un: Bachelor | text

[thantagonist]

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.]

Comments

[thantagonist]

I’m from a big city, but that’s not where I was brought from. Part of me is relieved to be here, though it shames me to say that as well. I feel like I have abandoned some amount of my duty. Though to be clear, it was never meant to be my job. Not once.

But I stepped up and took control of that cow-stinking backwards dump of a town. [He rubs his forehead. He went a little off the rails there.]

The city I am from is great and beautiful. Sprawling, with over a million people. And inside it lived my laboratory, Thanatica. It was me and my two assistants, and we worked together all the time in the morgue. I miss it terribly.

[fend]

You worked in a morgue then?

[ Yet he is a doctor, not an undertaker. Hinako chews on this thought as she does another bite of her sandwich. Maybe his world is different in that way, or maybe it's another way in which her town is different from the world beyond it. She has no way of knowing. ]

Where you're from sound huge, compared to my hometown.

[thantagonist]

I am a thanatologist. I study death. But you have to be a doctor to know what you’re looking at, or even for them to allow you near the bodies anyway.

Is that so? How small? A few thousand… a few hundred?

[The Town he was plagued by had like, 17,000 people and that was a total rinkydink joint to him.]

[fend]

Hundreds, counting people out on farmland. It might've ended up bigger, had things worked out differently.

[ The population had only dwindled as individuals and families moved away for opportunities over the years. ]

So what do you study death for? [ The question seems too pointed, and the thought visibly occurs to her, so he rephrases. ] What does a thanatologist aim to learn?

[thantagonist]

A truly small town. Sounds like little more than farm houses and crops. [Sounds really depressing, honestly.]

[Daniil perks up.] Why, the inner workings of death, of course. This can cover many things, like disease and anatomy. But I intend to learn the secrets to defeat death itself.