"Here, these will help your pain. Take two in the morning for the next three days. You should be all better soon enough, ok?" The doctor explained as she handed a teregrine a bottle of pain killer pills.
"Thanks Doc," he said. A pained groan escaped his lips as he raised himself off of the seat.
"You take care alright? No more bar fights?" The dahmak said as she jotted a few notes down on a clipboard.
"Sure thing. Have a good one."
The teregrine limped out of the small ward with a large bandage around his arm.
After he exited the room, the doctor let out a heavy sigh. Her shoulders slumped and her eyes were stinging. It had been a long day and an even longer night. For a casino, there sure were a lot of bar fights.
She hastily scribbled down the last few notes she had on the patient before sticking the form up on a board with all the other forms from previous injuries. Someone would be down to collect the paperwork soon enough. She was thankful that wasn't also her job. Dealing with injured drunks was bad enough as it was. She didn't need to go over a mountain of paperwork as well.
The room she was confined to was cramped to say the least. A casino medical ward was a rare sight, so she was glad there at least was one to begin with. However, it certainly wasn't anything to write home about. The walls were almost completely covered in charts, diagrams, paperwork and photos of various injuries. All along the desk lay filing cabinet drawers and odd medical tools that hadn't been given a designated place to be put.
Being the only active duty medic at the casino, she often found herself cleaning up everyone else's mess. Still, a job was a job. She wasn't about to complain. It kept food on her table and a roof over her head. That was all she needed. Or at least, that's what she kept telling herself.
The doctor shuffled over to the sink and flicked the tap on. She splashed some cool water on her face before taking a look in the mirror. Her expression was one of tiredness, her eyes were heavy and blinking felt like she was lifting weights with her eyelids. She'd been awake for almost twenty two hours now. Not exactly a great day at work.
She rubbed her eyes gently as she walked back to her desk. They stung like she'd spilled soap in them. The feeling of grogginess weighed down on her heavily. She was used to long work days. But that didn't mean she enjoyed them.
The sound of rapid knocking on the door caught her attention.
"Angel, Angel? Kardan wants you out on the floor asap. There's been an accident," A kugraw poked his head through the door. His skin was a deep blue and his eyes shone an aqua green. He was relatively young, likely younger than she was.
"Thanks Tak, I'll be out there soon." She droned.
"My apologies ma'am, he needs you right now." The extra emphasis on those last few words told her there was something going on. Come to think of it, she had heard a loud bang earlier. With a sigh she nodded briefly before grabbing her clipboard and coat.
"Alright." She said.
-V-
"What in the architect's name happened out here?" The lead guard cursed as he tried his best to take in the scene. Four people in handcuffs, two of them were actively fighting each other. A dead irva who by the looks of things had fallen from one of the stories above and a kugraw lying in a pool of blood with a bullet wound in his leg.
"One of you lot get me the bloody security footage!" He ordered as he pointed at one of the guards. The guard nodded quickly before jogging into the security office.
The lead guard's attention once again shifted back to the four suspects. He licked his lips slightly before frowning and approaching them.
"Alright. You lot have some bloody explaining to do. Why the hell am I staring at a dead four arms?" His derogatory speech only served to further put his frustration on display.
All four of them looked at each other as if one of them had the answer. When no-one spoke up, the vett'iri shrugged her shoulders.
"All I saw was this nox start shooting an unarmed kugraw. I stepped in to defend him, the nox started shooting at me," she said with an innocent sounding voice.
The nox sneered as he listened. The vett'iri's chipper attitude sounded almost like she was mocking him. It definitely didn't help she'd just cost him a bounty.
"Alright then Blondie. Care to explain why you decided to gun down one of our guests?"
The nox was silent for a few seconds. The tension in the air was so thick it could be cut with a knife. He looked like he was contemplating whether or not he wanted to bite the guard's head off then and there.
"Oi, you deaf as well? I'm talking to you fuzzball," the guard snapped.
The nox's ears flattened across the back of his head and he let out a low growl.
"If you'd be so kind as to take these cuffs off, I can show you my paperwork. Officer." His polite words were contradicted by his savage looks and rather passive aggressive speech.
A short laugh escaped the guard. "Like hell that's gonna happen. Oi, Fennik. Search his bag."
Another dahmak guard approached. The nox's steely gaze cut through him like a knife. He noticed a small gulp slide down the dahmak's throat. But the guard did as he was told. Shuffling around in the nox's bag, he pulled out a small piece of laminated paper.
The dahmak handed it to the main guard, who's eyes narrowed as he read it. He scoffed at the page and threw one of his hands in the air.
"Alright. Uncuff him," he reluctantly ordered.
"What?" The guards asked, looking at each other.
"You heard me. Uncuff him. Bastard's a bounty hunter. He's got a bloody form."
Upon hearing confirmation of his beliefs, the kugraw in handcuffs smirked slightly.
The nox tilted his head towards the guard menacingly as the cuffs around his wrists were removed.
"Thank you," he hissed. Before he could pack up his belongings and leave however, three more people emerged from the back room.
Two were guards, a kugraw and a mowlin, all dressed in black and blue armour. The third one stood out like a sore thumb however. Like her comrades, she too was a dahmak. However she was almost completely pure white. Dahmaks were known for having a wide variety of colours and patterns, however to see a pure white albino dahmak was incredibly rare. In fact, the nox had been around over four hundred years and never seen one before.
Her eyes were a beautiful raspberry red colour and her scales almost seemed to twinkle in the light as she moved, almost as if she was covered in glitter. Her morph lights were white just like her body, however they were still easily distinguishable from her skin. Like all dahmaks, they glowed beautifully.
Around her body she wore a long white doctor's coat that draped down to her ankles. It was held together at a single point on her chest. There were two marks on her shoulder, on the right was the symbol of the hegemony- three blue slash marks. On the left was a red cross, symbolising her medical expertise. She wore a black pair of toeless boots and a similarly coloured pair of fingerless gloves. Around her neck sat a black gaiter and the top of her head was adorned with a strange pair of dark brown goggles.
Her pants were a light tan and her shirt an even lighter cream colour with a soft sash with scissors and other medical tools lining it. Finally around her neck lay a golden necklace with a strange blue wave symbol etched into it.
The doctor's eyes widened in shock as she stepped out onto the casino floor. A warzone would be one way of describing it. Guards were stationed around every corner of the building, all of them carrying high powered weaponry. The floor was covered in shattered glass and parts of slot machine that had been snapped off by the irvagaleni that was now a mangled corpse and lying atop some of said slot machines. To her right lay a kugraw in a pool of blood, shivering and shaking as he tried to stay awake. It was clear he was losing a lot of blood and wasn't going to last much longer.
The main guard turned around, seemingly even more frustrated now that his doctor had arrived.
"Finally, what, did you tour Ketune on the way? Over here, I wanna know what the hell this was."
The doctor took a few steps forwards to get a better look at the irva. Almost as soon as she saw it however, she changed her mind and ran over besides the dying kugraw.
"What the- no you bloody snowflake, this one!" The guard roared.
The doctor seemed unphased by his anger however as she crouched down next to the kugraw.
"Kardan, That irva is dead. I can't do anything for her. I can help him though. I'd rather spend time working on a problem that can be fixed rather than one that can't."
The dahmak paid her superior no mind as she unravelled a line of bandages and began tending to the wounded kugraw.
"Hey, you're going to be fine alright? You've lost a lot of blood, so I'm going to give you a shot of painkiller to help, ok?" She consoled. Her voice was soft and almost feathery. She sounded calm and controlled, but at the same time as loving and caring as a mother to her child.
The kugraw looked up at her and smiled.
"Heh, the Angel in White, huh? G-Guess they're sparing no expense for m-me," he cackled.
The doctor hid her frustration, instead giving him a quick smile. She finished bandaging up his leg and quickly gave him a jab with one of the needles stored in her sash.
"The pain will go away shortly. We'll call an ambulance and have you taken to the hospital soon, alright?"
"Cheers, lovely."
The nox noticed the dahmak's head twitch slightly at the kugraw's words. But he was more focused on the fact she was now the reason the son of a bitch he was hunting would live to see another day. Another snarl curled up around his lips.
"Alright, now will you do as you're bloody told?" Kardan asked with a condescending tone.
The dahmak paid him no mind, instead brushing past him.
"Call an ambulance and tell them there's a gunshot victim in critical but stable condition at the Cerulean Sabre. Priority three," she said to the same dahmak who had searched the nox's bag. He quickly nodded and rushed off to grab a phone.
The doctor finally approached the deceased irva. She swapped her fingerless gloves for a pair of pale green surgery gloves and retrieved a small metal tool that looked almost like a dull scalpel. With a deflated sigh she approached the irva.
"How long ago did this happen?" She asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine. The grunts are looking over the tapes now."
She nodded slightly before beginning her investigation. The irva was dressed in a rather beautiful gown; or what remained of it. All across her body were scratches and lacerations from her impact with the ground. But that wasn't what interested the doctor the most. Her eyes narrowed as she ran the tool over the back of the irva's head. There was something interesting on her neck.
"Irva. Female. Looks to be around her early thirties. Maybe less. However... cause of death wasn't blunt force impact. She was dead before the fall. Or at least, before she hit the ground."
"What are you talking about?" Kardan scoffed.
"Here. Look. The side of her neck. There's a small indent on the skin. A needle of some kind. That combined with the way she fell. She hit the floor head first. Judging by the impact to her arms though, she didn't even try to brace herself. I'm willing to bet she went limp during the fall." She compacted her scalpel up and slotted it into her sash.
"You ask me what I think? I've been a doctor long enough to know a murder when I see one. I don't think this girl was drunk or intoxicated. I'm willing to bet she was poisoned."
Kardan's eyes narrowed. "You're sure?"
The doctor nodded her head.
"Well then. Looks like we got ourselves a few rats to sniff out," he followed.
The doctor turned back, her eyes resting on the body.
"Does she have a name?"
Instead of getting a response from Kardan like she expected, the kugraw from the row of suspects stepped forwards.
"Yea. Tanora."