Sanchez tossed his shiny hair like an especially virile pony. By all his calculations, his diabetes medicine should work! Diabetegone should work!

"Damn your furry heads," cried Sanchez, "Why won't your diabetes go away?"

He worried that he would be spending the rest of his life in the shadow of Dagless. No matter how good a doctor he was, he could never compare to Dagless who was not only a brilliant doctor, he was also completely devoted to the hospital. Dagless treated the hospital like his wife; he wasn't always faithful but he always came back. He had a legal obligation, sure, but he also liked to be buried deep inside her on a regular basis.

Sanchez squatted down to look one especially intelligent looking rat in the eye.

"Tell me what's going on?" Sanchez cried in frustration, "Why aren't you rats co-operating? Are you intentionally rebelling against humans as part of a rat movement to take over the world? Of course not, what a silly idea. As if rats could rule the world. How would they use our desks and telephones? They're far too small and they don't speak."

One of the rats squeaked in a manner that nearly sounded like, "Oh, really?"

If Sanchez had been a paranoid man, he might have thought the rat was actually offering a verbal response to his inquiry. But Sanchez was not a paranoid man. In fact, as a doctor, he rarely ever asked questions. He just gave answers.

xxx

Thorton Reed looked out his window and shook his head in frustration. It wasn't easy to run Darkplace. Reed was often put into a position where he had to make decisions between what made sense for the hospital budget versus keeping the portal to hell beneath Darkplace from opening further and swallowing the country whole. It was not an enviable position in which to be in. Having to choose between fiscal concerns and protecting the entirety of human kind from un-mitigated evil could be a burden.

Considering the stress and difficulty of his job, you would expect Thorton Reed to look older than his fifty-four years and, yet, Reed actually appeared to be in his thirties. It was strange but some people just have good genes.

Reed picked up his phone and yelled for, "Dagless and Sanchez, ASAP and that doesn't stand for As soon as Dagless and Sanchez feel like showing up. That would be ASADASFLSU."

Dagless and Sanchez didn't come running like a couple of lapdogs, they were busy men, but they came within a reasonable time period. They came as quickly as one could expect from busy doctors who liked and respected their boss even if he could be a hardass sometimes.

Reed stood at his desk and watched Dagless and Sanchez arrive. As usual, Dagless wore a cloak of mystery and sadness about him. While Sanchez may have been the more traditionally handsome man, most peoples' eyes were actually drawn to Dagless.

"Gentlemen, I'm glad you could join me. Finally. Took you long enough. I should say," Reed said sarcastically but without too much of an edge. He already knew Dagless and Sanchez had probably been doing something very important.

"Sorry, Chief," said Sanchez with a toss of his silken locks, "We had rather a ... tough customer on three, wouldn't you say so, Dagless?"

"If you call a woman who stabbed up the cashier at Tesco's over an expired coupon a tough customer then, yeah, that is exactly what we had," Dagless said, dryly because the woman was in fact a very tough customer, "She took out three orderlies before Sanchez and I were able to sedate her."

"That does sound like a tough customer but never mind that. I've got bigger fish to fry. The board is on me to cut my budget by 25% and I don't know where I'm supposed to find this money. I should pull it out of my hat, I suppose that's what the board thinks I can do. Never mind that, I'm sure we'll revisit this topic later but we've got an emergency on four in the nursery."

"Why would you call us?" asked Sanchez in a borderline cheeky tone, "We're not OBGYNs!"

"Or pediatricians," Dagless couldn't help but add, "I may know a lot about children - I was a father, after all - but we are not specialists dealing in babies."

"No, but you are the two best damn doctors in this damn hospital. We've got a baby aging at a tremendous speed down in the nursery. He was just born at 3pm and by dinner time, he was using a urinal. He'll be shaving come midnight and trying to collect a pension by the weekend. I need the two of you to nip this in the bud and quick!" Reed yelled, slamming his fist on the desk.

Sanchez and Dagless exchanged a knowing look.

"Here we go again, Dag," Sanchez observed, accurately.

"Looks like," agreed Dagless, "But we wouldn't have it any other way."

xxx

Snuggles sipped at the sugar water. His "Die-a-beat-hes" left him thirsty and craving sweets. The handsome Latino man kept giving them shots but the "Die-a-beat-hes" continued.

Or perhaps it continued because of the shots given them by the handsome, fiery doctor.

Snuggles had always believed the giant, nearly hairless monsters that shaved him and his brethren before pumping them full of drugs that sometimes lead to their deaths were kind-hearted and mostly harmless. Lately, he'd been having his doubts. Maybe the humans were not to be trusted.

Maybe it was time to stop letting the humans inject them with "Dizz-ease-ez".

Maybe it was time to fight back.

Snuggles watched Jingle-Bell as she sucked desperately at the sugar water. Snuggles instinctively sensed that the sugar water was compounding their problems. It all had something to do with the "Die-a-beat-hes". Jingle-Bells was a shadow of her former self. She was skeletal and going blind in one eye. She'd always been such a beauty. Not any more. No, she wasn't beautiful any more.

xxx

Liz spent the afternoon in the lab with Dagless and Sanchez, working on a cure for rapid aging in babies. Liz was not as brilliant as her colleagues but she was a quick typist and made the best coffee in the hospital. She was happy to be there, typing away and pouring coffee into the wee hours, only stopping once an hour to reapply her make-up. She was a doctor but she was also a woman.

A single and fertile woman. She had decided to spend her prime years in medical school so now she had to worry about landing a husband before she became a spinster. It was lucky for her that she was spending so much time in the company of single and handsome men but it was unlucky that both men were so focused on being doctors that they had little time left for dating. They went out with girls, of course, they were men with needs - but they weren't looking to settle down. Dagless had already settled down and, as has been discussed, it all ended in tragedy. He had had his heart broken and it wasn't easy to fix a broken heart.

Even if you were a heart surgeon.

Sanchez had only experienced true love once and that was a woman who was slowly turning into broccoli. He had more than his heart broken by that affair, he'd had his willy taken off as well. Luckily, not two days after the tragic incident, a young and male organ donor had come into their hospital on the brink of death. He had been well smashed up in a car accident because he was drinking and driving. He died and his penis was cut off and attached to Sanchez but, in a way, it was lucky for the man. He was dead and his body was mutilated but it was all because he was drinking and driving and it could have ended much worse like if he'd swerved and hit a bus full of kiddies and nuns. He was lucky that only his life was destroyed by his selfish act and he was lucky that part of him, his John Thomas, lived on without him. He had found a touch of immortality in the pants of Lucien Sanchez.

It made Liz flush to contemplate the contents of any man's pants, being that she was a virgin, but she was also a medical doctor and had an intellectual curiosity. She was intrigued by the idea of a donor penis. She wondered if it worked properly and could still create babies.

She also wondered if it could fill her with the pleasure and excitement that could only be experienced through sexual intercourse with a man. Liz didn't have to be 'experienced' to know there was one true pleasure for a young woman (other than having babies) and that was being brought to orgasm by the thrusting hips of the man she loved.

"Liz, do you need a glass of cold water?" Sanchez asked as he surveyed her pink cheeks, "You've gone all red. You aren't having naughty thoughts, are you?"

Dagless and Sanchez laughed uproariously, slapping one another on the back at the joke while Liz turned a deeper shade of red.

"Really, this is a place of work and I don't expect to hear such topics discussed. Especially not by my co-workers who are supposed to be medical professionals and doctors to boot! It's not like you're a psychiatrist who is supposed to be fiddling around with peoples' thoughts..."

Dagless and Sanchez exchanged glances.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, buddy?" Sanchez asked Dagless.

"Yes, my friend, only I thought of it slightly before you. What can stop a boy from ever growing into a man?"

"Their mothers?" Liz offered, helpfully.

"That isn't funny," Sanchez snapped, his Latin blood boiling, "My mother is a saint!"

"The answer is simple. Cartoons."

It was Dagless that said that.