etraya | un: Bachelor

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un: Bachelor | text

Attention Fellow People of Etraya,

I am Doctor Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine. As I understand it, few of you have seen a doctor lately. That simply won’t do! Please, don’t wait to get sick to establish care. I am situated in the hospital, ready to take consent forms and make updated medical histories. At least a few of you have unaddressed concerns, I just know it. The average person comes to see the doctor when it’s too late! Though we cannot die here, there is no reason to suffer unduly.

And if you are otherwise healthy, perhaps think of it as helping me out. In the event of an outbreak, it is far more helpful to have complete clinical pictures of the inhabitants. Especially, as I understand it, there are many biological differences in this population.

Please come visit me during my clinic hours, every day from 10am to 6pm.

[What Daniil really wants is to meet more of the unusual inhabitants of Etraya more quickly as well as conduct casual interviews of the sort of people who are slated to save the universe. But he can’t just say that completely outright.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Now I see why you don’t take many patients. I could spend the entire day drunk and it probably wouldn’t make a differnce.

Ah, actually, I have a question for you I’d rather not ask here. Are you in your room?

Yeah, come on in. I got chips.

[It is late evening by now. Daniil walks down the hallway in a pair of slippers. He’s removed his cravat, vest and coat, replaced with a smoking jacket and softer trousers.]

What are chips?

[Daniil holds a bottle of wine by the neck with a couple glasses pilfered from downstairs.]

[ Robert is in sweatpants, eating Doritos. He got himself one of the fancy rooms that has a little sitting room, and in the time he's been here, he's redecorated so he has a normal twin bed, a desk, and a little fridge.

It looks a lot like a dorm room.

He's in his little living room, reading case studies on PTSD treatments. ]

Thinly sliced fried potatoes. Or in this case, tortillas, but I have the potato kind too.

[ This man gets his dinners from the Kwiktrip so there is a wide selection of junk food. ]

Oh, that sounds good. [He doesn’t know what a tortilla was, but he figured he could just try one.] What’s that you’re reading?

[He sets down the glasses and then looks at his corked bottle.]

Do you have a cork screw?

[Daniil looks around. His own space also looked like a dorm, but one for a grad student with no friends. There was no sitting room to speak of, just a desk and the hospital bed. Daniil did enjoy the remote controls on the bed, though once he found them.]

[Daniil seems to have put aside his questions to nose about in Romano’s life.]

Effective treatments for post-traumatic stress.

[ He offers the paper to Daniil as he grabs a corkscrew from the fridge— it has a magnet! Which goes from sticking to the fridge to sticking to his arm. Very useful. ]

Here.

[Daniil skims the abstracts.]

Ah, they’ve renamed War Neurosis.

[Daniil glances at that magnetic arm.]

Have you seen combat, doctor?

[This is getting closer to what he wanted to talk about, at least. But they could afford to be sidetracked. Daniil opens the wine and pours each of them a generous glass.]

Sort of. But this isn't for me, there's a couple of veterans that could use a break.

[ He accepts a wine glass. ]

I'm not a psychiatrist. It's one of the few specialties I had absolutely no interest in.

Likewise. It only serves to complicate things when I’m trying to make a diagnosis. Oh, your heart hurts? Oh, no, of course. A break up. Thank you for wasting my finite time and resources.

[Daniil takes a sip.] That’s kind of you.

…Speaking of expanding our horizons and gaining new knowledge, I tell this to you in confidence. I fear I may not be able to gain the trust of the people here as I am now. I’m not sure I can take one more joke about being a Bachelor, a title I wore very proudly for the past four years.

What’s worse is that my practice feels antiquated to everyone. There are so many new machines here, and I’m learning all of them as quickly as I can.

People are gonna be distrustful by nature. Did you see the kid trying to get people's middle names and birthdays? I can show you how the machines work and update you on the past 70 years of medical advancements, but if you want tips on how to make friends and influence people I'm no use.

[ Robert treats people who want help and he has no interest in research beyond what's relevant for his handful of patients. ]

There should be an ice-breaker on the network in a few days though. It usually reveals information about people that they'd rather not have out there, it's a good excuse to make new friends.

I’ve been making friends well enough. A few enemies too, though I’ve changed the minds of people who disliked me more than any of them do.

[He had his secrets, after all. And he couldn’t stand whistle blowers. ]

I believe the superboy warned me about this. Chirper? What do you mean it reveals information about us? Like what?

It's hard to predict. It can be something harmless like your favorite color, or something more personal like your greatest fear. You can usually offset it by answering the questions yourself.

Maybe we'll get lucky some time and get people's blood types.

With our luck they would all be incompatible gibberish. Or all the impervious men have typo O- and could incubate and safely fight off anything in the known universe if we could only tap a vein.

[Daniil takes a deep drink of his wine before settling into the seat beside Romano at last.]

Still, I’ll take your advice. It always is better to answer questions rather than have someone answer them for you.

Speaking of- who are some good people to stay on the right side of? It’s hard to tell who the prominent people are. Obviously the little boy guarding the Supermen. I angered a little dog person the other day. I’m trying to figure out how concerned I should be about that.

Ah. I don't know, I haven't tried to stay on anyone's good side and no one's stabbed me yet. The masked kid is volatile, but I don't think he'd hurt a civilian for no reason.

[ He's trying to think of people he knows who might be dangerous, but the thing is most Etrayans are potentially dangerous. ]

The man who goes by Joss Sweden on the network is some kind of god-like being with special magic powers and he's a bit of a shit, but for the most part he thinks regular mortals aren't worth his time. You already met Superman and kid, the older one is one of those frustratingly nice people, if you managed to get on his bad side I'd probably be afraid of you.

Finch is worth getting to know, he's been here for a while and he cares about keeping records, unlike me. He's about my age, wears glasses and fancy suits, very proper, usually found at the library.

Joss Sweden, Finch, noted. …I think I did already get on his bad side. I wasn’t even trying to. He’s so senstive. As if an impenetrable man has anything to fear.

[Turns out he and Robert had quite a lot of things in common, down to the poor record keeping.]

[Unfortunately, his memory was excellent. His mind young and agile, his hubris waiting to drown him at its nearest convenience. ]

Yeah, well, you handled that conversation poorly.

[ He's drinking his wine, not mad or anything, just matter-of-fact. ]

He grew up on Earth, aware he wasn't human. Safe to assume he grew up with some fears of being experimented on. The god thing was probably another hot button. First step to not pissing people off is understanding people don't owe you answers.

[Oh Daniil doesn’t like that. People don’t owe him answers?]

It’s not like I’m an inquisitor. I’m not here to string anyone up! Or experiment on anyone!

[Daniil stands up to pace and gesture.]

Why, what’s wrong with being likened to a god?

[Except that he was pretty derogatory about the whole thing.]

[ He hates that he knows this vocabulary, but here they are. ]

It's othering. Alienating, he's just a guy trying to be helpful. Anyway, if your main priority is to sort out your world's plague, between the library and the internet you got a lot of resources.

If you want to prioritize something else that would require people to cooperate with you, you'll have to pick up some people skills and learn to accept people might not trust you even if you do put your best foot forward.

[ In a way he's lucky he has no interest in going anywhere, so his only job is to help people who want his help. ]

“People skills” were never my forte. But I manage. [He takes a sip before really looking at the chips. He takes a few, crunching them. Oh- They’re so delicate. How pleasant.] Mm. Do you think I’ve just decided to make my social interactions more difficult on purpose? I am trying.

[Of course his language othered people. They were other, after all. It flies over his head.]

I don’t believe I can fix that plague from here. I doubt even more that anyone will write about that plague. I’ve looked. It’s no wonder, the town was full of illiterates. I have seen no other disease that manifests in the way that this one does. For now, I have decided to try to understand the nature of death here and learn as much as I can about the people I have access to.

Speaking of, have you died?

[ It's clear to Robert that Daniil isn't really understanding his point, but he was young and full of himself once too, maybe he'll be humbled by the place. ]

Not since I died back in my own world. You can have my blood if you want it, but there's nothing special about it, or about me.

[Daniil is both brilliant and incapable of understanding his point.]

Without how easy it is to obtain a slide, it would be remiss of me to not obtain one. I don’t anticipate there being anything revolutionary in it, but we are all extraordinary people in circumstance, aren’t we? There may be something special about you that you cannot see. [But maybe a microscope can.]

[He grimaces.] I think I died back home, too. I can’t explain it well. I was alive shortly before I came here, though.

I'd tell you not to think about it too hard, but you're clearly not wired for that.

[ It's not that he's not curious, it's that he knows better than to expect any satisfying answers. ]

You should have the bots show you around the equipment you're not familiar with. You're gonna love MRIs.

I’m not. Thank you for noticing.

Oh, I will. Though don’t forget you offered this to me as well. Perhaps I’d like your personal touch. Anyway, I tend to fall asleep late anyway. Maybe I’ll head down after this and look around.

[Daniil is not so old and tired as that, so he thinks. He still expects satisfying answers in awful, miserable places.]

Do you miss anything from home? Did you leave any friends or family behind?

Nope. I'm confident I wasn't mourned.

[ He'd been so angry and depressed that he doesn't miss much either. ]

I miss my dog, but she passed away a couple of years before I did.

[Daniil sounds a little too gleeful about this.]

Oh? A real bastard in life, were you? Were you a bad surgeon as well? Do you think even your patients curse you?

[The bit about a dog is a bummer. But she’s not a loose end. At least. As grim as that is.]

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