etraya | un: romano

Oooh, I love a good sustained mystery.

Hmm, are you taking consultations at the hospital today? I skipped out for lunch, but I figured I'd be coming by again anyway to reset the plushie table.

I live here, you can drop in whenever.

If you have any squeaky round toys, bring one over, will you? I know a puppy who'd love it.

Perfect, I'll head back over.

Oh, hmm. Not any squeaky balls, but I might have a squeaking plushie? I'll check and bring in any I find that do! Every puppy deserves a squeaky toy.

[ Robert literally lives at the hospital. He's taken over one of the hospital rooms and he's adopted the biggest office, it's not like anyone ever actually uses the place.

He's at the front desk when Alex comes in. She's younger than he expected, he often forgets the median age around here is late teens to early twenties. ]

How did you get energy cores in your heart?

[ He's never had a good bedside manner and he's not about to get better now. ]

( She slings her backpack off her shoulder and snorts at the blunt question — if she's honest, Zayne has about equivalent bedside manner, and he's only a few years older than she is. Then again, in her mid twenties only feels old because she's beaten survival odds for the last fifteen years.

And had been mostly stable, even here. She's just worried that the "mostly" is going to bite her in the butt. )

Alien attack when I was eight or so. Big mass of them came pouring out of a locked orbit wormhole like thing we call the Deepspace tunnel. At least that's what I thought it was... I think it's what hurt my heart, but the original core might have been a little earlier. By about a month and a half?

( She unzips her pack to pull out a round, moon plushie, which she then squeezes between both hands to prove it makes the requested squeak. Nice and high pitched. )

But the one we've been treating for the last however many years went from a fragment to a whole, which was good. Then another one got... kind of absorbed? So now I'm back to being technically unstable.

( ... She'll get to the part where she's learned that... is not... just a personal problem. Even if it's also that. )

[ The wolf kid is going to love that plushie, but that's not the priority at the moment. The priority is this thing about the heart— shrapnel? Parasite? He's not sure yet. ]

I'm going to need you to explain it in baby steps. You were attacked by aliens, a fragment may have entered your heart before the alien attack, the fragment grew? Your heart absorbed a fragment?

[ This is the kind of case he'd be thrilled to be handling if he wasn't missing a whole arm. Despite what he kept telling the hospital, he's not actually confident enough to perform heart surgery one-handed. ]

( Alex sets the moon plushie down on the counter, making a sort of see-saw motion with her hand. )

Kind of? It's called a Protocore fragment, and people who have those in them are afflicted with Protocore Syndrome. It's a chronic medical condition. A fatal one in most cases.

( She hesitates, taking a deep breath. What she's about to say is going to sound utterly ludicrous, but even so. )

I learned a little before I ended up here that I was... shall we say, trafficked as a kid, experimented on, and a complete Protocore manifested in my heart after the first time they killed me.

( She's not smiling, and she's not deadpanning. Alex just looks uncomfortable, but what's he going to do, not believe that truth is weirder than fiction? Given their present situation, it'd be as ludicrous to deny as the fact he's alive now in the second bubble city of his experience. They're all beyond weird. )

When the aliens invaded Earth, I was broken out of the lab. I ended up injured by a Wanderer when I escaped — that's what we call the aliens — and I'm guessing it fractured the core in my heart. Fourteen years later, I found the other fragments, and they sort of unexpectedly fused back with the one still in me.

( Alex shrugs, holding out her open, empty palms. )

I'm not my cardiologist. He could explain this so much better. I just know how to kill Wanderers, not how to treat Protocore Syndrome.

[ Robert wasn't expecting any of the words that come out of Alex's mouth. Somehow "trafficked as a kid" is the least weird part of the whole thing. ]

There's a lot to unpack there. The good news is that it looks like progressive illnesses generally do not progress while we're in Etraya, which hopefully means we're not in a rush to unpack it.

We can run an echo and an ECG and that should give me an idea of what's going on. Protocore thing aside you're human?

Huh, so while we're here, we might actually be more stable?

( ... If she's being fully honest, though... maybe she can hold off on the "possibly I may generate enough explosive energy to level a decent chunk of Etraya when destabilized."

She nods to the tests he lists off, familiar with both from past exams. At least they have the capacity for those here. She hadn't checked any of it out in her first month, before they'd been sent off to San Francisco. )

Hmm? Yeah, I'm human as far as I know. Nothing's ever been mentioned otherwise, and I've been in and out of the hospital since I was eight. Unless you're wondering about Evolvers, but we're all human, just with an ability since birth.

Edited (repetition ) 2025-08-27 04:52 (UTC)

[ Evolvers, what does that even mean? Superpowered people, probably, going by context. ]

Evolvers scan as average human as far as you know?

[ He's guiding her to the ECG machine as they talk. ]

They do if their Evol didn't physically change their structure. Mine hasn't, so I should scan like an average human.

( Ah, ECGs. Alex shrugs her shoulders out of her half jacket, draping it over her arm as she walks. )

[ Is this what old people feel like when they hear younger ones speaking? Like they need context clues to understand every other word?

Whatever, he can hook her up to the machine while he figures it out. ]

What kind of evols are there? Is it like the winged kid?

( There is no word to even describe this generational gap, but you know what. That's the delight of being from forty years apart on Earth.

Alex gets down to her underlayer shirt so the attaching of nodes goes simply where they need to be. She's so exceedingly nonchalant, it's apparent that even that far in the future, some tests still run like this. (They're wireless, she'd say, but they do indeed monitor the same areas.) )

Is he the one who lives out at the school? Aurora mentioned there's someone like that. Wherever that school is. But um... I guess you could think of it like superpowers? Stuff people are born with. One guy I know has gravity, another one has light. Then one of my coworkers has Micromodifications and can rebuild near anything she can think of. They're not as durable as traditionally made things, but it's impressive anyway.

No idea. I'm not even sure if he's still here, I didn't see him last month.

[ Robert's hoping the readings are normal because it'd be such a pain to have to monitor this kid to establish a baseline. He misses the days when other people did that and he only had to come in if a surgery was needed. ]

( Alex accommodates connecting everything by stripping off her overlayer, hanging around in her tanktop. No hospital gowns is fine by her, though the gel is going to be a pain later on. )

Weird how this city is both so small and too big to keep up with so few people scattered around it.

( Her heart will... show an abnormality, but nothing that indicates bloodflow is restricted, or that her pulse is affected. Once the ultrasound wand is in, it'll be giving feedback that there's something rounded and stable in structure that's beating with her heart. Also embedded within it. Somehow. )

[ Robert really wants to be annoyed but he's helplessly fascinated. He'd never seen anything like it. ]

What do you know about people with a similar condition?

[ It's immediately obvious to him it'd be a high risk surgery, and this is only basic monitoring. He wants to do an MRI now, see what's happening in there. ]

( Alex tries to think, because as a patient she knows more than anyone from the outside who isn't in the field, but as far as general markers of her condition in others? )

We call it Protocore Syndrome. You're exposed to a Protocore and a shard of that energy condenses within you, and it slowly poisons you over time. Like... you know, kind of like radiation poisoning. Except that with Protocore Syndrome that poison spreads as crystals inside and outside of your body, not as cancer or whatever else radiation poisoning does.

( She lifts her hands, like she's searching for words. She knows she's not explaining this terribly well. )

You manage the spread with different type-specific suppressants. I rarely need that kind of medical intervention, but we can ask Aurora to make sure what my type would need is on hand... my case has never shown signs of spreading crystals, but it does impact my cardiac function when it's destabilized. Like miniature heart attacks.

How big are these fragments?

[ This is a pointless question because he can't do open heart surgery with only one hand, but he's still hoping for a new one eventually. ]

They vary. Mine's a complete core these days, but it was about this size before.

( She indicates the size using her fingers. Maybe like a baby fingerling potato? )

I'd like to run more tests first, but why haven't you tried surgery?

Mine's non-operable. Protocore fragments can react to outside stimuli, and that's unfortunately been proven true in surgical settings too. If it wasn't lodged in my heart, there'd be a chance. Like this, there's an equal chance it'll destroy my heart if they try, and the transplant list doesn't take protocore syndrome patients due to high mortality rates.

Mmh, I'll have to figure out how to neutralize it.

If you do, make sure to write it down so I can share it with my cardiologist back home.

( ... it... won't................. but it's weird when you deal with a thing that is both energy and solid and also partly alien and willing to jab anything that comes near it with black crystals. So rude! )

Maybe the magical wing has something for it. It came with a bunch of steampunk machines I still haven't looked into.

I mean... doesn't hurt to check?

un: romano | text

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how to explain this sci fi nonsense with no clear explanation in canon loooool

it's ok my medical knowledge comes from soapy tv procedurals. together we can make shit up

perfect we are on this like sphagetti sauce

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