"I'm looking for a job."
The personnel director stares back at Verrik and begins hacking and coughing. She takes another hit from her respirator mask and sucks the mucus back in, all in one great, sickening snort. It sounds much like a something wet and mushy, perhaps some kind of animal intestines, being sucked through a vacuum.
"Well, what are you qualified for?" she asks the young andorian man. Her voice is scratched and distorted, being produced by a crude electronic synthesizer. She gasps for more of the gaseous drug through her plastic mask, and coughs more, this time sputtering blood.
Verrik's antennae flatten against his head at the sight of the emaciated vulcanoid woman coughing a green sludge of blood and mucus. He nervously begins to fondle the edge of his shirt collar as he tries to remember his answer. He had been coached for all of this, but somehow now that he is actually there on Thetara trying so desperately to get a position at the northern continents largest hospital, everything he trained for seems to have escaped him.
"I'm a nurse." he admits, timidly. "I used to have a job in New Berlin, but I heard that the hospitals here on Thetara pay better."
"So?" she grunts back at him, gasping for air. "Nurses are a dime a dozen... We have plenty of androids... that can do a better job... than some federation slime... like you."
"Thats not all though," Verrik continues, regaining some of his confidence. He hands her a PADD containing his alleged resume. He is confident that it will pass as being authentic, the Kisheyans are not a people to question such things. "I have training in biological engineering. I understand you have a need for technicians in that area."
The woman stares at him as she once again reaches for the mask as she looks over his resume. She then types something in to her computer console which chirps mechanically as every new command is entered. The machine, like everything else in the office, is outdated and seemingly covered with a thin brown film of filth and germs. There are no windows or chairs, save the one that the personnel director is currently seated in. The seat, and everything else in the room is cheap plastic plastic, discolored from the weathering of the years.
The place is quite depressing to Verrik, then again, the entire shared the office's dim gray fog. He can't seem to remember why he agreed to take the mission to begin with. He didn't join Starfleet to be a covert operative, in fact, that was the last thing he had in mind. A career of helping others in some of the federations best hospitals. Developing new cures for diseases, having all the glamor and prestige of a medical practitioner.
But now he finds himself in an underground office of some nameless alien medical corporation. A place where lives were bought and sold, and the only reason that people became doctors or nurses to begin with was for the sheer lust of capitalism. This was nothing like the halls of Starfleet Medical. This was not the bright, pristine, and cheerful echoing corridors of the Federations finest medical facility. No, this place was quite different. He was there, after all, to investigate some very disturbing allegations involving biological engineering and some very prominent names in Starfleet and the Federation. His mission carried great consequence. All of it relying one meek and nervous starfleet nurse.
"You're application... has been approved... Nurse Zether" The director gurgles out at last as she hands Verrik a new PADD. "Report to... resources on floor... sixteen, room... twelve hundred... for re-designation."
Verrik takes the PADD and says nothing else. He turns to leave as the woman collapses back into her seat, choking down more of the drug. He noticed a few people carrying around the tanks of the mysterious gas since his arrival the Thetara just two days before. He quickly learned that it was generically known as "omega" and had not only highly intoxicating effects, but also wreaked catastrophic damage on ones respiratory system. It quickly causes the deterioration of its users lungs, who eventually begin to cough them out in chunks. The mortality rate is quite high.
The andorian smiles and nods as he walks briskly through the hospital. The staff is primarily Kisheyan, though there are other aliens present. The kisheyans, he has only learned from his debriefing, are a vulcanoid species.. They share the basic characteristics with their logic-compelled cousins. The pointed features and copper based skin. They are aesthetically different in that they have a notable variety of hair and skin colors, but most distinctive, are their eyes. The corneas are rather feline like, with slitted, vertical pupils as well as being highly reflective and sensitive to light.
But far beyond their differences from the Vulcans in appearance, their social evolution has proven to be quite different as well. Their planet is scarred by thousands of years of war. They are a violent and greed driven society. They are one of the Alpha quadrants leading producers of cybernetics, but only for their own devices. They have extensively advanced weaponry, and also quite notably, share their planet with a race of android slaves. They have produced such beings for nearly a thousand years, both male and female, and virtually identical to organic Kisheyans. They developed the droids to the point where they had evolved emotionally past their creators. Thus the androids are kept in place with harsh psychological abuse and physical constraints. For without the androids, the Kisheyan infrastructure would surly collapse. There has, however, been an android resistance movement since they gained sentience.
Verrik passes two of the slave droids as he steps onto an elevator. The idea of one being actually owning another makes him feel completely disgusted. One of his closest friends and mentors at Starfleet Medical is a android doctor known as Lennox. The idea of someone owning him, or any sapient android, was simply unthinkable.
Verrik's attention is drawn from his own thoughts to the blaring music on the elevator. It sounds like small animals being tortured to death, and knowing the Kisheyans, it very likely was just that. He examines the keypad by the door for a moment. Most of the buttons have long since been torn off and the metal shined underneath the grime of coffee and what could only be blood. Circuits are exposed like a vivisectioned animal and he wonders how the lift is even functional. But at last the doors screech open and he heads through the corridor, In search of room twelve-hundred.
The floor is white linoleum and the lights flicker above him. The whole place smells like medicine and the putrid stench of the not so recently dead. This makes him wonder if the hospital even has a morgue, or if they just leave the dead bodies around to rot. As he passes a patients room, he peers in the door, only to discover the source of the odor. The bloated green-black face stares at him from seepage soiled sheets. It appears to have been a woman, and he can not tell if she had been pregnant, or had simply become incredibly bloated. Whatever had happened, it looks as if Verriks sarcastic musings were correct. It looked as if she had just been abandoned and left there.
The andorian holds back the urge to vomit as he stumbles away from the room, his antennas twist as his entire body writhes from the shock of what he just saw. He had heard the rumors of the gruesome nature of Thetara, but never realized it would be anything like this. He takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself as he continues his search for "resources".
At long last, he knocks on the door. The sign reads what his internal translator decodes as being "resource". The door is rusted and decayed much like the rest of the hospital and the red dust scrapes his knuckles as he raps onto its surface. He waits and there is no answer. So he cautiously opens the door, not quite knowing what to expect. The room is dim and the floor creaks underneath the weight of his thin frame as he searches for any signs of life.
Suddenly, a light is switched on and the entire office is flooded with the bright fluorescent cascade of light. He shields himself from it momentarily and then looks around. In front of him, stands a very attractive Kisheyan woman with dark hair, slicked back in the traditional style of her species. Her pointed ears delicately arched toward the top of her head and her bright, lavender colored feline eyes glistening strangely in the light. In the floor, at first he only sees a huge pool of green blood. After staring at it for what seems like an eternity, he notices that there is a shape in the middle of it, but not just a shape, its a body. A man, around the same age as the beautiful woman, who appears to have suffered a severe neck wound.
"Don't mind him" the woman smiles as she takes Verrik by the arm and leads him away from the gruesome scene. "He was the last Medical Director. I'm Dr. Ferizin, his replacement."
The doctor pulls off her white coat, which Verrik only now notices is covered in blood, and hangs it on a coat rack. Underneath is a very tight, black leather dress. It becomes apparent to the andorian, who is momentarily quite in shock, that this was going to be nothing like he had expected.
"You must be Zether, one of our new nurses. Welcome to Ryxirin Memorial Hospital."