Staring fixedly at her sister, Vicky narrowed her eyes, then turned her head a little to the side in an attempt to watch her out of the corner of one of them. Then she repeated the process with the other eye, turning in the opposite direction. After which she glanced around to make sure no one was watching, before raising a hand and rapidly waving her fingers in front of her eyes for a second or two.
"What the hell are you doing, you weird girl?" The voice from across the table made her twitch guiltily and drop her hand to her fork, while she whipped her gaze back to see Dennis peering at her like he wasn't entirely certain she was sane.
She had to admit, if only to herself, that he might not be completely mistaken.
Smiling at him in a way that even she felt was unconvincing she poked her fork into some mashed potato and lifted it to her mouth. Swallowing the food, she shrugged slightly as he kept watching her with one eyebrow raised. "Nothing."
"You sure you want to go with that? Nothing?"
"I am."
He examined her closely for a moment more, turned his head to look at Amy, who was leaning across her own table talking quietly to Taylor, then returned his gaze to her eyes. "OK." He smirked a little. "Too much bleach today, maybe? I hear it can affect the mind."
Vicky glared at him. "I do not bleach my hair," she sniffed haughtily, making his smirk widen. "This color is entirely natural."
"If you say so," he snickered. They bickered good-naturedly about the subject for a couple of minutes before Chris asked Dennis something, distracting him. Vicky sighed internally. Apparently she'd gotten away with it that time. Dean was intermittently glancing at her with an odd look of his own, but he'd been doing that quite a lot for some time now and she was used to more or less ignoring it, especially as he always denied he was doing it in the first place.
She could hardly spare the time to wonder what secrets he had when she had enough things of her own to worry about.
Such as… Was she looking at her sister or not?
Glancing at Amy again, she saw the brunette who looked like the girl she'd grown up with now discussing something with Saurial and Lucy, the Chinese girl giggling quite hard about whatever the lanky lizard had said. Taylor was listening and wearing a small smile, and beside her, Mandy was grinning. Rich and Eric seemed engrossed in something on the latter's phone, which she couldn't make out from here.
Vicky's thoughts circled back, yet again, to the pair of jeans stuffed right down at the bottom of her backpack. What the hell was going on? She was certain they belonged to Amy, or whatever was posing as Amy, since she'd definitely accidentally mixed them in with her own clothes when she'd collected some laundry from the machine a few weeks back. Yet… They had a sleeve for a tail!
She was pretty damn familiar with what that looked like these days, since Saurial's casual clothes looked remarkably similar if you accounted for the otherwise different body shape. It was clearly a fairly large tail as well, again like Saurial's. But now, looking at her (possible) sister, she couldn't see a trace of any unexpected caudal appendage. Nor any strange tailoring choices.
In fact, the Amy-clone looked just like her sister, in every way she could think of, aside from being happier than she'd been before meeting The Family.
Perhaps that was when she'd been replaced?
The blonde shook her head, attracting another odd look from both Dennis and Dean, which she ignored. That was her paranoia talking again. The old theories she'd spend many sleepless nights over, of there being hidden reptile people all over the damn city, came back to her and made her shiver internally. Logically she knew it didn't really make any sense, even taking into account all the weird stories she'd run across in her research, but there was no denying there were a hell of a lot of strange similarities present. The obvious question is why would the lizards be replacing normal people with disguised members of their own kind? They were open enough about who and what they were, if you listened carefully and thought it through.
Leaving aside the issue of how long they'd been around, which she had her own ideas about but no proof of one way or the other, she was pretty sure now that the Family came, at some point, from a lot further away than the bottom of the ocean. There was simply no real way they could be related to anything normal except, possibly, dinosaurs. She'd paid enough attention in biology to realize that. Saurial on her own could easily simply be a Parahuman, of course, and even Raptaur could fit that description, but when Kaiju popped up, then Metis and Ianthe, never mind the rumors of there being something out there that made Kaiju look small… No, it didn't fit the Parahuman paradigm she was aware of and she'd spent quite a lot of time looking into it even before her near-disastrous run in with the lizard-girl sitting twenty feet away.
There were even rumors now of dragons in the sky… That seemed even less likely to be a Parahuman ability at work, although you could never rule anything out where powers came into it. But even so, it was another data point that added up to… something. Something very weird and not at all normal no matter how you cut it.
Discovering that fucking pair of jeans in her locker had brought all the more bizarre ideas she'd had back in a rush, and made her have a very unpleasant few minutes as her mind spun out of control until she got a grip on herself. The lesson immediately before lunch was one she couldn't remember anything at all of, she'd been thinking so hard. Apparently running on autopilot had got her through it although she felt like it had lasted about two months rather than an hour.
She looked again, meeting Amy's eyes as her sister raised her head and looked her way. The other girl smiled and she weakly returned it before dipping her head and resuming eating. The whole situation was insane, she thought, mulling over the evidence or lack thereof she had for a whole slew of steadily less sensible ideas.
If the lizards had replaced Amy, the question was why? And for that matter, how? The second thought implied they had some very strange abilities they hadn't mentioned to anyone, including a formidable Stranger power, which was the only way she could see it working. The girl to her left was, she'd have been prepared to swear, the same one she'd known since they were both six. She was sure of that. But the evidence in her backpack tended to suggest otherwise.
Or maybe Amy had just grown a tail for no good reason?
Vicky snorted quietly, almost amused at the idea. Lucy, she could see that girl randomly and spontaneously developing a lizard's tail and being delighted about it, but if she had, she'd be showing it off to everyone and grinning like an idiot. Everyone knew she was nuts about reptiles and thought the Family were the best thing that had ever happened in the history of everything.
Her sister, though… It didn't seem to fit. Leaving aside the little issue that there was no tail! She checked again, discreetly. No, definitely no tail. What the fuck was going on?
Why would the Family want to replace people? It was the sort of thing Dennis had joked about, having clearly read some of the same things on the internet that she had, but it was obvious he didn't believe it. And she couldn't see it making sense anyway. Yes, it might turn out that they could somehow disguise themselves, since until Saurial had popped up no one had ever reported them before, so obviously they had some method to hide. Maybe invisibility or something, although there was no evidence of that which she'd seen, or just some weird application of math. That she could believe, Saurial had amply demonstrated that she could fuck with reality in ways that only Vista seemed to be able to even vaguely understand, simply by mathing the universe into behaving the way she wanted it to.
Given that, what reason would they have to substitute one of them for a normal human? Or even a Parahuman for that matter. And specifically, why Amy? It seemed a stretch no matter how she tried to come up with something even vaguely plausible.
There was also the little matter that Amy's powers were definitely the same, since she'd seen them in action after she'd accidentally stolen the other girl's jeans, which set a hard lower limit on when any putative replacement could have happened. That meant, if the Family had turned Amy into a pod person, that they'd duplicated a Parahuman power as well, which was fucking terrifying to consider being possible.
No, it didn't add up. And it particularly didn't fit the fact that everything she saw, and heard, and felt, went to show that the girl she was watching discreetly again was indeed her adopted sister, someone she loved unreservedly. There was no way that some weird reptilian clone could fool her that well for this long, she was certain of that when she considered the idea carefully. She'd have noticed, unless there was either a Stranger effect way past anything she was aware of, or a similar Mastering ability in use.
If either of those were the case, she was in trouble, but she just didn't think it was likely. Having been taught countermeasures for a lot of the more common forms of both powers, which while not necessarily complete proof against them, apparently worked well enough that you could determine if you needed professional help, she was reasonably sure it was neither. So either it was a case of a Master or Stranger power too effective to fight, in which case she doubted she'd even be able to consider this the way she was doing, or it wasn't anything like that at all.
People might say at times she was oblivious and headstrong, both traits she admitted to herself were more true at times than they should be, but family was family, and Amy was family as far as she was concerned. Anyone who tried to hurt her would find that out the hard way. Her gut and her head, when she could get them to agree, told her Amy was indeed Amy, despite her more wild fantasies.
The big question was, then… Was her sister also Family?
She sighed, picking at her food and thinking. Nothing made any sense at all. One moment she was convinced she had proof of some bizarre reptilian conspiracy on a level that would make the internet go "Yeah, told you," and the next she'd talked herself around to thinking it was all some weird mistake that she was blowing up all out of proportion.
Flip-flopping back and forth between these two extremes left her almost dizzy, and ruined her appetite. Eventually she pushed the remains of her lunch to the side and just sat there staring at the table, thinking. She couldn't decide if she should confront Amy, or Lizard-Amy if that was the case, talk to Saurial, talk to Taylor who would surely know something was up since she was a close friend of both of the others, forget the whole thing as an obvious blonde moment, or what.
The bell rang to indicate five minutes to the end of the lunch break, prompting a couple of hundred students to start grabbing everything they had on the tables and piling it on trays. Dennis, who she dimly realized had been watching her with hidden concern for the last fifteen minutes, helpfully took her plate, glass, and cutlery without a word, putting it on his tray, then slid hers under it.
Standing, he put his free hand on her shoulder for a moment and squeezed it gently, then walked off. She watched him go, smiled a little, and started to get up. Dean, with a glance at her which showed a certain amount of confusion, started to say something, then shook his head and slowly left, glancing back at her a couple of times. The others who didn't seem to have noticed her odd mood were already half-way back to the tray drop-off point, Chris talking and gesticulating while Carlos nodded, looking pleased about something or other.
She got up to follow them, looking to the side to see her sister and the others from her customary table had already packed up and left. Saurial paused at the door and looked back at her, her head cocked in that unmistakable manner that inexplicably Taylor shared, smiled a little with a look in her glowing eyes of mild worry, nodded to her, and left.
Unsure what to think or do, the blonde picked up her backpack and swung it onto one shoulder. A moment later, biting her lip uncertainly and with a quick look around, she slid it off again and put it on the table. She checked carefully for witnesses once more, then opened the top and put her hand into it, rummaging around in the bottom for thirty or forty seconds with a growing sense of disbelief. Eventually she pulled her hand out, stared at the innocent pack with wide eyes, zipped it up, and slowly followed the last of the students out of the cafeteria, her mind whirling.
The tail sleeve which she had, one hundred percent definitely, seen on her sister's jeans was now... missing.
Something very weird was going on, and either she was slipping into insanity, and/or having hallucinations that extended to all her senses, or the Family was behind it.
Somehow.
'I need to think about this,' she mused dizzily as she twitched and hurried up when the final bell rang. 'I'll work it out, I have to. Before I go completely nuts.'
She was slightly worried it was too late for that, but didn't know how to check...
Driving at a steady sixty five miles an hour, Danny listened to the radio and hummed along with some of the songs, feeling in a good mood. The visit to Antonio and Serafina had gone far better than he'd feared it might, and reconnecting like that to what was in many ways the last of his family heritage, despite the disagreements they'd had, felt very satisfying. It was something that had been eating at him one way or another for nearly one and a half decades, but things were now settled between him and the old associate of his grandfather's, in a way that was… nice.
He smiled to himself, thinking that his father would have been pleased, as would Annette. She'd always liked the old reprobate and loved his wife, the feeling being mutual. Even with the less than entirely honest nature of his business, Danny thought that having Antonio back in his life was a good thing. And Taylor would probably like the guy a lot, while the Varga would find him hilarious.
Shaking his head a little, he rather dreaded what would happen when those two finally found out about the truth of the matter. He was certain that Lisa had already deduced it, probably weeks ago, and had been giggling to herself the entire time, pleased she was the only one in on the joke. He was going to have to think of something suitable in return… Ah well, it was done now, and well done at that. Life was looking good right at this moment.
Wondering what bizarre things had happened back home while he was away, he consoled himself with the thought that anything too ridiculous would have probably been mentioned to him by someone or other. So it was probably just the usual low level weirdness, which while pretty odd by the standards of six months ago, was more or less normal these days.
Glancing at the clock on the dash, he reached down and prodded the button to switch to a news channel, then listened to the latest happenings around the country and the world for the next thirty miles. Eventually, when the news finished, he switched back to the music, tuning around for an oldies station that was playing classic rock rather than the newer stuff having a hankering for some Queen or something like that. Finding a suitable channel he sat back to continue his drive, checking the mirrors every now and then as the traffic built up as he neared the next city, New York far behind him now.
Ten minutes later he was forced to slow to only about forty for a while, until he was past the local blockage where people were pulling off the freeway, forming a bit of a bottleneck. Wondering yet again why people would insist on roaring along in the outside lane right up until the last moment, then dive across four lanes of traffic to reach the off ramp, he sighed to himself and waiting patiently in the queue of cars and trucks that wanted to go straight on. Eventually the snarl-up unsnarled itself enough to let him past and he was able to get back up to speed.
Singing along to Thunderstruck at the top of his voice, rather enjoying the driving, he kept going until the sight of the diner he'd stopped at on the drive up caused him to slow, indicate, and pull in. Feeling that another steak wouldn't go amiss, he locked the car, then headed towards the diner, going past four identical green semis with the logo of a trucking company he vaguely remembered was based in Chicago and covered most of the country. A few minutes later he was sitting at a table drinking some coffee and waiting for his food, in a very good mood overall.
Finally through the security measures, Emily walked into the medical research room in the bio-secure facility deep under the PRT building, looking around for a moment before spotting the man she was after. Heading over to him she glanced at the huge high-res monitor that was displaying a number of graphs and displays surrounding a massively magnified image from the high-tech microscope he was working with. He was bent over it adjusting a series of manual controls and peering through a large full face viewer, while the image moved and changed color in response. After ten seconds or so, he said, "You missed your last checkup, Emily. Again. Do I have to borrow a stunner from Armsmaster and ambush you in the cafeteria to get you to take them seriously?"
"I was busy, as you well know, Jon," she said with asperity. He made a snort of slight amusement, still moving the controls of the microscope.
"You always are. As is everyone else in the entire building. Almost all of them still manage to turn up for mandatory medical examinations, although I admit I have to chase a few around for a while even so." He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes for a moment, then looked up at her scowl. "You're by far the worst."
"Director's privilege," she grated, making him grin momentarily.
"Oh, never change, Emily. We wouldn't know what to do if you were nice to someone. The end times would be on us, I have no doubt."
"Remind me why I let you talk to me like that?" she sighed.
The head of the PRT ENE medical department chuckled. "Because I've known you since you were a recruit and put you back together more times than either of us care to remember, I would imagine." He looked her up and down, then smiled again. "Although thanks to Panacea you're in far better shape than you used to be. Let's try to keep it that way, it would be a shame to let the girl's work go to waste."
"I still haven't forgiven you for that," she grumbled.
"I know. I don't care." They shared a look of understanding for a couple of seconds, then she turned to the monitor and inspected the image frozen on it. He followed her eyes.
"So?"
"So, what? You'll have to be a little more specific than that," he replied.
She glared at him. "So, do those things do what Saurial says they do?" She motioned at the small off-white lozenge sitting under the complex objective of the Tinker-Tech inspired machine.
"As far as we can determine so far, they do precisely what our local lizard girl claimed," he said after a short pause, also looking at the thing. Reaching out to the side he picked up the container the Family member had left with her, idly rattling it around for a moment, then put it back on the desk. "We're going to need an actual volunteer sooner or later, but animal tests, rather to my surprise, work perfectly. I was half expecting it to only work on humans but it seems fine with any primate we've tried, dogs, cats, and amusingly, reptiles."
Swiveling his chair around he watched her face. "It's the single most incredible piece of biological engineering I've ever seen in my life, and I'd go so far as to say the most complex machine ever made. It's clearly designed completely from the ground up, very carefully and thoroughly, by someone who totally understands biology and chemistry to a level that leaves current science gaping in awe."
"Saurial said it was a synthetic life form," Emily commented.
He nodded. "It's alive in some respects, yes. It's still a machine. It was designed, built, and programmed to do exactly what it does, with a vast array of error-checking and safety tests to make sure it only does what it does. The sheer amount of information in these things is just unbelievable. The equivalent of a genetic code is orders of magnitude denser than any other living thing on the planet, with the exception of the Family themselves, I would think. It's essentially a biological supercomputer optimized for diagnosing and repairing normal forms of life." He picked up the container again and opened it, removing one of the one-shot healers in a gloved hand and holding it up.
"This little thing contains the entire genome of, as far as we can determine, every complex multicellular animal there is. Along with that there's enough processing power to scan the entire organism, determine defects, injuries, weaknesses, anything that would count as being unhealthy, then work out a repair for it, apply that repair in seconds, boost cell replication rates to a level I still can't believe, make sure nothing goes wrong in the process… You name it, it does it. I wouldn't even know where to begin just to properly specify all the things you'd need to think of before you could start to design something like this."
He rolled the little thing around in the palm of his hand, then carefully returned it to the container and sealed it up again as Emily listened with a sensation of bemused shock. "The fact that Ianthe could, based on what Saurial said, design this in no more than months purely because she felt that humans are too fragile boggles the mind." Jon shook his head in wonder. "I personally suspect this is the end result of literally centuries of research by some appallingly brilliant people, which she fine tuned for this particular use. As unlikely as that sounds it's less ridiculous than the idea that she just came up with it in the bath one day a few weeks ago and thought it was a neat idea. But, like with almost everything else surrounding the Family, we don't know and may never know the full truth."
He fell silent as she stared at him. After some time she turned to look at the monitor again, then around at the other researchers who were busy with their own work on the tiny bioconstructs. "Christ," she finally sighed, pulling an empty chair over and dropping into it. "And they're happy to simply give them to anyone who wants one."
"I can see some very interesting times ahead over the next few years," he remarked soberly. "In one step they've basically made most of the medical industry obsolete. And ethically, I can't come up with any good reasons not to let them do it. As a doctor my primary goal is, and must be, the welfare of my patients. These things suddenly make that welfare a hell of a lot easier to guarantee."
"You think they're safe?" she asked quietly.
He shrugged and nodded at the same time. "So far we can't find any reason to doubt that. They're so fucking complex and so far beyond state of the art in biotech than we're probably a century of research too soon to be able to prove it, but my gut says they're exactly what they seem to be. All the evidence we have shows the same, and on top of that, the reputation the Family have already ended up with tells me that they can be trusted. If nothing else, the level of technology needed to design the things means that if they wanted to hurt us, not only would we probably not be able to stop them, we might not even realize it was happening until it was too late anyway."
"That doesn't make me less worried, Jon," she pointed out uneasily.
"Me either, but think about it… If they really wanted to cause trouble, we have absolute proof from the things they've already shown us that they could do it easily. God only knows what they can do that we don't know about. I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg, if that. All the evidence available tends to reinforce the idea that they genuinely want to help, don't like people being hurt, and would much rather fix things than break them. That appears to extend to humans as much as buildings or machinery." He prodded the box with a finger. "At the level of tech these things show, there's not much they couldn't do if they wanted to, and probably already have done."
"Oh, god," Emily groaned, massaging her forehead. "Every time I think I'm starting to get to grips with those crazy lizards something shows me we don't have the first idea about them."
The doctor chuckled. "I sympathize, believe me. Studying these little creatures has taught me more in a couple of days than six months in university did. Every person in this lab would tell you the same thing. The knowledge we can learn from them is just… unbelievable. I'd love to know where they originally came from and how they got here. And for that matter how long ago."
"And why," she sighed.
"Oh, that's obvious," he snickered, making her raise an eyebrow. "It was to mess with you personally."
Emily fixed him with a hard look. "Don't push it, Jon," she growled. After a moment, she added, "Although I'll admit sometimes it feels that way. Brockton Bay is just…" She shook her head. "Let's say that if alien lizards were going to turn up, them being here is the only place it could have happened."
"It does seem to fit the overall theme of the city being a weird place on a good day," he agreed. "Calmer these days, though. Which is something of a relief to most people despite the oddities surrounding precisely why."
She nodded absently, studying the box of healers that she'd picked up. "So what's the next step with these?"
"The consensus is that we're confident enough to move forward to volunteer human trials, if you sign off on it," he replied. "Animal testing can only show so much, but everything we've learned says that worst case nothing bad will happen. Personally I really do think that they'll do exactly what they're supposed to. We'd want to test them on a number of volunteers, with genetic defects, diseases, and injuries, and monitor the results very carefully. But assuming those tests went as I expect, everyone here feels we could recommend that we acquire more as a standard treatment."
He watched her tilt the container back and forth. "From what Saurial said, the DWU supplied some volunteers already, so I doubt there's any real risk. We all know that those reptiles appear to value their friends very much indeed so I highly doubt they'd have used something dangerous on them. An organization like the DWU will have regular minor injuries, considering the risks of the work they do, which means they probably tested the things pretty thoroughly long before Saurial talked to you."
"I'm still reluctant to approve the use of novel biotinker products," Emily said after a while.
"I realize that, and obviously I'm aware of the reasons," he nodded. "On the other hand, this is not a normal biotinker product. All the evidence we have is that the designers of the things understand their work far, far more than someone like, for example, Blasto does. These are the end result of a very large amount of very careful research, in my view, done by experts with a lot more data than our own science has. To be honest, we basically can't test them properly other than empirically since we just don't have enough expertise to second-guess the designers."
"So we have to trust the Family knows what they're doing."
"Pretty much exactly that, yes. However, have they let us down yet?"
She looked at him, then back at the container of alien biotech, which she put on the desk again. "No. No, they haven't. So far everything they claimed they could do, they can prove and have proved they can actually do. Armsmaster and Dragon have had similar conversations with me in their own disciplines, and both of them seem to trust those insane lizards far more than I would expect considering how recently they came on the scene."
Emily stared at the monitor for another minute or so, thinking. Eventually she turned to him. "File your report and recommendations. I'll review it, and sign off on human testing if you can find any volunteers. Keep it low key for now, though, we don't want too many people learning about it too soon. As you said, this will change practically everything and we need to be careful. The political ramifications alone are… a little terrifying."
He nodded. "All right. However, one thing to think about is that the DWU already knows about them, and so does Panacea. If I know her, she was right next to Ianthe when they were testing the things to make sure nothing untoward happened. The girl is very conscientious. And, again from knowing her, she's probably been thinking about how to get these out to a wider audience ever since, because she's a decent person and wouldn't want anyone suffering if she could stop it. Which in turn may well mean that she has talked, or will talk, to the administration of Brockton General about the healers."
Emily put her hand over her eyes.
"You think so?" she asked without removing it.
"Yeah, I do. I'd be surprised if it hasn't already happened, actually. I know a lot of people there, and they trust her implicitly. If she came to them with a box of these little widgets and told them what they did and who made them, I doubt they'd turn her away. They may already be running their own tests."
Lowering her hand, she looked at him. "And they could bypass the PRT?"
"Oh, there are a lot of medical and ethical regulations they'd need to meet, but there are also a lot of exemptions in them for some types of treatment in certain cases. Considering the healers basically fix everything, it wouldn't be a stretch to see some obscure FDA exemption being viable as a method to allow them to use the things in clinical trials at least with minimal effort. I can think of a couple of ways to do that without much trouble."
"Which means we've probably already lost any hope of containment," she sighed. "Unless they turn out to be dangerous. Which, I have little doubt, they won't."
"No. I doubt it either. I think we'll find that they're as safe as anything could be." Jon shrugged. "Sure, the Chief Director might be able to bring pressure to bear somehow, but I doubt it would work in the long term. The genie is almost certainly out of the bottle and it'll be far too late to push it back in. Not to mention, if they do what they are supposed to do, I can't honestly see a good reason to do that in any case. Healing people is the right thing to do."
"Even if it puts most of the medical industry out of business?" she asked.
"Even so." He smiled at her a little wryly. "It'll mostly affect the big pharma companies at first, and to be honest I doubt they'll get much sympathy these days. Sure, in the long term it'll make some amazingly fundamental changes to a lot of businesses, but saving lives trumps all of those in my opinion. And it's not like it would happen overnight anyway. I expect the Family are at least as well aware of how large a change it will be and will try to minimize the impact, plus there are a hell of a lot of logistical issues even getting the things to all the people who will ultimately benefit from them. It might take years. And that's assuming they can make them in the quantities we'd need in the first place."
"I think we probably have to assume that won't be a problem," Emily noted.
"No, most likely not. I doubt they'd have told us if the supply was limited. Ianthe can maybe make a healer tree or something," he grinned. "But it'll take time even so, and it's not like there will be no need for doctors or nurses overnight. In the long run it would probably mean a lot of hospitals would shrink or disappear, and it'll have a profound effect on general practitioners, but it might mean the number of researchers and other disciplines actually increases. But that's not something I'm qualified to really talk about, or anything I can change anyway, so I'll leave it to other people."
"God." She shook her head a little. "Yet another thing they've changed."
"They do seem quite effective at that," he chuckled.
"Too effective sometimes," she muttered, standing up. "We're in danger of becoming the Family Response Team."
He laughed, and she reluctantly smiled. "Get me your report as soon as it's finished," she requested.
"Of course." He turned back to the microscope and she headed for the door. "Make sure you see me for your checkup this afternoon," he added, causing her to pause, then resume walking while grumbling about doctors who poked you all the time.