((J. Dac says: 10 points to whomever catches the "House, MD" reference.))
The majority of the physicals went according to the book, though we had a few difficult customers who didn't want a thermometer stuck up their hoohoos. (Which was sometimes unavoidable, considering many species don't have proper mouths.) Every new inmate filled me with anticipation, hoping that it would be her next, and I would have the freedom to do whatever I pleased—in the name of "medicine"—to that creature that had contributed to the extinction of my people. I craned my neck to glance down the line; still I caught no glimpse of her, despite having admitted twenty or so inmates. Anxiety was beginning to itch up my spine. It made me sweat as if my whole body were incased inside suffocating latex. I could barely focus on the patients in front of me, which led to some unintentional malpractice. Luckily, my patients were in no position to sue.
The outburst occurred while I was very carefully sticking a long cue-tip down the throat of an incoming inmate with Jetsam-like rows of steak knives for teeth to test for strep. A loud shriek issued from the back of the line, and though most of the inmates and prison employees were accustomed to brief explosions of chaos, this particular shriek seemed to herald a sudden dissolution of begrudging order. It seemed to a siren song to the criminals, incensing them to strike out at their captors with collective vigor.
I pulled my arm out of the inmates mouth just in time to avoid losing it entirely. Not finished with me, my patient lurched forward with mouth wide, and for a moment I feared my last sight would be of an alien uvula, and my last words would be a childish whimper. At the last second (as if to do the maximum damage to my sanity), one guard yanked me away and the other delivered a punch straight to my patient's grill. My patient, instantly unconscious, tumbled backwards and hit the wall, where he lay incapacitated.
Catching my breath, I surveyed the scene. It seemed as if the prisoners had suddenly broken into an alarmingly organized mutiny—unlikely, considering prisoners were invariably reluctant to work together. Suspicious, I began examining individuals, trying to pick up on similarities between the enraged. My attention fell to their eyes. Although each possessed a unique set of them (sometimes more than just a couple), a common iridescent fog swirled within the centers, as if they had all been possessed by a singular consciousness. This internal smoke also happened to be cotton-candy colored, and the criminals all happened to have ridiculously childish grins on their face, as if they had been promised candy and sunshine for their efforts.
Faerie magic.
"Doctor Sloth!" a frantic voice cried over the mad fray. I craned my neck in the direction of the tangle of bodies that used to be an orderly procession. A head bobbed up periodically through the knot of movement that I recognized as my manager, combined with the strident voice. Having locked eyes with him, coming to his assistance was unavoidable.
"Crap, man, you've involved me." I sighed heavily, and leaned down to open my black bag. I pulled out a tiny vial from the neatly organized row of chemicals and a syringe and hypodermic needle from a translucent box. Affixing the needle to the syringe, I plunged the sharp tip into the rubber top of the vial, extracting a dose of sedatives enough to put down a rampaging Grarrl. I stood up and held the hypodermic needle over my head, holding my breath as I plunged into the fray.
Somehow, I managed to make it to the eye of the storm with only a few violent jabs to the ribs. In the middle of the action, five guards encircled a singular figure, who held them off with only the extension of her two hands. Her red eyes were lit up like stoplights, and a wavy air seemed to issue from her outstretched hands. It was a basic Faerie defense spell, and the guards, strangers to magic, couldn't penetrate it for their lives.
Thankfully, Feather society had offered basic defense classes against assault by Faeries. There was always a central weakness to any given Faerie spell. It took a trained eye to spot it, as it varied from Faerie to Faerie, but if one struck at it, the spell crumbled like old parchment.
Unfortunately, Feather society had been unable to find the hole in the curse that ultimately destroyed it.
"Doctor Sloth, for the love of betty, do something!" cried my manager, briefly emerging at my side, and then getting carried off again by the tide of criminal fury.
"On it, Jeff," I replied, positioning the syringe in one hand. With the other shoulder, I nudged my way into the ring of helpless guards, all beating pointlessly against apparent air. Given a full view of the spell surrounding the Faerie, I looked for a small pocket of color that indicated a weakness in power. It occurred right at her wrist, and I carefully moved along the circumference of her spell to line myself up with it. With my free hand, I plunged my fingers through the hole, clamping my hand around her delicate wrist roughly.
The spell gave a tiny sigh as it popped, and her eyes lost their supernatural light. Her head snapped towards me. The orbs of red that gave her sight flashed open in surprise for a brief second, and then narrowed spitefully. She spoke one word, not in Intergalactic Common, but the language of Feather-Faerie diplomacy.
"Feather," she spat.
"Faerie," I returned in the same language and with equal loathing, and plunged the needle upwards into her jugular. Not waiting for the burst of blood to indicate I had hit gold, I depressed the stopper and watched with suppressed glee as the chemicals drained into her. The hatred slowly drained from her eyes as the sedatives took effect, until her eyelids overtook them like a feathered curtain. She swooned in my direction, as if a part of her expected me to catch her romantically. I stepped out of the way and let her faint onto hard tile.
The criminals immediately stopped in their tracks, no longer controlled by the Faerie's spell. They looked around themselves as if unsure of their surroundings. Immediately guards were upon them. Belatedly, a crew of backup security arrived, and the criminals were corralled back into an orderly fashion. The five guards who had circled the Faerie to no affect during the peak of chaos collected the fallen Faerie, beginning to drag her away. My manager accompanied them, wiping blood with the inappropriate calmness characteristic of him from his forehead. Instead of returning to my post, I scrambled after them.
"Jeff, hold on." I reached out to touch my manager on the shoulder. He turned around and looked at me blankly, as if surprised to see me.
"Dr. Sloth. Don't you have a job to be attending to?" He meant the
"Well yeah, but … look. I've never seen her species before," I lied, indicating the Faerie with a gesture of the empty syringe in my hand. "I'm not completely positive how this sedative's going to turn out in her system. If you could put her in the hospital, in isolation … after all, she might pull a stunt like that again. You'd want me around to shoot her up a second time, wouldn't you?"
Jeff paused, letting the guards with the Faerie move ahead for a second. He looked me up and down, as if assessing my credibility. "Well, you are the doctor here …" He rubbed the side of one of his mouths. (Jeff was of an amphibian species with two toothless mouths and three eyes, not unlike a Quiggle that had been exposed to a little too much radiation. Considering that his coloration was caution-tape yellow and squealing prepubescent pink, it was a little difficult to take him seriously. The inside of my cheeks were raw from being viciously bitten to maintain a straight face.) "Who's going to inspect the inmates, then?"
"Well, routine physicals really aren't that hard, y'see," I explained. "Take the temperature, feel the glands, look in the eyes, tap the knees, voila. I mean, you could totally do it if you wanted to." (Not exactly the truth, but strategic lies were often necessary to get what I wanted. Thankfully, 99 of the prison was ignorant to medical procedures. That extra 1 was accounted for—me.) "Mostly it takes guts just to touch the inmates. And you got that in spades, right? And hey, if push comes to shove, most prisons give their inmates a routine physical right before they leave. We're really just inspecting for any diseases they may have acquired in transit. The files on each inmate should theoretically already contain anything I would pick up on a physical."
Precise flattery and talky explanation was working its social magic on Jeff. One by one, each of his eyes lost their skeptical stare and became more permissive, while the strain around each mouth loosened until assent was inevitable. Finally, he nodded. "Who'm I to argue with you, Franky?" (Nails on chalkboard. Internally, I cringed.) "I'll allow that. Guys!"
He called after the guards, who had already left us behind a considerable distance. They turned around reluctantly. "Bring that lassie to the isolation chamber in the hospital wing. Dr. Sloth will be overseeing her."
And with that subtle manipulation successful, I unknowingly circuited my life towards the shadowy fate I would someday fulfill. What if I had stayed in line and continued with the monotonous physicals, writing her appearance off as coincidence and forgiving the actions of Faeries through non-action? What if I had not loomed over her as she slept, awaiting her awakening with equal parts anticipation and anger, but instead watched her escape through some other feat of magic? What if I had continued my predictable but peaceful existence with Gormos, the silent sole survivor of a massacred species?
I don't linger on possibilities. The past remains written, and the future endlessly flexible. The fact is I stayed in that isolation chamber with her, mentally calculating how long the chemicals would keep her unconscious. The guards had shackled her to the Spartan bed inside the chamber, its mattress barely inches thick. I perched myself on the closed lid of the toilet, trying not to think about all the filth collecting on the seat of my scrubs.
For belonging to a species that had destroyed the entire existence of another, she was awfully pretty while sleeping. Some inter-species romances had occasionally existed between Feathers and Faeries in ancient children's tales, but towards the end the coexistence between the two species was largely political. I had rarely seen Faeries beside snapshots in newspapers. Now, more than a century after I thought I'd seen my last Faerie, one lay before me. Admittedly, she was, as mentioned before, unlike any of the stereotypical Faerie ideals. Her skin was a coffee-and-cream color, and I had certainly never seen Faeries with red eyes. From the stubble pushing up through her scalp, I detected hair colored azure. Her wings were blue as well, but considerably lighter. They were a color I remembered as sky blue. Though the symmetry of her face was interrupted by several piercings, the metal in her face almost served to underline certain gorgeous features. To Faeries, she may have been an abomination, outside of their standard of pale-faced, pale-haired beauty. Yet something about the exotic qualities of her complexion struck me as stunning. I hated her all the more for it.
She stirred slightly. Eyelash spasms indicated the first hints of consciousness. Slowly, slits of red showed underneath dark lashes. She turned her face towards me while waking. Her eyes had opened all the way before they registered anything, evidenced by the delayed reaction of her seeing me. As soon as I did register, however, she tried to jerk into a sitting position, kicking her legs violently and uselessly. Giving a defiant howl, she lurched upwards with her midsection, which only caused her to flop back sharply into the bed, bouncing up and down slightly with the box spring.
Before she could twitter her fingers and cast a spell, I grabbed her hands roughly, reaching across her body to seize the one closest to the wall. She lunged forward with her teeth, a vicious bite just grazing my nose. Failing that, she hacked up something from deep within her throat, and ejected it just short of my right eye.
"Filthy Feather!" she growled. "You should be dead!"
"And so should you," I answered, keeping her hands pinned down and useless as I could. She sank her nails into my skin, but I held her firm, ignoring the pain. "Faeries breathe oxygen. Albeit very little in your high altitudes, which accounts for how vacuous you Faeries are. So you're an anomaly, sweetheart. 'Cause as far as I know, Faerieland ain't producing any deep-space spaceships. Unless there's been some changes since your last genocide."
"Let me go!" she screamed, ignoring my inquiry entirely.
"No! Not until you give me some answers."
"I'm not telling a filthy Feather anything," she hissed. We stood at a stalemate for a moment, she unwilling to divulge information, me unwilling to release her unless she did. A brief revelation, and possibly an explanation, suddenly occurred to me. Briefly, I dropped her right hand and grasped her by the neck, turning her head sideways so I could see where her jaw line met her throat. Sure enough, an insignia was branded into her skin: a circle with a diagonal cross through it. I fingered the raised scar, and she snarled. "Get your dirty mitts off me, pervert!"
"Relax, sweetheart, I'm not interested in an exile," I sneered, snapping my hand back so it kept her other hand down. Her shoulders tensed visibly. I smiled with smug satisfaction. "I'm no Faerie anthropologist, but I know enough about your culture to know what marks an invalid. You took to space because you didn't have anywhere else, right? Wonder how you made it this far with no air."
"I don't need air, idiot," she hissed. "I'm no common cattle Earth Faerie, or some run-of-the-mill Light Faerie. I'm an original."
"And that's why they didn't want you, huh? Couldn't fit in with their conformity, so you decided to rebel. But you want to be just like them, don't you? You'd give anything for that, right?" I asked mockingly.
"That's no business of yours, filthy Feather. And you're one to talk about conformity. Look at your wings, bound up like meat. You think that's gonna get you to heaven?"
"That's completely irrelevant. I have no God."
The stalemate re-ensued. A silent battle of wills waged between us, until she spoke, a slight shred of hatred withdrawn from her tone.
"Then we've got one thing in common, Feather."
"Tell me why you're out here."
"I'll tell you if you let me go."
"If I let you go, you'll use that magic of yours to attack me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Guess you're gonna have to risk that, huh?" I examined her expression closely, trying to detect the slightest flicker of deceit. Though our faces were similar, Faeries and Feathers used each muscle differently to express certain sentiments. Reading her face was like reading Intergalactic Common for the first time: completely foreign. It would be a leap of faith to trust her.
"… Okay. I'll let you go. But I swear, Faerie, you start chanting one spell, I'll hit you with a tranquilizer so fast it'll make your head spin."
"Fine. Just get your paws off me."