Slumrat Rising

Truth had gone to the hospital with some vague notion of just… wandering the hallways, treating the ill and infirm. Learning more about Cup and Knife as he microscopically made the world a better place. Alas, the kneecap of dreams must always confront the lead pipe of reality.

I do not have the faintest goddamn idea of what I am supposed to be doing here.

The Emergency Room was a wash of people. Some stacked up in the waiting room, more in little curtained off sections of the ER proper. Some stuck on gurneys in the “hallways” betweened curtained sections. Most quietly enduring until they could be seen. A vocal minority being anything but stoic about their conditions.

Apparently, it was his job to sort it all out. Not even fix everything, just sort out where they should go from here.

“Did Nurse-Bro triage them?” He asked the senior nurse, She was absurdly heavyset and old looking for a Jeon native, sporting pink scrubs and sneakers with a staggeringly thick foam sole. He had seen softer looking special forces soldiers, but not many harder ones.

“Naturally. Most urgent is the top of the stack, least on the bottom.” She nodded. Truth looked at the top name on the list. Broken arm. He looked at the bottom page- cranial bleed, multiple ruptured organs, infection, most ribs broken, both legs broken, pelvis broken, spinal damage- the patient had been hit by a wagon, and managed to live.

He was about to ask what the hell the nurse thought she was playing at, then remembered he was in a Jeon hospital. He looked a little longer at the intake sheets. Top right corner was a little check box indicating insurance coverage and citizenship rating.

He had wronged the nurse. The order was impeccably correct. For Jeon.

“I’ll get on it. Am I the only Doctor-Bro on the floor?”

“Yes, though our new resident is also making rounds. He’s stabilizing the D-Tiers and Bronze-Plan patients.”

“Alright. When he’s got ‘em stable, have Junior-Bro come shadow me.”

“Yes Doctor.”

He quickly found the first patient. A rather aggrieved looking teen and his furious mother.

“DO YOU HAVE THE SLIGHTEST IDEA HOW LONG WE HAVE WAITED?!” She bellowed. The teen looked mortified, but the youngster had an ice pack on his arm and a look of real pain on his face so he was stuck.

Truth checked the intake. “Twenty five minutes, Ma’am-Bro. I’m the Bonesetter-Bro. Here to set the little Bro’s bones.” Truth walked past the sputtering C-Tier and pulled up a stool next to the kid. He removed the ice pack and quickly checked the break with Cup and Knife.

“Ulna’s fine, Radius has a Comminuted Fracture.” Truth made a note on the chart with his findings. “How did you manage that one, Bro?”

“Was playing soccer at school, slipped on the grass and my arm slammed into the goal post. But, like, really hard.” Truth looked in his eyes. The boy was lying. The mom was too busy furiously muttering about suing the school to see it.

“Bullied at school? Abused at home?” His lips hardly moved but his words reached directly into the boy’s ear.

“No, really, I-” Truth fixed him with a calm look. He deflated. Then mouthed “School.”

“Good news is that this is something I can heal, no need to wait for Demon-Eye-Bro.” Truth said loudly.

“Well it’s about time!”

Truth cast Cup and Knife. The injury seemed to want to fly off somewhere. Truth smiled, and returned the broken limb to its origin. He made a note on the sheet “Broken Radius. Fixed with bone spell. Sent to discharge Bro.”

“Alright, someone will be in with your discharge paperwork. These kinds of accidents have a way of happening more than once, little Bro. Longer if you don’t talk to people about it. Maybe consider radical steps to take care of it.”

Truth waved away the sputtering mother and moved to the next on the list.

In the next cubicle was a elderly man with a horrible cough. It looked like a seizure, convulsing his body as thick chunks of phlegm flew over the room. Some didn’t, just spilling over thin lips and down his thin chest. He gasped a few times, then the coughing started again.

“Senior-Bro! Mask! Where is your mask?” Truth urgently asked.

“Never use masks!” The old man coughed and hacked. Then- “Just traps the sickness in you. Makes you more sick. You doctors are fools to be wearing them all the time.”

“Not how that works, Senior Bro. Not how anything works. Also, and no disrespect Senior-Bro, but you are covering everything in disease carrying phlegm.”

“That’s what cleaning talismans are for. Are you going to whine or heal me? Don’t think I won’t leave a one star review!”

Truth checked the chart. C-Tier, but a decently wealthy one judging by the shoes on the floor. Truth quickly checked him with Cup and Knife. Major lung problems, as well as a general sense that his body was in a bad way, and getting worse.

“Have examined by Demon-Eye-Bro, Cast ANCEF, Consult with Pathology-Bro and Lung-Bro.”

“Feel better soon, Senior Bro.”

“Eeeh? You haven’t done anything!”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Don’t worry, Senior Bro. We’ll have you on your feet in no time.”

He escaped the disgusting cubicle only to spot a harried looking junior in scrubs come running towards him. There were bags under his eyes that could have carried the week’s shopping. The eyes themselves had that quiet despair and surrender to inevitable horror Truth associated with the utterly burnt out.

“Nurse Brochard said you wanted me to shadow you, Doctor…?

“Hey Junior-Bro! Yeah, I’m Bonesetter-Bro.” Truth watched a few things visibly click inside the resident’s head. Looked like this was a very well settled persona. It almost felt like the identity was running through invisible grooves carved in the air of the hospital hallways.

“An honor to meet you, Bonsetter…?”

“Yeah! We do Bones, Bro. Now most of these people have problems that are not-bones. Which is bad. So we need to get through them fast.”

“Okay?” The resident glanced around. There was a hollowness to his cheeks that suggested too many skipped meals. The hospitals were notorious for working their junior doctors almost to death. Or actually to death, depending on how attentive the senior doctors were.

“Yeah, so you are going to be my Paperwork Bro. I’ll test you on what to do as we go, see how you are coming along.” Truth nodded decisively. The resident looked like he would rather dive into a wood chipper.

“Err. Doctor Bone-Bro, while I am immensely grateful for the privilege of observing you work, Mr. Coldswalop in Number Eight is presenting with severe kidney problems, and-”

“He gonna die right this minute?”

“Well. Not right this minute.”

“You leave a message for Salt-Bro, saying that this is his problem?”

“I… made a request for a Nephrology Consult.”

“Nurse-Bro knows he’s in there?”

“Yes…”

Truth shoved the clipboard into the resident’s hands, spun him around to face the next cubicle and slapped him on the ass hard enough to propel him into the curtained ‘room’.

The patient was a teen, maybe sixteen years old, male, looking around blindly. Literally, as Truth could see the ruins of his corneas from a couple meters away.

“Hey, Junior Bro. I’m the Doc on call for this shift, here with my Resident Bro who’s going to ask you a few questions. But first, Bro. Really Bro. How did this happen?”

“Does it matter?” The kid’s voice was brittle.

“Yeah, Bro. Because it tells us a lot about how we treat it, and how we make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

There was a long silence. “I don’t want to say.”

Truth glanced over to the resident, who looked helplessly back at him. Truth shook his head and mouthed “watch and learn.”

“How old are you, Bro.”

“Seventeen.” Truth blinked at that and checked the intake sheet. The boy was, in fact, seventeen. From a C-Tier family, no less, with Silver Plan insurance. Clothes looked… the kind of ordinary you got when you had enough money to make good quality look ordinary. Not poor, but not very rich either.

“When’s your birthday?” Truth was hunting over the sheet and somehow- ah right up at the top. The kid had hunched in on himself.

“Three weeks, huh.”

“Yeah.”

Which meant that in three weeks, he would be on a bus headed for Basic, getting ready to do his National Service. Just as the most brutal war in Jeon’s history was really starting to hit its stride, and the body bags were coming home by the shipping container-full. When there was still a body to fill a bag.

Truth flipped through the clipboard. Three other juveniles presented with the same symptoms. All Seventeen years old. Truth rested his hand on the side of the kid’s face, and investigated with Cup and Knife. His eyes weren’t just damaged- they were destroyed. Whatever it was had completely destroyed all the fine structures inside the eyeball that actually allowed the little ball of water to see. Even the nerves leading to the brain had been severed and burnt to nothing.

It was healable. Expensive. Crushingly expensive. It would require specialized mages, specialized talismans, a course of carefully administered potions… or a spell as weird and powerful as Cup and Knife.

“Hmm. Not what you want to hear, little Bro, but I’m concerned not all the necessary treatment is covered on your insurance plan. We will happily do the work, of course. But I will need a signed contract from your parents approving the proposed treatment plan. Given that four juvenile-Bros all developed the same injury at the same time, we have to be very diligent about the possibility of terrorism or some other form of sabotage. This isn’t a reportable incident, of course, we just need to be careful on our end.”

Truth nodded decisively. The resident was looking at him, bewildered, his jaw slightly hanging open. The kid looked like he was trying to parse what Truth said. Eventually, he slowly nodded.

“Whatever you think is best, doctor.”

“Are you in pain?”

“No. It doesn’t hurt.”

Because all the nerves are destroyed. If they weren’t you would be in agony.

“Alright, Paperwork-Bro, start listing all the necessary consults, the necessary potions and talismans, Demon-Eye bookings, Vibro-Sight Wanding-”

“Err, Bonesetter, Vibro-Sight is not… generally used in optometry…”

“Eh? But there are bones around the eyes? You know what, list a consult for a few Eye-Bros, as well as the Vibro-Sight Tech-Bro. Let's have a meeting and discuss a plan for evaluating the medical advisability of a Vibro-Sight examination given the presented symptoms.” Truth nodded decisively. He didn’t know much about hospitals, but he would bet cash a meeting with that subject would be postponed until five years after the end of time.

The resident looked like he would dive into the sweet embrace of death at the first available opportunity. Barring that, a reasonably quiet linen closet he could pass out in for a few blissful hours of unconsciousness.

“Yes, Bonesetter.”

“Awesome! Oh, make sure you note on his form he’s 4-F. Sorry, Kid-Bro. Just can’t let you serve in that condition.”

“Oh. Well. If you say so.” The kid’s voice was very quiet.

“Yeah, damn shame. I loved my Service. Every day, we did runs, pushups, situps, burpees, it was AWESOME!” Truth nodded with blythe enthusiasm. “Sorry you are going to miss out. Alright, hang tight. Someone will be in with the paperwork. Eventually. How are you getting home?”

“Bus?”

“Nah Bro, no-can-do. Have Nurse-Bro message your parents. Someone needs to pick you up.”

“Okay.” The voice was very soft. Truth could see the swirling storm of emotions playing over the kid’s face.

“Hey, fingers crossed some of these treatments might come up on special offer. You never know.” Truth nodded wisely. “Alright, I’mma head out. Remember, if you are feeling down, do like bonesetters do- lift heavy at the gym.”

Truth looked over at the resident. “We gotta check in on ‘em, but I’ll save you some time- duplicate the paperwork on the other three blind kids too.”

“Doctor?”

“Bro, are you blind? This requires careful handling.” Truth shook his head. “You got a long way to go Junior-Bro. Don’t worry. Your senior will walk you through it.”

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