Mysteries were Aeris Gainsborough MD's favourite thing. But not something as mundane as crosswords, numerical patterns or cryptography. She liked the mysteries of the human body, the strange interactions of biological processes with a mish-mash of environmental factors and various kinds of chemicals. She worked as head of the diagnostics department in a hospital in Midgar. The only one of its kind - a department she made purely to do what she did. Other patients would come and go; other doctors could deal with them.
Most patients were either trivially simplistic or present for a known medical procedure. Aeris hated those patients, preferring to waste time; on soap operas, annoying other members of staff, anything unless something truly interesting came in. Some kind of sport might have been fun; pity about the damaged leg forcing her onto a cane and constant pain medication. Life had not played fair there and left her with the consequences. Perhaps things would have been easier to have the leg amputated; Aeris refused at the time, not wanting to lose a body part.
The pain and the medication influenced her interactions elsewhere. Despite her own diagnostic skill and knowledge, the hospital administrators insisted on a team to assist her. A trio of younger doctors who performed well enough, though they were little more than sounding boards (on one occasion Aeris had substituted passengers on an airship for them and diagnosed the problem without issue) most of the time. Biggs was career minded and chafing at the occasional menial tasks Aeris set him on - to say nothing of orders to break into the patient's home. Wedge was eager to please, more of a skilled surgeon than a diagnostician. And there was Jessie.
Jessie was perhaps the best of them at their nominal job and the most likely to call Aeris on any questionable actions. She was also totally crushing on Aeris, something Aeris had used for her own ends with thus far relatively minor damage to their relationship. She had a breaking point but it was not hard and fast. Her problem - all their problems - was empathy. They cared about the patient, wanted to make them well. Not that she didn't, but they wanted them well for their family, for their own conscience or sense of morality. They had a tendency to live vicariously via a glimpse of these other people.
No such desire for Aeris. Once diagnosed, once the treatment worked, her interest lapsed and she moved onto the next. Sadly the next often took a long time to arrive and left her bored, staring into the depths of Cure materia, searching out more minute facets of ancient knowledge, other treatments, other diseases and their underlying causes.
The most recent case took some time to arrive on her desk. Jessie took a first try at the patient, concluding the issue was nothing beyond a bad rash. The patient failed to get better and forced other attempts. Cancer mooted and dropped as various tests failed to detect any cancerous cells. The plague mentioned off-hand, investigated and dropped. But the disease - whatever it was - was not similar to the recorded instances of plague.
They kept him away from others, keeping as many safeguards in place. Treatments failed and they started to run short of theories. Until at the end the symptoms stumped Aeris; she had to go and see the patient in person. Aeris adhered to certain processes and precautions; whatever the patient had was not known to be contagious, so she limped into the sealed chamber he lay in. Stupid hair. What she would tell him when he was conscious; those blonde spikes a throw back to a previous decade if not more.
A distraction from the sickness. A black mottling ran the length of his left arm, strange and unresponsive to whatever treatments they threw at it. It seeped a viscous fluid of the same colour periodically. The stuff defied current analysis; the hospital was considering trying any hints at what this stuff was. Somehow it was causing pain. Somehow despite the amount of skin it covered, the mottled darkness was not spreading. And it caused the patient a lot of pain.
Aeris sat down on the patient's bed. No names; he was nothing more than a puzzle she would solve. The Materia could tell her anything the Cetra ever knew about disease and illness. It could tell her nothing about this. Easy to extrapolate from but it would not do to be too presumptuous. But had they encountered a new disease - one never seen before?