From: nikolai@very.net (nikolai kingsley)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: the recovery ward
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 20:09:14 +1100
Organization: anarchartists/FDP
Lines: 50
Message-ID: <MPG.eed29c2d73b6d8a989690@news.mira.net.au>
Reply-To: nikolai@very.net
X-Newsreader: Anawave Gravity v2.00.753


And this is the ward for people who have been injured off-world and who 
couldn't get to a medical on time. In most cases they were found and 
treated by aliens. If you're lucky, they'll keep you stable and send for 
help. If you aren't, they sometimes try to fix you themselves. Yes, 
giving them numbers is sort of dehumanising, but few of them are in any 
state to complain.

Over there is 73.77.86. As far as we can tell, he witnessed an atomic 
blast at close range - that's from the burn scars on the front of his 
body. According to the alien who brought him in, he'd been blinded; while 
they were waiting for the ends of the optic nerves to heal, they decided 
to put in some temporary eyes. They couldn't be bothered running nerves 
around to the front, so they dug out new eye sockets in the back of his 
head and put in four new eyes. He was barely coherent when he arrived; 
his neck was strained from trying to turn around and face the front, and 
he was malnourished because he couldn't coordinate his hands well enough 
to get food to his mouth without being able to see them. Yes, his regular 
eyes are fine, now, but whenever we remove the ones in the back of his 
head they grow back again within a matter of hours. We're still trying to 
track down the responsible parties.

This is Miss 25.86.190. She was found orbiting Parizz in an escape pod. 
According to the text we found on her notepad, she had been planning on 
finding the Paulamonster; she'd been at Parizz for about six days before 
accidentally stumbling into the Exotic's section without an environment 
suit. Someone found her and replaced her blood with.. yes, that's the 
sample, the bright yellow liquid. It contains a variety of algae that 
performs the functions of both red and white blood cells, but as you can 
imagine, it made rather a mess of her immune system. She can breathe both 
oxygen and methane atmospheres now, but she hasn't spoken since she came 
here.

20.114.2 was on a freight shuttle over Millimillenary when it suffered a 
mechanical failure. The backup systems managed to guide it into a long 
spiral orbit inwards, but he was trapped on the ship for six weeks with a 
Moridani, and when her food ran out she, well, kind of lost it and 
attacked him. She chased him up and down the ship, trying to talk him 
into giving himself up, and she'd caught him and was gnawing on his 
ribcage when the Bythians broke in and blew her away. When they landed, 
the Bythians looked at what was left of him and decided he was a Jherani. 
They handed him over to the Jherani consulate, where they fixed his 
injuries and then put him through two months of therapy. He's completely 
sane... by Jherani standards. Yes, don't put your fingers near his mouth.


nikolai
---
What a giftless bastard!
 - Tchaikovsky, re: Brahms