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_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.

[the_civilian]

"Could you sound like that pisses you off any more?"

Tadashi placed a scalpel in Brainy's hand, smiling just a little.

"If I'm going to be continually scanning people, I should at least know what's normal for them so I don't freak out and freak them out unnecessarily. There's going to be plenty of things to freak out over here as-is."

[googledox]

"My vexation can't be properly expressed with verbal communication, so I don't plan on exerting any further effort in the attempt," he said dryly. He went to work, excising the damaged tissue. Then he washed out the wound with the Hibiclens until it was as clean as possible, using a sterile brush to get the last of the debris out and proceeded to close it up. "If you can stomach it, you should watch me close up the wound. This is one of the most vital skills you could learn."

[the_civilian]

"It's almost like being home. All but two of my friends and family are over-dramatic scientists, too."

Tadashi grimaced, but steeled himself. Brainy did have a point about learning to close up a wound.

"If I think I'm going to throw up, I'll hit the sink," he said.