Wastelands ~ The Game's afoot

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"It's still an abomination. Nothing changes that fact. It poses a danger. I want that thing kept in a secure cage at all times." The colonel shrugged at Sydney. "Years of military experience doesn't make you able to to diagnose every single wound just with one look, especially when you expect bite and tear marks... Virgil, what the hell made you shoot yourself in the leg? Oh well, get onto a bed, and let's get that bullet out. Should be simple enough procedure."

"I was in a closet being attacked by a mutated bunny, you do the math." Hobbling over to the bunny again he looked it over with an eye of sympathy. "yes, it's dangerous but it's also a wealth of information on whatever the f**k is wrong with it - it's quite possible most animals have this syndrome."

Sydney turned from the wounded Virgil and glared at the Colonel.

"I don't know whether you realised something, Colonel, but the medlab would normally be able to contain a tiger. Even a guy on Angel Dust would only be able to do little more than dent the door. Obviously, we cannot keep the sod. But I'm not going to kill it. I'm going to set it loose outside. But not before I subject it to a battery of tests. Time to try out the multiscanner, I think. I'm going back to the lab and confirming the results that were from 'Fido' from yesterday."

With that, Sydney closed the shattered door to the medlab and walked back to his lab.

"I think killing it is more humane, this thing is going to live the rest of it's life in horrfic pain." Virgil yelled this as he got comfy on a medlab bed so the Colonel could yank out the bullet. "Don't need painkillers, I dont have many nerves left in that leg. Just yank it out, disinfect and bandage it."

"Well, we learned one valuable thing today. We shouldn't ever underestimate those beasts." Saldana secured Virgil's right leg, and wrapped it up with a tight bandage to restrict the bleeding in the lower leg. He hurried over to the side to get some medical disinfectant and Morphine from the closet which had been badly shot up, and first dabbed the disinfectant over the leg, then examined the wound. "Are you sure? This is going to be pretty painful, even if you have very few nerves left in it."

"I barely felt the bullet go in, I wont feel it coming out." Virgil got himself calmed and prepared as best he could.

"Not taking the chance. If you suddenly flinch while I'm trying to get the bullet out, it could damage the leg even more." Saldana injected a small dose of morphine, and checked his medical gloves. After a minute, he pulled the bullet out slowly, careful not to cause any damage to the leg. He then applied surgical spray, to clean the wound, and applied bio glue which worked in the same way as stitches. After that, he wrapped it up with a bandage, and tore off the tight bandage applied to restrict blood flow.
"Done, but you should rest in here for at least five hours. Want a book or a video?" The colonel threw the disposable gloves into the bin, and washed his hands.

"Just leave me with a pack of smokes and "Blaze"" (Book by Stephen King).

"Sure thing." The colonel strolled out of the medical room, went up to the library, found the book after about 3 minutes, then took some cigarettes from where Virgil left them in the command room, and headed back to the medical facility.
"I will have to go up to the surface and sort out the sensor equipment by myself, seeing as everyone else is otherwise busy, Alan will have to stay inside to calibrate it all." Saldana handed the two items to Virgil, then headed off to the tech room to review the equipment, after messaging Alan to come up from his quarters, and brief him on what he would have to do.

((I will be going as well, goodnight folks. For the moment, Saldana is going over the tech details with Alan. I'll be back soon enough.))

Sydney walked back into the medlab, holding a printout, while having the multiscanner on his back.

"I'm not absolutely certain, but it's a new type of disease. I thought, with that much growth in such a limited period of time, the only think I could think of off-hand was a type of nanomachine. It's not far off the mark. It's a type of white blood cell. But at the same time, it is also a plenipotentiary stem cell. In other words, it can grow into any type of tissue. But the telomeres are all screwed up. Too long. And there are distinctive chromosomal abnormalities that shouldn't be there. It's like much of the body has become a living cancer. It means they're effectively immortal, especially considering that, from what I saw earlier, the neoplasic growths have no associated pathology. But in reality, the body grows too many sensory organs, and in fact too many organs, period. In case you're wondering why we aren't infected, I do not know. Body fluid transmission may be a vector, but I personally doubt it. There was enough of an aerosol of the blood from the dog yesterday that one of us probably would have succumbed to it by now. ((BTW, Flagg, is oxygen filtered from outside the bunker, or from a can purely?)) To be honest, I don't think the dog was a pure radiation mutation, and neither was the 'T-Cell' disease. The most, I think, that we're gonna find out there are animals dying of cancer, not becoming cancer."

He then went over to the rabbit, picking up the DEW where he left it. It was an experimental one that fired an electrical discharge within a plasma beam, but on a 'kill' setting, had only about three discharges until recharged. With reluctance, he clicked it over to the kill setting. He then scanned the rabbit. A quarter of an hour later, he sent the results to his lab computer (the readout on the multiscanner being inadequate for a virtopsy) and put the multiscanner down and picked up the DEW. If it was in pain, he would make sure that it wasn't for long. He picked up the DEW and placed the muzzle between the rabbit's two standard eyes, still closed from the anaesthetic.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

He pulled the trigger. The rabbit's malformed skeleton briefly showed through in the discharge as it spasmed on the slab. It sucked in breath, then let it all out in its final breath. Smoke rose faintly from it.

Sydney looked at Virgil bitterly. "I hope the Colonel's happy now."

He picked the multiscanner up again and checked the grotesque corpse. No life signs of any kind. The rabbit had been cooked thoroughly from the inside out by the discharge. It was definitively dead.

"It's definitely dead. I'll get back to you with the results."

With that, Sydney walked out, thinking: When you take a life, do you know what you give? Odds are, you will not like what it is....

"Luckily the filters are so good that nothing besides 1% of outside radiation gets in." Glad his five hours were up he hopped off the slab and walked over to the rabbit corpse, though he wasnt religous right now he was seriously hoping there was some afterlife reward for the s**t that rabbit had gone through.

"Poor f****r"

Virgil, in one of his nicer moods decided to take it to the surface for a proper burial. Putting on a radiation suit he picked up the rabbit and a shovel, he felt pretty bad about the rabbit. He honestly didnt know it would turn out so badly for it - maybe an extra toe or a funny bud on the head but not Lovecrafts version of a rabbit.

Once outside the warehouse he buried it in dead soil deeply and gave it a marker "A noble victim to our tests, may he rest in peace for his sacrifice - Virgil Brown and Co." He throughly boarded up the hole again after he'd buried the rabbit and went back into the bunker, throughly deconning himself and decided that Syndey should give him and the Colonel a completle checkup to make absolutely sure they werent tainted with this "thing".

((The reason why I asked about filters would be that if the disease developed outside, and it was a filtered air supply rather than a closed circuit, the inhabitants would've caught the disease already. Doesn't mean there are no more of the mutants. Not as many as you'd think, but they are still out there and dangerous. Nice touch with the burial scene, Flagg. Just remember, the biggest danger now is not anything outside, but Sydney's drums....))

((Virgil is still scared s**tless that he might be sick with the virus - his thinking is it would take longer to affect a larger organism and he has no idea Sydney is going insane))

((Not affected, just extremely scared of it. He is paranoid and this is something youd naturally be scared of anyway - he is just even more afraid of it and its completely irrational. Virgil is pretty orney of most of the time but he has his nice moments - like the burial. He likes animals better then most people. But you'll learning about his past soon, which will explain a lot about him.))

Gulit about the rabbit still racked Virgil, it was completely innocent and he had gone put it through the most painful death on Earth. Though he was also quite glad whatever had mutated it he couldn't get him, well supposedly but Sydney had been wrong before.

His mind was such a swirling vortex of emotions and he knew would need to fix something just to get some clarity. Picking up his toolbox, Remington shotgun and MP3 player he suited up again and headed for the bunker blast doors to mess with the motorhome. It looked like the left tirewell could use some extra armor and this was not the place to be unprepared.

Putting on some loud metal to drown out his thoughts he started up one of his blowtorches and set to work.