[Sickbay]: Round One scans and vaccines

[ten_fwd_npcs]

[ Captain's Log: a Meeting with the Senior Staff. Wherein Picard discusses what to do with their new, er. "Guests." ]







As you enter sickbay tonight, escorted there by Lieutenant Worf and his security detail, you may notice it isn't all that unusual. There are no terrifying devices or humming machines you could 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 Chief Medical Officer Crusher herself, she's well-groomed and kindly, wearing her teal uniform and a blue coat. No masks, no rubber gloves. The most dangerous thing about her is that maternal look in her eyes; the one that scolds you for not doing your homework, or leaving your dirty dishes in your room.

The crew makes no promises for Dr. McCoy, on the other hand. He isn't one of ours. You should probably watch your neck.

"All right, don't be shy," Dr. Crusher calls out as you enter. "Come in and sit down. It's just a scan and maybe a hypospray, nothing to worry about."

Probably.


[ooc: This is an open log for everybody. Tagging isn't mandatory, but going to sickbay is. So 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, we have Bones McCoy and Beverly Crusher (NPC) on deck, so if you'd prefer one over the other just specify it in your tag. If you would like more details about sickbay, here's the wiki page. If you haven't made your OP yet, you can assume the doctors will want to see your character shortly after they arrive.]

Comments

[just_a_chemical]

"Then you'll just have to quarantine me," she says. "I'm used to that."

She's been living in a quarantine room for the past ten years, anyway. Glass walls, bulletproof, teleportation-proof, with cameras so her mother can watch her all the time and video screens so her mother can talk to her. It keeps Eleanor in, and everyone else out. The only time she's allowed to leave the room is sometimes to go down the hall to her mother's office for treatments.

If she's going to be locked up here, she'd rather it be a quarantine than as a lab rat.

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard sighed and rubbed his face.

"Sweetheart, I really don't want to do that. I just need to do some readings, that's all. It's not going to hurt. I realize you're uncomfortable, but I promise you, it'll just take a few minutes and you'll be free to go. Please, just let me do this."

[just_a_chemical]

"I'm not going to be anyone's science experiment," she says. "Not getting strapped to a table, hooked up to machines, cut open. If you start injecting me with things, whatever treatments you're giving to people here, it could kill me. And I've got girls back home who are counting on me. I'm not going to die here."

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard sighed.

"I understand your concern, darling, but you really don't have anything to worry about. All we do is scan you for your biometrics and keep that information logged in the system, that way if you get injured, we can treat you. No injections, no strapping down, no cutting open. Just scanning. That's all. I promise."

[just_a_chemical]

She is silent for a while, as she considers that.

"I'll fight my way out of here if I have to," she says eventually, as she steps forward. As thin and frail as she might look, she probably also looks afraid enough (and stubborn enough) to try it.

"Just scanning. Nothing else."

[shut_up_dammit]

"There won't be any reason to fight." Good, Leonard was glad she decided to come along. He eased her along to the station and motioned to the biobed.

"Go ahead and have a seat for me, sweetheart." Then he picked up the medical scanner. "This is just going to hover over your face. Won't touch your skin. I'll give me an injury listing, current and past, and some basic information about your race."

[just_a_chemical]

She takes a seat but stays tense, ready to run if she feels a need to.

Good luck with the scanning; there is probably not one system in her body that registers as normal. She may not quite register as human anymore either, and her symbiote certainly doesn't--there's a sea slug embedded in the lining of her stomach, which has shrunk around it, leaving little room for a decent meal. The slug produces and exudes raw, unstable stem cells, that then circulate through her body and alter her.

There's not a single trace of injury on her, not even so much as falling off a bicycle as a kid; her body's healing ability is so powerful as to have wiped away all past damage as well. The stem cells in her system see to that.

She doesn't just contain her own genetic signature, but those of dozens of other people as well, not to mention the parts of her genetic code that have been rewritten by science: she is stronger, faster, her senses sharper, and that's without getting into the strange energy patterns that represent her superpowers.

And most of those changes have an instability to them. She's holding together for now, but eventually, without more of the stem cells than the slug can currently produce, she might end up as mutated and mad as the other people in her city.

This would be why she didn't want to get examined.

[shut_up_dammit]

This was just... weird. All weird. The scanner was feeding out information that Leonard, despite seeing aliens walk through the room, simply wasn't prepared for. It was clear she was some level of human at some point, but the patchwork genetics that were taking place here were just unusual. Although her skin didn't scream Frankenstein's monster, the genetics certainly did.

Normally he would ask for a blood sample, but this was just a scan. Just a scan. He'd explain to Beverly later the psychological implications of forcing a sample and get one later if or when she was more willing.

But for the time being, he pulled the scanner away and set it back on the table. "Go ahead and lay down for me. The bed'll scan you and give you the rest of the information I need. I might have a few questions but then that'll be it, okay?"

[just_a_chemical]

They get you on the table, they strap you down and cut you open. That's how it worked before, even if she doesn't still have a scar from the surgery.

But she's trying--maybe if she doesn't cause too much trouble, it'll go a little easier. Maybe she won't have to fight her way out, and maybe she won't get killed.

"All right," she says quietly, settling back on the table.

No restraints emerging from the table yet, no visible IVs of sedatives. Deep breath.

[shut_up_dammit]

With the readings firing back, Leonard annotates as fast as he can on the PADD in her file. But there was so much to note. She'd lay there for about a couple of minutes while he worked, flicking from readings to notes. When he did finally finish, he looked at her and kept the PADD tucked under his arm.

Then he stopped. "Alright, you can sit up. I have a couple of questions for you, but we're done with the scan. I will need to ask you these questions now so I can finish up the report, but we can do that in the hallway if that's more comfortable for you."

[just_a_chemical]

"Everything check out?" she asks, sitting up slowly.

She can guess the answer, but maybe if she pretends everything's fine, it will be. Maybe the slug can hide itself from the scanners. People can hide themselves from security cameras, after all.

"Here's fine."

[shut_up_dammit]

"Not exactly, but I think some questions will clear up most of the problems."

He hesitates for a moment, looking down at the PADD. There were so many questions, he really didn't know where to start. But eventually, he found the first question just kind of rolled out.

"What are you? I don't mean that as an insult, but it's clear that you're not human. What do you classify yourself as, race wise?"

[just_a_chemical]

No chance on things seeming normal to the scanners, then.

At least she knows the science behind what was done to her.

"I still see myself as human. Maybe I shouldn't, but I don't look as different as some people. I can still almost pass for normal."

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard made notes on the PADD. He called her "reassembled human". He'd make notes into exactly what that meant once she was gone and he had more time to exactly figure it out.

"It doesn't matter if you tell others you're human or not. I just needed to know if you call yourself anything else because it doesn't like we can use normal human means if you're injured." He paused a moment. "The scans there was some kind of organism in the lining of your stomach. What purpose does it serve you? And can you still eat with that thing there or do we need to find another way to get nutrients in your system?"

[just_a_chemical]

"When I was six years old," she says, "my mother got sent to prison, and Uncle Stanley sold me to an orphanage that was basically a front for turning young girls into drug factories. That's what the slug's for--it produces some on its own, but not enough to be mass-marketed. They found that it's happiest in a younger girl; it makes thirty to forty times more in there."

Never mind how they discovered that. There are no regulations on research, where she's from.

"I don't eat much, but I don't need to. It takes care of that for me."

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard silently takes notes again, but then pauses and looks back at her.

"Does it need anything in particular to take care of you or is it going to work fine the way it is now?"

[just_a_chemical]

"That's a very good question," she says. "Mother thinks I'll be fine, but she can't actually be certain. I'm a combination of two failed experiments, and she thinks that combining them will somehow cancel out the flaws and make it work."

There's a first time for everything, right?

"The other girls my age have gone feral, as the slugs don't produce as much of the drug as they used to. And Dr. Alexander was injected with so much of it that he mutated horribly, and he lives in a tank now. She thinks that injecting me with high doses will keep me from going feral like the other girls, and that the slug will keep me from mutating like poor Dr. Alexander, but there's no way to know. Either way, at home I get daily injections, and here I haven't."

[shut_up_dammit]

That was concerning. Daily injections.

"Do you happen to know what those injections consisted of?" He didn't even pause to annotate anything. They couldn't have a new comer mutate on the ship. It would be a disaster. Others would freak out, would think it would happened to them and then it would be a problem. They couldn't have that.

[just_a_chemical]

"I know exactly what it is," she says. "The slugs on their own don't make enough of the drug, even if you put one in a girl. But if people have ever injected it, you can extract it from their bodies after they die, give it to a girl to drink, and the slug multiplies it. The girl brings it up, and it's ready to process. When it's passed through the dead, it carries their memories and essence with it--that's why my mother does it."

There are a lot of dead people in her city.

"I can give you a sample, if you like. If you've got a test tube or something."

[shut_up_dammit]

Leonard dug through the station drawers for a moment before he pulled out a glass test tube. It wasn't something that was normally used for physicals, so it took awhile, especially with his unfamiliarity with this sickbay, but hell, at least he found one. He handed it over.

"If I can't replicate it, does that mean something bad for you?"

[just_a_chemical]

"There's no way to know, until it happens. It might be bad, or it might just affect my ability to heal. But I am a doctor--a few of our genetic researchers, which might help. I know the experiments they were doing with our drug, how they refined and developed it. I don't have Dr. Tenenbaum, the lead researcher on it; she's still alive. She had a cure for the younger girls, could remove their slugs safely and return them to normal, but her cure wouldn't work on me."

Her regurgitation skills are apparently well-honed; she brings up the equivalent of a few spoonfuls of a viscous, glowing red liquid, remarkably discreetly.

"Here. Don't inject anyone with this."

[shut_up_dammit]

"Alright. Then I'd like you to keep me informed of any changes that you-"

His words stopped when she threw up into the tube. Okay. He's seen weird things in his life, but that was new. He frowned and grabbed the tube cap from the station. He was going to need it. She handed it to him and Leonard capped it, not interested in sharing it with anyone else in the sickbay.

"Thanks. As I was saying, I'd like you to keep me informed of any changes. My name is Leonard McCoy. Once we get rooms, you can just see me in my quarters instead of coming here. Or you can call for me over the intercom. I'd like to help you be comfortable here if that's at all possible."