“Please-” I tried again, looking to the PRT uniform, but he was pushing his way past the curtain, leaving my company.

Leaving me chained up.  Alone.

Well. This certainly is a development.

I looked up the Hippocratic Oath to see if it mentioned this kind of behavior. It doesn’t seem to (not that it’s legally binding these days anyway), though on the bright side, I did notice that the original oath was sworn in the name of – among other medical deities – the original Panacea.

“My other arm’s broken, please don’t move it,” I pleaded.

He gripped it anyways, and I couldn’t help but scream, strangled, as he pulled it to one side, clasped a manacle down on my wrist, hooked the other side of the manacle to the second pole.

Well fuck you too.

“What-” I started to ask a nurse, as I forced myself to catch my breath, stopped as she turned her back to me and pulled the curtain closed at the foot of the bed, walked past it.

Great. You’re great human beings, you know that? Simply fantastic.

“Listen, my friend, Tattletale, do you know-”

“She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand.  “Designation Master-5, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis.  No super strength.”

Nice.

Arthropodovoyance is a clunky word, but a pretty good description of her ability to sense and sense through arthropods. Arthropodokinesis less so, technically, because that sounds more like she directly moves the bugs rather than making them move themselves.

The nurse nodded, “Thank you.  Handle it?”

The man in a PRT uniform holstered his gun and stepped up to the bed.  He grabbed my right wrist, clasped a heavy manacle around it, fixed it to a vertical metal pole by the head of the bed.

Damn it.

“My back, I think it’s broken,” I said, to no one in particular.  Nobody in particular replied.

Butt out of this, Nobody In Particular. She was talking to your sibling, No One In Particular.

All of them too busy with set tasks.  People seemed to approach my bedside and leave to go attend to another patient elsewhere.

Yeah, this place is too busy right now to spend too much time with each patient at a time.

“Your name?” someone asked.

I looked to the other side of me.  It was an older woman in a nurse’s uniform, pear shaped, gray haired.  A man in a PRT uniform stood behind her, holding a gun on me.

I mean, I get that she’s a known villain, but do you really think there’s that high a risk of her attacking someone right now, in this place and this state?

“Skitter,” I replied, confused, feeling more scared by the second.  “Please.  I think my back’s broken.”

“Villain?”

Please, PRT, do not abuse the truce to arrest your enemies while they’re down after doing all they could to defend the city.

I shook my head.  “What?”

“Are you a villain?”

That said, this is actually a question Taylor needs to be asked around now. Yes, she’s a known villain, but just today, she left the team that was the sole reason she’s not a hero instead. Now she needs to consider her options.

“It’s complicated. My back-”

“Yes or no?” the Nurse asked me, stern.

But seriously, what does it matter to you?

The teleporter touched one hand to my chest, another to Laserdream, who turned her head to look at me.

Oh hey, she’s awake.

There was a rush of cool air, and we were in the midst of chaos.  Nurses, doctors, moving all around us.  I was lifted and placed on a stretcher, hauled up by four people in white.  There were shouts, countless electronic beeps, screams of pain.

Yeeah, there are a lot of people to take care of here.

I was placed on a bed.  I would have writhed with the pain of being shifted if it weren’t for my general inability to move.  There was a heart monitor on one side, a metal rack with an IV bag of clear fluid on the other, thick metal poles beside each, stretching from floor to ceiling.  Curtains loomed on either side of me, making for a small room, ten feet by ten feet across. The emergency room, triage or whatever was in front of me, past the foot of the bed, a dozen more cots, doctors doing what they could for the massed injured, civilian and cape alike.

I wonder if Panacea is around here somewhere, helping everyone she can.

All around me, nurses moved with a rote efficiency, to put a clip on my finger, and the heart monitor started beeping in time with my own heartbeat.  One put some sticky glue on my collarbone, pressing an electrode down there.

With the sheer amount of injured people, there needs to be a massive amount of nurses running around right now.

(By the way, if anyone’s playing the bingo, you can cross off “looks up a word”. Specifically “rote”.)