardly a teacher." He's good at what he does, gifted, yes, but not a teacher and not even a very experienced doctor. "It takes years of study and experience, but if you wanted to learn, I'm sure there's a way to get started here."
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She looked around the room, and her shoulders slumped a little, as she realized just how many doctors there were here. She could take care of Katniss, but the hope was... Katniss wouldn't need much mending.
"But of course you have all you need here," she muttered, looking at Buttercup again, feeling stupid. She could patch up Lady, way back when but here... here she was once again nothing more than Katniss Everdeen's little sister. A useless appendage.
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That's just it. For all he's a doctor and has wanted to be one for most of his life, for all he loves the work and the ability to truly help people,that doesn't make him particularly skilled at talking to the people he's helping.
In fact, he's awful at it, something that the crew of Serenity has commented on more than once. He doesn't know how to deal with a girl from another time and place, one he's completely unfamiliar with, who wants to be a doctor.
He glances down at the tricorder, then holds it up, a questioning expression on his face.
"Do you mind if I do this now?"
The checkup, he knows how to do.
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If it would get her to allow him to do his work and stop him from feeling like any more of a cad by upsetting her again, he'd show her. And even if teaching medicine to a girl of her age was beyond him, what wasn't was showing her some of what he knew.
Sometimes, he had to do the same thing with River, to talk her through the steps, let her see the instruments he was using, explain the treatments and the medications. Some patients needed to know, for their own sake, and some wanted to learn.
He held up the tricorder.
"Have you seen one of these before?" he asked. "It's a tricorder. We use it to scan you and check on your physical state."
no subject