Gods and Monsters [cs: torture and murder and scary stuff]

[beetlebutt]

Jaime Reyes was standing on a street in El Paso, looking very confused, and talking to himself. Well, at least it looked like he was talking to himself. Really, he was talking to the scarab, because the two of them were trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. The world had blurred, Jaime had passed out and now...

"This is so not El Paso."

Now he was in a place that was home and yet not home.

|T L[][]KS \|/E|RD. \|/HERE'S THE PUTT-PUTT?

"Exactly. And that - what is that? That building wasn't there yesterday. Neither was that bank building. And where's the El Diablo?"

/-\LTERN/-\TE D|/|\ENS|[]N?

"Are your sensors picking up anything weird?"

...SENS[]RS /-\RE |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L.

After doing a systems check, the scarab trilled a little wordless cry of alarm.

"What's wrong?"

/|\UTIPLE SYSTEMS |N[]PER/-\T|[]N/-\L. []NLY B/-\S|C L|FE SUPP[]RT, B/-\SIC TR/-\NSF[]O/|\/-\T|[]N /-\B|L|T|ES, /-\ND C[]/|\/|\S /-\V/-\|L/-\BLE. D|/-\GN[]ST|CS UN/-\BLE TO DETER/|\INE WHY.

"Whoa, whoa, okay, calm down, you're kinda panicking. Stop with the brain klaxons, okay?"

|'/|\ RUNN|NG BL|ND. Y[]U C/-\LM D[]WN!

"I know this is freaky, and you're not used to being blind like this, but you're still conscious and I'm still conscious, and we're not fighting an evil death satellite or, I don't know, being shot at by aliens. We'll figure this out, okay? Just keep a cool head."

The response was a very surly, | D[]N'T H/-\VE /-\ HE/-\D.

Jaime rolled his eyes. "You know what I meant, Mr. Literal. Look, we'll figure this out, okay?"

In fact, maybe he could just talk to someone and get some answers. Some teenagers ran down the street towards him.

"Hey! Very, very lost superhero here," he said, waving them down. "Any chance you could -"

They didn't notice. In fact, with a feeling like cold mist, they ran right through him. Jaime froze up after they did, expression stricken.

"Okay, we're a ghost or something and no one can see, hear, or touch us. Time to panic."

| T[]LD Y[]U!

Comments

The Medbay

[googledox]

"Trach kit, cabinet, now," Brainy said to Tadashi, pointing to a nearby cabinet as he worked on clearing Jaime's airway of debris and started using a bag-valve mask to re-ventilate. "Lyle, get the crash cart and the debrillator." He looked down at the suit, and one-handed, with the other hand still working the bag-valve mask, he got out his omnitool and carefully disengaged and dismantled the device stuck into the armor, putting it down in a nearby metal pan. "And you, symbiote, you need to get this armor off my patient. You should be free to disengage and self-repair now so get out of my way."

Re: The Medbay

[the_civilian]

This was a bit more than the bloody scrape he'd dealt with his first day here. Nevertheless, Tadashi dove for the indicated cupboard, grabbing the (clearly labelled, thank goodness) tracheotomy kit and a pair of gloves as Lyle (the one of these two Tadashi had actually had an extended conversation with) went for the cart.

"Is it listening?" he asked dubiously of the (really cool) symbiote, then added, since the armor didn't appear to be peeling back, "Hey, I know this situation's pretty scary, but I promise that we're here to help. But we can't help with you covering him up like this, so ease off so we can help your friend, all right?"

[beetlebutt]

It could hear them. And it was scared. Not for itself. The scarab didn't want to expose Jaime's face to these strangers but right now it was all or nothing. Either it fully retracted and tried to regenerate or the armor would remain deployed. In either case, it could not call up the functions it needed to to resuscitate and heal Jaime. So the armor retracted, withdrawing from the boy's body, making horrible crunching and grinding noises as it did, a clear sign that it was malfunctioning. It all disappeared under him, into his back. On Brainy's omnicom, on all the monitors and sensor feeds that had now been turned on while they tried to help Jaime, there were words, clear and desperate: F|X H|M. What the armor left behind as it retreated wasn't pretty. Because of the cut to his head, under the armor, and because of a nasty wound on his cheek where some flesh had been scored away by the head of a hammer, his face was drenched in blue goo that was pretty clearly a substitute for blood while the suit was functional. His left leg was also drenched in it, due to the damage to his knee, some kind of foreign object that had been shoved through it. So was his right arm and part of his torso, due to the chewed up chainsaw wound at his shoulder/neck. All of those injuries were still bleeding, so after the suit retracted, the wounds started to trickle red instead. Those were just the wounds that were actively bleeding. The boy's side looked horribly bruised, in a way that suggested blunt trauma that might have broken some ribs and there were countless other bruises and places that had been battered. The boy looked very, very small without his armor.

[googledox]

Brainy pulled a sheet in a thin band over the boy's waist to preserve his modesty, leaving the rest of his abdomen and legs uncovered so they could work on them. He flicked on an overheard heating lamp, knowing that he was likely suffering at least mild hypothermia from immersion. Right now they couldn't afford to cover him with blankets when they had so many injuries to work on. The retracting armor and the messages on the monitor were something that made Brainy arch his eyebrow in interest as he took the trach kit from Tadashi, gloved up, and worked on stabilizing the boy's airway. "What a fascinating case," he muttered. "Lyle, the techno-organic symbiote he has - it's quite remarkable." He had so many questions he wanted to ask when he was conscious and conversational. There. Intubated. Brainy attached the tubing to a ventilator and set up a separate set of nasogastric tubing that was meant to provide suction. The boy's chest rose and fell but only lightly. There was too much fluid in his lungs and his heart was still in V-fib. But now Lyle was there with the crash cart and the defibrillator. Brainy primed the pads and attached them to the boy's chest. "Everyone, clear," he said, hitting the buttons that started the device. It automatically started scanning for the boy's heart rhythms, calculating the right charge to provide. While it did that, Brainy held out the metal pan with the device to Lyle. "Lyle, this device was inhibiting his armor. It was primed with an explosive charge and a vial of particularly deadly neurotoxin for whoever tried to remove it, perhaps as a trap meant for any possible rescuers, but I disarmed it. Please dispose of it safely, Tadashi can assist me from here." And kashunk, the deibrillator shocked the boy, causing his body to startle slightly as it did it.

[atippleoftransparency]

Of course it was, and of course he had.

"Can do," Lyle said, taking the pan and winking at Tadashi, who didn't seem to know if he should be sick or alarmed that he was being tapped to assist. "Don't worry," he said. "You're in good hands."

[the_civilian]

Tadashi was very proud of himself for not throwing up on the floor at the sight of their patient in all his under-the-armor injured glory. It didn't fully distract him from the weirdness of 'Brainy' being clearly more interested in the poor kid's symbiote than he was in the injuries themselves (somehow. They were pretty eye-catching), nor was it entirely enough to prevent him from making an alarmed noise when the injuries started to trickle red.

Maybe he should just throw up in the sink now and get it over with.

"I- I don't..." he swallowed hard. "What do you need me to do?"

Brainy seemed pretty confident here -- far more than Tadashi felt. He'd read about all this stuff, but it was less...this printed on paper in the safety of his lab.

But someone had to help, so he wasn't going to try and escape.

[googledox]

"Hand me one of those small devices over there," he pointed at a counter closer to Tadashi, where a strange little device that almost looked alike a blue tooth for a cell phone sat with others of its kind. While Tadashi did that, Brainy started pulling out equipment and sutures, putting them out on the work tray next to him. The defibrillator went off two more times and Brainy temporarily paused it, taking several drugs from the crash cart to inject into the boy's body. "I'm administering epinephrine and vasopressin," he said, as he did it. Then he set the defibrillator to go off again. "This will - hopefully - finally get him stabilized." Hopefully. "Come on," he urged the unconscious boy. "You're wasting altogether too much time with this whole not-breathing nonsense." The second time the machine shocked him, he finally started to cough and retch, his heartbeat finally stabilizing and strengthening on the monitors. At first, reddish and bluish liquid bubbled out around the tubes in his mouth and nose but the tube that had been threaded through his nose started to suction off everything he was coughing - and vomiting up - to collect it in an empty bag attached to the ventilator. The suction caught up to how much he was coughing and he started to breathe easier as it sucked away all the nasty stuff he was coughing up. His heartbeat was still somewhat weak but at least finally free of any arrhythmias. Brainy left the pads stuck to the boys chest, but turned off the defibrillator and removed the leads that went to it, then held out his hand for the device he'd asked for.

[the_civilian]

The part of his brain that had apparently recorded everything that he'd ever programmed into Baymax agreed with the administration of epinephrine and vasopressin -- the former to jump-start the kid's failing heart, the latter to help with both slowing the bleeding and getting what blood he still had where it needed to go.

Tadashi swallowed down the urge to vomit again and passed Brainy one of the indicated devices. Okay, that was airway cleared, the kid was breathing on his own, so next step was "C" for circulation.

"I got the scan," he said, moving to a slightly better angle and allowing his magical power a straight line to his mouth. "He's got a concussion, but there's no sign of brain bleed, none of the injuries on his face and head are otherwise severe -- what?"

Why was Brainy scowling at him like that?

[googledox]

Brainy was scowling at him as he affixed the device to Jaime's temple - a neural inhibitor that would block any pain he felt while they were treating him. "I find your magical shortcut offensive," he said, finally using his shield power to snap the metal restraints on the young man's hand that they'd been working around. He paused. "I realize the irony of saying that as I use a meta-power, but at least it's not magic. By all means, keep using it, it's useful, but the fact it exists -" He visibly shuddered. It was a shudder of annoyance. He turned to call out to Lyle. "Lyle, when you're done with that device, I need a 1000 cc bag of electrolyte mix in lactated ringers, some form of intravenous corticosteroid for the pulmonary edema, and a serotonin 5-HT3 receptor antagonist for vomiting. He's human, aged seventeen, biochemically no different from humans from our universe, and mostly stable now. Use your best judgment on the exact compositions."

[the_civilian]

"Got it!" Lyle called back from where ever he'd disappeared off to with his neurotoxin as Tadashi blinked at Brainy, unsure how exactly to react to that.

"Uh, okay," he said slowly, then went back to cataloguing the teenager's injuries. "The chainsaw wound is nasty and likely our biggest concern, assuming we don't have internal bleeding somewhere...nope, three broken ribs on his left side under all that bruising, but no internal organs punctured, that's better than the alternative. There's..."

Oh, there was the urge to throw up again. "There's a drill bit in his knee, but it's less dangerous than the chainsaw wound, so it would be best to put a pressure bandage on the knee to curtail the bleeding until we can get there. Everything else is pretty minor in comparison, his magical healing and mine can probably take care of everything short of the knee and shoulder."

[googledox]

"I agree with your assessment - however artificially it was achieved." He pushed the floating equipment tray over the boy and crossed over to Tadashi's side, working on wrapping and immobilizing the boy's injured leg, using his shield powers to hold the boy's leg up. "Use some gauze and put pressure on his shoulder wound until I finish." They needed to staunch the bleeding.

[the_civilian]

Weren't all methods of scanning a body for internal injuries artificial?

Tadashi did as he'd been bidden, snagging a sufficiently-sized piece of gauze and placing it over the wound, holding it in place as indicated by the Baymax portion of his brain and concentrating really hard on not starting the healing process -- hopefully it required skin-to-skin contact and the gloves and gauze would be sufficient if his willpower wasn't.

(Note to self, get more practice with crazy magical healing powers so nobody gets a freaking drill bit healed inside their knee.)

"I'll keep scanning, in case anything goes wrong," he added. Not that he could stop himself from scanning, yet, but letting Brainy know he was doing it could speed things along if something did go wrong.

[googledox]

"Hmmph," was Brainy's only response to that, but he seemed to be trusting in Tadashi's power enough to not scan with his omnicom every five minutes. He bandaged the boy's knee serviceably and elevated his leg on a foam block to cause blood flow to the wound to be minimized, then joined Tadashi at Jaime's shoulder. "Switch places with me," he said curtly, moving in to take Tadashi's place, assessing the wound. "A ragged wound like this usually requires some form of debridement and cleansing to prevent infection and such debridement will restart the bleeding so it needs to be done before inducing clotting and any possible placement of sutures. While his myth powers should help stave off an extreme infection, they're likely already overtaxed due to his injuries being cumulative so we'd best not risk closing anything up over the debris." Despite his earlier scoffing of Tadashi's powers, he seemed to be...teaching him? Brainy gestured to the supply cabinet behind them. "Pick the optimal solution to cleanse this kind of wound." He was testing him, making him think. The options were sterile water, saline, Hibiclens - a solution meant to specifically cleanse wounds - peroxide, and rubbing alcohol.

[the_civilian]

Oh...kay. Tadashi wouldn't personally pick these circumstances to start teaching someone about medical care, but he wasn't the guy with actual training, so he meekly headed for the supply cabinet and tried to work out the answer without relying on the books in his head.

It didn't work, but he felt that he could make a decent argument in support of his choice that wasn't "that's what the magic told me". He retrieved the Hibiclens and moved back to the table.

"Water and saline would work in a pinch, but something with actual cleansing power would be better," he explained, offering it to Brainy and trying not to sound like he was spitting up a textbook. "And peroxide and rubbing alcohol are way too harsh."

[googledox]

"Correct. Not that you likely came up with the answer on your own, given what I've heard of your powers, but you're giving thought to why that knowledge might be correct. That's imperative to using powers like yours with any efficacy," Brainy said, getting to work cleaning the worst part of the wound and suturing the place where the most blood was leaking from. "You're not always going to have an exact, precise picture of how best to aid someone who's injured - logic and extrapolation may be necessary to work off of the knowledge base you've magically acquired. And that's not even accounting for times you may not have access to your full powers. There may potentially be situations where, even powerless, you'll have more knowledge of first aid than any injured team members that need your help, due to your background." As much as he seemed to hate the idea that Tadashi had a magical shortcut, he seemed pleased with the fact that Tadashi was at least putting some thought to the knowledge that was magically in his head. "Aside from the possible foreign debris, what other issue is a concern during debridement of a wound like this, where extreme friction has been applied to tissue?"

[the_civilian]

"Not that I object to the lessons, but is this really the best time?" Tadashi asked, shooting the teenager a quick look to scan him again. Nothing seemed out of place. "This situation isn't good, even if we do have it under some degree of control for the moment. And, uh, the speed the chainsaw may have actually caused burns on the tissue it came into contact with."

As long as he was thinking about it hard enough to reword it into regular English instead of Medicalese, he was likely thinking about it hard enough to satisfy Brainy that he wasn't coasting.

[googledox]

"He's in stable condition, the knee wound's bleeding is under control, and the neural inhibitor means he's in no pain." Brainy leaned forward to work on picking debris out of the wound, nudging a stool with his foot to sit on as he worked. "Real medical treatment is nothing like those ridiculous medical dramas where everyone is yelling dramatically and saying everything needs to be stat." He gestured to the wound. "In the past I've sometimes spent well over a half hour picking out every single particulate and bit of broken bone out of an open wound before closing up - because that's what you have to do to prevent infection. Unless there's another patient in need of triage, needlessly rushing like characters do in the medical holos is unwise in actual medical practice. Usually in a situation like this, a patient would be referred to a surgeon or an automated robotic surgical suite for surgical debridement under anesthesia." He gestured around the room. "Do you see any other surgeons besides myself at the moment? If it's going to take time and he's stable and it's not a situation that requires triage of multiple patients, I may as well teach you in the process. With any luck, injuries on our team-mates will be sparing so it's best to take advantage of learning opportunities when they arise."

[the_civilian]

Tadashi gingerly took the offered stool, frowning to himself.

"I guess that makes sense," he admitted. "I didn't really talk to O.R. doctors and nurses -- Baymax was only meant to stabilize people in cases of emergency."

He, meanwhile, is still proud of himself for not throwing up on the floor. Though watching Brainy navigate the wound with tweezers is bringing that possibility back up again.

"So, what else do you need me to do?"

[googledox]

"Go to the window between here and the lab to get the IV bags Lyle should be finished making in approximately ten seconds." He knew how fast his boyfriend worked. Exactly how fast. In fact, Tadashi might find it somewhat uncanny. "Do you know how to insert a peripheral venous catheter? If not, I wouldn't recommend you being the one to place it today, but I can show you how it's done."

[the_civilian]

Tadashi shot Brainy a dubious look, but moved toward the window between this room and the lab as instructed, mentally counting down the seconds.

Lyle popped up with the IV bags right on time and Tadashi almost failed to grab them in his surprise.

Weird.

"I read up on the theory, but that was going to be something I worked out the programming for somewhere down the line," he said, bringing the bags over to Brainy. "I'll sit and play audience for now."

He didn't take his stool again, but remained standing in case he was going to need to fetch anything else.

"How much training do you have with this kind of thing?"

[googledox]

"Mm, I'm primarily an engineer and a theoretical physicist so I never did a formal medical residency, if that's what you're asking, but I have spent the last few years acting as full-time physician for my team by virtue of sheer necessity. And while I didn't care for their daily medical needs before that, I was often the one finding cures for the more unusual ailments and superpower regulation issues some of them dealt with." He shrugged slightly as he placed another bit of armor fragment in the tray with the tweezers, then placed the tweezers down on the tray and stood up, walking over to the other side of their patient, where the IV stand was. He started to set up the tubing, doing it slow enough for Tadashi to see. "I obtained perfect grades in my coursework in my xenobiological medicine module when I was seven, though, and the medical breakthroughs in the ten theses I wrote for my final project were considered some of the most innovative advances in xenobiological medicine in the last century. The only reason I didn't become a doctor was because I didn't apply for a license; I still obtained perfect scores on my medical exams. My interests just always were in other fields, like engineering, physics, and time travel. Most diseases were cured in my dimension and time, anyway, so medical sciences presented no challenge."

[the_civilian]

...Was he joking? Tadashi squinted at him, his magical scanner automatically taking another reading. His blood pressure didn't appear to have changed, but Tadashi wasn't exactly familiar with how to tell if people were lying using their blood pressure.

"Oh...kay." he said slowly. Well, it wasn't much weirder than using his magical powers to help an alien from the future perform surgery on some kid with self-aware armor at the North Pole, was it?

God, his life was so weird these days.

He scanned the kid again, mostly to distract himself from freaking out too badly over that thought. The blow-to-the-head realizations were fewer and farther between these days, but they could still knock him for a loop.

[googledox]

Brainy picked up the incredulity for what it was and smirked slightly. "With a scanning power like yours - and the fact you have functioning eyes - I would have thought that it was already transparently clear that I'm not human." He took the IV catheter and showed him very carefully how to unwrap it, prep it, tap to find a viable vein, and insert it, slowly and carefully. Then he started to rig up all the IVs, again, going slowly, so that Tadashi could see how all the tubing intersected. "I'm a Coluan. My species is known for its high intelligence and relative longevity. We have lifespans that sometimes exceed six hundred Earth years and on the Coluan intelligence scale, the average Coluan is a level eight. Earth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is about a six. That's all of Earth, mind you - every mind, every computer, the processing power of the entire planet. The scale used to only go to ten once but they had to adjust it due to the mutation prevalent in my family line. I'm a twelfth level intellect, capable of multiple simultaneous tracks of consciousness." The IVs helped stabilize their patient even more and they did it quickly. His heartbeat started to grow stronger on the monitors. "Our species was exploring the stars while humans were still discovering the basic scientific principle of 'fire good.'" Brainy bustled back over to the other side to continue his work on his shoulder. "You're going to have to get used to the concept of sapient non-Terran life rather quickly, you know. Even some of the individuals here at the Pole that seem human aren't. Superboy, for instance, isn't capable of flying just because of his myth powers. He's half-human but also half-Kryptonian, an alien species that looks identical to humans externally but has wildly different physiology under the skin." He gestured at Jaime with the tweezers. "Just like this young man seems to be biologically human but appears to be a host to a bio-organic parasite or symbiote -" Brainy had referred to it as a symbiote before just on the off chance calling it a parasite would piss it off but he'd never actually confirmed it was. However, he was interrupted almost immediately by the medical monitor screens warping and words appearing: SYMB|[]TE, N[]T P/-\R/-\S|TE. S[] RUDE. Brainy continued, slightly more politely, "He appears to be a host to this endosymbiont, who is apparently capable of using its host's auditory sensory organs even while he's unconscious."

[the_civilian]

"I could hazard a guess that you weren't human," Tadashi answered dryly. "Considering this is effectively first contact with intelligent species not originally native to Earth for me and Honey Lemon, I'd say it's going rather well."

He supposed that if Brainy had the twice the brain power of his entire planet, it probably explained the grandiosity of his resume and skill set.

"I'll put Superboy on the list of people I should get base scans of though, so that I'll be able to tell if something's going wrong or if that's just normal for him," he added.

[googledox]

"I already have scans in his digital chart but it might be helpful for you to have some baseline scans. Your powers may allow you to perceive certain things my omnicom's medical scanners can't." Much to his dismay. He reached out a hand. "Scalpel." He needed to excise some of the friction-burned flesh.