EVENT: DIONYSUS ▒ MEDBAY

[ataraxites]

CHARACTERS: Ensemble production!
LOCATION: Medical Bay.
WARNINGS: Sickness, body horror, disturbing imagery, etc.
SUMMARY: Characters seeking treatment for or attempting to help those suffering from the sickness.
NOTES: Open to all! IC-ly covers from now until the jump.

You've made it — only to discover a whole new set of challenges. Medbay is crowded, dispersed and scrambled in a way that is entirely different than the times you've seen it at the jump. Instead of a flood of shuffled motion out of the pods and to the showers and lockers, lively and full of shouts or grumbles but all with a destination in mind, there are groans and the hum and beep of machinery in its place. Less lively, perhaps, but no less busy. You may want to check in when you can — if there's anyone available to help. Maybe you're here to help out - if you're able - or you simply want answers. Asking around might net you some clues — or simply more questions. Each day that passes without a solution is a day closer to the jump... now that you're here, it might not be a good idea to leave.

Comments

Closed to Rex

[dogbane]

On break, William is nonetheless sitting by a console not too far from the doors. He's eating the lobes of an orange there and watching his screen with a fixed, unblinking interest. It's hard to see what has his attention so rapt, but a number of colors and unfocused graphics are reflected against the whiteness of his face, moving in accordance with some unknown algorithm. It is technically the twenty-fifth day after the Jump. There are six more until the next Jump. The medbay behind is a dull drone of people incoherently moaning and inscrutably changing, and machinery chugging to keep them stable, whatever that means when your body's survival depends on hourly internal reconstruction.

They are no closer to a solution. Or it feels that way.

Still, William doesn't appear to have changed much. Eating on-schedule, talking to people, and working properly is a good disguise for the fact he still hasn't slept at all since the worst of the plague started. He is comfortably hunched, face blank with concentration.

[evo_lution]

Rex had spent much of the week asleep, hoping against hope that enough hibernation would cure his symptoms. Despite the overproduction of his own healing network of nanites, he'd woken up with his joints so stiff he could hardly move his fingers. From what he'd heard, the ships medical division had been working overtime with people puking up blood and other really not good stuff. A sudden onset of arthritis wasn't exactly life threatening, but Rex wasn't fond of the idea of losing fine motor control forever. It was time to give up on the condition resolving itself and go down to the medbay.

The harsh smell of cleaning products and harsh white walls were familiar, almost comforting. He scanned the bustle and quickly zoned in on William as someone who was definitely medical, and currently unoccupied by patients. "Hey Doc, you got a minute?" he asked as he parked himself in the rolling chair next to him. Other than the gauntness, pallor, and tightly curled fists, Rex almost looked like a healthy human being. The sheepish grin almost sold it.

[dogbane]

"Maybe five," is William's answer, easily, as he looks up from the display. He boops the screen and one of the windows shrinks away into a narrow bar on the edge, leaving an unnamed and labelless micrograph glowing on the screen. It's a bunch of healthy human cells doing healthy human cell stuff, doing a few interesting things, but nothing nearly as interesting as to explain the behavior of the man a dozen yards behind Rex. Whose silhouette is warping, contorting, even as the young man and the medic speak. "How can I help?"

William looks over Rex quick, but even with that glance-over it's clear to him that the boy isn't Stage 3 by any stretch. He offers him a lobe of orange, its fragrant, cirtrusy sweetness a stark contrast to the reek of death and antiseptic permeating the medical bay.

[evo_lution]

The orange looked and smelled amazing. His stomach grumbled audibly in agreement. He raised both fists and with some effort managed to twitch his wrists to demonstrate his conundrum. "Kind of can't grab that right now. That's why I'm here," he supplemented, and then opened his mouth expectantly.

[dogbane]

Reaching up, William sticks the piece of fruit into the younger man's mouth, a quick, clean movement that suggests William's been feeding a few people lately. "Sorry to hear. That ain't a specific symptom we been seeing too much of in here the past few days, but you'll be happy to hear it ain't the worst, either." He moves his chair with a foot on the floor, draws up even to the seat that Rex presumed to take. Setting the remains of the orange down beside his console, he holds his hands out, palms up. An invitation for the younger man to give him over his. Pls.

"What's your name, son?"

[evo_lution]

"Rex," he answered around the food in his mouth and placed one of his hands in Williams' for inspection. The skin around his joints was discolored, but didn't appear to be cyanotic. "I haven't been able to move 'em since I woke up and I have a healing power so this is kiiiind of freaking me out."

[dogbane]

William touches them here or there, says, "Tell me if this hurts," to assess for point pain, and a few more actions in a sequence of examination before he pulls a handheld scanner off the table to have a look. "Fucking," he says. "Well it's possible your healing power's actually got an idiosyncratic interaction with whatever the fuck this disease is. I mean back there--" he jerks his head at the stretch of medbay behind Rex. "We've got more advanced sufferers whose symptoms are obviously keyed into their DNA, or phenotypic features.

"People with scales practically turning into fucking dragons. Others who've normally got animalistic features is getting really exaggerated, to the point where I seen personality changes." William makes a face. It does not apparently occur to him to censor himself around minors.

[evo_lution]

The sudden rigidness in his back had nothing to do with his condition or the onslaught of swears on his tender virgin ears. He got to his feet distractedly and scanned the surrounding patients with knitted brows. "People are mutating?" Behind on the news ftl. "Will you show me?"

[dogbane]

"Uhhhh," William says, very intelligently. "Ummm." He peels himself out of his seat, knees it aside, draws even with Rex this time on-foot, as if actually concerned Rex is going to run off and start to inflict his curiosity on patients.. Wait is that a violation of patient confidentiality. Confidentiality is important. Back in his world, they couldn't disclose medical or personal information about anybody unless that person directly posed a thr--

--oh fucking A. "Y--yeah. Yes. If the nature of your inquiry is pertinent to saving our fucking arses, and not just morbid curiosity." Something about Rex's urgency makes him believe it so, and there's a discreet nudge from the demon in his head, too, that highlights the kink in Rex's brow, the subtle signals of body language. No ulterior motives here. "Yes? Yes?" he asks for confirmation, but he's already moving.

[evo_lution]

"On my homeworld? Spontaneous genetic mutations are common. I'm talking tentacles, claws, gross pulsing bits-- usually leads to people forgetting who they are and attacking everyone around them," he explained, though he didn't seem scared of the idea of the medbay turning into a battlefield. "I just need to check something." And as he followed William, he added, "Preferably someone who's conscious."

[dogbane]

Unmistakably interested, William guides the younger man across the room. He stops just short of the hydraulic doors, which open to admit him. Some of the more morphologically extreme patients are further in the back, the ones with the hollow bones and stuff like that. Inadvertent self-injury tends to lead to disruption, and it's better, besides, to have a shift informally separated out back there. So he diverts them instead to the nearer unit, fourth down. Not full life-support, fortunately. However horrendous the mutations are to look at, their functional value is increasingly apparent as time goes on.

"Mr. Remus," William's voice goes through the curtain to the man lying behind it. Last William saw him, something was going on with his eyelids. Different color, extra set. "Sorry to bother you. Coming in with a little bloke's got a theory could help us, all right?" He waits a second or three, something conversationally appropriate. Draws aside the sheaf of plastic aside.

[fullmoon]

Remus makes an affirmative noise, busy blinking and snuffling himself out of a light doze, rubbing his eyes with the back of a hand that's beginning to look clawed. Once the curtain's open he drops it and smiles, sort of. Grimaces in a vaguely friendly way. The intent is there.

"Mr William," he answers, never too ill to be entertained by that sort of unnecessary formality. And Remus isn't too ill in the scheme of things, really, anyway. Wizards are hardy folk, even the too-skinny ones with preexisting conditions. "And—" Someone whose name he might remember if so much of his attention wasn't diverted to his pain receptors. Sorry, Rex. "Hello."

[evo_lution]

"Hey," he responded, his look of perturbed concentration melting into something friendlier as he took in Remus' condition. "So," he took a deep breath and attempted to gather his thoughts. He only needed to divulge the bare minimum unless his theory checked out.

"So I'd like to check out your nanites. I'll need to touch you, it won't hurt, and if you feel anything happening you can spare me a headache by not resisting it," he smiled uncertainly, suddenly very aware of the fact that he had just dumped a lot of information without any context. ...Maybe he should have started by explaining things. WELP.

[dogbane]

On the upside, most of the patients in the medbay at this point are accustomed to being pelted with questions, poked, prodded at, and referred to by ridiculous formalities, with a bunch of swearing leading that train and probably following caboose also. William smiles at Remus reassuringly from over the younger man's shoulder, but his eyes inevitably go to the werewolf's fingernails. If 'fingernails' is the right word for those anymore. That looks awful, but he's careful not to show it on his face. They torture people with fingernail stuff in many worlds, don't they?

"His name's Rex. He thinks there were something similar to this in his homeworld."

[fullmoon]

A technical explanation might have been nice, or it might have gone right over Remus's pain- and exhaustion-addled head—and regardless, it's fine. His gaze flickers past Rex to William, one second of uncertainty before William soothes it over, and he relaxes back against his pillow.

Nanites. All right.

"Aye aye," he says. His hands curl against his sheet while he tries to decide what to do with them—offer Rex an arm for the touching part, or stay still and let himself be handled. He goes with the latter mostly out of laziness.

[evo_lution]

His expression blanked momentarily, and he blinked dully in disbelief. People in his homeworld would have fought him on this even with a full explanation and his reputation as a rad hero. What were people on the Tranquility even.

"Cool," he said as he stepped forward. He couldn't extend a nonthreatening open palm for this, given the state of his hands, so he gently plunked a fist down on Remus's bicep and closed his eyes. Geometric veins of blue light spread up both of their arms from the point of contact.

The ships' advanced network was vast, and the interface completely alienating and foreign. Other words that came to mind: creepy, uninviting, haunted. He floated uncomfortably through it until he stumbled upon a second type of nanite. He willed it into himself, paused at the non-reaction of the thing, and willed a bit more aggressively. There was no sense of struggle or resistance. In fact, the new type of nanites didn't seem to acknowledge his presence at all.

He pulled his hand back and swayed a bit as he readjusted to seeing with his eyes again. "So are nanites native on your homeworld?"

[dogbane]

Though he was raptly fascinated at first, William gets this absurd look on his face at the kid's last question. Like he wants to answer on Remus' behalf, but he refrains from that. Wizards and technology, he understands, are not generally the most comfortable mix-- never mind nanotechnology. Instead, he touches Rex's shoulder gently to get his attention, mutters, "Going to get something for your hands," and then tips Remus a nod. Turns away.

A little reluctantly. How come his superpowers don't glow or make anthropomorphized golems and shit. What can you do. William steps away to look into mineral supplements and anti-inflammatories for Rex, which will only take him a moment.

[fullmoon]

Remus watches Rex work with what would have been rapt and curious attention, if it weren't dulled by pain and a fever and the early stages of starvation. As it is he's sort of slow to move, slow to blink, slow to answer. By the time he's nodding back at William William is already gone.

"Er. No," he tells Rex. He only barely understands what nanites are: they're in the tattoos, they communicate with the doors and comms devices, and they seem an awful lot like magic but are, Remus has been assured, actually made with science. If he knew what they were really capable of he might have been more alarmed by Rex and his glow shtick. "I don't think so. I'm—" A wizard. But that's not relevant, really. Just because he never used a calculator at home doesn't mean those didn't exist. More relevant, possibly, if their timelines bear any resemblance: "I'm from 1982."

[evo_lution]

Rex nodded thoughtfully. Silently, he went through a bit of a mental tangent where he tried to justify the existence of nanites in 1982 through minor tweaks to the timeline, though while he thought it possible he didn't bother thinking too hard about it. Instead he brought a hand up to his chest, closed his eyes, and checked his own nanites.

There was the familiar greeting of his homeworld's nanites, the watchful presence of the Tranquility's, and, now that he was looking for it, that same foreign aggressor he'd encountered in Remus. "That's not good," he clicked his tongue.

"When I first got here, there was only one strain of nanites present on this ship. Now there's extra strain," he informed William upon his return. "The ship's nanites seem to have set functions and even though they won't tell me what those functions are, I'm not too worried about them. These outliers, though. They're multiplying like a virus." It didn't occur to him that discussing this in front of a patient might not be the best course of action. As an after thought, he added, "At least in me and Remus."

[dogbane]

William personally has ample suspicions about the native nanites, the ones they're accustomed to, but this is neither the time nor the place to be talking that up when apparently. There's. "What the fuck seriously." William sets down the little yellow plastic bottle of mineral supplements on the bedstand by Remus' unit, and then a pack of anti-inflammatories second. "Two kinds of nanites. That--" Is in line with Luke's theory. His brow knits, and he looks at the werewolf for a moment.

1982 had its own problems, he's sure, but this is pretty dramatically frustrating. "Shit. The computer people around have shared speculations that nanites was somehow involved, but nobody could tell there was two kinds. Will you be up to having a look at a few other people, check and make sure that the symptom severity is proportionate to the number of new nanites?" he asks. "I'm going to do some micrography try to get a picture of these things. Makes sense I couldn't find any earlier.

"I was using samples off people weren't sick enough." William grimaces in consternation.

[evo_lution]

His defensive stance deflated. Someone believed him?? Without him having to stave off a nuclear holocaust first??? is this what real people are like omg.

"Uh-- Sure. Yes. I'll make the rounds and verify. Do you want me to check you first?"

[fullmoon]

Remus's focus—to the extent it can be called that—is on his own arm now, his tattoo. One set of tiny unseen robots moving around inside his body was already more than he could quite wrap his head around. Now there are two. Muggles.

But he's still listening well enough to chime in, "It doesn't hurt," in support of Rex's offer.

[dogbane]

"Oh, sure." Occasionally, the grind of breakneck mess of work means that William forgets that he, too, is a passenger, with valuable samples to offer and treatments to benefit from, if a treatment there will be. "Yes. Maybe we ought to leave Mr. Loops be, though." He casts the werewolf's vital stats panel a brief look, then remembers to smile at the man himself.

"It's good news," he says. He's lying, but he doesn't really know it. Later he'll think: at least, it's news.