if you pray to god for rain, don't you complain about the lightning

[asafepairofhands]

Who: Ratchet and YOU and also whoever else wants to set up threads in here
What: Ratchet's limping around on crutches, feel free to put yourself in the line of fire
Where: Red Alert's clinic
When: A little while after Drift is conscious
Warnings: YELLING? yelling probably


Well, it had been a few days and nobody had nearly died again so Ratchet starts to let himself relax a little.

Not much, mind--Drift and Nautica are still bedridden, if not critical, and there are people in and out all the time. This is completely ignoring the fact that Pharma and Tarn are wandering around out there somewhere, probably terrorizing the general populace or maiming things or doing whatever else psychotic killers do in their clearly abundant free time. Ratchet has no such luxury, and he works, maintaining the patients he already has on top of trying to handle anyone else who comes in the door. He's just not necessarily pleasant about it.

Comments

[asafepairofhands]

Ratchet's optics flicker and his mouth twitches up at one corner, letting go of one of the crutch handles to flip a palm out in a releasing gesture.

"Don't have much choice but to be, do I?" he says, his voice dry. "It doesn't hurt or anything, though." From her angle, she probably has a better view than most of the hastily patched and soldered lines, repairs he'd done himself. "You seem to be doing all right for yourself, by comparison."

[smarterthandad]

"I don't have any four million year grudge matches going on," Val said with a shrug. "The worst thing you guys do to me is underestimate me." Which was totally fine by her. More room to work unimpeded, mua ha ha and other noises of Machiavellian satisfaction.

"Anyway, I'll fab you up a new leg, but it's kinda low on my priority list, since it's not a life-threatening injury." She pulled her datapad out from under her arm--still no augmented reality controls, speaking of priority lists--and made a note to that effect.

[asafepairofhands]

"I'll figure something out," Ratchet says, shifting on his crutches. "I'm definitely not the most critical patient in here. And we're working on bringing our equipment online. I'd say to worry about yourself and the other organics here, first, but you seem to have things mostly covered."

[smarterthandad]

"I can teach myself human medicine if I have to, I guess," Val said, sounding like it was the last thing she wanted to do. Biology, ew. "Cybertronian physiology is much more interesting." Novelty was a factor in that, yes, but when you got right down to it, she just loved machines.

[asafepairofhands]

"Yeah, well, we have people who know Cybertronian physiology. My knowledge of humans is, well. Limited, let's say." Ratchet's just going to not mention the incident with the jumper cables. "Not much I can do if one of you gets too badly injured."

[smarterthandad]

"Maintain oxygen flow to the brain. Everything else is details. If someone loses a limb I'll make them a prosthetic." Val waved a hand in dismissal of other concerns about human medical procedures. Except... "Ugh, I should do something about pain management." Grudgingly, she made another note on her tablet. More things taking away time from her fun projects.

[asafepairofhands]

"Yeah, for triage, maybe," Ratchet says, eyeing Val. "That's keeping them alive. We're not in enough of a crisis situation here that that's all we have time to worry about."

[smarterthandad]

"If someone gets cancer or whatever, I'll invent a cure then." She wrinkled her nose as she continued to stare up at Ratchet. "Given all the Decepticons wandering around, trauma treatment seems more likely to be useful in the short term."

For example: Ratchet's missing leg.

[stubbornandfrustrating]

"You know, and I never thought I'd be saying this, but there's something to be said for a little empathy thrown in with the quality of the rest of the care." He watches Val narrowly and is nearly swamped under a sudden, powerful wave of longing for Wheeljack's company. He shakes his helm a little.

"You're a scientist, not a doctor. It shows."

[smarterthandad]

Hey, having poor empathy was normal for Val's developmental stage. She wouldn't be as bad about it if there were an injured person present, but most problems were intellectual ones to her. It was the only way she could cope with her mental abilities so far outstripping her emotional ones.

"Obviously." She didn't regard that as any kind of insult or even really an admonition, because who wanted to be a medical doctor. Not her. "But okay, fine, I'll write down everything I know about human physiology, biochemistry, and medicine, and then you'll have a reference."

Val never forgot a fact, so what she knew about the human body, while scant compared to her awe-inspiring grasp of physics or math, was still a lot.