"No, what I'm saying is that Lex Luthor is a menace, and he should be locked up," Cameron huffed.
"But you don't know if the kryptonite worked." Toss. Catch. "Because you left."
"His assistant has a gun," Cameron persisted. Her hair was all messed up. House kind of liked it that way. "How did she even get a gun in here? Aren't we supposed to have metal detectors now? Maybe it's a composite. Aren't those illegal in New Jersey?"
"You're babbling." House clunked his chair back into the upright position and grabbed his cane. "What happened to Chase, anyway? You throw him out of the sleigh?"
Cameron looked at him like he'd lost his mind. He sighed. She'd be so much more fun if she could keep up. He wished he knew what she'd be like in ten or fifteen years. By the time she was old enough to really banter with, he'd probably be dead. "To distract the pursuing wolves," he muttered, hating how lame it always sounded when he had to explain stuff like that.
"No, I ran away on my own," Chase said, coming in with a handful of papers. "I got the analysis back on that vomit."
"You say the sweetest things. Gimme."
Chase handed the papers over and sat down, saying, "There's nothing there, though. It's mostly just water, with a little bit of some unidentifiable proteins and traces of sulphur and magnesium."
House grunted noncommittally.
"The CT and ultrasound were just as featureless as the MRI," Chase went on.
"How can an ultrasound be featureless?" Cameron asked.
"Don't know. His skin must block sound waves or something. He said he could hear them, though."
"Which also should be impossible," Cameron muttered.
The kids were silent for a few moments, letting House make a little more sense of the lab analysis. On the one hand, he'd kind of like to run it himself, because the lab never did anything exactly the way he liked it. On the other hand, vomit.
"Wait. Doesn't Superman have x-ray vision?" Cameron asked. "We could just have him look at himself and tell us what he sees."
"Sure, if he were a trained physician and knew what he was looking for," House answered absently.
"And if he were conscious," Chase added.
"This looks sort of like a nonapeptide," House mused, scratching his eyebrow. "Vasopressin is a nonapeptide. Maybe whatsisname is vomiting all the time because nothing's going out the other way. Do aliens have kidneys? What's his output?"
Nobody answered. House looked at them. Cameron wouldn't meet his eyes, but Chase did.
"It's not charted because you chased off the nurses. And I'm not going back in there to ask them. Luthor will kill me."
"Or he'll have that woman do it," Cameron put in.
House was disgusted with them. "This is why I need Foreman around. You girls are scaredy cats." He pulled himself to his feet and stumped to the door.
"Where are you going?" Cameron asked, touchingly (typically!) alarmed.
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," he quipped. Honestly, such worrywarts.
"Not alone," she declared, getting up.
"What? Let him!" Chase sputtered.
"Chase," Cameron said, fixing him with a stern eye. Wow, only one night together and she bossed him around like an old married woman. It was probably just as well that their only dinner date had turned out so badly. (Just keep telling yourself that.)
"Fine," Chase said. He got up and came along.
As House and his girly-man posse stepped out into the hallway, Small Intense Asian Girl Who Sits in the Front Row swept by with her own little flock of white-coats. She was self-importantly explaining clinic duty to them. (Good God -- they had younger med students than Small Intense Asian Girl Who Sits in the Front Row now? She couldn't be an intern already, could she? Damn, he was getting old.)
"It's very important," SIAGWSitFR declared, "to always ask every patient the standard questions." She tapped her clipboard. "They're on your checklist. Always ask them! For instance, ask every female patient if she could be pregnant, even if she seems too old or too young. Skip it, and you will end up getting sued!"
House stopped dead for a second. The kids barely avoided running into him. "Oxytocin is a nonapeptide!" he said, and laughed.
"Oxytocin? But that's..." Cameron's voice trailed off to nothing.
"It's an idea," Chase said. "Wow."
Halfway to the patient's room, they ran across Wilson in the hallway.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "I heard a patient's bodyguard threw you out of a room at gunpoint."
"Patient's boyfriend's bodyguard, and it wasn't me." House gestured at the kids with his chin, and kept walking.
"And now you're going...?"
"Back to the patient's room, yes."
"Of course." Wilson fell into step with him. "Shouldn't you give the patient's boyfriend a while to cool down? Before you get shot again."
"Nah. This'll be neat, anyway. Wanna come with? You'll have to be sworn to secrecy, and you may have to falsify some medical records for me later." House was amused to hear Cameron sputtering behind them, but all the kids knew better than to interrupt when he was talking to grownups.
"What are friends for?" Good old Wilson!