- The following except contains the recorded experiences of witnesses from various species, races and cultures. All reports have been translated into your set Default Language for your convenience -
Burgundy velvet folds rippled across the room like an ever shifting monument to blood itself. Of the being inside the robes, there was little to be seen. Even in the bright, antiseptic light of the medlab, his face was completely overshadowed by the thick brim of his hood. Dray straightened his scrubs and made himself presentable. Whoever - or whatever - this robed figure was, they would be nowhere near the weirdest patient he had ever treated, Dray half-knew, half-hoped.
"You are a doctor?" a voice from inside the hood asked. It sounded male, but then again there were plenty of aliens with unusual vocal chords.
"Yes," Dray replied. "Are you injured?"
"I am sick," the hood replied. "I need an antibody stim."
"I'm afraid I cannot simply dish out stims to unexamined passengers. I'll need you to step this way into the triage scanner for me first."
"I can't do that, doctor," the hood replied firmly. "I need those stims." Dray clasped his hands behind his back and felt for the cold grip of his stunner. Was the hooded robe act an attempt to intimidate him?
"The scanner is non-invasive and your confidentiality is assured, sir," Dray droned. The privacy speech was one he'd been repeating since leaving the academy nearly eight years ago.
"It's only a cough. I don't need a scan," the hood replied.
"I'll still need to examine you," Dray repeated.
The hooded figure made no reply.
"Sir?"
"You have started calling me 'sir'," the hood replied. "And your arm is taught. You are holding something behind your back."
Dray reaffirmed the grip on his stunner. This man was creepy.
"You think I am a threat?" the hood deduced uneasily. "Very well." The sleeves of the hood's robe rose. Dray whipped his arm around and held the stunner between him and the hooded figure. The hood stopped moving for a second, before slowly easing his hands up to the hood's brim. For the first time in the whole encounter, Dray could see something of the hooded figure's skin and those hands looked, well, human. Dray's medical mind was using his adrenaline to work overtime. They noticed the pale, thin fingers of the hands, the barely visible veins - a common side effect of artificial gravity only found in mammals - and the bracelet-like bruising on the wrists. Force shackles, Dray's head suggested. This man had been prisoner somewhere. That explanation certainly explained the hood.
Slowly, the dark red hood was pushed back. Dray blinked. It was a human man. He looked quite young, but his eyes... His eyes looked weathered and sunken like he'd never had a night cycle of sleep in his life. Dray's eyes flicked around the man's face. His skin was pale and his hair was cropped in a shaggy crew cut.
"Please don't tell..." the man said weakly.
"All my dealings with patients are confidential," Dray replied, still examining the man from this distance. The man's eyes flicked down at the stunner and nodded. "Oh." Dray holstered it. Despite the fact that he was only a doctor, the stunner was a necessity on public frigates like the Gift. "Now, will you consent to using the scanner?"
"Don't you have a handheld one?" the man asked.
"The Gift could only afford two," Dray answered. "They've been prioritised to the main medical ward on Deck 6. You can-"
"No, it's fine," the man replied, moving over to the white circle on the floor against the wall - the triage scanner. Dray's medlab was only a small white box of a room. An examination table sat in the middle, where three robotic arms hung from the ceiling; one for dental work, one for minor surgery and another for cryogenic preparation. The triage scanner took up a chunk of one corner, and a small desk space and computer terminal filled the rest of the bow-side wall of the lab. The aft-side wall was mostly data screens and storage compartments, while the port-side wall comprised of the thick bulkhead that connected to Deck 3's starboard arterial corridor. The entire fish-shaped ship was almost organic in its architecture. On every deck, there was a spinal corridor running from aft to bow, as well as two arterial passageways on either side. Due to the fact that the ship had a main medical ward three decks below, Dray's lab had been sidelined to the side of Deck 3 against the hull. Even through the apartment-thick chunk of hull plating and environmental shields, Dray could still hear the hull grumbling whenever the ship was put through her paces.
The robed man waited patiently for Dray to start the scanner. All Dray had to do was key the blue panel on the wall. Barely anything in the medlab was code-locked, unlike the wards. A soft beep emitted from the ceiling as the scanner activated and Dray stepped back. The scanning node on the roof emitted a blue centering light onto the robed man's head and then began arcing a thin blue line of light back and forth across the man's body. Dray's Burshta Academy training had taught him long ago that the line of light was essentially irrelevant; modern medical scanners used restricted-bandwidth magnetic resonance emitters to develop a pin-point accurate bounce-image of the scanned object or person, much like primitive sonar or LADAR.
Dray moved over to the bow-side wall as the scanner began submitting its images. The initial scans were coronal and sagittal cross-sections of the man's brain.
"I'm sorry, I don't know your name," Dray said as he stared at the scans. The scanner was constructing a temporal activation video to show areas of activity and patterns of nutrient flow. Dray waved his hand and the man's flesh in the scan fell away. The man's body was displayed from side-on and front-on, with a yellow line for his outline.
"It's Kiron, doctor," the man replied. "What can you see?"
"I don't know," Dray answered, looking over the scans. The man's central nervous system scans were unlike any other CNS scans Dray had ever set eyes upon. The levels of activation in the man's brain, for both oxygenated blood and electrical neural activity were far above resting state average, and were more typical of someone involved in a complex problem-solving task. As Dray looked over the man's spinal cord, he swore in Cataron. "These... nodules... All the way down your spine..."
"Yes."
"They... Your bone structure has formed around them... They aren't cancers. You were born with these?" Dray asked his mysterious patient in surprise.
"Yes," Kiron replied. "But they are not why I am here. I have a cough. I need stims."
"Sir, I don't know if you realise," Dray started. "These nodes, or whatever they are, they're grafted onto your central nervous system. No, they are part of your nervous system. I've never heard of anything like this in Humans before. If I had the time and the resources, I'd-"
"What? Study me?" Kiron interrupted. "Not a chance. Now, please; the stims."
"Uh, okay..." Dray breathed, feeling the intensity of the man's stare. Using the wireless capability of his tech implant, Dray saved a copy of the man's scans. It was completely unethical, but he had to know more. He'd been trained as a full medical researcher; he was wasted in this dead-end practitioner job he'd landed in.
Dray made a show of switching his attention to the other scan results. The screens were merely holographic projections, which meant that Dray could fill the entire wall with imaging results if he had to. Sure enough, the man's chest scans showed blockages of mucous and his lung capacity was a little down. The immune system readings were also low. Space travel tended to stress immune systems to their limits; even with the decontamination procedures, Dray had only recently managed to stay healthy while shipbound. It was almost disgraceful for a doctor to be sick when working.
"Anything?" Kiron asked impatiently.
"Yes, I've seen this strain a few times this week. Must have snuck through decontamination," Dray noted. He raised his right hand to his ear and keyed his aural implant. "Winter? I'm going to need a P-042 and R-L3 stim from Stores, if you have a minute."
"I always have a minute," the synthesized voice replied through the medlab speakers, rather than through Dray's private comm channel.
"Who's that?" Kiron asked.
"That's Winter, my assistant," Dray answered. "She's a Cythlione."
Kiron continued to look confused.
"Sentient cephalopod species?" Dray tried.
Kiron continued to look confused.
"Walking squids," Dray muttered, with resignation.
"Oh!" Kiron burst out.
"Yeah, 'oh'."
The bulkhead door hissed and opened, revealing Winter's fleshy form. Three thick tentacles suspended her off the ground, which were surrounded by a skirt of seven smaller, more dextrous ones. Two huge glassy eyes stared lidlessly out her 'head', which was about level with Dray's chest. Her breathing sacs - two rubbery lung-like bags that hung down her back - huffed and puffed behind her. She'd clearly made an effort to dress herself today, despite the difficulty of finding clothes for a Cythlione. A ring of ribbons and chandelier-like crystals were draped around her upper body, just below the level of her eyes. The chromatophores in her species' skin allowed them to change their colour to quite complex combinations of hues. Today she was a soothing shade of buttermilk. However, as soon as she took a tentacled step inside the medlab and saw the colour of Kiron's robes, she changed to a little too exciting colour scheme of red-and-white stripes. Dray shook his head. Her whole species was a little childish in nature, but their worth as technicians, surgeons and engineers made them an extremely useful species to have around, if you could bear the synthesized voice boxes and extravagant colours.
"I have brought those stimulants, doctor," Winter said, her synthetic voice trying to emulate cheerfulness. In actual fact, Cythliones rarely experienced emotions as other species did. There had been a whole wing of Burshta Academy dedicated to Cythlione psychology. It turned out to be an extremely popular research subject.
"Good," Dray nodded. "Here's the patient."