WCH: Infinity Surgery
Author’s note: CRITIQUE APPRECIATED!
World’s Craziest Hospital: Infinity Surgery
“We have to open this duck up now! The fate of the multiverse depends on it!”
As a crack team of surgeons and nurses rushed a comatose duck-like creature to the operating room, Dr. Leucine S. Naturae reflected on how things got up to this moment.
It began on a muggy August afternoon in Wolcrasi Community Hospital. Leucine was asleep on the job as usual.
Leucine was a young woman with bright red hair tied high in a ponytail by a large purple bow and large red lips usually held in an impish smile. Her nose was large and upturned, her eyes an unnatural shade of purple, and her skin pale, but not exceedingly so. She wore a black velvet tube top dress, a long pair of black low-heeled boots that ran up to her thighs, a long dark purple neckerchief, and fingerless black opera gloves that went up nearly to her shoulders. Fortunately for the hospital’s reputation, a white doctor’s lab coat obscured her bare shoulders and lent her questionable ensemble a modicum of professionalism. Her mortal colleagues frequently called her “Code Black” or “Code BDSM”. Behind her back, of course.
Oh yeah, about that the word “mortal” for her colleagues? Well, Leucine was also a devil. Which meant that Leucine was mostly-human looking, save for a long black pointed tail. The large purple bow securing her ponytail came in the shape of a pair of curved horns, although whether this was intentional or not always got a shrug from her.
Many found it difficult to believe that Leucine was one of the best emergency surgeons in the world, but as she was an immortal being, that was probably inevitable after over a thousand years of medical practice. It definitely was not because she was clever or hard working. Hence why she slept at her desk today.
Leucine awoke with a slight flinch to the sounds of a loud fleshy impact and cursing. She recognized it as Dr. Chiharu Matsuda swearing in fluent Japanese. She rubbed at her bleary eyes and stretched on her desk. Must be “Aru” being harassed by the rogue security department today. She stepped out of her office to see more.
She looked outside her office to see a black-haired vampire lady in a basketball jersey and basketball shorts running by. A swarthy Asian woman with short hair chased the vampire with a 9mm pistol in hand, her face red and eyes tearing with pain. Oh, that would be Dr. Matsuda. The jersey-wearing vampire ran much faster than she did, however, and Dr. Matsuda lost her quarry almost immediately. Dr. Matsuda swore again in Japanese as she bent over in frustration. Leucine recognized many obscenities of the caliber to which only a former member the military would be privy.
“Hey, Aru”, said Leucine. “The slampire get you again?”
“Fucking bitch threw a basketball at my face! Agh! Why do they even allow these things on campus?”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m sure you’ll have a shot at her later. Get it, shot, because you have a gun!” said Leucine.
Firearms were a natural sight on WCH, a way for the more ordinary humans around here to deal with the many supernatural beings that ran amok and did not respond to lesser measures. Beings like Leucine. It did get somewhat crazy in this place. Chiharu shook her head as the rest of her shook with exhaustion. She holstered her pistol, but keeping her hand in place on the handle as she backed away from Leucine.
“God, I only grabbed your ass that one time! Don’t be so jumpy. It was just that one time, I’ll never do it again!” said Leucine.
“No, you did it five times. Five! And you said every time was the first or second time! What is wrong with you? One time is bad enough as it is.” said Chiharu, the frustration in her panting breaths turned at Leucine.
“Well… I’m sorry. I’ll write it on myself, how about that? I won’t forget this time!” said Leucine.
She erred on the side of believing what people said about her past behavior, because chances are that she actually really forgot. She was sure she would have remembered someone shooting her over it though, gunshots really did sting, and pain did jog the memory.
Leucine reached into her lab coat and took out a bright red marker. Chiharu flinched at the sudden movement, and then relaxed as Leucine wrote “DO NOT GRAB ARU’S ASS” on her left long glove.
“Better?” said Leucine.
Chiharu muttered a brief Japanese remark about crazy devils and crazy vampires as her hand drooped away from her gun. Her weapon completely disappeared beneath her lab coat.
“Whatever, I have patients to attend to. I’m sure you’re hard at work as usual”, Chiharu said as she turned around, the sarcasm in that remark almost palpable.
Leucine took it as a sign of affection, though most everyone else would have disagreed with her.
“Yup! See you later, Aru!” Leucine said, the smile wide on her face.
Chiharu swore some more under her breath and stalked off to resume her business.
Since she was awake again, Leucine decided to continue walking around, not looking for anything or anyone in particular. Something interesting would happen eventually, right? As if on cue, Leucine’s phone beeped. She fished it out of her lab coat up to her eyes so smoothly it almost flew up into her hands by itself.
“Ahhh help Lucy patient is growing mouths!! Plz halp thnks ward 431”
Thusly read a text message from a certain Dr. Bella Luna. Leucine nodded her head. She headed for the pediatrics department next doors, trying to think of how many diseases were capable of causing patients to grow extra mouths. Only three, that she could think of, unless you counted that one edge case when necrotizing shoggothitis had a superimposed infection with-
Ah, that would do it, she thought as she stepped into a room. Dr. Bella Luna, pediatrician, cowered in the middle of a physical with Persephone Therion, a member of the hospital’s IT department.
“Percy” normally looked like a sallow teenager with long black pigtails and bangs obscuring one of her eyes. She wore a loose, low-cut hoodie with a swirly pattern that made Leucine’s eyes hurt. Of course, the most notable feature of Miss Persephone at this moment was the fact that half of her body was currently a large white glob with large, horrible purple eyes and huge oozing teeth formed from hardened sections of the ooze. Ah yes, thought Leucine, that would be Percy’s true form, and it was quite hard on the eyes, so she had better make this quick. She took stock of the situation and looked at the tiny figure cowering in the other corner of the room.
Dr. Luna seemed very unremarkable next to the big monster terrorizing her at this moment- Bella was an androgynous and tanned young Asian woman. She always had on a similar outfit: wearing a purple tie on some pink or red shirt or blouse, and a purple skirt over leggings, all underneath the usual white doctor’s lab coat. Dr. Luna was very new here, and Wolcrasi pediatrics was her first job out of med school.
Leucine was not sure why, Bella had the qualifications on paper, but she also did not quite have the mindset needed to cope with unpredictable events around here. She definitely should not be dealing with someone like Persephone without a few more years under her belt.
The Persephone-blob swallowed a piece of furniture with the massive toothed pseudopod that her left arm turned into, too fast for Leucine to see what the object used to be. Leucine snapped out of her thoughts and used her boot to flip up a stepstool into her hands.
“Hey, Percy, how are y-“, Leucine said, just before she dodged another wicked white blob swinging up and ripping up the wall that her head was against a moment ago.
Leucine ducked under another pseudopod lashing out, which tore out a supply cabinet door with its horrendous white teeth. Being eaten by Percy would suck today, she thought.
Just as soon as Leucine recovered her footing from the evasive maneuver, the bulk of Percy’s body lunged at Leucine. Leucine pressed the stepstool in her hands as a shield against Percy’s massive form, Percy’s massive teeth tearing into the wood.
“PERCY! I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY!” Leucine screeched at the top of her lungs.
Percy paused and then slowly retracted, her globular form coalescing back into the pale pigtailed girl she usually was. She had a frown on her face, her arms folded as she waited for Leucine to make the next move.
“See? You just have to yell at a frequency she likes”, said Leucine. “Now, what did you do piss her off, storkie?”
“I… I don’t know!” cried Bella, clearly at wit’s end.
“Well, what were you doing before Percy wigg- I mean, gently made her displeasure known?” said Leucine.
“I was taking her temperature! Her temperature!” sobbed Bella, with the conviction of one sentenced to execution for a crime she did not commit.
“Ah… did you use the thermometer gun?” said Leucine.
“Yes!”
“There’s your problem. Percy’s species hates infrared, especially when you shine it in her eyes. Why were you even handling her, xeno stuff is Dr. Fidelis’ specialty.”
“I have no idea! She looked totally normal!”
“Yeah, that’s the idea. Right Percy?”
“Yeah. Why else would I try to hang out as a human if I couldn’t do it right? You humans are crazy, you’ll think I’m disgusting if I screw up my human look even a little bit.” said Persephone.
“I think you’re disgusting now!” Bella screamed. Then her eyes widened as she realized what she just said and her hands clamped over her mouth.
“We-e-ell...” said Persephone, with a smile. “Look who finally grew some balls.”
“Ovaries”, said Leucine.
“Ugh, stupid genders”, said Persephone.
“Getting back on track”, said Leucine. “Probably the reason why Percy is in pediatrics is because she’s technically an adolescent for her species. They live to about… how old again, Percy?”
“Like five hundred? I haven’t even heard of anyone who got up to that, usually we get eaten.”
“BY WHAT?” Bella screamed.
“Bigger creatures”, said Leucine. “Bella, I can’t believe of all people, I’m the one telling you this, but you have got to focus!”
“She turned into a blob-thing full of teeth and eyes and tried to eat me!” said Bella.
“Okay, you know what fine, Percy hates humans, and she’s already been abnormally patient with you. Right Percy?” said Leucine.
Percy nodded.
“How about you show her your true form, storkie?” said Leucine.
“My what?” asked Bella.
“Don’t play stupid. You’re not a human either. You’re an angel.”
“Whoa, don’t devils hate angels?” said Persephone.
“Some of them are dicks. Bella is cool, she’s an angel named ‘Storge’ in the Court of Rakha. The ones that I have beef with are in the Court of Brethren. There’s a big difference between the two, actually. I’ve been meaning to write a medical paper about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about” Bella mumbled, half-heartedly. The fidgeting in her hands told the other two this clearly was not the case.
“Oh that’s adorable, I think she’s lying”, said Persephone.
“Duh”, said Leucine. “Come on Storge, I’ve seen you transform before, you’re literally a fucking heart. It’s adorable. You really think doing your magical angel weirdness around Percy is going to break *her* mind? She’s the one scaring you right now.”
“Uh, well, it’s supposed to be a secret”, Bella said, her face quite red now.
“You’re working next to a bunch of people who are openly angels and devils”, said Leucine, holding and waving around her devil tail. “Some of us even read minds. Some secret. Now do it! Do the transform thingy!”
“Do it! Do it! Do it!” Persephone chanted.
Bella sighed deeply and her body started into emit gently floating sparks, each one like a soap bubble with a tiny reflected image of herself. The room around her visibly warped and spiraled as pink bursts of light emitted from her. Her body turned a dark shade of pink, the room visibly exploded into bright light, and reality seemed to collapse into a thin line, before expanding again. In a moment, in place of Bella floated a very large human heart with classic angelic wings.
“Baller”, said Persephone, grinning with respect.
“See? That’s what Storge really looks like. It’s pretty cool right? Literally a heart, not a heart shape”, said Leucine.
“Do you do have a true form, uh, red-hair-doc?” said Persephone.
“My name is Leucine. I had a neat godly form once, but it was killed once, so yeah, not really an option right now. What you see is what you get with me. Anyways, now you can give your physical in peace, Storge!”
The floating heart that used to be Bella gave another deep sigh, her voice echoing from the center of the heart. “I don’t have hands in this form.”
“And Percy will reflexively eat anything organic that touches her true form, so I think you’re all set. Just zap her with your healing magic powers, and if you have some diagnosing powers, so much the better.” said Leucine. “I’ll talk to Nurse Elias about getting Percy reassigned to someone who can handle her better. Don’t forget to change back when you’re done.”
“Fine, whatever.” said heart-Bella, clearly resigned to this sequence of events.
“Have fun, you kids.” said Leucine.
“I’m 29!” Bella yelled.
“Not in your angel form!” said Leucine with a wink. She stepped out of the room and locked it behind her. She checked her phone. Hm, almost lunchtime, she thought. Better head over to the food court.
Then she heard it, and she froze.
“Duuuuck…”
Out from the hallway corner waddled hatred incarnate.
The Grand Duck. So named because a duck was what it resembled the most. A short, squat creature less than a meter tall, with a round body and round head entirely covered in very short golden feathers. It walked on short, cream-colored legs and held two very fat, clawed arms up to its round bulbous head. An enormous and broad duck’s bill dominated most of its face, and it wore a simple crown made of some bright orange metal on its head, the crown engraved with an emblem resembling a pitchfork. Behind the crown lay a few tufts of black feathers, usually obscured by the crown. However, it was between the crown and the bill that lay the Duck’s most notable feature- its large, tiny-pupiled eyes.
It, or rather, he, had eyes which held nothing but pure hatred. There were no other emotions present, not even different flavors to its anger. No jealousy, no self-loathing, no covetousness, no fear, no frustration. Just calm, confident sheer pain and hate burning itself into the very soul of anything that met his gaze. Leucine cringed at just a glance of it and tried not to meet his stare. It was like looking into a singularity of darkness, hate, rage and duck-based homicide.
Normally, something, or someone, held back the Grand Duck to merely a nuisance, running around and harassing doctors. Should you truly gave him an excuse, however, he would straight up tax you a limb or two. Which actually was not that bad, considering they were in a hospital and everything. However, the homicidal rage in his eyes clearly wanted to murder everything and everyone ever, even the most oblivious dullard could see that. Leucine had the utmost respect and appreciation for whoever kept the Grand Duck from indulging in mass murder.
Law enforcement and hospital security had long since given up on anything more than damage control around the Duck’s antics, and the Duck had set up shop posing as hospital security. He waddled right up next to Leucine and looked up at her with his usual deep frown on his bill. She tried her best to ignore his presence, seemingly absorbed in her phone instead.
“Duck duck”, he said.
She ignored him still.
“Duuuuuck. Duck”
She pretended not to understand him.
“Duck! Duck duck, duck duck duck. Duuuuck.”
She fiddled between apps on her phone, clearly trying to look busy.
The Grand Duck waddled past her with no change in its hateful expression.
She heaved just the slightest sigh of relief, and then yelped as the duck’s axe bit into the back of her calf, drawing a fair amount of blood. She dropped to her opposite knee, and then the flat of the same axe slammed against her head, knocking her entirely to the floor. She decided not to get up, even though she felt fully able to.
“Psy yi yi yi”, he said, with some satisfaction in his tone.
Leucine tried to keep the profanity in her head. She heard the duck walking away. She slowly got up to her feet. She checked the axe wound. Her boots had a gash open and the skin underneath revealed a small nick, which quickly disappeared before her eyes. Good thing devils healed fast. The boot sealed up behind where the wound was. Regenerating the clothes along with the body was a particularly difficult thing to learn, but it saved so much on repair time, considering how prone to trouble Leucine could be.
Almost everyone hated the duck. His small retinue of devotees was somewhat easier to tolerate, but fortunately, they were not around to bother her. Now that it was properly lunchtime, Leucine decided to head for the Wolcrasi food court.
For lunch, Leucine ordered a burrito full of… stuff. Whatever it was, it was supposed to be all whole grain, lean protein and omega-three, healthy stuff. She hated it. It was not as if devils needed to maintain their weight or nutrition anyways. Next time she would bring her own lunch, but she kept forgetting…
She took her usual table with Dr. Kiva Fidelis, a tan-skinned woman with curly dark red hair and thick pink-red lips. She usually wore a flowery brown and yellow dress beneath her lab coat. Yellow-golden eyes peered out behind her glasses at Leucine and immediately folded into an expression of disdain.
“Heeeeeeey Fiddy”, said Leucine in a sultry tone, swaying her hips as she approached.
“Oh god”, Fidelis muttered, slumping down and running both hands through red hair.
“How’s my favorite doctor in the world doing?” said Leucine, making sure to stress the word ‘favorite’ suggestively.
“Of all the doctors in this fucking hospital, you have to hit on me every single day we sit together”, said Fidelis.
“The Angel of Peace is out today so I can’t hit on her. So it’s just you. And me. Foreveeeeer.”
“Ugh, I can’t wait for our hiring to get started again”, said Fidelis.
Wolcrasi as a hospital was only a year old, so it currently suffered a little from understaffing, even after a hiring blitz that picked up a lot of valuable doctors, nurses and staff who capably did the work of many.
“Why? Bringing in a cute sister for me?” said Leucine.
“Something like that. W… what is that written on your arm? ‘Don’t grab Aru’s ass?’ Lucy, I think you super need to get laid. And before you look at me like that, I’m not volunteering. Now, we are professionals in a professional environment, so can we please talk about something else besides how I look today and what you would like to do with me? Please.”
“Since you asked nicely”, said Leucine with a playful grin. Man, messing with Fidelis was awesome! Even if she were pretty enough Leucine would be hitting on her anyways.
Although she absolutely looked like a human being, Fidelis was actually an angel from the Court of Brethren. She was the one of the few who was experienced in the human world, and were exiled, sort of, for reasons that Leucine could not be arsed to recall. She took on a human form permanently, while the other Brethren were, shall we say, only moderately humanoid most of the time. Anyways, Fidelis was on lukewarm terms only with her siblings, which made her all right in Leucine’s book, because most of them were jerks.
“So, today I helped Bella deal with a physical for Persephone. She flipped out when Bella tried to scan her with an infrared thermometer.”
Fidelis tried not to choke on her salad. “Dr. Luna? The newbie from pediatrics? She’s nowhere near qualified to deal with a hyperdimensional Bleed dweller!”
“Oh yeah. Especially since Percy is super touchy. The other one, with the long hair, Abby, she is such a nice person though. Even though… I think they’re different species, right?”
“I think we might be starting to get into patient confidentiality.”
“Oh poo, Kiva! Anyways, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if you dealt with Percy’s physicals? You’re used to dealing with psychokinesis and the weirdest stuff and you’d deal with it the best.”
“Yes, but also, Percy is touchy as hell. She does her job with IT stuff sure, but she also bites people and screams a lot at problems she can’t bite. I’m immortal, not invincible. I’m not sure why we hired Percy or even keep her as a patient”, said Fidelis.
“Because she’d be close to the medical support she needs as a growing cosmic monstrosity, and also because she’d probably do something like kill people for fun or crusading with the Grand Duck if someone didn’t keep her gainfully employed.”, said Leucine.
Fidelis and Leucine looked around the food court. No sign of the duck anywhere. Fidelis exhaled in relief.
“We might need tougher doctors for the problem patients”, said Leucine. “What about that medical robot? Or the physical therapist? Or the white haired guy with the dog ears?”
“If by the robot, you mean Chihiroe, she’s smart and tough, sure, and almost never rests, but she also has shit for bedside manner. She’d set off someone like Percy in a hurry. If by the therapist, you mean Chac, he knows that crazy martial art, but it only works on human beings and he is pushing 70 and moves like it. So, no. Finally, the person with the dog-ears is KS Elias. He’s pretty good with tough human patients, but he’s also new here, and Percy is probably beyond him.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but we should probably get hiring more of your siblings then”, said Leucine. “The Rakha angels aren’t made of nearly as sturdy stuff.” Under her breath, she made sure to add, “Because they haven’t spent eternity persecuting my people.”
“I heard that. Look, maybe we’re approaching this the wrong way. Our psychiatry wing isn’t open yet, you know that right? Maybe Percy just needs some therapy. ”
“Pft, psychiatrists. Ooh, let’s talk about feelings, maybe that’ll get her to stop biting keyboards in half because the computer froze up.”
“Lucy, you-“
Leucine’s phone chimed with a text message.
“Oop, that’s me.”, she said, swooping her phone out of her lab coat again. “Champey says we have to get ready for a big visit, I should see Willis.”
“Um, secretary Champey or medtech Champey?” asked Fidelis.
“Uh, let me check… ”, said Leucine. “Secretary Champey. That’s not good news.”
“Okay, I’m going to leave this with you”, said Leucine, putting her untouched, unappetizing lunch down next to Fidelis.
“You want me to watch your food?” said Fidelis.
“You can eat it I guess? Not my problem!”
Leucine skipped off to the surgical wing.
Still keeping an eye out for that damned duck, Leucine opened the door to Dr. Wilhelm Doctorow’s office. “Hey, dickhe- oh hey Bella.”
Bella was sitting next to the next, seeming upset about something else as she looked sideways at Leucine. Behind the desk was an older Asian man who spoke with a strong Filipino accent. He wore glasses, a very short haircut and standard work clothes under a lab coat. He always carried an air of extreme calm, even in emergencies. He was Wilhelm “Willis” Doctorow, the chief of medicine at Wolcrasi Community Hospital, and the single best surgeon in the hospital, possibly the world. Willis was also a ten-thousand-year old angel in the Court of Rakha by the name of Virtus, but unlike Dr. Bella Luna or Dr. Grace Vaya, never admitted it after pressure from Leucine. Leucine held back a little vomit when she remembered what his true form looked like.
“Welcome. Bella was just telling me how you saved her life today. Thank you.” said Willis.
“Psssht. You people are semi-mortal in human-form; it won’t kill you to get partly eaten. And I think you’re fully immortal in angelic form.” said Leucine.
Willis made no reaction whatsoever to that statement. “I believe the assignment of an adolescent extraterrestrial to an inexperienced pediatrician was clearly some sort of clerical error, I’m sure we can get it blah blah blah…” Willis’ speech faded into the background as Leucine remembered something important.
Leucine remembered now. Willis was the reason that Bella got this job. Something about adopting her and raising her in a compound to do kung fu and medicine, for some reason... to keep her pure or some other creepy shit. Well, that was none of Leucine’s business; Willis did not give off the creeper vibe and Bella could give him some healthy distance sometimes.
Leucine, focus”, said Willis, as gently as anyone possibly could. “The reason why I asked for you today is because we are due for a personal visit from the chair of the hospital board.”
Leucine froze up. Sensing the tension in Willis and Leucine, Bella shuddered and whimpered.
“W-w-whatever for?” said Leucine.
“A surgery of great importance”, said Willis. “Have you seen the whereabouts of our anatine nuisance lately?”
“You mean the duck? No.”
“What about his followers?”
“The wrestler, the vampire and the kittens? Uh, I think I saw the vampire dunking on Chiharu like ten minutes ago.”
“Hm, not good.” said Willis. “The vampire is too mobile; it’s a stale lead at best.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to have to hunt them down, for reasons that will be explained when the chair arrives.”
“If Dr. Lemaitre is pissed off, you know it’s curtains, right?” said Leucine. “You know she can actually kill me and you, right? For reals.”
“Yes, I am…uncomfortably aware that your natural regenerative abilities do not cover her esoteric … dissection… technique.” said Willis, clearly quite woozy at the thought of angering Lemaitre.
“Well, we have nothing, Dr. Naturae”, he continued. “I took a look at the surgical assignments; you’re free and clear today. Well, you are as of now. I want the vampire, Totallyhumannormalgirl, restrained as quickly as possible. I will personally handle those homicidal cats the Duck keeps around.” He tugged at his tie in a rare tic of nervousness. “I have confidence that Dr. Luna can handle the wrestler.”
“Dr. Bella Luna? Right here? Seriously? She has chops sure, but she’s also like a fifth of Hank Sokolov’s weight. No offense Bella.” said Leucine.
Dr. Luna just silently nodded in reluctant acknowledgment of this fact.
“We don’t have much choice”, said Willis. “This stays need-to-know only, with minimal staff, and Bella unfortunately overheard a video call with Lemaitre at an inopportune time. Try not to drag Dr. Matsuda or anyone else into it in the process.”
“We’re leaving out that no one’s taking care of the Duck. That’s easily the hardest part.” said Leucine.
“The Grand Duck will be easy. We need the Angel of Peace, Keith Takeda and Nurse Chihiroe.” said Willis.
“Peace is taking the week off recuperating from a body waxing session. Dr. Takeda starts with us next month. ”
“Um”, said Willis “I thought that Peace doesn’t have hair. Or skin.”
“It was a really serious waxing session.”
Willis visibly made an effort to suppress the obvious questions that popped into his head.
“Let’s see about contacting Dr. Takeda then. This is an emergency.” he said.
“Yesterday he blocked my number, replying I texted him too much. I said, and I quote, ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you?’ It was the second text message! I don’t think we can reach him.” Leucine said.
“That is unfortunate. Well, in that case, I have also arranged backup choices.”
“Sucks to be them.”
Five minutes later…
“You want WHAT?” Dr. Vivi Belgica yelled.
“This office is too small. Your suit is tacky. Dr. Luna’s profuse sweating is unseemly of a professional, and, oh yeah, and you just ordered us to our goddamn suicides!” said Dr. Fidelis.
“Order registered. Executing when team is ready”, said Chihiroe.
Vivi, Fidelis and Chihiroe had piled into Willis’ office with Leucine, Willis and Bella. Leucine resisted the urge to cop a feel on someone.
Vivi was a humanoid being called a “Dreamy”. For the most part, she was a very cute and tall Asian woman with long hair, a long teal dress, striped tattoos across her upper chest and the usual doctor’s lab coat. However, she also sported a very large fuzzy tail resembling a very fat hair braid, only moving upwards instead of downwards. It gave the impression of her being a very cuddly, harmless scorpion. Her head had large animal-like ears sticking out, colored with a green white and black pattern reminiscent of butterfly wings.
Chihiroe, whose name stood for some long acronym Leucine never could remember, was the local medical robot, of unknown make and provenance, and a damn fine one at that. Probably the most technically competent nurse in the world, although she showed very little in the way of a personality or bedside manner, so she was a little annoying to deal with as a person. Also, she had a bad habit of tasering Leucine whenever Leucine tried to get handsy with her, so Leucine kept her distance, usually.
“You all have a crucial part to play in this”, said Willis. “I trust the three of you to disable the Grand Duck. Your unique talents will-“
“I’m a sleep therapist. I didn’t sign up to fight people sir.” said Vivi. She tried her best to give her usual smile, but it came off as a prisoner savoring a last meal.
“Look, this is an operation of non-metaphorically existential importance. When we complete this, I will happily give you all two weeks of paid vacation, at my expense.” Said Willis.
“You think I do medicine to pay bills? I’ve been practicing for 800 years. I hardly need time off. But what I don’t need is to get hacked to pieces by a berserk duck. As I’ve told Leucine, I’m immortal, not invincible. Do you think regrowing body parts is free and painless?” said Fidelis.
“And I don’t want to die!” said Vivi.
“Fine”, said Willis. “I am prepared to earmark one million dollars apiece from the board’s budget to the sleep medicine and supernatural medicine departments’ allocations, apiece. This is that important. Lemaitre is a woman of her word and this, I guarantee this will be small change in exchange for the favor that we do.”
“Hey, why don’t I get a million?” said Leucine.
“This sounds really dangerous…” said Bella.
“If one million is small change, then I want five million for my department, nothing less.” said Fidelis.
“If I’m risking death and she’s just risking a lot of pain, why doesn’t my department get more!” said Vivi.
“Beep boop, I am a robot”, said Chihiroe.
Willis paused with his hands folded for a long moment, keeping his composure. Finally, he spoke. “Consider the following factors: Firstly, subduing the Grand Duck will make him wary of harassing any of you in the future, if not remove him from the picture forever. It will go a long way for your personal safety and peace of mind. Secondly, this operation is of extreme significance, if it does not happen, I think it is safe to say many people will die. Thirdly, we will alter the plan, to deal with the Grand Duck’s retinue first, two against one, before all six of us take him down; I think that is most reasonable. Fourthly, if you wish to refuse this request from the Hospital Chair herself, I can call her on video chat here and you can explain to her face.”
With that last sentence, a wave of tension went through the other doctors in the room, which made hairs stand on end and sweat drops extract from skin. They knew Willis did not ever bluff in any way. The Chair, even less so.
“Two million”, said Fidelis, quickly.
“Yeah!” said Vivi.
“Very well, two million dollars for your departments. I will extend the paid time off to Dr. Belgica. Final terms, end of story. And, Leucine, no, Emergency Surgery already eats up something like 20% of our budget. But I will let you be Chief of Medicine for a day, no strings attached.”
“Fuck yeah!” said Leucine.
“Okay, that’s not so bad then. Except the part where Dr. Naturae gets to be my boss”, said Vivi.
“I’ll punch her in the soul if she gets out of line”, said Fidelis.
“Done”, said Vivi.
Leucine frowned.
---------
Hank Sokolov stomped through the halls of Wolcrasi Community Hospital. A massive Russian strongman and a veritable colossus of flesh, at over 7 feet and 400 pounds, Hank moved with an unusual sense of purpose today. As one of the Grand Duck’s retinue, the Altan Lord, clearly he had orders to do something nefarious. He wore a red and yellow wrestling leotard, his nearly bald head and coarse black stubble framing his usual broad frown.
Dr. Bella Luna stepped out of the shadows into the hospital hall. Hank stopped. She had her hands up in a fighting pose. He chuckled, and then the chuckle became a loud laugh.
“Are you proposing to being fighting me, leetle girl? You should know Hank Sokolov is invincible. No one is getting over on me”, he said in his thick and deep Russian accent. He flexed his doughy arms and Bella cringed at the enormous muscles that revealed themselves through the fat. She muttered something about hurrying up, sweating under his enormous shadow.
“Eh? Is small Filipino doctor in rush to being smooshed? Very well, I am always ready to oblige, let it be said Hank Sokolov is greatly understanding man.”, he said, making another massive flex of his muscles before slowly looming over Bella.
Suddenly, another pair of lab coat-wearing arms appeared around Hank’s neck and wrapped themselves around it. Willis strained to pull down Hank from behind. Hank did not budge in the least, and smiled. He reached behind himself with one colossal hand and bodily picked up Dr. Willis by the side of his lab coat. Willis’ hands snapped up in a counter. He executed a nasty-looking lock around Hank’s fingers and pushed as hard as he could. His spectacled eyes opened in bewilderment as he might as well be attacking a statue for all the effect it had. Hank smiled and threw the doctor into the ground. Willis rolled out of most of the impact, barely keeping his bones from snapping under the sheer force, and stood up into fighting stance, stumbling a bit from the excess momentum.
While Hank’s back was turned, Bella yelled with a kiai and ran up behind him, executing a furious flurry of sharp punches to his back, topped off with a flying kick at the back of his head. The sound of her blows thundered through the hall. Hank made no reaction, not even a stumble. He turned around at Bella, clearly irritated, catching her with a backhand as he did so. She blocked well in advance of the strike, but the sheer force crumpled her arms against her face and sent her flying nonetheless.
“Leetle girl knows gong fu. I would need many hands to count on fingers how many gong fu fighters I have snapped in half”, Hank said.
Bella held her hand up to her swelling cheek, making sure nothing was broken.
Willis ran up behind Hank and wrapped his arms and legs around one of Hank’s legs, trying to immobilize it. Bella charged forward at the same time. Hank grunted with some effort to free his leg as Bella flew uppercuts and jabs into Hank’s jaw. Vaguely annoyed by each blow to his head, Hank slapped at her, and she narrowly evaded the blow with a deft roll to the side. He slammed his hand down at her, but Willis’ leg hold kept him from quite reaching her. She used the opening to catch him with a roundhouse kick to the side of the hip, to similarly little effect, but Hank, with surprising speed, tugged at her leg as she was retracting from the blow, and threw her into the wall behind him. She landed with a loud cracking sound and plaster chips flew around her as she slowly slid down the shattered wall onto her head.
Hank then reached down to Willis. Willis lunged away from Hank’s incoming grasp, and slid back up to his feet. Hank swiped with his open hand with blinding speed, and Willis casually sidestepped it. Then Hank threw a punch and Willis barely caught onto Hank’s arm. Willis’ foot lashed out at the side of Hank’s foot as Willis executed a flawless throw with his upper body. Except he did not throw Hank. Hank remained there, unmoved as always. Willis’ eyes boggled.
Bella leapt up behind Hank with her lab coat in her hands and wrapped it against Hank’s face, blinding him. She was dangling off his back. Hank yelled a curse in Russian and freed his arm from Willis’ grasp by sheer force, then made an immense leap backwards into the wall. Bella’s body again made a bone-rattling thud against the wall, and she released her grip and slumped onto the floor. Willis lunged forward, caught one of Hank’s hands and spun around, pressing his hands against it in an expert wrist breaking maneuver. He felt only the slightest give from Hank’s wrist and had to duck the counterattack, a powerful hook. The wall splashed under Hank’s fist.
Willis panted with exhaustion as Hank took the offensive, a devastating series of slaps, punches and grabs that Willis dodged with waning confidence. Willis tried to look for an opening, but Hank was fast when he got angry and his massive reach advantage did not make things easier.
Finally, Hank grabbed Willis, and in a movement barely quicker than the eye could see, shattered the doctor’s glasses against both their faces as forehead met forehead. Willis fell to the floor and did not get up.
Hank wiped glass shards off his face as if removing sweat. He turned to Bella, expecting another attack. Bella, slumped down where the wall met the floor, slowly stirred back to life, and wheezed through something that was probably broken. Her mind raced with diagnoses, but she fought off those thoughts. She dragged herself to her feet, blood pooling on the floor from her nose.
She looked to her left and to her right, checking the hallway before mustering her breath for one last effort.
Hank grinned and curled his fingers at her in the universal sign of invitation to violence. Bella stood up, shaking horribly as she did so and clutching one of her arms. Something strange flashed through her mind, and as desperate as she was, it was good enough for her.
She ran forward with a blood-chilling scream and as Hank’s enormous arm met her with a ferocious jab that seemed to stretch forward for miles. She leapt up onto his arm, missing his fist by a hair’s length, pressed her foot against his outstretched arm and sprang forward past his head with a half-roll, passing by legs-first. When the length of her body had nearly passed him, her arms wrapped around his face, and she used her airborne weight and momentum to pull him down. The sheer force managed to sink Hank down to one knee with a loud grunt from both of them. Bella looped her moving body downward and sideways like a gymnast curling herself around rings. Hank’s body jerked with the sudden sideways movement and Hank touched down to the floor with one hand to stay on his knees.
Bella continued her body’s path under and then around Hank’s head, leveraging herself to swing up over Hank’s head at a height that would have Olympians clapping. The back of her shirt touched the ceiling of the hospital hallway for an instant, and then the meteor descended. With Hank wide open beneath her, Bella’s fingers wove together into a ball and as she ended her descent back to earth, she slammed her conjoined fists against Hank’s back with an impact that shook the entire building.
Hank grunted in pain and fell to the floor. Bella flopped down from the impact next to him, the last of herself spent. She weakly raised her head to see if he was still up. He was not. She was not sure if he was going to get up later, but it sure felt like a good time to take a nap.
Bella fell into darkness.
----
“Hey Aru!” said Leucine. Fidelis followed behind her.
“Code black again.” Aru said, shaking her head. “Hey Dr. Fidelis.”
“Where’s the vampire? We are in need of some ass to kick”, said Fidelis.
“Oh that’s a relief.” said Chiharu. “Well, there’s only one place you can catch Totallyhumannormalgirl (god I hate that name), because she runs really damn fast and she’s really hard to find. The basketball court.”
“I’m not familiar with her”, said Fidelis. “Why the basketball court?”
“THNG can’t be caught if she doesn’t want to be.” said Chiharu. “She’s hell-bent on sports and crap in general. The only reliable way to get her to show up is to challenge her to a game of basketball. It seems no matter where you are, what time of day, she’ll rush to play basketball. 30 minutes a pop. But she’s also incredibly good at it, I usually go 0-90 in a solo game with her, and I hear that’s pretty normal. It’s better to have a team, but she’ll still win. Most people around here have given up on challenging her in any way.”
“Well, we’re desperate enough. We’ll take Totallyhumannormalgirl down.” said Fidelis.
The three of them filed into the hospital’s gym. It had all sorts of lines drawn into the ground and poles and equipment lying around for other sports, but the only thing it seemed anyone used it for was basketball. A very small section of bleachers lay on the side, usually empty.
“Okay. This is what we have so say to summon her”, said Chiharu. She pressed her face against her open palms in the universal gesture for embarrassment, and gathered herself before looking up and speaking. “Come on and slam, if you-“
“Wanna jam!” the vampire’s voice rang out as she appeared out of nowhere in the opposite side of the court, amidst a cloud of metal baseball bats. The bats clanged loudly as they hit the ground. She dribbled a basketball at a furious pace, her basketball jersey and curly black hair swaying with every movement.
Chiharu took her gun out and started firing. The vampire leapt around in a series of inhumanly sharp maneuvers, with the ball still in play, keeping Chiharu from getting a bead on her.
“Wait, what?” screamed Fidelis among the deafening din of gunshots and metal bats clanging against the ground. “Why are you shooting at her?”
“The game has begun! There are no rules, except take her out! We get thirty minutes to take her out!” said Chiharu.
“WRRYYYYYY”, the vampire screamed as she leapt several dozen feet up in the air and dunked on the opposite side of the court. The gym’s automated scoreboard flipped three points in her favor.
Fidelis hefted up one of the discarded baseball bats, very unsure of the situation. Leucine simply sat back and observed, clearly waiting for some kind of opening.
The basketball suddenly caromed off Chiharu’s skull, knocking her to the floor with a loud slam and drawing some blood from her nose. Her gun flew out of her hands. The vampire charged at the ball as it bounced shallowly against the floor, covering most of the distance. Fidelis scrambled for the ball, several dozen feet behind the vampire. Leucine smirked, still standing where she started the game and made a spinning motion with her hands, looking straight into the vampire’s eyes.
“Come on and slam- wait, whose ball is it?” said the vampire, THNG, suddenly stopping in her tracks and scratching her head.
Fidelis caught up to the vampire, who seemed suddenly unaware of the doctor approaching her with the baseball bat. Fidelis smashed the baseball bat into THNG’s legs.
“WRRRYYYY!” the vampire screamed as she fell underneath the blow. Fidelis then decided to use her own special talent as she reached down and grasped THNG’s head. Nothing happened.
“Um, I should be opening up your soul right now”, said Fidelis
“Lawl, vampires have no souls!” THNG said, with a grin. She then spun herself up to her feet, causing Fidelis to flinch backwards. She dashed off to retrieve the basketball, losing Fidelis entirely.
Leucine gestured at Chiharu, still rolling on the ground at the pain of having her nose broken by a basketball. Chiharu suddenly stood up, her face entirely free of injury. Chiharu reached for her gun, but THNG was faster and threw the ball at the gun, knocking it away again. The gun discharged as it hit the ground and the bullet caught Chiharu in the shin. She fell to the ground with a grunt, bleeding from her leg. Leucine gestured again and Chiharu got back up to her perfectly healthy feet, unsure why she was kneeling down to begin with.
“Ohhh! I get it now! You’re the medic! Shoot the medic!” said THNG. She retrieved the loose ball once again with her inhuman speed and threw the basketball at Leucine with a speed that would do baseball proud. Leucine narrowly dodged as the ball zoomed past, ricocheted off the wall behind her and hit her in the back off the head. Leucine fell to the ground. THNG caught the ball.
“Hey, wait the ball went out of bounds!” said Fidelis. “That’s not fair!”
“Get dunked on, girlie-o!” said THNG as she sailed through the air and dropped the ball through the hoop. She dropped down after the ball and then threw it at Fidelis. “Your ball!”
“Shit”, said Fidelis. She leapt out of the way, but was too slow. The ball caught her in the obliques, and she fell face first onto the ground hacking and coughing. The ball flew back at THNG as if it were a boomerang. THNG rushed forward to carry the ball forward to the half-court.
THNG cackled as Chiharu continued rapidly shooting at her, missing every shot. The vampire threw the ball at the doctor. Chiharu blocked it with her forearms, the force of the impact snapping her chest and arms backwards, and causing her to stumble backwards. The ball once again bounced back to THNG’s hands. Chiharu scrambled for balance, again seemingly unhurt and Fidelis recovered similarly behind the both of them.
“Time to get schooled then”, said THNG, as she saw Leucine finish making another odd gesture at Chiharu and Fidelis. Then her face wrinkled in confusion as Leucine made another gesture at her, again looking straight into her eyes.
“Wait… who am I playing ag-“, said THNG.
Fidelis slammed the baseball bat against THNG’s head. THNG barely flinched.
“Fool! You can’t hurt me with my own bats!” she said.
Chiharu suddenly pointed the gun in THNG’s face, at point blank range. The gun clicked empty.
Chiharu gave both the vampire and the gun a hateful facial expression that well substituted for the stream of profanity no doubt going through her head.
“Jam with the rest!” said THNG, still with her usual grin. She leapt up several dozen feet as her three opponents looked up in awe. As she fell, she threw down the basketball. It hit Leucine in the head first, then bounced off Chiharu’s head and finally smacked Fidelis in the leg, keeping enough momentum to draw a fair bit of blood on every impact. The bloodstained basketball bounced back into THNG’s hand as she ran past, and she leapt back up to the hoop and dunked it into rim again. The scoreboard now read 8-0.
After quite some time unconscious, Chiharu rolled up to her feet, puddle of blood at her feet, and looked up at the scoreboard. “Hey Leucine, do your magic healing thing!” she said, with some difficulty. “We still have 10 minutes to bring her down!”
Leucine sat and clutched her head in pain. She hobbled over to Chiharu to get within normal speaking distance. “Doesn’t work that way, I have to witness the injury happen”, she whispered to Chiharu. “I’d heal myself if I could, but I lost consciousness.”
Fidelis crawled to them, battered and bruised all over, her injured legs clearly not in shape to support her.
“Don’t you people heal fast by yourselves?” said Chiharu.
“Leucine’s special because she can actively heal herself. With limitations. Outside of that, we immortals need some downtime to get better”, said Fidelis, as she spat out teeth. “The score is 215-0 now. She’s just been dunking unopposed on me this whole time and hitting me with the ball every time she scored.”
“Fuck the score”, said Chiharu. “We kick her ass to win, that’s all that needs to happen.”
“Your ball!” said the vampire as she sank yet another basket.
“Incoming!” said Chiharu as she tackled Leucine to the ground. The basketball zoomed past them. THNG made another almost-flying leap across the gym towards the ball.
“Plan? I’m almost out of bullets. Just this last clip.” said Chiharu.
“Fidelis, instead of trying to use your mojo on the vampire, how about Aru here?” said Leucine.
“You know, that just might work.” said Fidelis.
“Wait, what?” said Chiharu.
Before Chiharu could protest, Fidelis sunk her hand deep into Chiharu’s skull, passing into it as if immaterial. A golden yellow glow emitted from the interface where their bodies met. Chiharu’s eyes rolled up a bit and stared far away, her jaw went slack and she sat motionless. Fidelis’s eyes stared into Chiharu’s head, looking over something she could see, as if reading a text. She made fine movements with her obscured hand, as if practicing surgery and muttered under her breath.
“I’ll cover you”, said Leucine. She picked up Fidelis’ baseball bat and swung hard at an incoming basketball, barely deflecting it. Fidelis was deeply absorbed with whatever she was doing to Dr. Matsuda.
“Don’t have much time”, said Leucine. The vampire ran up to her, with the ball in hand. Leucine hesitantly prepared another swing, but she was too late.
“Get dunked on!” said THNG, as she leapt up and smashed the ball onto Leucine’s head. Leucine dropped like a brick through thin air.
“Done!” said Fidelis as THNG similarly smashed the basketball into her skull. Fidelis unceremoniously dropped to the ground as well.
“Slam with the best or jam with the rest!” said THNG, as she prepared for the coup de grace on a still-catatonic Chiharu.
A hand flew up and caught the ball just as it made contact. Chiharu’s glazed expression creased in determination and her lips made a snarl as her hands wrestled the ball out of THNG’s grip. She punched the vampire in the face, knocking the vampire back. She rose to her feet, dribbling the basketball defiantly.
“Take this thing into overtime!” said THNG, still cheerfully grinning and apparently unhurt. She rushed at Chiharu, disappearing into a blur. Chiharu pulled out her gun again in an equally fast draw and calmly fired a single shot at THNG. The vampire dodged to the side of the bullet and Chiharu’s aim followed her. The vampire tried to shake her aim, but Chiharu kept pace, periodically firing a shot to keep her opponent guessing, and dribbling slowly towards the basket on the opposing side of the court.
She then threw the ball at the basket rim. Like iron filings in a MRI room, the vampire flew at the ball to intercept it. But Chiharu was ready for her. Chiharu placed her last bullet next to the path of the basketball and THNG flew right into it. The vampire continued her trajectory, landing in a crumpled, bleeding heap.
“Wrrryyyy”, the vampire moaned on the ground.
Chiharu stood over her foe and looked over her injury. “I hate you so much. Now it’s your turn to get dunked on.” She kicked the vampire in the face, and satisfied that the bullet was not life threatening enough (insomuch as this thing was alive), walked off.
“Okay, that’s one down”, Chiharu panted, as exhaustion caught up to her.
Chiharu roused Fidelis and Leucine from their unconsciousness and onto their feet.
“What on earth did you do to me? I don’t feel any different and I don’t remember what you did after you reached your hand into me. But… I won. All by myself.” Chiharu said.
“I reached into your soul and altered your mind to stay calm and focused.” Said Fidelis. I can’t give you skills you don’t have but I can get you perform at your best even in the worst possible situation. You might behave a bit differently from this point on, but hopefully nothing drastic. The effects should leave the next time you go to sleep, so just take a nap if you’re not feeling quite yourself. Sorry about the lack of consent, surely you understand.”
“Yeah. It was worth it.”
“Now, we are about to do something even stupider than this, so you can go off now and do something non-dangerous without us.” said Leucine. “Also, be sure to call me when I get promoted to Chief of Medicine for a day!”
Chiharu stared forward in blank abject horror.
“She’s kidding.” said Fidelis.
Chiharu slowly walked away. Leucine felt struck by a mighty urge to grab Dr. Matsuda’s ample Japanese behind, but as her hands reached out, she noticed the “DON’T GRAB ARU’S ASS” drawn on marker on her glove sleeves. She quickly snapped her hands back to her sides. Fidelis scoffed.
Leucine turned to Fidelis. “Wow, Fiddy, you look like shit”
“I’ve been shot with a basketball for fifteen minutes on end while you were in dreamland”, said Fidelis. “You know what, I’ll be in the hospital dorms while I sleep this off. Wake me up when it’s time to commit suicide by duck”. She walked off with a dismissive wave of her hand.
-----
Vivi and Chihiroe followed a trail of shed cat hairs. Their opponent today would be the fearsome MASSCAT, a collective of small feline beings of pure malevolence. In other words, kittens.
Vivi looked rather out of place with her massive scorpion-like green and brown tail swaying behind her as she walked. Her normally cheerful demeanor was replaced by a worried frown, possibly because she was thrown into a battle against a being of pure evil. Her human-appearing body, from the chest down, sported a thin coat of tan-colored fur, but it was hard to tell because her long dress, white leggings and lab coat covered most of it.
Chihiroe, short for “Counter-hazard Inspection, Health and Infirmary Robotic Entity” walked beside her. Her pink-trimmed black robe vaguely reminded passerby of a kimono, if it were not for a few electronic-looking glowing lines running across it. Her face was extremely pale and slightly metallic, with a faceplate across her lower face that strongly resembled a surgical mask, and usually bore a placid expression. Her long black hair formed into a ponytail and several long bangs, and no one ever saw her without a surgical light on her headband. Today she carried a shotgun.
“Isn’t that a bit much to hunt for cats?” said Vivi.
“Current ordnance: Less-lethal baton rounds. Odds of serious injury from incapacitating impact calculated at 23%”, said Chihiroe.
“That’s pretty high!” said Vivi.
Chihiroe pointed at Vivi’s tail. “Naturally-emitted soporific dust of unknown provenance. Odds of serious injury from unexpected sedation calculated at 17%. Long-term side effects unknown.”
“Only in an uncontrolled setting. I don’t use it on standing patients; they need to sit down first. And MASSCAT is a bunch of kittens, they can handle falling down much better than humans.”
Chihiroe suddenly stopped in her tracks. “Divergence in trail noted. Highest probability is splitting of hostile feline entities.”
“So… split up?”
“Negative.” Chihiroe swiped her hand across the hairs and looked closely at them. “Further analysis of hair suggests sequential, rather than simultaneous shedding. Highest probability is backtracking.”
“Lol ambush faaaaaags!” cried a high-pitched voice as a gunshot rang out. It bounced off Chihiroe. Vivi flinched. A small kitten leapt out of nowhere onto Vivi and sank a tiny knife into her shoulder. She screamed and tore the kitten off her, throwing it aside.
“Lololol you didn see it coming fags” said the kitten as it landed on the floor with a perfect three point landing. Chihiroe snapped up her shotgun at it, but another kitten landed on her arm, throwing off her aim. It hit her with a lensed surgical instrument, shattering its glass against her arm. Chihiroe smoothly picked up the kitten and slammed it onto the floor.
“lol owned”, said the kitten and then it gurgled as it hit the floor. Suddenly, a car came out of nowhere and smashed into Chihiroe, crushing her against a wall. Vivi yelped and dove out of the way of the vehicle and debris. Another gunshot narrowly missed her. She covered her head and whimpered. Her tail began emitting a strange white dust that seemed to float in the still air.
“Bitches u gunna die”, said another kitten in a high-pitched screech from the direction of the gunshot. It carried a BB rifle up to Vivi. It shot her in the face. She flinched up to a kneeling position and screamed in pain.
As the kitten cycled the rifle, Chihiroe peeled herself out from against the car, and kicked the gun-wielding kitten out of the way, sending it flying. She picked up her shotgun, but several kittens dismounted from the car that hit her, with various dangerous medical instruments in hand. Chihiroe knocked one kitten away with a hasty-aimed shot, but the kittens were on her immediately and hacked away in abandon, causing her to drop her shotgun again.
“Die slut dieeeee”, said one kitten. “Haters gonna hate, get fucked up boyo” said another. Chihiroe threw off all of her attackers, but more and more poured out of the car and the ones who fell off simply got back on and bashed their axes, hammers and bone saws against the robot.
Vivi limped up to her feet, clutching a welt below one of her eyes and a cut in her shoulder. She heard something familiar behind her, a put-puttering sound, followed by a loud RNGGGG-DUHDUHDUHDUH that sent a shiver up her spine. She looked at the source of the sound and saw a kitten wielding a small medical bone chainsaw looking at her with hateful glee. She screamed at the top of her lungs as the kitten lunged at her. She barely pushed the chainsaw away from her face, screaming the entire time. Another kitten popped into her view behind her attacker, and Vivi’s eyes widened as much as they humanly could as the second kitten produced a cautery pen, glowing red hot at its tip. The second kitten stabbed at her with the pen, and Vivi Belgica mustered absolutely everything she had to push the chainsaw kitten into the path of the pen.
The kitten yelped a vile racial epithet followed by a stream of profanity as the cautery pen sank into its back with a hiss, and the air bloomed with the smell of burnt fur. The burnt kitten went limp and collapsed where it stood. The second kitten with the cautery pen giggled and extracted the tip from its comrade. Vivi yelled when the first kitten dropped the running chainsaw, causing it to dance around on the floor, cutting shallowly into her foot as it did so. She fell backward out of the path of the chainsaw, fighting the urge to clutch at her foot. The second kitten landed on its feet, away from the loose chainsaw, and approached her with the cautery pen.
Vivi scrambled away from the kitten as it menaced her with the cautery pen, the attached power pack on its back like a backpack. Desperate enough to try something stupid, she spun around with her tail as fast as she could. It slapped the kitten, knocking the pen away, but doing little else. The kitten recovered quickly and lunged for the pen at the same time as Vivi. She started winning their sudden tug-of-war, when the kitten bit into her hand. She screamed and released it. The kitten seized onto the cautery pen. Thinking fast, Vivi picked the kitten up by the power pack on its back and pushed it down onto the floor, squashing the kitten with her weight.
“Fucking whore cunt I’ll fu-“the kitten sputtered, then Vivi felt something give way underneath her with a nasty silent wet crunch.
Vive pushed the (hopefully) neutralized kitten and its ruined battery pack away, and then turned to help Chihiroe. White dust from Vivi’s tail and debris from combat swirled around the battlefield now.
Chihiroe wasn’t showing much sign of damage, but the kittens were hacking away at her neck and face, and she was pinned underneath the weight of at least a full dozen kittens on her. One of them leapt off at Vivi. Vivi, barely conscious of her actions at this point, slapped it away, sending it flying and bouncing through the hallway. She picked up a large piece of plaster from the destroyed wall that the car hit, and threw it at Chihiroe, knocking off another kitten.
Chihiroe used the opening to free her arm and produce a very large taser from her robe pockets. She jammed it into her own face and the currents ran across her metallic skin. Most of the kittens that were on her twitched and danced to an inaudible but surely very fast tune as electricity surged across her and their bodies. They fell from her like bizarre fruit from a robotic tree, slightly smoking as they lay still, amplifying the smell of burnt fur in the air.
The few kittens remaining on Chihiroe renewed slamming their tools against her body with great vigor, knocking her off balance. Another wave of kittens descended from the ceiling, to Vivi’s horror, descending on all sorts of medical cables and wires as if they were drop lines, bearing scalpels and pins in their teeth.
Vivi, still not hoarse from nonstop yelling, gave an uncharacteristic cry of panic and fury as she concentrated and tensed herself, her tail quivering rapidly. The white dust in the air intensified.
As the kittens descending down breathed in the rising white dust, their movements slowed. Then, finally, stopped, as they were about to reach Vivi and Chihiroe with their sharp implements, and they fell. The few that were on Chihiroe quickly followed suit, falling to the ground with gentle cat snoozing noises. Vivi yelped and covered her head with her arms as several unconscious kittens bounced onto and off her. One unlucky scalpel fell onto her leg, drawing blood. She extracted it without thinking.
After she finished cowering, Vivi looked around. The area was still. She was bleeding and bruised in many places, but she could mostly walk, with a bit of difficulty. Her dress and lab coat sported more tears than uninterrupted fabric at this point. Her tail, oddly enough, was perfectly fine.
Chihiroe seemed for the most part fine, although her body now sported many cuts, scuffs and dents. She stood at attention once more as if nothing went wrong.
“Mission successful. All 27 components of MASSCAT accounted for.”, Chihiroe said.
“Is there a washroom nearby?” said Vivi, dizzy with her own sleeping dust in her lungs. She knew adrenaline was the only thing keeping her standing, and that would wear off soon. “Where are we now, even?”
“We seem to be in front of the medical waste facilities”, said Chihiroe.
“Okay. I think I am okay, so going to get cleaned up, then let’s report back to Dr. Doctorow. I just want a hot bath at the end of the day and then my two weeks.”
Vivi, leaning against Chihiroe, staggered back to Willis’ office.
-----
“Okay, headcount”, said Willis. The group huddled together in an empty operating room.
Willis seemed in perfectly normal shape, although he now wore a slightly different pair of glasses and his clothes looked shredded up underneath a replacement lab coat. Bella, on the other hand, leaned against him, barely able to stand up on her own, and covered in bloody bandages. One of her eyes swelled shut and she held up an icepack up to her head. She had a nervous smile on her face despite all this.
Leucine tended to Vivi, carefully suturing up her cuts as Vivi downed a few painkillers. Fidelis lay sound asleep in a chair beside them. One could see her fresh scars and bruises get ever so slightly smaller with every minute that passed.
Chihiroe stood at attention as usual, entirely unconcerned with the battered state of her body.
“We really shouldn’t have Vivi do more fighting”, said Leucine.
“Yeah, but I made it out okay this time. Next time it’ll be okay too, right?” said Vivi, with an air of disbelief in her words.
“Everyone seems to be okay except Dr. Belgica, who seems to be in a classic state of post-traumatic shock.” Said Willis. “We’ll have her and Chihiroe prep an operating room while we deal with the Duck. I’m afraid it’s too late to substitute Dr. Belgica.”
“Is the four of us enough to take on the Duck?” said Leucine.
“I have no idea”, said Willis. “Anyways, he’s going to be in the medical waste center, I suspect his three minions were standing guard for him.”
“What is he doing there?” said Bella. “Eating dead bodies? Er, body parts?”
“He’s seeking the Unlimited Gallstones, an immense source of power created from an excess of psychokinetic, or magical, energy. We apparently had them extracted from some especially gifted patients. Our surgeons did not recognize what they were, and the Unlimited Gallstones are currently scattered in various forms among this week’s medical waste. But he knew, somehow. It is important that we take down the duck before he can amass them all and acquire immense power. “
“Wait, what? Immense power just comes from people’s gallstones? What?” said Bella.
“These are particularly powerful beings, whose identities I am not at liberty to disclose, due to privacy regulations.” Said Willis “All I know is that we will be handling medical waste from supernatural beings far more carefully in the future. Currently, the five gallstones correspond to, and control, five fundamental forces that make the world go round:
He shuddered.
“Wait, did the Fat-Bottomed Girls one come from Valine in the Sleep Medicine ward?” said Leucine.
Willis visibly hesitated.
“I knew it! That girl has ass for days!” said Leucine.
“Fat-Bottomed Girls? What the heck does that have to do with anything even?” said Bella.
“God, haven’t you ever listened to Queen?” said Leucine.
“I was trapped in a room for two hun- for a while, okay?”
Fidelis snorted and gasped in her sleep, interrupting their train of thought.
“Anyways, let’s kick some ducky ass”, said Leucine.
“The longer we delay, the closer he is to completing his search of the medical waste facility!” said Willis.
----
Fidelis, Willis, Bella and Leucine burst through the double doors into the medical waste facility. The immortal team was ideal for taking on the Grand Duck, as there was a non-zero chance they would lose this battle.
The Grand Duck was clearly expecting them. He stood in the middle of the facility, dried blood saturating his little yellow claws, his large beak and round torso. He quacked menacingly at them, with his large battle-axe firmly in his claws.
“Duck duck… Duck. Psyyyy…. Yiyiyiyi.”
Fidelis flinched at seeing the hate in the Duck’s eyes. Sensing weakness, the Duck flung his axe. Willis ducked out of the way and the axe hit Leucine behind him, removing her head immediately. Her severed head fell onto the floor and started pouring ashes instead of blood from her neck stump.
Willis yelled, “Focus on the duck! Dr. Naturae can recover!” The three remaining doctors began to charge forward at the duck. The Grand Duck stared hatefully at them as he tipped his crowned head forward. A small green object fell out of his crown. He caught it, removed a smaller silver sliver of material from it with a loud click and almost dismissively tossed it forward.
Willis grimaced with force as he realized the projectile bouncing towards them was a hand grenade. He shoved Bella to the ground, covering her with his body. Fidelis started to dive to the side, but too late. The grenade went off at her feet, ripping off many pieces of her body, which decayed into ashes almost immediately upon leaving her. The remaining tatters of Dr. Fidelis’ body fell to the floor with a surprisingly soft thump.
Willis got up to his feet, bleeding and shaking considerably from several fragments entering his lower body. Bella scrambled to her feet, but had some difficulty. The Duck lunged forward, shockingly fast on his tiny ducky feet, covering the ground between him and them almost immediately.
Willis braced for an attack, but the Duck’s furious claws sprung out and ripped into his guarded stance immediately, ignoring whatever parries Willis could muster. Willis tried to grab the Duck for a counterattack, but the Duck fought relentlessly and whenever Willis grabbed a claw, the other one tore into his arms, leaving deep gash. Willis’ legs, pin cushioned with shrapnel, threatened to buckle under him, keeping him unable to match the duck’s rapid footwork.
Bella crept up from behind and smashed both fists together on the Duck’s head, which only pissed him off. The Grand Duck leapt up frighteningly high, kicking Bella backwards. Willis took the chance to catch the Duck with a punch, but the Duck twisted in midair, catching Willis’ arm, and, clinging onto the arm like a branch, deftly swiped his claws across Willis’ throat.
Willis gurgled and gasped for air. The Duck leapt up with unnatural force and slammed his head into Willis’ forehead, knocking him down. Willis struggled to get up, blood sputtering from his lips as she strained, but his wounded legs would not obey him. His breath caught in his slashed throat, and he fought to stay calm.
In the moment this all happened, Bella stumbled from the kick, and when she recovered and Willis fell, the Duck gracefully pirouetted around to meet her. He stared deeply into her eyes, contesting her will. She fought the urge to shudder beneath his all-hating gaze. Willfully discarding all the horrible things she had heard and just saw about him, she took the first move, a measured spear-handed strike. The Duck sidestepped it just so and lashed out with his claws to dig into her hand. She accepted the attack as it nicked her retreating hand and without pause used her other hand to slam into the Duck’s skull. The Duck too accepted the blow, and leapt at her in a flurry of claw strikes. Bella backpedaled under the assault. The duck landed and immediately darted forward far sooner than any being should have. Bella acrobatically leapt over his lunging strike and over his head, landing behind him. She made a sweeping kick behind her at where she guessed he was and she was rewarded with an impact and a quack of anger.
They turned around to face each other. The Duck took the initiative this time, and ran forward at her, swiping wildly at her feet and legs. She moved like a dancer despite her injuries, weaving out of his strikes. When the moment presented itself, she intercepted one of his strikes at his elbow, instead at his claws, with a sharp kick. As he staggered backward from the rotation, Bella dipped low, leaning in for a fist to his head. He gave her what she swore could have been a smile, and then jumped up again with unearthly force, leading this time with his large duckbill. She blocked the blow, but the hardness of the bill bit into her arms. He then contorted in midair and ripped up her forearms with another sharp claw slash. She yelped in pain and stumbled backwards. In her heart, she realized defense was hardly tenable against an opponent with sharp claws and this kind of agility. The duck landed, took a resting stance and stared at her again with hatred burning in his eyes.
Bella left her usual stance and relaxed. She started hostilities again with a sharp kick. The Duck’s claws ripped into her leg, but she did not relent. She kicked with her other foot in a wide crescent kick that caught him in the head and knocked him backwards. She nearly stumbled on her hurt leg, but forced it into place with sheer will as she threw a barrage of low punches and smashes into the Duck’s head. Every single blow landed, and one of the Duck’s eyes closed with tears when she bashed her fist right against it. The Duck began rolling with the strikes, and eventually managed to parry one with its bill, skinning Bella’s knuckles against its blunt surface.
Bella did not stop and her next strike knocked off the Duck’s crown, revealing a small patch of a few large black hairs on its head. The Duck leapt up into her wide-open stance and cut open her face with an unexpected swipe of his claws, and although she could see only red, white and agony, she flew an elbow up to meet him in the face. She could feel the Duck knocked off balance in mid-air by the strike. He continued on his trajectory onto her torso, clinging on with one of its hands, and she felt the Duck wildly scramble at her with his free hand, slashing away at her upper arm, shoulder and neck. The warmth of her own blood bathed her and everywhere she turned her mind, the pain in her own body screamed at her.
She raised her un-injured arm and dropped an elbow up into his head, feeling a gratifying impact. She continued slamming into his head, until he finally seized her forearm and cut the length of her arm open. She screamed and did the only thing left to her- remembering her fight with Hank, she leapt up as high as she could and landed on her opponent clinging to her. The Duck flattened slightly under her weight. She rolled off, blinded and bloodied. In between her loud breaths, she heard the Duck get up to his feet and walk around. She screamed with rage and struggled away in his general direction, not sure exactly where he was.
Then she felt the Duck’s claws around her and the tension of his body. Before she could react, she felt a blunt impact and then her mind was silence.
The Grand Duck rolled his claws out of a tight fist and dropped Bella to the ground. He heard her still breathing. He gently rolled her onto her side. He waddled over to where Willis lay. Willis’ eyes glazed over, his breathing had stopped, and his skin was white with exsanguination. What the Duck could not have known was that Willis’ body was still very much warm and would continue to be so as he recovered, but that possibility did not concern the Duck in the least.
He breathed with some difficulty, one of his eyes was swollen shut, one of his arms barely moved, and any of the doctors on the floor could tell he was enjoying the effects of a concussion with the difficulty in some of his movements. However, The Grand Duck had a mission, and his injuries were entirely secondary in his mind.
The Grand Duck waddled over to Leucine. Leucine was stirring to consciousness, her skin and hair materializing out of thin air and slowly wrapping itself around on the exposed muscle of her regrowing skull. Her decapitated head had decomposed entirely to a ring of ashes and smoke on the ground next to the reconstructing head actually on her neck. The duck shook his head in frustration and bit into her neck and upper chest with his large duck bill. She screamed awake and then cried in pain as his large blunt beak dug into her. Finally, the bill made a loud crunching noise and drew blood. Leucine stopped yelling and went limp in the duck’s grasp. The Duck tore away and spat out a large chunk of flesh, which began decaying to ash the moment it left her body, as before. Leucine slumped back to the ground.
The Duck pulled out a flare and threw it at Leucine, setting her body on fire. He turned to Fidelis, similarly observing the way her body was undoing the holes where the grenade had torn into her body, although she was not nearly intact enough to regain consciousness. Then he lit her on fire too.
Now fully uninterrupted, the Grand Duck, lord of the Altan Ord, spat out the blood pooling in his mouth and waddled over to his prize. The last Unlimited Gallstone, hidden in a bag of medical waste a few meters away. He tore it open, savoring the smell of days-old gore before he tucked into a piece of gore that glowed with unnatural energy.
He froze up in the middle of his morbid meal. Something quaked in his stomach, loud enough to be felt from outside. The edges of his open eye glowed with a rainbow of color and he shook furiously- not as in seizing, but as in actually vibrating side to side as a single entity. Then, his big ducky eyes rolled back and The Grand Duck slumped to the ground.
-------
Leucine gained consciousness outside the operating room. She saw Bella, Vivi and Chihiroe nearby. Bella looked like she been successfully murdered and rose from the grave, she was covered in freshly removed blood and parts of her were barely holding together amidst several hundreds of stitches. She sat in a chair, clearly in no condition to sit up, although her eyes were open, she clearly wasn’t fully there right now.
Vivi and Chihiroe were as they were before the confrontation with the Duck, clearly prepping for a surgery. Leucine noticed she was lying on a hospital bed. That means the Duck killed her at some point in the last hour. She looked around to her sides and saw two other beds: Fidelis’ body slowly reassembling itself to her right, and the Grand Duck himself, unconscious, on her left.
Willis stepped in, gasping and huffing. His clothes looked completely trashed and bloodstained he was missing his glasses. He clearly had been running, but otherwise seemed in perfect condition. No indication of a fight was present on his body, even though his shredded clothes said otherwise.
Leucine stared with some curiosity. He somehow recovered faster than she did and Fidelis did, but not fast enough to squeeze in a change of clothes. Probably something to do with being an angel of healing.
“Let’s begin operating immediately”, he said, motioning for Chihiroe to bring him something. “These are far from ideal or even halfway sterile conditions, but bear with us. Ah Dr. Naturae, you are up already. Good. We’ll fill in Dr. Fidelis when she wakes.”
Leucine nodded and got out of bed. Chihiroe brought them scrubs and helped them get dressed in the nearby changing rooms. Meanwhile, Vivi and Chihiroe wheeled in the Grand Duck. Chihiroe palpated his arm for a vein. Chihiroe took an IV line filled with a strange murky fluid, shrugged her shoulders and stabbed his arm with the cannula and threaded the IV needle through it. Vivi and Chihiroe gave the Duck the Wolcrasi standard procedure for a being of unknown anatomical composition. Anesthetic gas intubation, reinforced straps tying him to the table, stomach pumping (didn’t remove the Unlimited Gallstones, unfortunately), more vital sign sensors than usual and several reflex tests to make sure he was completely out (thankfully, he was). It wasn’t standard practice, but Vivi also threw in a good old-fashioned prayer because, if he left sedation while the surgical team was anywhere around, that would probably be the end of all of their lives that very moment. She made a move towards her Sudoku before remembering that this procedure would need her full attention as a (stand-in) anesthesiologist.
Fidelis woke up midway through preparations. Leucine, noticing Fidelis’ loud gasp of breath with new lungs, stepped out halfway-dressed. She sashayed over in her purple scrubs just for Fidelis and handed her a spare set of scrubs. Fidelis pretended not to notice Leucine trying to draw attention to her butt as she stepped into another dressing room stall.
Bella burst into the room and yelled at no one in particular.
“Let’s go, we’re ready! We have to open this duck up now!” she said.
Willis stepped out, fully dressed and nodded. “The fate of the multiverse depends on it!”
The surgical team reconvened with the Duck in the operating room. Bella and Fidelis had undone their injuries like Willis and Leucine did, Bella having changed into scrubs privately out of everyone’s sight. However, the both of them were still quite unsteady on their feet, unlike Leucine and Willis standing quite confidently as Chihiroe applied gloves to their waiting hands.
“Subject is the anatine creature known as the Grand Duck”, said Willis into a recording device that Chihiroe held up. “Patient shows no sign of-“
“Two questions”, said Leucine. “First, we don’t need a surgical transcript, this is top secret and we’re in a rush, remember. Secondly, and yes this goes against everything I am as a doctor, but why are we bothering to keep the duck alive? He’s a mass murderer, anesthesia will be difficult on a being of unknown bodily composition and put two and two together, if he wakes up he’s going to kill every single one of us, magic gallstone powers or not. It will complicate this surgery like heck.”
“You’re right about the transcript”, said Willis, waving away Chihiroe’s recorder. “But we aren’t killers, Dr. Naturae. You have seemed to already concede the ethical issues, so on a practical note I will say this: the Chair of the Board said she wants the duck quite alive, and that should be reason enough. If it’s not, we don’t know what the unlimited gallstones can do. They could save his life and cause him to wake up if sufficiently threatened or resurrect him or…. Rakha knows what else. So… just keep an eye out for that.”
“Okay, whatever”, said Leucine. “Fiddy, stick your hand in him.”
Fidelis sighed and put one hand on the Duck’s head. With some difficulty, she phased her hand into his forehead. She shuddered and made a noise. “God, his soul is most horrifying thing I’ve seen after that one gal who killed all of Phiem. But he is asleep now and if I play with this right, he will definitely stay that way. But let’s not go there unless we have to.”
Willis nodded. Bella handed him a marker and a thin, uneven black tube wired up to a screen on the wall next to him. Laparoscopy was his specialty, he could make surgical cameras and tubes smoothly disappear into someone as if their bodies were born to take it. “Dr. Naturae, incise where I have marked. Excellent.”
He slid the tube into the duck and looked around in the camera screen beside him. He informed the team that the Duck’s crop and gizzard were empty and he would be moving on to the intestines, no further incisions necessary. His hands worked almost magically, pushing the laparoscope through the Duck’s body in ways that clearly not intended by anyone, ever, and he was fully getting away with it. In a few moments, he searched the duck’s intestines thoroughly and detected no less than three gallstones, quite separated apart. He snaked the laparoscope around as it were alive, to get a good look in the lower intestines and detected the other two. He reached around the Duck with his marker and placed three crosses for necessary incisions and others that precisely indicated where additional openings might help. The sparse placement of the necessary markings was an act that required both great faith in the surgical team as well as fantastic expertise in triangulating the position of the camera to the Duck’s body. Especially when a non-human being was the subject.
The Duck stirred and the entire operating room audibly tensed. Vivi hurriedly adjusted several dials on the anesthetic gas machine and inspected the IV line going into the Duck. Fidelis nervously waited with her hand still phased into the Duck’s head. They would be working from the path from the last Unlimited Gallstone back up the Duck’s intestines. Leucine made the first operating incision, a tiny nick, just enough to slide a flexible tube in, which she would be working through to extract the Unlimited Gallstone. Willis watched her movement through, switching his eyes between the opening and his laparoscopy monitor and gave a few helpful remarks to guide her. Leucine maneuvered her blade with expert grace, slipping through each layer of the Duck’s tissues. In half a minute since cutting open the duck, she had reached the gallstone. She pulled it out with the utmost care and dropped it onto a tray Chihiroe held. Willis withdrew his camera to the position of this next gallstone. Leucine pulled back her knife slightly and made a straight path for the next stone with supreme confidence, Willis directing her to adjust her path slightly. The Duck’s thick internal tissues gave little resistance under Leucine’s finesse. Though she had never cut open the Duck or any of his ilk before, the tissues were well familiar to her and she knew how to coax her way through with each layer’s weaknesses and quirks.
The room shook slightly. Leucine and Willis didn’t so much as flinch, absorbed as they were in the surgery. Vivi gasped a little. The room shook again, this time harder.
Willis said, “Doctors Luna and Fidelis, please attend to whatever unwanted visitors we may have”.
He returned to the surgery as if nothing had happened, correcting Leucine ever so slightly.
Dr. Fidelis extracted her hand from the Duck’s head. With a grunt, she walked off and tore off a section of metal railing from an empty hospital bed. She slapped its heft against her hand and, apparently satisfied, moved to leave the room. Bella followed her, palming a spare item from the surgical tool tray on her way out.
They kicked open the doors and saw Hank and THNG before them. Hank had a large and nasty bruise climbing up his right shoulder and THNG’s basketball jersey was soaked somewhat from her prior gunshot, although both of them were still up and fully standing. Bella twitched and her mouth filled with foam a little. She and Fidelis both looked very fed up and tired.
Hank said, “I take little glasses doctor, you take care of small gong fu lady”.
THNG nodded and said, “Come on and slam and welcome to the jam!”
Fidelis yelled something in Russian at Hank. Bella had no idea what it meant, but it was probably extremely unladylike if Fidelis’ uncouth body language and Hank’s quickly reddening face meant anything.
Hank sputtered with rage and stalked forward. Fidelis concealed the metal bar in her hands behind her back. Hank broke into a run at Fidelis, who sidestepped it and, bracing the bar against her body, pried it between Hank’s massive legs mid-stride. Hank fell to the ground with a meaty crash and Fidelis wasted no time in jumping onto his upper back, and rammed her hand into his head.
Hank went still and lay politely against the floor. A basketball shot out at the back of Fidelis’ head. Bella dove and caught it, then rolled out of her roll up to her feet and threw the ball back at the vampire.
THNG caught the returning ball. As her hands closed against the basketball, Bella dashed forward with incredible speed and bashed her palm against the ball to ram it into THNG’s face, then delivered a couple of sharp hooks into THNG’s midsection. The vampire crumpled under the barrage. Without the slightest pause, Bella kicked out THNG’s feet and jumped onto her, punching down wildly, drawing ample blood. Bella’s screaming and pounding contrasted with Fidelis a meter away, carefully twitching her hand inside of Hank’s head with a smoldering anger on her face.
Suddenly, a kitten leapt up on Fidelis’ back and sank a knife into it. Fidelis grimaced in pain, and used her free hand to grab at the kitten. The kitten already left that spot, though, and stabbed her again lower in the back. Bella paused from laying into THNG, retrieved something from her lab coat pocket, and revealing it as antiseptic spray, unleashed it into the kitten’s eyes, causing it to flail around blindly.
Fidelis pinned the kitten under her elbow, knocking it flat and laying it still. Another kitten creeping towards her with another knife hesitated. Bella continued punching THNG in the face.
Before either MASSCAT or Fidelis could act further, Willis opened the operating room doors, smoothly walked out behind Fidelis, grabbed the kitten, and gently held one of his fingers against its throat. It went limp almost instantly, and he threw it aside. Another kitten lunged at him with a pair of surgical shears, but he just sidestepped it and let it smack into the wall behind him. Three kittens dropped down on him from the ceiling with a high-pitched scream and multiple racial slurs against folks of Asian descent. Willis slid out of the way of their attack, and swept one of them aside with his hand to join its comrade smushed against the wall. He danced out of the way of the other two kittens’ lunging attacks.
Fidelis released Hank and Hank’s head flopped onto the floor, a dull look and a spot of drool on his face. Fidelis removed the knife from her back, and in one motion expertly threw it to pin one of Willis’ assailants against the wall by its fur. It impotently cursed up a storm, yelling and ranting all sorts of slurs for female genitalia at Fidelis. Willis carefully tossed aside the last free kitten’s weapon and seized it by the scruff of its back. As the cat’s tiny claws uselessly flailed against his grasp and its mouth wailed profanity, Willis reached up to it and gave one of its legs a gentle wrench. It gasped as its limb dislocated and it went limp like a doll. He carefully laid its unconscious form onto the floor. Fidelis socked the kitten she pinned against the wall, finally shutting it up and splattering the wall slightly with blood.
Bella finished punching the crap out of THNG. The vampire lay against the floor, blood everywhere and her face surprisingly not too mangled considering how intensely Bella had been punching her.
Fidelis put a hand on Bella’s shoulder. Bella spun around, hyperventilating and frothing at the mouth a little. Willis made a motion to Fidelis and Fidelis stepped back. Willis stepped forward and offered Bella his hand. Bella hesitated, and then seemed to return to herself, taking his hand.
Willis scratched his head, looking over the defeated bodies of the Grand Duck’s followers. He seemed almost taken aback by how quickly it ended.
He scratched his chin and said, “Now that I think about it, perhaps my mistake was in assigning the wrong doctors to the wrong opponents.”
“No shit?” said Fidelis.
“I want to go home.” said Bella.
Willis said, “And home you shall go. But first, we have a surgery to conclude.”
Bella clutched her skinned knuckles as they stepped back into the OR. Only Willis wasn’t breathing heavily by this point. Well, perhaps Chihiroe counted as well, she calmly stood at attention with robotic stillness while Leucine operated.
“Last Gallstone, doc!” said Leucine, a wide grin behind her surgical mask.
Willis said, “Excellent progress, Dr. Naturae. Let’s continue to operate.”
He resumed his post at the laparoscopic screen, before a look around distracted him. “Hm… the Duck’s vital signs aren’t quite right. Dr. Belgica, inspect his anesthesia again.”
Vivi took a moment to react. She looked quite frazzled by this point, but complied. She busily changed around dials and switches on the anesthetic gas machine while looking over the Duck’s vitals.
“Okay, last Gallstone is out!” said Leucine, and the entire operating room sighed a breath of relief as she dropped it onto the tray.
“See, I wasn’t even necessary.” said Fidelis with a smile.
“Okay, apply your psychokinetic retrokinesis to the Duck’s injuries, Dr. Naturae,” said Willis. “Let’s call it a day and wrap up quickly before he wakes up. That went almost perfectly, I’m proud of you all.”
Leucine carefully focused on the Duck’s bleeding cuts, as if remembering past events, and the Duck’s incisions sealed up as if they never existed.
“This is better than he deserves”, she said.
“Psyduck!” the Duck said, nodding in agreement.
Leucine let loose a gasp as the Duck sat up, fully conscious. Fidelis and Bella clutched each other in fright. Willis raised an eyebrow. Vivi screamed. The Duck glared at Leucine.
“Oh… shit.” Leucine said as the duck clawed away her surgical mask, drawing blood from her face. She dragged him off the operating table, onto the floor, toppling a tray of medical instruments as she did so.
The Grand Duck yelled his species name repeatedly as Leucine pinned him under her body. Bella ran over and kicked him in the head a few times. Chihiroe ran for her shotgun and Willis ran to a nearby phone. Fidelis pushed Bella aside and rammed her hand into the Duck’s head. The Duck writhed and shook under Fidelis’ assault.
“Duuuuuck”, said the Duck, clearly fading into unconsciousness.
“Whew”, said Fidelis.
“Duck!” he said, with sudden determination.
The room glowed blue, as did the Grand Duck’s large eyes. Leucine felt herself quickly becoming lighter as she drifted off his body.
“Oh crap oh crap oh crap,” she said, realizing what was happening. The Duck had some last trick up his sleeve, always, and this was it. Normally his immense psychokinetic abilities never came into play unless he was desperate, and well, this probably counted!
Fidelis’s hand ejected from his head with great force and she joined Leucine in slowly drifting up to the ceiling. Chihiroe fired off a shot at the Duck, but the baton round halted a few centimeters from his head and floated away from him.
Bella covered her eyes and screamed as everything in the room slowly migrated from the Grand Duck.
The Grand Duck yelled with a mighty quack and everything in the room flung away from him by itself, slamming against the walls.
Equipment, knives, drugs and people. The doctors shielded themselves the best they could against the objects splashing and breaking against the walls around them.
The Grand Duck got up unsteadily to his feet as the surgical team groaned in pain and tried to brush off sharp debris sticking in them and heavy equipment pinning them.
“Psy… duck”, he said with a cruel look in his eyes, hefting a bone saw up to the prone and pinned body of Willis. Willis met the Duck’s eyes squarely, clearly afraid but prepared for what came next.
Then, one of the doors fell off its hinges, and in walked in a human figure in a very long, robe-like business suit trimmed with yellow and purple. Its face was a solid black color with a single bright stripe running along the center of its face, the only thing exposing the contours of its face. It raised a single finger at the Grand Duck.
“That’s enough”, a female voice said from the figure’s face.
The Grand Duck dropped the saw and stared at the figure. In his eyes was not quite his usual hatred, but a feeling of defeat and resentment.
“Ah… Dr. Lemaitre. Ladies and… gentlemen…might I present the Chair of the Board…” said Willis with some difficulty as he strained under the battered, ruined medical equipment pinning him down.
“Haha, start some shit now, stupid duck”, said Leucine from the floor. “She’ll probably extract your brains and cook them at the same time!”
The Duck held his bloodied claws up to his head and glared at Lemaitre with a rare mixture of hate and fear, but he made absolutely no movement or indication of preparation to move.
Lemaitre gave the duck a quick glance and walked past him to where Willis was pinned. She raised her hand with a flick of her finger and the obstruction literally melted away with the smell of burning plastic, leaving a huffing Willis underneath it, completely unburnt.
Willis slowly stumbled up to his feet and looked carefully into the bright stripe across Lemaitre’s otherwise blank, black face. One got the impression that he was waiting for something. Lemaitre looked around, almost casually, until she spotted something on the floor.
Lemaitre turned to face Willis and extended a hand. “My apologies for my lateness, other parties were interested in the stones and my allies had to tackle them first. From what I can see here, this was an operation well done, Dr. Doctorow. I will take it from here.”
Willis shook her hand and sighed very heavily in relief. He turned to Bella and carefully extricated her from a heap of rubble. He hugged her, wiped some of the dust off his lab coat, and turned to help the other doctors up.
Lemaitre suddenly turned her head and shot the duck a glare. The Duck held his ground, though his already massive eyes widened in surprise. She held eye contact with him while walking over to a glowing puddle on the ground.
“The Infinity Gallstones… are no more. No one should have this power”, she said.
She swiped her hand towards it and the room filled with the smell of burning viscera. The Duck’s eyebrows furrowed and growled underneath his breath, but again, he remained stock-still. The puddle instantly disappeared in a flash of steam and bright light.
Lemaitre turned to the Duck and said, “As for you, fortunately, the Board does not yet desire your presence in a fine duck confit. Tread carefully from here on in. Now get the hell out.”
The Duck turned around with some reluctance, and waddled out, giving the doctors around his usual determined, hateful expression as he left.
“What? He just gets to go? He threw a grenade at us!” said Leucine as she stood back up.
“Let’s say there is a delicate balance of power, Dr. Naturae”, said Lemaitre. “One that you should be grateful exists and equally grateful you know nothing about.”
“Ughhhhh”, Leucine said. “Whatever. I’m taking the rest of the day off, I need to work off all the regeneration and psychokinesis this stupid duck and his stupid basketball vampire made me do.”
Lemaitre ignored her and turned to Vivi, who stared forward in total shock. Lemaitre extracted a slip of glossy paper from her pocket and bowed slightly to Vivi.
“For you, Dr. Belgica”, said Lemaitre. “You showed conspicuous courage, risking death in a way that the others here might not have. Consider this my way of showing personal thanks.”
Vivi snapped to attention and stared at the shiny slip. “Is that a-? A Platinum Great Hub Warppass?”
She seized it from Lemaitre’s hand and held it close to her face. “Oh my god, it’s for two weeks! For any dimension or dimensions? ATokyo? Nucrea? Amytlei? All expenses paid, five stars everything?”
She beamed and held the slip to her chest.
Lemaitre might have been smiling back, but it was impossible to tell behind the darkness obscuring her face.
She turned to Bella, who knelt down in an embrace with Willis. Bella was holding back tears, partly of relief, partly of shock. Willis consoled her.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t get Dr. Luna anything, her involve was not planned”, said Lemaitre. “I’m sure I can think of something. Perhaps if Wolcrasi is too hostile an environment, I’ll give her my full personal recommendation and that of my friends on the Wolcrasi Hospital Board, for to any medical center she wishes to transfer to.”
Willis turned slightly to Lemaitre, slightly awed. “Thank you, that is a great favor, but we’ll work through this. I feel this is the best place for our people.” Lemaitre nodded with understanding.
Willis continued, “Until then, perhaps if you could fast-track the psychiatric wing. I’m looking forward to getting some uniquely qualified therapy for some of the staff, including Dr. Luna, and until then, we don’t have anyone really well suited for this hospital’s unique circumstances.”
“I will do everything.” Lemaitre said.
Lemaitre turned to inspect Chihiroe. Chihiroe calmly awaited orders as always, despite the many dents, slashes and burns adorning her body. “Willis, have the medical android fully restored and serviced, as much as is possible. You may use the hospital reserve fund.” Chihiroe nodded and bowed with something that some would interpret as gratitude.
Lemaitre turned to regard Fidelis.
“We’re even now. How are the kids?” she said.
Fidelis sputtered. “I…. no, they don’t count. They’re not my DNA and I have zero influence over them. Don’t you dare bring that up ever again. Just give my department the extra budget and leave me alone.”
Lemaitre chuckled and turned to leave the room.
“Hey don’t I get some kind of cool weird acknowledgment or foreshadowing?” said Leucine.
“Mm, I don’t have anything to really tell you, Dr. Naturae. You already have your reward from Willis already, a day which I’m sure everyone in this hospital will soon come to regret.” Lemaitre paused for a bit, her hand on her chin. “Oh yes, the board has personally reviewed your sister and found her rather borderline, even with her unique talent. I’ll push for her, although I was going to do that anyways.”
“Oh nice!” said Leucine.
“And of course, your other sister has passed with flying colors.”
Leucine’s jaw dropped. “Other sister? … Who? Tell me it’s not Leona.”
Lemaitre cocked her head in a manner that normally went with a smirk. “No.”
“I only have one other sister! Why the hell would she be here!” said Leucine.
Lemaitre simply walked off, clearly not in the mood to entertain further conversation.
“Who is this other sister?” said Willis. “Actually, who is the first sister? I haven’t been apprised of any of this.”
“Oh boy, things in this hospital are going to get really interesting”, muttered Leucine.
EPILOGUE, several months later.
A young woman with short pale blonde hair walked up to the hospital. In her hand was a large gray teddy bear and on her back was a backpack. She wore a dark blue bow in her hair in a slightly horned shape in the same style as Leucine. A devil’s tail emerged from the seat of her pants, although it was different from Leucine’s tail. The young woman looked very nervous today.
Leucine and Willis emerged from the hospital’s front doors, bickering as usual.
“That’s not fair, you can’t be Super Chief of Medicine. That doesn’t even exist”, said Leucine.
“I promised to transfer my title of Chief of Medicine just for today so you could greet your sister here as Chief of Medicine. I said nothing about what I would do to myself”, said Willis with a rakish grin. “I must admit I thought you harbored selfish motives behind this move. However, I still feel the need to keep you in line. Hence I will still be in a higher position to reign you in should the need arise.”
“A compromise then. Until someone complains, you sit back in the break room and let me run the hospital and impress my sister the med student”, said Leucine.
“Eminently reasonable”, said Willis, slightly impressed. “Until someone complains it is then.”
The nervous young woman just stared on with incomprehension. She held carefully onto her gray teddy bear.
“Ah, Miss Taube.”, said Willis, turning to her as they finally neared her. “We didn’t see you here. She is rather inconspicuous, is she not?
He cracked a flawlessly practiced smile. “Welcome to Wolcrasi. I hope your medical education here is pleasant and prosperous.”
“Yeah, Noelle here is a quiet one. I can’t believe you’re already out of university, Noelle! Me, I’m Chief of Medicine for today. Cool huh?” said Leucine.
Noelle hid behind her teddy bear, staring at Willis carefully. She blindly reached out and held Leucine by the hand.
“She’s really shy and super adorable!” said Leucine. “I think I’ve already briefed you and the most of the staff on her and her uh, special need.”
Leucine gestured as subtly as possible at the teddy bear. Noelle still seemed to notice, sinking further behind her bear, though it did not cover most of her body.
“Honestly”, said Willis, with a pause. “… this doesn’t stand out much by Wolcrasi standards. I’m positive we can be perfectly accommodating.”
Noelle seemed to withdraw less behind her bear and stared up at Willis.
Dr. Luna ran up between them, huffing and puffing too hard to speak.
“Oh hey, this is Dr. Bella Luna”, said Leucine. “She is our pediatric surgeon. I think you’ll like her. She’s a great teacher.”
Noelle carefully extended a hand from behind her big gray teddy bear.
Bella shook her hand, and then dropped the handshake as soon as she realized she was able to speak again. She stuttered out her message between deep, whiny breaths.
“The Romans are back! ….We used too much Latin ….in our … medical…..terminology! The time portal …back up! It opened!” she said.
“For fuck’s sake, just spell it ‘drops’, ‘guttae’ doesn’t even sound cool. Well, what’s the game plan this time, Willy? ” said Leucine.
The clang of swords and yelled Latin echoed in the distance. Willis walked away. “Your problem, Chief of Medicine!” he said.
Leucine’s eyes narrowed. “Well played.”
A Roman legionnaire in full equipment rounded into view and stared at horror at them. He pointed his sword at them and trembled as he walked forward.
Bella rolled up her labcoat sleeves and took a stance. Leucine struck a pose. Noelle hugged her bear fiercely with an expression of fear and confusion, not at all understanding why a frightened man in heavy armor and a shield was approaching them. The Roman stopped his approach, dropped his sword and shield, and slowly started clutching at his neck and abdomen in intense discomfort as he choked and seized slightly.
Bella rushed forward to help, not really understanding what was happening to the soldier. Then she looked back to Noelle’s tight embrace of the bear, noticing where she was hugging the bear. Leucine was gently coaxing the bear out of Noelle’s grasp. She slowly looked back at where the Roman legionnaire was clutching at in pain. Then she looked back where Noelle was grasping the teddy bear. Bella’s eyes widened in horror.
“Yep, welcome to Wolcrasi”, said Leucine. “It gets weird here sometimes!”, as she tried to remove Noelle’s hands from the teddy bear.
THE WORLD’S CRAZIEST HOSPITAL WILL CONTINUE IN “WCH:THE FLIGHT OF THE DOVE”!
World’s Craziest Hospital: Infinity Surgery
“We have to open this duck up now! The fate of the multiverse depends on it!”
As a crack team of surgeons and nurses rushed a comatose duck-like creature to the operating room, Dr. Leucine S. Naturae reflected on how things got up to this moment.
It began on a muggy August afternoon in Wolcrasi Community Hospital. Leucine was asleep on the job as usual.
Leucine was a young woman with bright red hair tied high in a ponytail by a large purple bow and large red lips usually held in an impish smile. Her nose was large and upturned, her eyes an unnatural shade of purple, and her skin pale, but not exceedingly so. She wore a black velvet tube top dress, a long pair of black low-heeled boots that ran up to her thighs, a long dark purple neckerchief, and fingerless black opera gloves that went up nearly to her shoulders. Fortunately for the hospital’s reputation, a white doctor’s lab coat obscured her bare shoulders and lent her questionable ensemble a modicum of professionalism. Her mortal colleagues frequently called her “Code Black” or “Code BDSM”. Behind her back, of course.
Oh yeah, about that the word “mortal” for her colleagues? Well, Leucine was also a devil. Which meant that Leucine was mostly-human looking, save for a long black pointed tail. The large purple bow securing her ponytail came in the shape of a pair of curved horns, although whether this was intentional or not always got a shrug from her.
Many found it difficult to believe that Leucine was one of the best emergency surgeons in the world, but as she was an immortal being, that was probably inevitable after over a thousand years of medical practice. It definitely was not because she was clever or hard working. Hence why she slept at her desk today.
Leucine awoke with a slight flinch to the sounds of a loud fleshy impact and cursing. She recognized it as Dr. Chiharu Matsuda swearing in fluent Japanese. She rubbed at her bleary eyes and stretched on her desk. Must be “Aru” being harassed by the rogue security department today. She stepped out of her office to see more.
She looked outside her office to see a black-haired vampire lady in a basketball jersey and basketball shorts running by. A swarthy Asian woman with short hair chased the vampire with a 9mm pistol in hand, her face red and eyes tearing with pain. Oh, that would be Dr. Matsuda. The jersey-wearing vampire ran much faster than she did, however, and Dr. Matsuda lost her quarry almost immediately. Dr. Matsuda swore again in Japanese as she bent over in frustration. Leucine recognized many obscenities of the caliber to which only a former member the military would be privy.
“Hey, Aru”, said Leucine. “The slampire get you again?”
“Fucking bitch threw a basketball at my face! Agh! Why do they even allow these things on campus?”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m sure you’ll have a shot at her later. Get it, shot, because you have a gun!” said Leucine.
Firearms were a natural sight on WCH, a way for the more ordinary humans around here to deal with the many supernatural beings that ran amok and did not respond to lesser measures. Beings like Leucine. It did get somewhat crazy in this place. Chiharu shook her head as the rest of her shook with exhaustion. She holstered her pistol, but keeping her hand in place on the handle as she backed away from Leucine.
“God, I only grabbed your ass that one time! Don’t be so jumpy. It was just that one time, I’ll never do it again!” said Leucine.
“No, you did it five times. Five! And you said every time was the first or second time! What is wrong with you? One time is bad enough as it is.” said Chiharu, the frustration in her panting breaths turned at Leucine.
“Well… I’m sorry. I’ll write it on myself, how about that? I won’t forget this time!” said Leucine.
She erred on the side of believing what people said about her past behavior, because chances are that she actually really forgot. She was sure she would have remembered someone shooting her over it though, gunshots really did sting, and pain did jog the memory.
Leucine reached into her lab coat and took out a bright red marker. Chiharu flinched at the sudden movement, and then relaxed as Leucine wrote “DO NOT GRAB ARU’S ASS” on her left long glove.
“Better?” said Leucine.
Chiharu muttered a brief Japanese remark about crazy devils and crazy vampires as her hand drooped away from her gun. Her weapon completely disappeared beneath her lab coat.
“Whatever, I have patients to attend to. I’m sure you’re hard at work as usual”, Chiharu said as she turned around, the sarcasm in that remark almost palpable.
Leucine took it as a sign of affection, though most everyone else would have disagreed with her.
“Yup! See you later, Aru!” Leucine said, the smile wide on her face.
Chiharu swore some more under her breath and stalked off to resume her business.
Since she was awake again, Leucine decided to continue walking around, not looking for anything or anyone in particular. Something interesting would happen eventually, right? As if on cue, Leucine’s phone beeped. She fished it out of her lab coat up to her eyes so smoothly it almost flew up into her hands by itself.
“Ahhh help Lucy patient is growing mouths!! Plz halp thnks ward 431”
Thusly read a text message from a certain Dr. Bella Luna. Leucine nodded her head. She headed for the pediatrics department next doors, trying to think of how many diseases were capable of causing patients to grow extra mouths. Only three, that she could think of, unless you counted that one edge case when necrotizing shoggothitis had a superimposed infection with-
Ah, that would do it, she thought as she stepped into a room. Dr. Bella Luna, pediatrician, cowered in the middle of a physical with Persephone Therion, a member of the hospital’s IT department.
“Percy” normally looked like a sallow teenager with long black pigtails and bangs obscuring one of her eyes. She wore a loose, low-cut hoodie with a swirly pattern that made Leucine’s eyes hurt. Of course, the most notable feature of Miss Persephone at this moment was the fact that half of her body was currently a large white glob with large, horrible purple eyes and huge oozing teeth formed from hardened sections of the ooze. Ah yes, thought Leucine, that would be Percy’s true form, and it was quite hard on the eyes, so she had better make this quick. She took stock of the situation and looked at the tiny figure cowering in the other corner of the room.
Dr. Luna seemed very unremarkable next to the big monster terrorizing her at this moment- Bella was an androgynous and tanned young Asian woman. She always had on a similar outfit: wearing a purple tie on some pink or red shirt or blouse, and a purple skirt over leggings, all underneath the usual white doctor’s lab coat. Dr. Luna was very new here, and Wolcrasi pediatrics was her first job out of med school.
Leucine was not sure why, Bella had the qualifications on paper, but she also did not quite have the mindset needed to cope with unpredictable events around here. She definitely should not be dealing with someone like Persephone without a few more years under her belt.
The Persephone-blob swallowed a piece of furniture with the massive toothed pseudopod that her left arm turned into, too fast for Leucine to see what the object used to be. Leucine snapped out of her thoughts and used her boot to flip up a stepstool into her hands.
“Hey, Percy, how are y-“, Leucine said, just before she dodged another wicked white blob swinging up and ripping up the wall that her head was against a moment ago.
Leucine ducked under another pseudopod lashing out, which tore out a supply cabinet door with its horrendous white teeth. Being eaten by Percy would suck today, she thought.
Just as soon as Leucine recovered her footing from the evasive maneuver, the bulk of Percy’s body lunged at Leucine. Leucine pressed the stepstool in her hands as a shield against Percy’s massive form, Percy’s massive teeth tearing into the wood.
“PERCY! I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY!” Leucine screeched at the top of her lungs.
Percy paused and then slowly retracted, her globular form coalescing back into the pale pigtailed girl she usually was. She had a frown on her face, her arms folded as she waited for Leucine to make the next move.
“See? You just have to yell at a frequency she likes”, said Leucine. “Now, what did you do piss her off, storkie?”
“I… I don’t know!” cried Bella, clearly at wit’s end.
“Well, what were you doing before Percy wigg- I mean, gently made her displeasure known?” said Leucine.
“I was taking her temperature! Her temperature!” sobbed Bella, with the conviction of one sentenced to execution for a crime she did not commit.
“Ah… did you use the thermometer gun?” said Leucine.
“Yes!”
“There’s your problem. Percy’s species hates infrared, especially when you shine it in her eyes. Why were you even handling her, xeno stuff is Dr. Fidelis’ specialty.”
“I have no idea! She looked totally normal!”
“Yeah, that’s the idea. Right Percy?”
“Yeah. Why else would I try to hang out as a human if I couldn’t do it right? You humans are crazy, you’ll think I’m disgusting if I screw up my human look even a little bit.” said Persephone.
“I think you’re disgusting now!” Bella screamed. Then her eyes widened as she realized what she just said and her hands clamped over her mouth.
“We-e-ell...” said Persephone, with a smile. “Look who finally grew some balls.”
“Ovaries”, said Leucine.
“Ugh, stupid genders”, said Persephone.
“Getting back on track”, said Leucine. “Probably the reason why Percy is in pediatrics is because she’s technically an adolescent for her species. They live to about… how old again, Percy?”
“Like five hundred? I haven’t even heard of anyone who got up to that, usually we get eaten.”
“BY WHAT?” Bella screamed.
“Bigger creatures”, said Leucine. “Bella, I can’t believe of all people, I’m the one telling you this, but you have got to focus!”
“She turned into a blob-thing full of teeth and eyes and tried to eat me!” said Bella.
“Okay, you know what fine, Percy hates humans, and she’s already been abnormally patient with you. Right Percy?” said Leucine.
Percy nodded.
“How about you show her your true form, storkie?” said Leucine.
“My what?” asked Bella.
“Don’t play stupid. You’re not a human either. You’re an angel.”
“Whoa, don’t devils hate angels?” said Persephone.
“Some of them are dicks. Bella is cool, she’s an angel named ‘Storge’ in the Court of Rakha. The ones that I have beef with are in the Court of Brethren. There’s a big difference between the two, actually. I’ve been meaning to write a medical paper about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about” Bella mumbled, half-heartedly. The fidgeting in her hands told the other two this clearly was not the case.
“Oh that’s adorable, I think she’s lying”, said Persephone.
“Duh”, said Leucine. “Come on Storge, I’ve seen you transform before, you’re literally a fucking heart. It’s adorable. You really think doing your magical angel weirdness around Percy is going to break *her* mind? She’s the one scaring you right now.”
“Uh, well, it’s supposed to be a secret”, Bella said, her face quite red now.
“You’re working next to a bunch of people who are openly angels and devils”, said Leucine, holding and waving around her devil tail. “Some of us even read minds. Some secret. Now do it! Do the transform thingy!”
“Do it! Do it! Do it!” Persephone chanted.
Bella sighed deeply and her body started into emit gently floating sparks, each one like a soap bubble with a tiny reflected image of herself. The room around her visibly warped and spiraled as pink bursts of light emitted from her. Her body turned a dark shade of pink, the room visibly exploded into bright light, and reality seemed to collapse into a thin line, before expanding again. In a moment, in place of Bella floated a very large human heart with classic angelic wings.
“Baller”, said Persephone, grinning with respect.
“See? That’s what Storge really looks like. It’s pretty cool right? Literally a heart, not a heart shape”, said Leucine.
“Do you do have a true form, uh, red-hair-doc?” said Persephone.
“My name is Leucine. I had a neat godly form once, but it was killed once, so yeah, not really an option right now. What you see is what you get with me. Anyways, now you can give your physical in peace, Storge!”
The floating heart that used to be Bella gave another deep sigh, her voice echoing from the center of the heart. “I don’t have hands in this form.”
“And Percy will reflexively eat anything organic that touches her true form, so I think you’re all set. Just zap her with your healing magic powers, and if you have some diagnosing powers, so much the better.” said Leucine. “I’ll talk to Nurse Elias about getting Percy reassigned to someone who can handle her better. Don’t forget to change back when you’re done.”
“Fine, whatever.” said heart-Bella, clearly resigned to this sequence of events.
“Have fun, you kids.” said Leucine.
“I’m 29!” Bella yelled.
“Not in your angel form!” said Leucine with a wink. She stepped out of the room and locked it behind her. She checked her phone. Hm, almost lunchtime, she thought. Better head over to the food court.
Then she heard it, and she froze.
“Duuuuck…”
Out from the hallway corner waddled hatred incarnate.
The Grand Duck. So named because a duck was what it resembled the most. A short, squat creature less than a meter tall, with a round body and round head entirely covered in very short golden feathers. It walked on short, cream-colored legs and held two very fat, clawed arms up to its round bulbous head. An enormous and broad duck’s bill dominated most of its face, and it wore a simple crown made of some bright orange metal on its head, the crown engraved with an emblem resembling a pitchfork. Behind the crown lay a few tufts of black feathers, usually obscured by the crown. However, it was between the crown and the bill that lay the Duck’s most notable feature- its large, tiny-pupiled eyes.
It, or rather, he, had eyes which held nothing but pure hatred. There were no other emotions present, not even different flavors to its anger. No jealousy, no self-loathing, no covetousness, no fear, no frustration. Just calm, confident sheer pain and hate burning itself into the very soul of anything that met his gaze. Leucine cringed at just a glance of it and tried not to meet his stare. It was like looking into a singularity of darkness, hate, rage and duck-based homicide.
Normally, something, or someone, held back the Grand Duck to merely a nuisance, running around and harassing doctors. Should you truly gave him an excuse, however, he would straight up tax you a limb or two. Which actually was not that bad, considering they were in a hospital and everything. However, the homicidal rage in his eyes clearly wanted to murder everything and everyone ever, even the most oblivious dullard could see that. Leucine had the utmost respect and appreciation for whoever kept the Grand Duck from indulging in mass murder.
Law enforcement and hospital security had long since given up on anything more than damage control around the Duck’s antics, and the Duck had set up shop posing as hospital security. He waddled right up next to Leucine and looked up at her with his usual deep frown on his bill. She tried her best to ignore his presence, seemingly absorbed in her phone instead.
“Duck duck”, he said.
She ignored him still.
“Duuuuuck. Duck”
She pretended not to understand him.
“Duck! Duck duck, duck duck duck. Duuuuck.”
She fiddled between apps on her phone, clearly trying to look busy.
The Grand Duck waddled past her with no change in its hateful expression.
She heaved just the slightest sigh of relief, and then yelped as the duck’s axe bit into the back of her calf, drawing a fair amount of blood. She dropped to her opposite knee, and then the flat of the same axe slammed against her head, knocking her entirely to the floor. She decided not to get up, even though she felt fully able to.
“Psy yi yi yi”, he said, with some satisfaction in his tone.
Leucine tried to keep the profanity in her head. She heard the duck walking away. She slowly got up to her feet. She checked the axe wound. Her boots had a gash open and the skin underneath revealed a small nick, which quickly disappeared before her eyes. Good thing devils healed fast. The boot sealed up behind where the wound was. Regenerating the clothes along with the body was a particularly difficult thing to learn, but it saved so much on repair time, considering how prone to trouble Leucine could be.
Almost everyone hated the duck. His small retinue of devotees was somewhat easier to tolerate, but fortunately, they were not around to bother her. Now that it was properly lunchtime, Leucine decided to head for the Wolcrasi food court.
For lunch, Leucine ordered a burrito full of… stuff. Whatever it was, it was supposed to be all whole grain, lean protein and omega-three, healthy stuff. She hated it. It was not as if devils needed to maintain their weight or nutrition anyways. Next time she would bring her own lunch, but she kept forgetting…
She took her usual table with Dr. Kiva Fidelis, a tan-skinned woman with curly dark red hair and thick pink-red lips. She usually wore a flowery brown and yellow dress beneath her lab coat. Yellow-golden eyes peered out behind her glasses at Leucine and immediately folded into an expression of disdain.
“Heeeeeeey Fiddy”, said Leucine in a sultry tone, swaying her hips as she approached.
“Oh god”, Fidelis muttered, slumping down and running both hands through red hair.
“How’s my favorite doctor in the world doing?” said Leucine, making sure to stress the word ‘favorite’ suggestively.
“Of all the doctors in this fucking hospital, you have to hit on me every single day we sit together”, said Fidelis.
“The Angel of Peace is out today so I can’t hit on her. So it’s just you. And me. Foreveeeeer.”
“Ugh, I can’t wait for our hiring to get started again”, said Fidelis.
Wolcrasi as a hospital was only a year old, so it currently suffered a little from understaffing, even after a hiring blitz that picked up a lot of valuable doctors, nurses and staff who capably did the work of many.
“Why? Bringing in a cute sister for me?” said Leucine.
“Something like that. W… what is that written on your arm? ‘Don’t grab Aru’s ass?’ Lucy, I think you super need to get laid. And before you look at me like that, I’m not volunteering. Now, we are professionals in a professional environment, so can we please talk about something else besides how I look today and what you would like to do with me? Please.”
“Since you asked nicely”, said Leucine with a playful grin. Man, messing with Fidelis was awesome! Even if she were pretty enough Leucine would be hitting on her anyways.
Although she absolutely looked like a human being, Fidelis was actually an angel from the Court of Brethren. She was the one of the few who was experienced in the human world, and were exiled, sort of, for reasons that Leucine could not be arsed to recall. She took on a human form permanently, while the other Brethren were, shall we say, only moderately humanoid most of the time. Anyways, Fidelis was on lukewarm terms only with her siblings, which made her all right in Leucine’s book, because most of them were jerks.
“So, today I helped Bella deal with a physical for Persephone. She flipped out when Bella tried to scan her with an infrared thermometer.”
Fidelis tried not to choke on her salad. “Dr. Luna? The newbie from pediatrics? She’s nowhere near qualified to deal with a hyperdimensional Bleed dweller!”
“Oh yeah. Especially since Percy is super touchy. The other one, with the long hair, Abby, she is such a nice person though. Even though… I think they’re different species, right?”
“I think we might be starting to get into patient confidentiality.”
“Oh poo, Kiva! Anyways, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if you dealt with Percy’s physicals? You’re used to dealing with psychokinesis and the weirdest stuff and you’d deal with it the best.”
“Yes, but also, Percy is touchy as hell. She does her job with IT stuff sure, but she also bites people and screams a lot at problems she can’t bite. I’m immortal, not invincible. I’m not sure why we hired Percy or even keep her as a patient”, said Fidelis.
“Because she’d be close to the medical support she needs as a growing cosmic monstrosity, and also because she’d probably do something like kill people for fun or crusading with the Grand Duck if someone didn’t keep her gainfully employed.”, said Leucine.
Fidelis and Leucine looked around the food court. No sign of the duck anywhere. Fidelis exhaled in relief.
“We might need tougher doctors for the problem patients”, said Leucine. “What about that medical robot? Or the physical therapist? Or the white haired guy with the dog ears?”
“If by the robot, you mean Chihiroe, she’s smart and tough, sure, and almost never rests, but she also has shit for bedside manner. She’d set off someone like Percy in a hurry. If by the therapist, you mean Chac, he knows that crazy martial art, but it only works on human beings and he is pushing 70 and moves like it. So, no. Finally, the person with the dog-ears is KS Elias. He’s pretty good with tough human patients, but he’s also new here, and Percy is probably beyond him.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but we should probably get hiring more of your siblings then”, said Leucine. “The Rakha angels aren’t made of nearly as sturdy stuff.” Under her breath, she made sure to add, “Because they haven’t spent eternity persecuting my people.”
“I heard that. Look, maybe we’re approaching this the wrong way. Our psychiatry wing isn’t open yet, you know that right? Maybe Percy just needs some therapy. ”
“Pft, psychiatrists. Ooh, let’s talk about feelings, maybe that’ll get her to stop biting keyboards in half because the computer froze up.”
“Lucy, you-“
Leucine’s phone chimed with a text message.
“Oop, that’s me.”, she said, swooping her phone out of her lab coat again. “Champey says we have to get ready for a big visit, I should see Willis.”
“Um, secretary Champey or medtech Champey?” asked Fidelis.
“Uh, let me check… ”, said Leucine. “Secretary Champey. That’s not good news.”
“Okay, I’m going to leave this with you”, said Leucine, putting her untouched, unappetizing lunch down next to Fidelis.
“You want me to watch your food?” said Fidelis.
“You can eat it I guess? Not my problem!”
Leucine skipped off to the surgical wing.
Still keeping an eye out for that damned duck, Leucine opened the door to Dr. Wilhelm Doctorow’s office. “Hey, dickhe- oh hey Bella.”
Bella was sitting next to the next, seeming upset about something else as she looked sideways at Leucine. Behind the desk was an older Asian man who spoke with a strong Filipino accent. He wore glasses, a very short haircut and standard work clothes under a lab coat. He always carried an air of extreme calm, even in emergencies. He was Wilhelm “Willis” Doctorow, the chief of medicine at Wolcrasi Community Hospital, and the single best surgeon in the hospital, possibly the world. Willis was also a ten-thousand-year old angel in the Court of Rakha by the name of Virtus, but unlike Dr. Bella Luna or Dr. Grace Vaya, never admitted it after pressure from Leucine. Leucine held back a little vomit when she remembered what his true form looked like.
“Welcome. Bella was just telling me how you saved her life today. Thank you.” said Willis.
“Psssht. You people are semi-mortal in human-form; it won’t kill you to get partly eaten. And I think you’re fully immortal in angelic form.” said Leucine.
Willis made no reaction whatsoever to that statement. “I believe the assignment of an adolescent extraterrestrial to an inexperienced pediatrician was clearly some sort of clerical error, I’m sure we can get it blah blah blah…” Willis’ speech faded into the background as Leucine remembered something important.
Leucine remembered now. Willis was the reason that Bella got this job. Something about adopting her and raising her in a compound to do kung fu and medicine, for some reason... to keep her pure or some other creepy shit. Well, that was none of Leucine’s business; Willis did not give off the creeper vibe and Bella could give him some healthy distance sometimes.
Leucine, focus”, said Willis, as gently as anyone possibly could. “The reason why I asked for you today is because we are due for a personal visit from the chair of the hospital board.”
Leucine froze up. Sensing the tension in Willis and Leucine, Bella shuddered and whimpered.
“W-w-whatever for?” said Leucine.
“A surgery of great importance”, said Willis. “Have you seen the whereabouts of our anatine nuisance lately?”
“You mean the duck? No.”
“What about his followers?”
“The wrestler, the vampire and the kittens? Uh, I think I saw the vampire dunking on Chiharu like ten minutes ago.”
“Hm, not good.” said Willis. “The vampire is too mobile; it’s a stale lead at best.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to have to hunt them down, for reasons that will be explained when the chair arrives.”
“If Dr. Lemaitre is pissed off, you know it’s curtains, right?” said Leucine. “You know she can actually kill me and you, right? For reals.”
“Yes, I am…uncomfortably aware that your natural regenerative abilities do not cover her esoteric … dissection… technique.” said Willis, clearly quite woozy at the thought of angering Lemaitre.
“Well, we have nothing, Dr. Naturae”, he continued. “I took a look at the surgical assignments; you’re free and clear today. Well, you are as of now. I want the vampire, Totallyhumannormalgirl, restrained as quickly as possible. I will personally handle those homicidal cats the Duck keeps around.” He tugged at his tie in a rare tic of nervousness. “I have confidence that Dr. Luna can handle the wrestler.”
“Dr. Bella Luna? Right here? Seriously? She has chops sure, but she’s also like a fifth of Hank Sokolov’s weight. No offense Bella.” said Leucine.
Dr. Luna just silently nodded in reluctant acknowledgment of this fact.
“We don’t have much choice”, said Willis. “This stays need-to-know only, with minimal staff, and Bella unfortunately overheard a video call with Lemaitre at an inopportune time. Try not to drag Dr. Matsuda or anyone else into it in the process.”
“We’re leaving out that no one’s taking care of the Duck. That’s easily the hardest part.” said Leucine.
“The Grand Duck will be easy. We need the Angel of Peace, Keith Takeda and Nurse Chihiroe.” said Willis.
“Peace is taking the week off recuperating from a body waxing session. Dr. Takeda starts with us next month. ”
“Um”, said Willis “I thought that Peace doesn’t have hair. Or skin.”
“It was a really serious waxing session.”
Willis visibly made an effort to suppress the obvious questions that popped into his head.
“Let’s see about contacting Dr. Takeda then. This is an emergency.” he said.
“Yesterday he blocked my number, replying I texted him too much. I said, and I quote, ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you?’ It was the second text message! I don’t think we can reach him.” Leucine said.
“That is unfortunate. Well, in that case, I have also arranged backup choices.”
“Sucks to be them.”
Five minutes later…
“You want WHAT?” Dr. Vivi Belgica yelled.
“This office is too small. Your suit is tacky. Dr. Luna’s profuse sweating is unseemly of a professional, and, oh yeah, and you just ordered us to our goddamn suicides!” said Dr. Fidelis.
“Order registered. Executing when team is ready”, said Chihiroe.
Vivi, Fidelis and Chihiroe had piled into Willis’ office with Leucine, Willis and Bella. Leucine resisted the urge to cop a feel on someone.
Vivi was a humanoid being called a “Dreamy”. For the most part, she was a very cute and tall Asian woman with long hair, a long teal dress, striped tattoos across her upper chest and the usual doctor’s lab coat. However, she also sported a very large fuzzy tail resembling a very fat hair braid, only moving upwards instead of downwards. It gave the impression of her being a very cuddly, harmless scorpion. Her head had large animal-like ears sticking out, colored with a green white and black pattern reminiscent of butterfly wings.
Chihiroe, whose name stood for some long acronym Leucine never could remember, was the local medical robot, of unknown make and provenance, and a damn fine one at that. Probably the most technically competent nurse in the world, although she showed very little in the way of a personality or bedside manner, so she was a little annoying to deal with as a person. Also, she had a bad habit of tasering Leucine whenever Leucine tried to get handsy with her, so Leucine kept her distance, usually.
“You all have a crucial part to play in this”, said Willis. “I trust the three of you to disable the Grand Duck. Your unique talents will-“
“I’m a sleep therapist. I didn’t sign up to fight people sir.” said Vivi. She tried her best to give her usual smile, but it came off as a prisoner savoring a last meal.
“Look, this is an operation of non-metaphorically existential importance. When we complete this, I will happily give you all two weeks of paid vacation, at my expense.” Said Willis.
“You think I do medicine to pay bills? I’ve been practicing for 800 years. I hardly need time off. But what I don’t need is to get hacked to pieces by a berserk duck. As I’ve told Leucine, I’m immortal, not invincible. Do you think regrowing body parts is free and painless?” said Fidelis.
“And I don’t want to die!” said Vivi.
“Fine”, said Willis. “I am prepared to earmark one million dollars apiece from the board’s budget to the sleep medicine and supernatural medicine departments’ allocations, apiece. This is that important. Lemaitre is a woman of her word and this, I guarantee this will be small change in exchange for the favor that we do.”
“Hey, why don’t I get a million?” said Leucine.
“This sounds really dangerous…” said Bella.
“If one million is small change, then I want five million for my department, nothing less.” said Fidelis.
“If I’m risking death and she’s just risking a lot of pain, why doesn’t my department get more!” said Vivi.
“Beep boop, I am a robot”, said Chihiroe.
Willis paused with his hands folded for a long moment, keeping his composure. Finally, he spoke. “Consider the following factors: Firstly, subduing the Grand Duck will make him wary of harassing any of you in the future, if not remove him from the picture forever. It will go a long way for your personal safety and peace of mind. Secondly, this operation is of extreme significance, if it does not happen, I think it is safe to say many people will die. Thirdly, we will alter the plan, to deal with the Grand Duck’s retinue first, two against one, before all six of us take him down; I think that is most reasonable. Fourthly, if you wish to refuse this request from the Hospital Chair herself, I can call her on video chat here and you can explain to her face.”
With that last sentence, a wave of tension went through the other doctors in the room, which made hairs stand on end and sweat drops extract from skin. They knew Willis did not ever bluff in any way. The Chair, even less so.
“Two million”, said Fidelis, quickly.
“Yeah!” said Vivi.
“Very well, two million dollars for your departments. I will extend the paid time off to Dr. Belgica. Final terms, end of story. And, Leucine, no, Emergency Surgery already eats up something like 20% of our budget. But I will let you be Chief of Medicine for a day, no strings attached.”
“Fuck yeah!” said Leucine.
“Okay, that’s not so bad then. Except the part where Dr. Naturae gets to be my boss”, said Vivi.
“I’ll punch her in the soul if she gets out of line”, said Fidelis.
“Done”, said Vivi.
Leucine frowned.
---------
Hank Sokolov stomped through the halls of Wolcrasi Community Hospital. A massive Russian strongman and a veritable colossus of flesh, at over 7 feet and 400 pounds, Hank moved with an unusual sense of purpose today. As one of the Grand Duck’s retinue, the Altan Lord, clearly he had orders to do something nefarious. He wore a red and yellow wrestling leotard, his nearly bald head and coarse black stubble framing his usual broad frown.
Dr. Bella Luna stepped out of the shadows into the hospital hall. Hank stopped. She had her hands up in a fighting pose. He chuckled, and then the chuckle became a loud laugh.
“Are you proposing to being fighting me, leetle girl? You should know Hank Sokolov is invincible. No one is getting over on me”, he said in his thick and deep Russian accent. He flexed his doughy arms and Bella cringed at the enormous muscles that revealed themselves through the fat. She muttered something about hurrying up, sweating under his enormous shadow.
“Eh? Is small Filipino doctor in rush to being smooshed? Very well, I am always ready to oblige, let it be said Hank Sokolov is greatly understanding man.”, he said, making another massive flex of his muscles before slowly looming over Bella.
Suddenly, another pair of lab coat-wearing arms appeared around Hank’s neck and wrapped themselves around it. Willis strained to pull down Hank from behind. Hank did not budge in the least, and smiled. He reached behind himself with one colossal hand and bodily picked up Dr. Willis by the side of his lab coat. Willis’ hands snapped up in a counter. He executed a nasty-looking lock around Hank’s fingers and pushed as hard as he could. His spectacled eyes opened in bewilderment as he might as well be attacking a statue for all the effect it had. Hank smiled and threw the doctor into the ground. Willis rolled out of most of the impact, barely keeping his bones from snapping under the sheer force, and stood up into fighting stance, stumbling a bit from the excess momentum.
While Hank’s back was turned, Bella yelled with a kiai and ran up behind him, executing a furious flurry of sharp punches to his back, topped off with a flying kick at the back of his head. The sound of her blows thundered through the hall. Hank made no reaction, not even a stumble. He turned around at Bella, clearly irritated, catching her with a backhand as he did so. She blocked well in advance of the strike, but the sheer force crumpled her arms against her face and sent her flying nonetheless.
“Leetle girl knows gong fu. I would need many hands to count on fingers how many gong fu fighters I have snapped in half”, Hank said.
Bella held her hand up to her swelling cheek, making sure nothing was broken.
Willis ran up behind Hank and wrapped his arms and legs around one of Hank’s legs, trying to immobilize it. Bella charged forward at the same time. Hank grunted with some effort to free his leg as Bella flew uppercuts and jabs into Hank’s jaw. Vaguely annoyed by each blow to his head, Hank slapped at her, and she narrowly evaded the blow with a deft roll to the side. He slammed his hand down at her, but Willis’ leg hold kept him from quite reaching her. She used the opening to catch him with a roundhouse kick to the side of the hip, to similarly little effect, but Hank, with surprising speed, tugged at her leg as she was retracting from the blow, and threw her into the wall behind him. She landed with a loud cracking sound and plaster chips flew around her as she slowly slid down the shattered wall onto her head.
Hank then reached down to Willis. Willis lunged away from Hank’s incoming grasp, and slid back up to his feet. Hank swiped with his open hand with blinding speed, and Willis casually sidestepped it. Then Hank threw a punch and Willis barely caught onto Hank’s arm. Willis’ foot lashed out at the side of Hank’s foot as Willis executed a flawless throw with his upper body. Except he did not throw Hank. Hank remained there, unmoved as always. Willis’ eyes boggled.
Bella leapt up behind Hank with her lab coat in her hands and wrapped it against Hank’s face, blinding him. She was dangling off his back. Hank yelled a curse in Russian and freed his arm from Willis’ grasp by sheer force, then made an immense leap backwards into the wall. Bella’s body again made a bone-rattling thud against the wall, and she released her grip and slumped onto the floor. Willis lunged forward, caught one of Hank’s hands and spun around, pressing his hands against it in an expert wrist breaking maneuver. He felt only the slightest give from Hank’s wrist and had to duck the counterattack, a powerful hook. The wall splashed under Hank’s fist.
Willis panted with exhaustion as Hank took the offensive, a devastating series of slaps, punches and grabs that Willis dodged with waning confidence. Willis tried to look for an opening, but Hank was fast when he got angry and his massive reach advantage did not make things easier.
Finally, Hank grabbed Willis, and in a movement barely quicker than the eye could see, shattered the doctor’s glasses against both their faces as forehead met forehead. Willis fell to the floor and did not get up.
Hank wiped glass shards off his face as if removing sweat. He turned to Bella, expecting another attack. Bella, slumped down where the wall met the floor, slowly stirred back to life, and wheezed through something that was probably broken. Her mind raced with diagnoses, but she fought off those thoughts. She dragged herself to her feet, blood pooling on the floor from her nose.
She looked to her left and to her right, checking the hallway before mustering her breath for one last effort.
Hank grinned and curled his fingers at her in the universal sign of invitation to violence. Bella stood up, shaking horribly as she did so and clutching one of her arms. Something strange flashed through her mind, and as desperate as she was, it was good enough for her.
She ran forward with a blood-chilling scream and as Hank’s enormous arm met her with a ferocious jab that seemed to stretch forward for miles. She leapt up onto his arm, missing his fist by a hair’s length, pressed her foot against his outstretched arm and sprang forward past his head with a half-roll, passing by legs-first. When the length of her body had nearly passed him, her arms wrapped around his face, and she used her airborne weight and momentum to pull him down. The sheer force managed to sink Hank down to one knee with a loud grunt from both of them. Bella looped her moving body downward and sideways like a gymnast curling herself around rings. Hank’s body jerked with the sudden sideways movement and Hank touched down to the floor with one hand to stay on his knees.
Bella continued her body’s path under and then around Hank’s head, leveraging herself to swing up over Hank’s head at a height that would have Olympians clapping. The back of her shirt touched the ceiling of the hospital hallway for an instant, and then the meteor descended. With Hank wide open beneath her, Bella’s fingers wove together into a ball and as she ended her descent back to earth, she slammed her conjoined fists against Hank’s back with an impact that shook the entire building.
Hank grunted in pain and fell to the floor. Bella flopped down from the impact next to him, the last of herself spent. She weakly raised her head to see if he was still up. He was not. She was not sure if he was going to get up later, but it sure felt like a good time to take a nap.
Bella fell into darkness.
----
“Hey Aru!” said Leucine. Fidelis followed behind her.
“Code black again.” Aru said, shaking her head. “Hey Dr. Fidelis.”
“Where’s the vampire? We are in need of some ass to kick”, said Fidelis.
“Oh that’s a relief.” said Chiharu. “Well, there’s only one place you can catch Totallyhumannormalgirl (god I hate that name), because she runs really damn fast and she’s really hard to find. The basketball court.”
“I’m not familiar with her”, said Fidelis. “Why the basketball court?”
“THNG can’t be caught if she doesn’t want to be.” said Chiharu. “She’s hell-bent on sports and crap in general. The only reliable way to get her to show up is to challenge her to a game of basketball. It seems no matter where you are, what time of day, she’ll rush to play basketball. 30 minutes a pop. But she’s also incredibly good at it, I usually go 0-90 in a solo game with her, and I hear that’s pretty normal. It’s better to have a team, but she’ll still win. Most people around here have given up on challenging her in any way.”
“Well, we’re desperate enough. We’ll take Totallyhumannormalgirl down.” said Fidelis.
The three of them filed into the hospital’s gym. It had all sorts of lines drawn into the ground and poles and equipment lying around for other sports, but the only thing it seemed anyone used it for was basketball. A very small section of bleachers lay on the side, usually empty.
“Okay. This is what we have so say to summon her”, said Chiharu. She pressed her face against her open palms in the universal gesture for embarrassment, and gathered herself before looking up and speaking. “Come on and slam, if you-“
“Wanna jam!” the vampire’s voice rang out as she appeared out of nowhere in the opposite side of the court, amidst a cloud of metal baseball bats. The bats clanged loudly as they hit the ground. She dribbled a basketball at a furious pace, her basketball jersey and curly black hair swaying with every movement.
Chiharu took her gun out and started firing. The vampire leapt around in a series of inhumanly sharp maneuvers, with the ball still in play, keeping Chiharu from getting a bead on her.
“Wait, what?” screamed Fidelis among the deafening din of gunshots and metal bats clanging against the ground. “Why are you shooting at her?”
“The game has begun! There are no rules, except take her out! We get thirty minutes to take her out!” said Chiharu.
“WRRYYYYYY”, the vampire screamed as she leapt several dozen feet up in the air and dunked on the opposite side of the court. The gym’s automated scoreboard flipped three points in her favor.
Fidelis hefted up one of the discarded baseball bats, very unsure of the situation. Leucine simply sat back and observed, clearly waiting for some kind of opening.
The basketball suddenly caromed off Chiharu’s skull, knocking her to the floor with a loud slam and drawing some blood from her nose. Her gun flew out of her hands. The vampire charged at the ball as it bounced shallowly against the floor, covering most of the distance. Fidelis scrambled for the ball, several dozen feet behind the vampire. Leucine smirked, still standing where she started the game and made a spinning motion with her hands, looking straight into the vampire’s eyes.
“Come on and slam- wait, whose ball is it?” said the vampire, THNG, suddenly stopping in her tracks and scratching her head.
Fidelis caught up to the vampire, who seemed suddenly unaware of the doctor approaching her with the baseball bat. Fidelis smashed the baseball bat into THNG’s legs.
“WRRRYYYY!” the vampire screamed as she fell underneath the blow. Fidelis then decided to use her own special talent as she reached down and grasped THNG’s head. Nothing happened.
“Um, I should be opening up your soul right now”, said Fidelis
“Lawl, vampires have no souls!” THNG said, with a grin. She then spun herself up to her feet, causing Fidelis to flinch backwards. She dashed off to retrieve the basketball, losing Fidelis entirely.
Leucine gestured at Chiharu, still rolling on the ground at the pain of having her nose broken by a basketball. Chiharu suddenly stood up, her face entirely free of injury. Chiharu reached for her gun, but THNG was faster and threw the ball at the gun, knocking it away again. The gun discharged as it hit the ground and the bullet caught Chiharu in the shin. She fell to the ground with a grunt, bleeding from her leg. Leucine gestured again and Chiharu got back up to her perfectly healthy feet, unsure why she was kneeling down to begin with.
“Ohhh! I get it now! You’re the medic! Shoot the medic!” said THNG. She retrieved the loose ball once again with her inhuman speed and threw the basketball at Leucine with a speed that would do baseball proud. Leucine narrowly dodged as the ball zoomed past, ricocheted off the wall behind her and hit her in the back off the head. Leucine fell to the ground. THNG caught the ball.
“Hey, wait the ball went out of bounds!” said Fidelis. “That’s not fair!”
“Get dunked on, girlie-o!” said THNG as she sailed through the air and dropped the ball through the hoop. She dropped down after the ball and then threw it at Fidelis. “Your ball!”
“Shit”, said Fidelis. She leapt out of the way, but was too slow. The ball caught her in the obliques, and she fell face first onto the ground hacking and coughing. The ball flew back at THNG as if it were a boomerang. THNG rushed forward to carry the ball forward to the half-court.
THNG cackled as Chiharu continued rapidly shooting at her, missing every shot. The vampire threw the ball at the doctor. Chiharu blocked it with her forearms, the force of the impact snapping her chest and arms backwards, and causing her to stumble backwards. The ball once again bounced back to THNG’s hands. Chiharu scrambled for balance, again seemingly unhurt and Fidelis recovered similarly behind the both of them.
“Time to get schooled then”, said THNG, as she saw Leucine finish making another odd gesture at Chiharu and Fidelis. Then her face wrinkled in confusion as Leucine made another gesture at her, again looking straight into her eyes.
“Wait… who am I playing ag-“, said THNG.
Fidelis slammed the baseball bat against THNG’s head. THNG barely flinched.
“Fool! You can’t hurt me with my own bats!” she said.
Chiharu suddenly pointed the gun in THNG’s face, at point blank range. The gun clicked empty.
Chiharu gave both the vampire and the gun a hateful facial expression that well substituted for the stream of profanity no doubt going through her head.
“Jam with the rest!” said THNG, still with her usual grin. She leapt up several dozen feet as her three opponents looked up in awe. As she fell, she threw down the basketball. It hit Leucine in the head first, then bounced off Chiharu’s head and finally smacked Fidelis in the leg, keeping enough momentum to draw a fair bit of blood on every impact. The bloodstained basketball bounced back into THNG’s hand as she ran past, and she leapt back up to the hoop and dunked it into rim again. The scoreboard now read 8-0.
After quite some time unconscious, Chiharu rolled up to her feet, puddle of blood at her feet, and looked up at the scoreboard. “Hey Leucine, do your magic healing thing!” she said, with some difficulty. “We still have 10 minutes to bring her down!”
Leucine sat and clutched her head in pain. She hobbled over to Chiharu to get within normal speaking distance. “Doesn’t work that way, I have to witness the injury happen”, she whispered to Chiharu. “I’d heal myself if I could, but I lost consciousness.”
Fidelis crawled to them, battered and bruised all over, her injured legs clearly not in shape to support her.
“Don’t you people heal fast by yourselves?” said Chiharu.
“Leucine’s special because she can actively heal herself. With limitations. Outside of that, we immortals need some downtime to get better”, said Fidelis, as she spat out teeth. “The score is 215-0 now. She’s just been dunking unopposed on me this whole time and hitting me with the ball every time she scored.”
“Fuck the score”, said Chiharu. “We kick her ass to win, that’s all that needs to happen.”
“Your ball!” said the vampire as she sank yet another basket.
“Incoming!” said Chiharu as she tackled Leucine to the ground. The basketball zoomed past them. THNG made another almost-flying leap across the gym towards the ball.
“Plan? I’m almost out of bullets. Just this last clip.” said Chiharu.
“Fidelis, instead of trying to use your mojo on the vampire, how about Aru here?” said Leucine.
“You know, that just might work.” said Fidelis.
“Wait, what?” said Chiharu.
Before Chiharu could protest, Fidelis sunk her hand deep into Chiharu’s skull, passing into it as if immaterial. A golden yellow glow emitted from the interface where their bodies met. Chiharu’s eyes rolled up a bit and stared far away, her jaw went slack and she sat motionless. Fidelis’s eyes stared into Chiharu’s head, looking over something she could see, as if reading a text. She made fine movements with her obscured hand, as if practicing surgery and muttered under her breath.
“I’ll cover you”, said Leucine. She picked up Fidelis’ baseball bat and swung hard at an incoming basketball, barely deflecting it. Fidelis was deeply absorbed with whatever she was doing to Dr. Matsuda.
“Don’t have much time”, said Leucine. The vampire ran up to her, with the ball in hand. Leucine hesitantly prepared another swing, but she was too late.
“Get dunked on!” said THNG, as she leapt up and smashed the ball onto Leucine’s head. Leucine dropped like a brick through thin air.
“Done!” said Fidelis as THNG similarly smashed the basketball into her skull. Fidelis unceremoniously dropped to the ground as well.
“Slam with the best or jam with the rest!” said THNG, as she prepared for the coup de grace on a still-catatonic Chiharu.
A hand flew up and caught the ball just as it made contact. Chiharu’s glazed expression creased in determination and her lips made a snarl as her hands wrestled the ball out of THNG’s grip. She punched the vampire in the face, knocking the vampire back. She rose to her feet, dribbling the basketball defiantly.
“Take this thing into overtime!” said THNG, still cheerfully grinning and apparently unhurt. She rushed at Chiharu, disappearing into a blur. Chiharu pulled out her gun again in an equally fast draw and calmly fired a single shot at THNG. The vampire dodged to the side of the bullet and Chiharu’s aim followed her. The vampire tried to shake her aim, but Chiharu kept pace, periodically firing a shot to keep her opponent guessing, and dribbling slowly towards the basket on the opposing side of the court.
She then threw the ball at the basket rim. Like iron filings in a MRI room, the vampire flew at the ball to intercept it. But Chiharu was ready for her. Chiharu placed her last bullet next to the path of the basketball and THNG flew right into it. The vampire continued her trajectory, landing in a crumpled, bleeding heap.
“Wrrryyyy”, the vampire moaned on the ground.
Chiharu stood over her foe and looked over her injury. “I hate you so much. Now it’s your turn to get dunked on.” She kicked the vampire in the face, and satisfied that the bullet was not life threatening enough (insomuch as this thing was alive), walked off.
“Okay, that’s one down”, Chiharu panted, as exhaustion caught up to her.
Chiharu roused Fidelis and Leucine from their unconsciousness and onto their feet.
“What on earth did you do to me? I don’t feel any different and I don’t remember what you did after you reached your hand into me. But… I won. All by myself.” Chiharu said.
“I reached into your soul and altered your mind to stay calm and focused.” Said Fidelis. I can’t give you skills you don’t have but I can get you perform at your best even in the worst possible situation. You might behave a bit differently from this point on, but hopefully nothing drastic. The effects should leave the next time you go to sleep, so just take a nap if you’re not feeling quite yourself. Sorry about the lack of consent, surely you understand.”
“Yeah. It was worth it.”
“Now, we are about to do something even stupider than this, so you can go off now and do something non-dangerous without us.” said Leucine. “Also, be sure to call me when I get promoted to Chief of Medicine for a day!”
Chiharu stared forward in blank abject horror.
“She’s kidding.” said Fidelis.
Chiharu slowly walked away. Leucine felt struck by a mighty urge to grab Dr. Matsuda’s ample Japanese behind, but as her hands reached out, she noticed the “DON’T GRAB ARU’S ASS” drawn on marker on her glove sleeves. She quickly snapped her hands back to her sides. Fidelis scoffed.
Leucine turned to Fidelis. “Wow, Fiddy, you look like shit”
“I’ve been shot with a basketball for fifteen minutes on end while you were in dreamland”, said Fidelis. “You know what, I’ll be in the hospital dorms while I sleep this off. Wake me up when it’s time to commit suicide by duck”. She walked off with a dismissive wave of her hand.
-----
Vivi and Chihiroe followed a trail of shed cat hairs. Their opponent today would be the fearsome MASSCAT, a collective of small feline beings of pure malevolence. In other words, kittens.
Vivi looked rather out of place with her massive scorpion-like green and brown tail swaying behind her as she walked. Her normally cheerful demeanor was replaced by a worried frown, possibly because she was thrown into a battle against a being of pure evil. Her human-appearing body, from the chest down, sported a thin coat of tan-colored fur, but it was hard to tell because her long dress, white leggings and lab coat covered most of it.
Chihiroe, short for “Counter-hazard Inspection, Health and Infirmary Robotic Entity” walked beside her. Her pink-trimmed black robe vaguely reminded passerby of a kimono, if it were not for a few electronic-looking glowing lines running across it. Her face was extremely pale and slightly metallic, with a faceplate across her lower face that strongly resembled a surgical mask, and usually bore a placid expression. Her long black hair formed into a ponytail and several long bangs, and no one ever saw her without a surgical light on her headband. Today she carried a shotgun.
“Isn’t that a bit much to hunt for cats?” said Vivi.
“Current ordnance: Less-lethal baton rounds. Odds of serious injury from incapacitating impact calculated at 23%”, said Chihiroe.
“That’s pretty high!” said Vivi.
Chihiroe pointed at Vivi’s tail. “Naturally-emitted soporific dust of unknown provenance. Odds of serious injury from unexpected sedation calculated at 17%. Long-term side effects unknown.”
“Only in an uncontrolled setting. I don’t use it on standing patients; they need to sit down first. And MASSCAT is a bunch of kittens, they can handle falling down much better than humans.”
Chihiroe suddenly stopped in her tracks. “Divergence in trail noted. Highest probability is splitting of hostile feline entities.”
“So… split up?”
“Negative.” Chihiroe swiped her hand across the hairs and looked closely at them. “Further analysis of hair suggests sequential, rather than simultaneous shedding. Highest probability is backtracking.”
“Lol ambush faaaaaags!” cried a high-pitched voice as a gunshot rang out. It bounced off Chihiroe. Vivi flinched. A small kitten leapt out of nowhere onto Vivi and sank a tiny knife into her shoulder. She screamed and tore the kitten off her, throwing it aside.
“Lololol you didn see it coming fags” said the kitten as it landed on the floor with a perfect three point landing. Chihiroe snapped up her shotgun at it, but another kitten landed on her arm, throwing off her aim. It hit her with a lensed surgical instrument, shattering its glass against her arm. Chihiroe smoothly picked up the kitten and slammed it onto the floor.
“lol owned”, said the kitten and then it gurgled as it hit the floor. Suddenly, a car came out of nowhere and smashed into Chihiroe, crushing her against a wall. Vivi yelped and dove out of the way of the vehicle and debris. Another gunshot narrowly missed her. She covered her head and whimpered. Her tail began emitting a strange white dust that seemed to float in the still air.
“Bitches u gunna die”, said another kitten in a high-pitched screech from the direction of the gunshot. It carried a BB rifle up to Vivi. It shot her in the face. She flinched up to a kneeling position and screamed in pain.
As the kitten cycled the rifle, Chihiroe peeled herself out from against the car, and kicked the gun-wielding kitten out of the way, sending it flying. She picked up her shotgun, but several kittens dismounted from the car that hit her, with various dangerous medical instruments in hand. Chihiroe knocked one kitten away with a hasty-aimed shot, but the kittens were on her immediately and hacked away in abandon, causing her to drop her shotgun again.
“Die slut dieeeee”, said one kitten. “Haters gonna hate, get fucked up boyo” said another. Chihiroe threw off all of her attackers, but more and more poured out of the car and the ones who fell off simply got back on and bashed their axes, hammers and bone saws against the robot.
Vivi limped up to her feet, clutching a welt below one of her eyes and a cut in her shoulder. She heard something familiar behind her, a put-puttering sound, followed by a loud RNGGGG-DUHDUHDUHDUH that sent a shiver up her spine. She looked at the source of the sound and saw a kitten wielding a small medical bone chainsaw looking at her with hateful glee. She screamed at the top of her lungs as the kitten lunged at her. She barely pushed the chainsaw away from her face, screaming the entire time. Another kitten popped into her view behind her attacker, and Vivi’s eyes widened as much as they humanly could as the second kitten produced a cautery pen, glowing red hot at its tip. The second kitten stabbed at her with the pen, and Vivi Belgica mustered absolutely everything she had to push the chainsaw kitten into the path of the pen.
The kitten yelped a vile racial epithet followed by a stream of profanity as the cautery pen sank into its back with a hiss, and the air bloomed with the smell of burnt fur. The burnt kitten went limp and collapsed where it stood. The second kitten with the cautery pen giggled and extracted the tip from its comrade. Vivi yelled when the first kitten dropped the running chainsaw, causing it to dance around on the floor, cutting shallowly into her foot as it did so. She fell backward out of the path of the chainsaw, fighting the urge to clutch at her foot. The second kitten landed on its feet, away from the loose chainsaw, and approached her with the cautery pen.
Vivi scrambled away from the kitten as it menaced her with the cautery pen, the attached power pack on its back like a backpack. Desperate enough to try something stupid, she spun around with her tail as fast as she could. It slapped the kitten, knocking the pen away, but doing little else. The kitten recovered quickly and lunged for the pen at the same time as Vivi. She started winning their sudden tug-of-war, when the kitten bit into her hand. She screamed and released it. The kitten seized onto the cautery pen. Thinking fast, Vivi picked the kitten up by the power pack on its back and pushed it down onto the floor, squashing the kitten with her weight.
“Fucking whore cunt I’ll fu-“the kitten sputtered, then Vivi felt something give way underneath her with a nasty silent wet crunch.
Vive pushed the (hopefully) neutralized kitten and its ruined battery pack away, and then turned to help Chihiroe. White dust from Vivi’s tail and debris from combat swirled around the battlefield now.
Chihiroe wasn’t showing much sign of damage, but the kittens were hacking away at her neck and face, and she was pinned underneath the weight of at least a full dozen kittens on her. One of them leapt off at Vivi. Vivi, barely conscious of her actions at this point, slapped it away, sending it flying and bouncing through the hallway. She picked up a large piece of plaster from the destroyed wall that the car hit, and threw it at Chihiroe, knocking off another kitten.
Chihiroe used the opening to free her arm and produce a very large taser from her robe pockets. She jammed it into her own face and the currents ran across her metallic skin. Most of the kittens that were on her twitched and danced to an inaudible but surely very fast tune as electricity surged across her and their bodies. They fell from her like bizarre fruit from a robotic tree, slightly smoking as they lay still, amplifying the smell of burnt fur in the air.
The few kittens remaining on Chihiroe renewed slamming their tools against her body with great vigor, knocking her off balance. Another wave of kittens descended from the ceiling, to Vivi’s horror, descending on all sorts of medical cables and wires as if they were drop lines, bearing scalpels and pins in their teeth.
Vivi, still not hoarse from nonstop yelling, gave an uncharacteristic cry of panic and fury as she concentrated and tensed herself, her tail quivering rapidly. The white dust in the air intensified.
As the kittens descending down breathed in the rising white dust, their movements slowed. Then, finally, stopped, as they were about to reach Vivi and Chihiroe with their sharp implements, and they fell. The few that were on Chihiroe quickly followed suit, falling to the ground with gentle cat snoozing noises. Vivi yelped and covered her head with her arms as several unconscious kittens bounced onto and off her. One unlucky scalpel fell onto her leg, drawing blood. She extracted it without thinking.
After she finished cowering, Vivi looked around. The area was still. She was bleeding and bruised in many places, but she could mostly walk, with a bit of difficulty. Her dress and lab coat sported more tears than uninterrupted fabric at this point. Her tail, oddly enough, was perfectly fine.
Chihiroe seemed for the most part fine, although her body now sported many cuts, scuffs and dents. She stood at attention once more as if nothing went wrong.
“Mission successful. All 27 components of MASSCAT accounted for.”, Chihiroe said.
“Is there a washroom nearby?” said Vivi, dizzy with her own sleeping dust in her lungs. She knew adrenaline was the only thing keeping her standing, and that would wear off soon. “Where are we now, even?”
“We seem to be in front of the medical waste facilities”, said Chihiroe.
“Okay. I think I am okay, so going to get cleaned up, then let’s report back to Dr. Doctorow. I just want a hot bath at the end of the day and then my two weeks.”
Vivi, leaning against Chihiroe, staggered back to Willis’ office.
-----
“Okay, headcount”, said Willis. The group huddled together in an empty operating room.
Willis seemed in perfectly normal shape, although he now wore a slightly different pair of glasses and his clothes looked shredded up underneath a replacement lab coat. Bella, on the other hand, leaned against him, barely able to stand up on her own, and covered in bloody bandages. One of her eyes swelled shut and she held up an icepack up to her head. She had a nervous smile on her face despite all this.
Leucine tended to Vivi, carefully suturing up her cuts as Vivi downed a few painkillers. Fidelis lay sound asleep in a chair beside them. One could see her fresh scars and bruises get ever so slightly smaller with every minute that passed.
Chihiroe stood at attention as usual, entirely unconcerned with the battered state of her body.
“We really shouldn’t have Vivi do more fighting”, said Leucine.
“Yeah, but I made it out okay this time. Next time it’ll be okay too, right?” said Vivi, with an air of disbelief in her words.
“Everyone seems to be okay except Dr. Belgica, who seems to be in a classic state of post-traumatic shock.” Said Willis. “We’ll have her and Chihiroe prep an operating room while we deal with the Duck. I’m afraid it’s too late to substitute Dr. Belgica.”
“Is the four of us enough to take on the Duck?” said Leucine.
“I have no idea”, said Willis. “Anyways, he’s going to be in the medical waste center, I suspect his three minions were standing guard for him.”
“What is he doing there?” said Bella. “Eating dead bodies? Er, body parts?”
“He’s seeking the Unlimited Gallstones, an immense source of power created from an excess of psychokinetic, or magical, energy. We apparently had them extracted from some especially gifted patients. Our surgeons did not recognize what they were, and the Unlimited Gallstones are currently scattered in various forms among this week’s medical waste. But he knew, somehow. It is important that we take down the duck before he can amass them all and acquire immense power. “
“Wait, what? Immense power just comes from people’s gallstones? What?” said Bella.
“These are particularly powerful beings, whose identities I am not at liberty to disclose, due to privacy regulations.” Said Willis “All I know is that we will be handling medical waste from supernatural beings far more carefully in the future. Currently, the five gallstones correspond to, and control, five fundamental forces that make the world go round:
- Money
- Angular Momentum
- Fat-Bottomed Girls
- Changing people
- Love
He shuddered.
“Wait, did the Fat-Bottomed Girls one come from Valine in the Sleep Medicine ward?” said Leucine.
Willis visibly hesitated.
“I knew it! That girl has ass for days!” said Leucine.
“Fat-Bottomed Girls? What the heck does that have to do with anything even?” said Bella.
“God, haven’t you ever listened to Queen?” said Leucine.
“I was trapped in a room for two hun- for a while, okay?”
Fidelis snorted and gasped in her sleep, interrupting their train of thought.
“Anyways, let’s kick some ducky ass”, said Leucine.
“The longer we delay, the closer he is to completing his search of the medical waste facility!” said Willis.
----
Fidelis, Willis, Bella and Leucine burst through the double doors into the medical waste facility. The immortal team was ideal for taking on the Grand Duck, as there was a non-zero chance they would lose this battle.
The Grand Duck was clearly expecting them. He stood in the middle of the facility, dried blood saturating his little yellow claws, his large beak and round torso. He quacked menacingly at them, with his large battle-axe firmly in his claws.
“Duck duck… Duck. Psyyyy…. Yiyiyiyi.”
Fidelis flinched at seeing the hate in the Duck’s eyes. Sensing weakness, the Duck flung his axe. Willis ducked out of the way and the axe hit Leucine behind him, removing her head immediately. Her severed head fell onto the floor and started pouring ashes instead of blood from her neck stump.
Willis yelled, “Focus on the duck! Dr. Naturae can recover!” The three remaining doctors began to charge forward at the duck. The Grand Duck stared hatefully at them as he tipped his crowned head forward. A small green object fell out of his crown. He caught it, removed a smaller silver sliver of material from it with a loud click and almost dismissively tossed it forward.
Willis grimaced with force as he realized the projectile bouncing towards them was a hand grenade. He shoved Bella to the ground, covering her with his body. Fidelis started to dive to the side, but too late. The grenade went off at her feet, ripping off many pieces of her body, which decayed into ashes almost immediately upon leaving her. The remaining tatters of Dr. Fidelis’ body fell to the floor with a surprisingly soft thump.
Willis got up to his feet, bleeding and shaking considerably from several fragments entering his lower body. Bella scrambled to her feet, but had some difficulty. The Duck lunged forward, shockingly fast on his tiny ducky feet, covering the ground between him and them almost immediately.
Willis braced for an attack, but the Duck’s furious claws sprung out and ripped into his guarded stance immediately, ignoring whatever parries Willis could muster. Willis tried to grab the Duck for a counterattack, but the Duck fought relentlessly and whenever Willis grabbed a claw, the other one tore into his arms, leaving deep gash. Willis’ legs, pin cushioned with shrapnel, threatened to buckle under him, keeping him unable to match the duck’s rapid footwork.
Bella crept up from behind and smashed both fists together on the Duck’s head, which only pissed him off. The Grand Duck leapt up frighteningly high, kicking Bella backwards. Willis took the chance to catch the Duck with a punch, but the Duck twisted in midair, catching Willis’ arm, and, clinging onto the arm like a branch, deftly swiped his claws across Willis’ throat.
Willis gurgled and gasped for air. The Duck leapt up with unnatural force and slammed his head into Willis’ forehead, knocking him down. Willis struggled to get up, blood sputtering from his lips as she strained, but his wounded legs would not obey him. His breath caught in his slashed throat, and he fought to stay calm.
In the moment this all happened, Bella stumbled from the kick, and when she recovered and Willis fell, the Duck gracefully pirouetted around to meet her. He stared deeply into her eyes, contesting her will. She fought the urge to shudder beneath his all-hating gaze. Willfully discarding all the horrible things she had heard and just saw about him, she took the first move, a measured spear-handed strike. The Duck sidestepped it just so and lashed out with his claws to dig into her hand. She accepted the attack as it nicked her retreating hand and without pause used her other hand to slam into the Duck’s skull. The Duck too accepted the blow, and leapt at her in a flurry of claw strikes. Bella backpedaled under the assault. The duck landed and immediately darted forward far sooner than any being should have. Bella acrobatically leapt over his lunging strike and over his head, landing behind him. She made a sweeping kick behind her at where she guessed he was and she was rewarded with an impact and a quack of anger.
They turned around to face each other. The Duck took the initiative this time, and ran forward at her, swiping wildly at her feet and legs. She moved like a dancer despite her injuries, weaving out of his strikes. When the moment presented itself, she intercepted one of his strikes at his elbow, instead at his claws, with a sharp kick. As he staggered backward from the rotation, Bella dipped low, leaning in for a fist to his head. He gave her what she swore could have been a smile, and then jumped up again with unearthly force, leading this time with his large duckbill. She blocked the blow, but the hardness of the bill bit into her arms. He then contorted in midair and ripped up her forearms with another sharp claw slash. She yelped in pain and stumbled backwards. In her heart, she realized defense was hardly tenable against an opponent with sharp claws and this kind of agility. The duck landed, took a resting stance and stared at her again with hatred burning in his eyes.
Bella left her usual stance and relaxed. She started hostilities again with a sharp kick. The Duck’s claws ripped into her leg, but she did not relent. She kicked with her other foot in a wide crescent kick that caught him in the head and knocked him backwards. She nearly stumbled on her hurt leg, but forced it into place with sheer will as she threw a barrage of low punches and smashes into the Duck’s head. Every single blow landed, and one of the Duck’s eyes closed with tears when she bashed her fist right against it. The Duck began rolling with the strikes, and eventually managed to parry one with its bill, skinning Bella’s knuckles against its blunt surface.
Bella did not stop and her next strike knocked off the Duck’s crown, revealing a small patch of a few large black hairs on its head. The Duck leapt up into her wide-open stance and cut open her face with an unexpected swipe of his claws, and although she could see only red, white and agony, she flew an elbow up to meet him in the face. She could feel the Duck knocked off balance in mid-air by the strike. He continued on his trajectory onto her torso, clinging on with one of its hands, and she felt the Duck wildly scramble at her with his free hand, slashing away at her upper arm, shoulder and neck. The warmth of her own blood bathed her and everywhere she turned her mind, the pain in her own body screamed at her.
She raised her un-injured arm and dropped an elbow up into his head, feeling a gratifying impact. She continued slamming into his head, until he finally seized her forearm and cut the length of her arm open. She screamed and did the only thing left to her- remembering her fight with Hank, she leapt up as high as she could and landed on her opponent clinging to her. The Duck flattened slightly under her weight. She rolled off, blinded and bloodied. In between her loud breaths, she heard the Duck get up to his feet and walk around. She screamed with rage and struggled away in his general direction, not sure exactly where he was.
Then she felt the Duck’s claws around her and the tension of his body. Before she could react, she felt a blunt impact and then her mind was silence.
The Grand Duck rolled his claws out of a tight fist and dropped Bella to the ground. He heard her still breathing. He gently rolled her onto her side. He waddled over to where Willis lay. Willis’ eyes glazed over, his breathing had stopped, and his skin was white with exsanguination. What the Duck could not have known was that Willis’ body was still very much warm and would continue to be so as he recovered, but that possibility did not concern the Duck in the least.
He breathed with some difficulty, one of his eyes was swollen shut, one of his arms barely moved, and any of the doctors on the floor could tell he was enjoying the effects of a concussion with the difficulty in some of his movements. However, The Grand Duck had a mission, and his injuries were entirely secondary in his mind.
The Grand Duck waddled over to Leucine. Leucine was stirring to consciousness, her skin and hair materializing out of thin air and slowly wrapping itself around on the exposed muscle of her regrowing skull. Her decapitated head had decomposed entirely to a ring of ashes and smoke on the ground next to the reconstructing head actually on her neck. The duck shook his head in frustration and bit into her neck and upper chest with his large duck bill. She screamed awake and then cried in pain as his large blunt beak dug into her. Finally, the bill made a loud crunching noise and drew blood. Leucine stopped yelling and went limp in the duck’s grasp. The Duck tore away and spat out a large chunk of flesh, which began decaying to ash the moment it left her body, as before. Leucine slumped back to the ground.
The Duck pulled out a flare and threw it at Leucine, setting her body on fire. He turned to Fidelis, similarly observing the way her body was undoing the holes where the grenade had torn into her body, although she was not nearly intact enough to regain consciousness. Then he lit her on fire too.
Now fully uninterrupted, the Grand Duck, lord of the Altan Ord, spat out the blood pooling in his mouth and waddled over to his prize. The last Unlimited Gallstone, hidden in a bag of medical waste a few meters away. He tore it open, savoring the smell of days-old gore before he tucked into a piece of gore that glowed with unnatural energy.
He froze up in the middle of his morbid meal. Something quaked in his stomach, loud enough to be felt from outside. The edges of his open eye glowed with a rainbow of color and he shook furiously- not as in seizing, but as in actually vibrating side to side as a single entity. Then, his big ducky eyes rolled back and The Grand Duck slumped to the ground.
-------
Leucine gained consciousness outside the operating room. She saw Bella, Vivi and Chihiroe nearby. Bella looked like she been successfully murdered and rose from the grave, she was covered in freshly removed blood and parts of her were barely holding together amidst several hundreds of stitches. She sat in a chair, clearly in no condition to sit up, although her eyes were open, she clearly wasn’t fully there right now.
Vivi and Chihiroe were as they were before the confrontation with the Duck, clearly prepping for a surgery. Leucine noticed she was lying on a hospital bed. That means the Duck killed her at some point in the last hour. She looked around to her sides and saw two other beds: Fidelis’ body slowly reassembling itself to her right, and the Grand Duck himself, unconscious, on her left.
Willis stepped in, gasping and huffing. His clothes looked completely trashed and bloodstained he was missing his glasses. He clearly had been running, but otherwise seemed in perfect condition. No indication of a fight was present on his body, even though his shredded clothes said otherwise.
Leucine stared with some curiosity. He somehow recovered faster than she did and Fidelis did, but not fast enough to squeeze in a change of clothes. Probably something to do with being an angel of healing.
“Let’s begin operating immediately”, he said, motioning for Chihiroe to bring him something. “These are far from ideal or even halfway sterile conditions, but bear with us. Ah Dr. Naturae, you are up already. Good. We’ll fill in Dr. Fidelis when she wakes.”
Leucine nodded and got out of bed. Chihiroe brought them scrubs and helped them get dressed in the nearby changing rooms. Meanwhile, Vivi and Chihiroe wheeled in the Grand Duck. Chihiroe palpated his arm for a vein. Chihiroe took an IV line filled with a strange murky fluid, shrugged her shoulders and stabbed his arm with the cannula and threaded the IV needle through it. Vivi and Chihiroe gave the Duck the Wolcrasi standard procedure for a being of unknown anatomical composition. Anesthetic gas intubation, reinforced straps tying him to the table, stomach pumping (didn’t remove the Unlimited Gallstones, unfortunately), more vital sign sensors than usual and several reflex tests to make sure he was completely out (thankfully, he was). It wasn’t standard practice, but Vivi also threw in a good old-fashioned prayer because, if he left sedation while the surgical team was anywhere around, that would probably be the end of all of their lives that very moment. She made a move towards her Sudoku before remembering that this procedure would need her full attention as a (stand-in) anesthesiologist.
Fidelis woke up midway through preparations. Leucine, noticing Fidelis’ loud gasp of breath with new lungs, stepped out halfway-dressed. She sashayed over in her purple scrubs just for Fidelis and handed her a spare set of scrubs. Fidelis pretended not to notice Leucine trying to draw attention to her butt as she stepped into another dressing room stall.
Bella burst into the room and yelled at no one in particular.
“Let’s go, we’re ready! We have to open this duck up now!” she said.
Willis stepped out, fully dressed and nodded. “The fate of the multiverse depends on it!”
The surgical team reconvened with the Duck in the operating room. Bella and Fidelis had undone their injuries like Willis and Leucine did, Bella having changed into scrubs privately out of everyone’s sight. However, the both of them were still quite unsteady on their feet, unlike Leucine and Willis standing quite confidently as Chihiroe applied gloves to their waiting hands.
“Subject is the anatine creature known as the Grand Duck”, said Willis into a recording device that Chihiroe held up. “Patient shows no sign of-“
“Two questions”, said Leucine. “First, we don’t need a surgical transcript, this is top secret and we’re in a rush, remember. Secondly, and yes this goes against everything I am as a doctor, but why are we bothering to keep the duck alive? He’s a mass murderer, anesthesia will be difficult on a being of unknown bodily composition and put two and two together, if he wakes up he’s going to kill every single one of us, magic gallstone powers or not. It will complicate this surgery like heck.”
“You’re right about the transcript”, said Willis, waving away Chihiroe’s recorder. “But we aren’t killers, Dr. Naturae. You have seemed to already concede the ethical issues, so on a practical note I will say this: the Chair of the Board said she wants the duck quite alive, and that should be reason enough. If it’s not, we don’t know what the unlimited gallstones can do. They could save his life and cause him to wake up if sufficiently threatened or resurrect him or…. Rakha knows what else. So… just keep an eye out for that.”
“Okay, whatever”, said Leucine. “Fiddy, stick your hand in him.”
Fidelis sighed and put one hand on the Duck’s head. With some difficulty, she phased her hand into his forehead. She shuddered and made a noise. “God, his soul is most horrifying thing I’ve seen after that one gal who killed all of Phiem. But he is asleep now and if I play with this right, he will definitely stay that way. But let’s not go there unless we have to.”
Willis nodded. Bella handed him a marker and a thin, uneven black tube wired up to a screen on the wall next to him. Laparoscopy was his specialty, he could make surgical cameras and tubes smoothly disappear into someone as if their bodies were born to take it. “Dr. Naturae, incise where I have marked. Excellent.”
He slid the tube into the duck and looked around in the camera screen beside him. He informed the team that the Duck’s crop and gizzard were empty and he would be moving on to the intestines, no further incisions necessary. His hands worked almost magically, pushing the laparoscope through the Duck’s body in ways that clearly not intended by anyone, ever, and he was fully getting away with it. In a few moments, he searched the duck’s intestines thoroughly and detected no less than three gallstones, quite separated apart. He snaked the laparoscope around as it were alive, to get a good look in the lower intestines and detected the other two. He reached around the Duck with his marker and placed three crosses for necessary incisions and others that precisely indicated where additional openings might help. The sparse placement of the necessary markings was an act that required both great faith in the surgical team as well as fantastic expertise in triangulating the position of the camera to the Duck’s body. Especially when a non-human being was the subject.
The Duck stirred and the entire operating room audibly tensed. Vivi hurriedly adjusted several dials on the anesthetic gas machine and inspected the IV line going into the Duck. Fidelis nervously waited with her hand still phased into the Duck’s head. They would be working from the path from the last Unlimited Gallstone back up the Duck’s intestines. Leucine made the first operating incision, a tiny nick, just enough to slide a flexible tube in, which she would be working through to extract the Unlimited Gallstone. Willis watched her movement through, switching his eyes between the opening and his laparoscopy monitor and gave a few helpful remarks to guide her. Leucine maneuvered her blade with expert grace, slipping through each layer of the Duck’s tissues. In half a minute since cutting open the duck, she had reached the gallstone. She pulled it out with the utmost care and dropped it onto a tray Chihiroe held. Willis withdrew his camera to the position of this next gallstone. Leucine pulled back her knife slightly and made a straight path for the next stone with supreme confidence, Willis directing her to adjust her path slightly. The Duck’s thick internal tissues gave little resistance under Leucine’s finesse. Though she had never cut open the Duck or any of his ilk before, the tissues were well familiar to her and she knew how to coax her way through with each layer’s weaknesses and quirks.
The room shook slightly. Leucine and Willis didn’t so much as flinch, absorbed as they were in the surgery. Vivi gasped a little. The room shook again, this time harder.
Willis said, “Doctors Luna and Fidelis, please attend to whatever unwanted visitors we may have”.
He returned to the surgery as if nothing had happened, correcting Leucine ever so slightly.
Dr. Fidelis extracted her hand from the Duck’s head. With a grunt, she walked off and tore off a section of metal railing from an empty hospital bed. She slapped its heft against her hand and, apparently satisfied, moved to leave the room. Bella followed her, palming a spare item from the surgical tool tray on her way out.
They kicked open the doors and saw Hank and THNG before them. Hank had a large and nasty bruise climbing up his right shoulder and THNG’s basketball jersey was soaked somewhat from her prior gunshot, although both of them were still up and fully standing. Bella twitched and her mouth filled with foam a little. She and Fidelis both looked very fed up and tired.
Hank said, “I take little glasses doctor, you take care of small gong fu lady”.
THNG nodded and said, “Come on and slam and welcome to the jam!”
Fidelis yelled something in Russian at Hank. Bella had no idea what it meant, but it was probably extremely unladylike if Fidelis’ uncouth body language and Hank’s quickly reddening face meant anything.
Hank sputtered with rage and stalked forward. Fidelis concealed the metal bar in her hands behind her back. Hank broke into a run at Fidelis, who sidestepped it and, bracing the bar against her body, pried it between Hank’s massive legs mid-stride. Hank fell to the ground with a meaty crash and Fidelis wasted no time in jumping onto his upper back, and rammed her hand into his head.
Hank went still and lay politely against the floor. A basketball shot out at the back of Fidelis’ head. Bella dove and caught it, then rolled out of her roll up to her feet and threw the ball back at the vampire.
THNG caught the returning ball. As her hands closed against the basketball, Bella dashed forward with incredible speed and bashed her palm against the ball to ram it into THNG’s face, then delivered a couple of sharp hooks into THNG’s midsection. The vampire crumpled under the barrage. Without the slightest pause, Bella kicked out THNG’s feet and jumped onto her, punching down wildly, drawing ample blood. Bella’s screaming and pounding contrasted with Fidelis a meter away, carefully twitching her hand inside of Hank’s head with a smoldering anger on her face.
Suddenly, a kitten leapt up on Fidelis’ back and sank a knife into it. Fidelis grimaced in pain, and used her free hand to grab at the kitten. The kitten already left that spot, though, and stabbed her again lower in the back. Bella paused from laying into THNG, retrieved something from her lab coat pocket, and revealing it as antiseptic spray, unleashed it into the kitten’s eyes, causing it to flail around blindly.
Fidelis pinned the kitten under her elbow, knocking it flat and laying it still. Another kitten creeping towards her with another knife hesitated. Bella continued punching THNG in the face.
Before either MASSCAT or Fidelis could act further, Willis opened the operating room doors, smoothly walked out behind Fidelis, grabbed the kitten, and gently held one of his fingers against its throat. It went limp almost instantly, and he threw it aside. Another kitten lunged at him with a pair of surgical shears, but he just sidestepped it and let it smack into the wall behind him. Three kittens dropped down on him from the ceiling with a high-pitched scream and multiple racial slurs against folks of Asian descent. Willis slid out of the way of their attack, and swept one of them aside with his hand to join its comrade smushed against the wall. He danced out of the way of the other two kittens’ lunging attacks.
Fidelis released Hank and Hank’s head flopped onto the floor, a dull look and a spot of drool on his face. Fidelis removed the knife from her back, and in one motion expertly threw it to pin one of Willis’ assailants against the wall by its fur. It impotently cursed up a storm, yelling and ranting all sorts of slurs for female genitalia at Fidelis. Willis carefully tossed aside the last free kitten’s weapon and seized it by the scruff of its back. As the cat’s tiny claws uselessly flailed against his grasp and its mouth wailed profanity, Willis reached up to it and gave one of its legs a gentle wrench. It gasped as its limb dislocated and it went limp like a doll. He carefully laid its unconscious form onto the floor. Fidelis socked the kitten she pinned against the wall, finally shutting it up and splattering the wall slightly with blood.
Bella finished punching the crap out of THNG. The vampire lay against the floor, blood everywhere and her face surprisingly not too mangled considering how intensely Bella had been punching her.
Fidelis put a hand on Bella’s shoulder. Bella spun around, hyperventilating and frothing at the mouth a little. Willis made a motion to Fidelis and Fidelis stepped back. Willis stepped forward and offered Bella his hand. Bella hesitated, and then seemed to return to herself, taking his hand.
Willis scratched his head, looking over the defeated bodies of the Grand Duck’s followers. He seemed almost taken aback by how quickly it ended.
He scratched his chin and said, “Now that I think about it, perhaps my mistake was in assigning the wrong doctors to the wrong opponents.”
“No shit?” said Fidelis.
“I want to go home.” said Bella.
Willis said, “And home you shall go. But first, we have a surgery to conclude.”
Bella clutched her skinned knuckles as they stepped back into the OR. Only Willis wasn’t breathing heavily by this point. Well, perhaps Chihiroe counted as well, she calmly stood at attention with robotic stillness while Leucine operated.
“Last Gallstone, doc!” said Leucine, a wide grin behind her surgical mask.
Willis said, “Excellent progress, Dr. Naturae. Let’s continue to operate.”
He resumed his post at the laparoscopic screen, before a look around distracted him. “Hm… the Duck’s vital signs aren’t quite right. Dr. Belgica, inspect his anesthesia again.”
Vivi took a moment to react. She looked quite frazzled by this point, but complied. She busily changed around dials and switches on the anesthetic gas machine while looking over the Duck’s vitals.
“Okay, last Gallstone is out!” said Leucine, and the entire operating room sighed a breath of relief as she dropped it onto the tray.
“See, I wasn’t even necessary.” said Fidelis with a smile.
“Okay, apply your psychokinetic retrokinesis to the Duck’s injuries, Dr. Naturae,” said Willis. “Let’s call it a day and wrap up quickly before he wakes up. That went almost perfectly, I’m proud of you all.”
Leucine carefully focused on the Duck’s bleeding cuts, as if remembering past events, and the Duck’s incisions sealed up as if they never existed.
“This is better than he deserves”, she said.
“Psyduck!” the Duck said, nodding in agreement.
Leucine let loose a gasp as the Duck sat up, fully conscious. Fidelis and Bella clutched each other in fright. Willis raised an eyebrow. Vivi screamed. The Duck glared at Leucine.
“Oh… shit.” Leucine said as the duck clawed away her surgical mask, drawing blood from her face. She dragged him off the operating table, onto the floor, toppling a tray of medical instruments as she did so.
The Grand Duck yelled his species name repeatedly as Leucine pinned him under her body. Bella ran over and kicked him in the head a few times. Chihiroe ran for her shotgun and Willis ran to a nearby phone. Fidelis pushed Bella aside and rammed her hand into the Duck’s head. The Duck writhed and shook under Fidelis’ assault.
“Duuuuuck”, said the Duck, clearly fading into unconsciousness.
“Whew”, said Fidelis.
“Duck!” he said, with sudden determination.
The room glowed blue, as did the Grand Duck’s large eyes. Leucine felt herself quickly becoming lighter as she drifted off his body.
“Oh crap oh crap oh crap,” she said, realizing what was happening. The Duck had some last trick up his sleeve, always, and this was it. Normally his immense psychokinetic abilities never came into play unless he was desperate, and well, this probably counted!
Fidelis’s hand ejected from his head with great force and she joined Leucine in slowly drifting up to the ceiling. Chihiroe fired off a shot at the Duck, but the baton round halted a few centimeters from his head and floated away from him.
Bella covered her eyes and screamed as everything in the room slowly migrated from the Grand Duck.
The Grand Duck yelled with a mighty quack and everything in the room flung away from him by itself, slamming against the walls.
Equipment, knives, drugs and people. The doctors shielded themselves the best they could against the objects splashing and breaking against the walls around them.
The Grand Duck got up unsteadily to his feet as the surgical team groaned in pain and tried to brush off sharp debris sticking in them and heavy equipment pinning them.
“Psy… duck”, he said with a cruel look in his eyes, hefting a bone saw up to the prone and pinned body of Willis. Willis met the Duck’s eyes squarely, clearly afraid but prepared for what came next.
Then, one of the doors fell off its hinges, and in walked in a human figure in a very long, robe-like business suit trimmed with yellow and purple. Its face was a solid black color with a single bright stripe running along the center of its face, the only thing exposing the contours of its face. It raised a single finger at the Grand Duck.
“That’s enough”, a female voice said from the figure’s face.
The Grand Duck dropped the saw and stared at the figure. In his eyes was not quite his usual hatred, but a feeling of defeat and resentment.
“Ah… Dr. Lemaitre. Ladies and… gentlemen…might I present the Chair of the Board…” said Willis with some difficulty as he strained under the battered, ruined medical equipment pinning him down.
“Haha, start some shit now, stupid duck”, said Leucine from the floor. “She’ll probably extract your brains and cook them at the same time!”
The Duck held his bloodied claws up to his head and glared at Lemaitre with a rare mixture of hate and fear, but he made absolutely no movement or indication of preparation to move.
Lemaitre gave the duck a quick glance and walked past him to where Willis was pinned. She raised her hand with a flick of her finger and the obstruction literally melted away with the smell of burning plastic, leaving a huffing Willis underneath it, completely unburnt.
Willis slowly stumbled up to his feet and looked carefully into the bright stripe across Lemaitre’s otherwise blank, black face. One got the impression that he was waiting for something. Lemaitre looked around, almost casually, until she spotted something on the floor.
Lemaitre turned to face Willis and extended a hand. “My apologies for my lateness, other parties were interested in the stones and my allies had to tackle them first. From what I can see here, this was an operation well done, Dr. Doctorow. I will take it from here.”
Willis shook her hand and sighed very heavily in relief. He turned to Bella and carefully extricated her from a heap of rubble. He hugged her, wiped some of the dust off his lab coat, and turned to help the other doctors up.
Lemaitre suddenly turned her head and shot the duck a glare. The Duck held his ground, though his already massive eyes widened in surprise. She held eye contact with him while walking over to a glowing puddle on the ground.
“The Infinity Gallstones… are no more. No one should have this power”, she said.
She swiped her hand towards it and the room filled with the smell of burning viscera. The Duck’s eyebrows furrowed and growled underneath his breath, but again, he remained stock-still. The puddle instantly disappeared in a flash of steam and bright light.
Lemaitre turned to the Duck and said, “As for you, fortunately, the Board does not yet desire your presence in a fine duck confit. Tread carefully from here on in. Now get the hell out.”
The Duck turned around with some reluctance, and waddled out, giving the doctors around his usual determined, hateful expression as he left.
“What? He just gets to go? He threw a grenade at us!” said Leucine as she stood back up.
“Let’s say there is a delicate balance of power, Dr. Naturae”, said Lemaitre. “One that you should be grateful exists and equally grateful you know nothing about.”
“Ughhhhh”, Leucine said. “Whatever. I’m taking the rest of the day off, I need to work off all the regeneration and psychokinesis this stupid duck and his stupid basketball vampire made me do.”
Lemaitre ignored her and turned to Vivi, who stared forward in total shock. Lemaitre extracted a slip of glossy paper from her pocket and bowed slightly to Vivi.
“For you, Dr. Belgica”, said Lemaitre. “You showed conspicuous courage, risking death in a way that the others here might not have. Consider this my way of showing personal thanks.”
Vivi snapped to attention and stared at the shiny slip. “Is that a-? A Platinum Great Hub Warppass?”
She seized it from Lemaitre’s hand and held it close to her face. “Oh my god, it’s for two weeks! For any dimension or dimensions? ATokyo? Nucrea? Amytlei? All expenses paid, five stars everything?”
She beamed and held the slip to her chest.
Lemaitre might have been smiling back, but it was impossible to tell behind the darkness obscuring her face.
She turned to Bella, who knelt down in an embrace with Willis. Bella was holding back tears, partly of relief, partly of shock. Willis consoled her.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t get Dr. Luna anything, her involve was not planned”, said Lemaitre. “I’m sure I can think of something. Perhaps if Wolcrasi is too hostile an environment, I’ll give her my full personal recommendation and that of my friends on the Wolcrasi Hospital Board, for to any medical center she wishes to transfer to.”
Willis turned slightly to Lemaitre, slightly awed. “Thank you, that is a great favor, but we’ll work through this. I feel this is the best place for our people.” Lemaitre nodded with understanding.
Willis continued, “Until then, perhaps if you could fast-track the psychiatric wing. I’m looking forward to getting some uniquely qualified therapy for some of the staff, including Dr. Luna, and until then, we don’t have anyone really well suited for this hospital’s unique circumstances.”
“I will do everything.” Lemaitre said.
Lemaitre turned to inspect Chihiroe. Chihiroe calmly awaited orders as always, despite the many dents, slashes and burns adorning her body. “Willis, have the medical android fully restored and serviced, as much as is possible. You may use the hospital reserve fund.” Chihiroe nodded and bowed with something that some would interpret as gratitude.
Lemaitre turned to regard Fidelis.
“We’re even now. How are the kids?” she said.
Fidelis sputtered. “I…. no, they don’t count. They’re not my DNA and I have zero influence over them. Don’t you dare bring that up ever again. Just give my department the extra budget and leave me alone.”
Lemaitre chuckled and turned to leave the room.
“Hey don’t I get some kind of cool weird acknowledgment or foreshadowing?” said Leucine.
“Mm, I don’t have anything to really tell you, Dr. Naturae. You already have your reward from Willis already, a day which I’m sure everyone in this hospital will soon come to regret.” Lemaitre paused for a bit, her hand on her chin. “Oh yes, the board has personally reviewed your sister and found her rather borderline, even with her unique talent. I’ll push for her, although I was going to do that anyways.”
“Oh nice!” said Leucine.
“And of course, your other sister has passed with flying colors.”
Leucine’s jaw dropped. “Other sister? … Who? Tell me it’s not Leona.”
Lemaitre cocked her head in a manner that normally went with a smirk. “No.”
“I only have one other sister! Why the hell would she be here!” said Leucine.
Lemaitre simply walked off, clearly not in the mood to entertain further conversation.
“Who is this other sister?” said Willis. “Actually, who is the first sister? I haven’t been apprised of any of this.”
“Oh boy, things in this hospital are going to get really interesting”, muttered Leucine.
EPILOGUE, several months later.
A young woman with short pale blonde hair walked up to the hospital. In her hand was a large gray teddy bear and on her back was a backpack. She wore a dark blue bow in her hair in a slightly horned shape in the same style as Leucine. A devil’s tail emerged from the seat of her pants, although it was different from Leucine’s tail. The young woman looked very nervous today.
Leucine and Willis emerged from the hospital’s front doors, bickering as usual.
“That’s not fair, you can’t be Super Chief of Medicine. That doesn’t even exist”, said Leucine.
“I promised to transfer my title of Chief of Medicine just for today so you could greet your sister here as Chief of Medicine. I said nothing about what I would do to myself”, said Willis with a rakish grin. “I must admit I thought you harbored selfish motives behind this move. However, I still feel the need to keep you in line. Hence I will still be in a higher position to reign you in should the need arise.”
“A compromise then. Until someone complains, you sit back in the break room and let me run the hospital and impress my sister the med student”, said Leucine.
“Eminently reasonable”, said Willis, slightly impressed. “Until someone complains it is then.”
The nervous young woman just stared on with incomprehension. She held carefully onto her gray teddy bear.
“Ah, Miss Taube.”, said Willis, turning to her as they finally neared her. “We didn’t see you here. She is rather inconspicuous, is she not?
He cracked a flawlessly practiced smile. “Welcome to Wolcrasi. I hope your medical education here is pleasant and prosperous.”
“Yeah, Noelle here is a quiet one. I can’t believe you’re already out of university, Noelle! Me, I’m Chief of Medicine for today. Cool huh?” said Leucine.
Noelle hid behind her teddy bear, staring at Willis carefully. She blindly reached out and held Leucine by the hand.
“She’s really shy and super adorable!” said Leucine. “I think I’ve already briefed you and the most of the staff on her and her uh, special need.”
Leucine gestured as subtly as possible at the teddy bear. Noelle still seemed to notice, sinking further behind her bear, though it did not cover most of her body.
“Honestly”, said Willis, with a pause. “… this doesn’t stand out much by Wolcrasi standards. I’m positive we can be perfectly accommodating.”
Noelle seemed to withdraw less behind her bear and stared up at Willis.
Dr. Luna ran up between them, huffing and puffing too hard to speak.
“Oh hey, this is Dr. Bella Luna”, said Leucine. “She is our pediatric surgeon. I think you’ll like her. She’s a great teacher.”
Noelle carefully extended a hand from behind her big gray teddy bear.
Bella shook her hand, and then dropped the handshake as soon as she realized she was able to speak again. She stuttered out her message between deep, whiny breaths.
“The Romans are back! ….We used too much Latin ….in our … medical…..terminology! The time portal …back up! It opened!” she said.
“For fuck’s sake, just spell it ‘drops’, ‘guttae’ doesn’t even sound cool. Well, what’s the game plan this time, Willy? ” said Leucine.
The clang of swords and yelled Latin echoed in the distance. Willis walked away. “Your problem, Chief of Medicine!” he said.
Leucine’s eyes narrowed. “Well played.”
A Roman legionnaire in full equipment rounded into view and stared at horror at them. He pointed his sword at them and trembled as he walked forward.
Bella rolled up her labcoat sleeves and took a stance. Leucine struck a pose. Noelle hugged her bear fiercely with an expression of fear and confusion, not at all understanding why a frightened man in heavy armor and a shield was approaching them. The Roman stopped his approach, dropped his sword and shield, and slowly started clutching at his neck and abdomen in intense discomfort as he choked and seized slightly.
Bella rushed forward to help, not really understanding what was happening to the soldier. Then she looked back to Noelle’s tight embrace of the bear, noticing where she was hugging the bear. Leucine was gently coaxing the bear out of Noelle’s grasp. She slowly looked back at where the Roman legionnaire was clutching at in pain. Then she looked back where Noelle was grasping the teddy bear. Bella’s eyes widened in horror.
“Yep, welcome to Wolcrasi”, said Leucine. “It gets weird here sometimes!”, as she tried to remove Noelle’s hands from the teddy bear.
THE WORLD’S CRAZIEST HOSPITAL WILL CONTINUE IN “WCH:THE FLIGHT OF THE DOVE”!