Public Health: An Interlude

A glimpse into a New Alhiran morning, mere hours after the presence of the Advanced Thul Resequencing Virus is confirmed...

New Alhira Medical Center  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Nothing had been stinted in the building of New Alhira's medical center. With ample stores and equipment, the wards are spacious enough to accomodate hundreds of patients in anticipation of the colony's future needs, while laid out to allow doctors and nurses maximum access in a minimum amount of time. With wings devoted to everything from pediatrics to emergency, the center is well-equipped to handle any case that may yet arise in the new capital. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Sat Jul 23 06:34:42 3005

It's a tense morning in the Medical Centre, what with the deployment of the PHS, the confirmation of ATRV on Demaria, and the sheer number of non-Demarians in the local. Add to that the day to day litany of accidents and other medical emergencies that any city suffers, and you get what tonight is like. Busy. Stressed. Tense.

It is too early for a human being to be awake, but alas, mass epidemics do not require sleep. Once she spots the crowds from where she stands in the doorway black-and-red worksuit, Mika groans audibly, the mounted comm spluttering out a wave of static along with the noise. She tromps in, eyes searching behind her red-tinted faceplate for the distinctive orange biohazard suits.

"Mika Male? Female? In that suit, it's impossible to tell. This short bipedal figure's features are concealed by a sturdy black duroplast helmet outfitted with an integral commlink and photochromatics, mounted light, and a thick faceplate tinted red to protect against glare. This is securely attached to an hermetically-sealed black novaprene coverall which follows the contours of the wearer's lanky frame. A well-balanced life support pack crafted of ferroplastic is strapped to the person's back, and sports the getup's temperature and rebreather units along with ports for support connections and a safety line. While the internal conditions can be controlled via a flip-up panel on the suit's wrist, a pony bottle of reserve air and a red octupus line hang from one of several supplemental eyelets about the waist. ... Just in case."

A few of the newly-arrived PHS are about, orange-clad and overworked as they slowly chew through this batch of test subjects. It's grim work, since the results invariably produce almost mad joy or wails of dispair; worse are the families that are irregularly infected. They stand seperated, staring at each other in mute terror and pain.

Through the crowds Mika weaves, threading her way through the madhouse until she is within close proximity to one of the PHS team. Not like she can recognize who it is; she simply watches the person insert a slide with DNA readings into his datapad and analyze the contents. Her greeting is profound. Timeless. Some might say prophetic. "Um."

The PHS man looks up (man being visible from the beard behind the faceplate). "Eh? Oh. What?" He glances down at the reader briefly, but the scan is nowhere near being done.

"I uh." Mika kind of shifts uncomfortably, rolling her buly shoulders and glancing around. "I'm kinda s'posed ta, y'know, 'elp, r'somethin'. Y'know." She sniffs. "With th' PHS. But uh... I dunno what'm s'posed t'be doin'."

The man stares blankly at Mika for a long, uncomfortable moment. He half-turns to pick up a datapad from a nearby table, gives it a quick once over, then holds it out to Mika. "Are you up to date on testing protocol?" His own datapad beeps and he looks at it. "Damn," he mutters, then looks over to another orange clad PHS member. "Positive on number five-two-five-a." The other merely nods and moves off towards a waiting family of Demarians.

Mika's head cocks to one side slightly, the thick lining about her neck area crinkling as she does so. "Do I blinkin' look like a doctor?" she asks, as if anyone could discern through that buglike getup. Of course, maybe that working-class accent is enough. "No, I ain't up t'date on testin' protocol, bollocks."

The man stares at Mika. "Right then." He holds up a sample slide. "Pick a demmie. Get their number. Write it on a slide. Get a sample of blood or other tissue on the slide." He points to a DNA scanner on a bench across the room. "Put slide into analyzer. It'll give you a DNA chip like this." He jacks the chip out of his pad and holds it up. "Put it into your pad and run the ATRV scan on it. Result is positive or negative." He points at the other man taking down information. "Tell him. Got it?"

Unclipping her datapad from the eyelet on the suit's exterior, Mika fumbles with it for a moment before studying the medical equipment available to the support staff. She picks up a blood collecting unit -- a flat black box with a pad spotted with microscopic pores -- and makes a little sound of displeasure. "S'one a'them prickly things, ain't it?" she asks. "I can jus' maybe get 'em t'spit on a slide? I don't blinkin' do needles, bollocks."

"Blood preferably. Tissue will do, but no hair...the virus doesn't show up in it all that quickly." The man smiles as a thought strikes him. "You can do the tribals here with the Demmie officer, Silvereye. One of 'em is over there." He indicates with a hand a robed figure in the back of the room who seems to be watching the goings-on with some interest.

Recognition flares behind Mika's green eyes as she looks to where the man points. Unaware that this fellow is essentially tossing her to the wolves, she bobs her head and starts over toward the robed felinoid. "'lo there," she greets, the hermetically-sealed lining of her suit creaking as she waves a hand. "Y'been tested?"

Whitestripe looks over in a typically spastic motion. "Oh, crazy captain. You are here to help the People, yes?" He straightens up from his slouch against the wall; his robes making a soft, sibilant noise as he shifts.

Whitestripe Looking in its direction, you see a wiry bipedal figure. It is a haggard, wizened figure. Stoop-shouldered and slightly hunched, it's not easy to quickly guess its height or weight. It bears a bleached and threadbare coat of fur, long in places and roughly barbered in others. What is somewhat hard to see is a streak of bone white fur that crosses its throat, left to right. The stripe blends deeply into the sandblasted colour of its fur, being a transparent white-gold colour of bleached hue. Of 'normal' height--roughly six feet and a bit, depending on its hunching--it carries itself with the light, watchful gait.

Despite that its fur makes clothing redundant, it's garbed in a long, billowy robe of sand coloured cloth. Shortsleeved, the robe leaves the figure's lower arms free. The hands are gloved in a roughly tailored set of chitinous-hide gloves. The face is covered by a white scarf, unmarked except for a hide cover over its eyes that has one long viewslit cut into it. It wears well patched hunting boots; leather, soft-soled and ment for quiet movement through broken terrain or hot sand. The end of a bone white pommel juts out from behind him, off to the right side of his lower back, quietly denoting a knife that rides along the base of his spine.

Mika clicks the device on and is rewarded with a little 'bloop' noise. "Yeah," she responds, watching the status indicators flick from red to green. "I am a goddamned saint. That a yes'r a no, mate?"

Whitestripe nods his head. "I have not been tested, yes." He quirks his head to the side. "Are you going to test these all? Pity. You should be testing those in the mountains."

Following a little snort of laughter, Mika strikes a pose -- well, as much of a pose as one can strike dressed like that -- and gestures grandly at herself. "Does't look like I can bloody scale me some mountains in s'getup?" she asks. Crooking her fingers, she beckons him to obey her request. "Let's see yer 'and, bucko. Gotta make sure y'ain't gonna get all sluggy on me."

Whitestripe cranes his head down to get a better look at her. "Whyfor you want my hand, crazy lady? I have heard of many things about you, many inappropriate, and I am a proper Demarian man. Err." He looks pensive for a moment, insofar that Demarian expressions translate to human ones; one ear flat, the other up. "The human phrase is 'I am not that type of girl, yes'?"

For several long seconds Mika stares at Stripe, but the expression on her face is thankfully well-hidden. "I uh... right." She hath been rendered speechless. But only for a moment. To better explain to the Demarian just what she needs to do, she shows him the little prickly-box. "'Cause um, when y'put yer 'and on this thing, I can blinkin' tell ya if'n y'got th' virus. S'real simple, see?"

Whitestripe studies the little box, shrugs, and holds out a glove-covered hand. "Modern technology is amazing if it can tell that quickly. Do go ahead and scan me then," he says in his typically raspy voice.

Rather than explain how the whole process works, Mika just lets it go. "Yer gonna 'afta take off yer glove," she instructs, reaching to do so herself unless the crazy old sand hobo stops her.

Whitestripe pulls the hand away, pauses, then shrugging, begins pulling the glove off himself. The hand is a typically Demarian one, four fingers and a thumb, all furry. "Strange and unclean it may be...how do i know that you know where that thing has been?" He hesitantly holds out the hand.

"'cause we're in'n 'ospital an' 'ospitals are sterile." After providing that lovely cop-out, Mika goes to press the reader underneath Stripe's hand. Assuming he doesn't make any drastic movements, a bluish-violet beam no wider than a datapad stylus runs the length of the pad, scanning his biological imprint before a quick, jarring little poke collects the blood sample from his index finger.

Whitestripe yipes, jerks his hand away and with a motion that can only be described as a magic trick, presto chango, there's a wickedly shap dagger in his other hand, the point leveled at Mika's face. "...ow." He sticks the offended finger in his mouth, while lowering the dagger. "Sirruh, ol' refreck-uss."

The fact that she is protected by a nice thick envirosuit doesn't register when Mika sees that knife strike out. With a shriek, she fumbles the device, literally juggling the damn thing in midair as she cycles backwards. When Whitestripe calms himself down, she relaxes, pressing a hand to her chest and emitting a relieved sigh that fuzzes up the feed of her comm.

Whitestripe does the reverse of the trickm and the dagger is gone. Pulling the finger from his mouth, he apologies again. "My apologies, my good lady. You get all types in this world." He blinks a few times. "So..."

Mika presses a the release button on the side of the unit, ejecting a slide sealed in a protective layer to prevent contamination of the sample. She shows it to the big cat. "So now I gotta go put this in th' li'l thinger over there," she explains, jerking her head toward the machine the tech had pointed out to her earlier. "An' then I can tell ya if'n yer infected'r not, bollocks. Sit tight, 'kay?" She clomps off in that direction, pushing her way through the knot of bodies, and loads the specimen into the waiting slot.

Left with nothing else to do, Whitestripe waits.

It doesn't take too terribly long, though it certainly must feel like an eternity for all those poor souls awaiting results. Lucky for Mika, the instructions are posted on a memo to better assist the volunteers, so after a moment's hunting to find the proper controls, she is entering in the relevant information. A number is assigned to the slide. It's placed in the queue. The display lights up with alienesque diagrams of the patient's cellular structure and a readout of pyrogen levels before delving even deeper into the genetic structure and characteristics of the individual's bloodstream.

After a little bit, Whitestripe's data is spit out in the form of a datachip, which the rogue snaps into the waiting recepticle on her datapad. She executes the program. And waits. Every now and again, she sends a look around, and every now and again, she looks to the tribal over there. Now it's her turn to think this is taking forever.

Her 'pad beeps, stealing her full attention once again. Knitting her brow, she thumbs the trackball and scrolls down the list of funky medical moon-language until she gets to bit she does understand -- whether Whitestripe Stainedclaws is ATRV positive or negative. And her face falls. Hard. She stares at it for a good long moment before searching out the project's night shift manager and calling out the awful news.

"Positive on number two-five-six-a."

Whitestripe stares at Mika, silent, one ear perked up, questioning...

Despite her front of devil-may-care hedonism, Mika Tachyon is nothing if not a complete marshmallow, and her steps are slow as she crosses back to Stripe. Not just because of the suit, no. She swallows again, shifting uneasily, uncertain how exactly one breaks this sort of news, finally spitting out a sad, "I'm sorry, mate."

Whitestripe's lone upright ear falls flat. Quietly he slides his hood back up, tugs the facemask back into place, and without further ado turns away. As loud as sand sliding in the wind, he moves off through the crowd, past overburdened PHS workers, and as luck would have it he passes through momentarily unguarded doors and out into the dark, cold world...

Mika's novaprene-covered hand drops back to her side and she lets out a breath, shaking her head regretfully as the unfortunate feline leaves. She looks next to those who still wait with a slump of her shoulders, sizing up the crowds, and decides that one thing must be take care of before she can evaluate another person. She approaches the shift leader, tapping him on the shoulder. When he turns to look at her, she's rubbing a hand along the rugged duroplast of her helmet. "Y'got somethin' fer'n 'eadache?" she asks. "'cause Christ almighty, I got a whopper."