Week 15, Monday-Wednesday: First Aid Courses

Sosie leaned back and sighed. She had prepared a selection of work for all levels, with charts and graphs, data pads full of interactive games and puzzles and tricks to remember parts of the body, systems, definitions. Despite the fact that the majority of her class were AIs who wouldn't get much from the games, and the remainder was Pinkie, Sosie felt confident in her methods. Anyone attending her class was subjected to a questionnaire to assess what they knew; Bell did this slowly, eyes glowing after every question. She scored very well, and for some reason, her mother still put her in the lowest level of 'classes'.

After the initial busy work, there were models and demonstrations. How medpacks worked and how to apply them, how nano resuscitation packs worked, how to apply Compound H and what you need to be sure of when you re-attached limbs. The basics of agent anatomy were covered, as well as replicant mechology and how to help the non-augmented, like setting bones, how to deal with someone if they choke or collapse, and so on. She explained what everything on the Biostatus monitors meant, and when to be worried or not worried. She was impressed by how diligent Pinkie was, and deeply amused by how Dusty was determined to give CPR with his tiny barely functional four inch long arms. Still, it was exhausting, and Pinkie was advanced enough that the only thing left for her was proper med school and diagnosis once she grasped these basics. Despite her claims to the contrary, the pink haired murder machine did understand medicine well. Now to learn how not to die, if Pinkie is showing such willing..

On Monday Ace spent the entire day in the Mechtronics Lab, working away at dismantling and removing the ID chip checker from a liberated L80. The work was hard and informative, but ultimately a solo affair.

Tuesday, however, was free. Ace didn't need to prepare for his bounty hunting excursion until later and he had time to spare, and he had signed up for Sosie's medical course. He knew some basic first aid and was very much hoping to learn more in the short time he had. So with a spring in his step over a job well done he opened the door to the Medical Lab, and stopped dead. He'd not been in here since he moved in and was staggered by the transformation that had gone over the place. After a brief pause to make sure he wasn't interrupting he went to join the class proper.

"Good morning Ms. Sosie. I was hoping to join your class, for a bit. I've not got much time to spare but I'm a fast learner."

Sosie raised her eyebrows and grinned at the word "daycycle." She laughed a little, and easily threw him a datapad. "Hey Ace. Sure, sit down. Take the little quiz thing so I can access your basic competency and things you need to work on." The datapad eager lit up when caught, displaying a screen full of multiple choice questions. There were a few pictures, and it appeared to be page one of sixteen.

The doctor tucked herself into the table, sitting up straighter, and pointed to a spot next to Pinkie. "Go on, there are styluses on the table if you don't feel comfortable using your finger." She looked down the row of students, and frowned a little at Bell. "Don't WDN every bit of the human body, Bell. See if you can remember it from previously. What happens if you don't have access to the internet when you need to help someone?"

Bell looked up at her mother, face blank... And then slowly turned back to her own datapad which was displaying a series of overlapping transparent images of the human form. Despite her mechanical nature, Bell was very slow with her hands on the pad, moving them as if she had never used one before.

Ace flicked through the questions, surprised by how many and how comprehensive they were. Starting at the beginning he answered as many as he felt he could, some using knowledge he remembered from his training, some by intuition or reasoning. He could tell he wasn't going to get very good marks on this, he wasn't a doctor or a medic, but he did his best.

((Medicine at 1. Int+Med 11, Roll 4 - Pass by 7. Not bad Ace, not bad at all.))

After a while of tapping away at the screen he handed the datapad back to Sosie with a smile.

"I wasn't expecting anything so comprehensive Ma'am. You've put a lot of work into this. I’ve not had much training before, just some basic first aid, but I’ve done my best and I think I got some of them right."

Just after Ace finished, Darya began hovering at the doorway, clearly trying to decide whether to go in or to leave. "Can I join? I know you're all busy and in the middle of things, but..." She said, twisting her fingers.

"Looks to me like this is a 'just wander in' kind of training. Ms. Sosie has just let me walk in anyway, and I don't think either of us has time for a full course if we want to catch some criminals before the end of the week."

Ace smiled at Darya and went to sit back down, attentively looking to Sosie for instructions.

:Sure, take a seat, Dar." Sosie looked over Ace's datapad, and then glanced up at Darya with a smile. "Going somewhere new this week? Here." She lobbed a datapad accurately at the aunt of her son, eyes twinkling. "Just fill it out as best you can and note on the last page if there is anything you want to work on. Now to review Ace's results.." She laughed low in her throat. "No cheating!"

The doctor tapped the pad a few times, bringing up the answers and the results. She nodded appraisingly, fingers sliding along the pad. At the table with Darya and Ace, Bell continued to touch the datapad with slow, heavy fingers, identifying bones. Dusty tapped faster and eagerly, sometimes sending the pad moving a few inches as his tiny claws gripped the stylus and clambered with his spider legs. Sometimes he made little excited "oo!" noises.

"You did very well, Ace." Sosie looked up from the test with a smile. "Like Pinkie, you might be a natural." She waved at hand at her pink-haired pupil, and her grin widened. "Though, you got some basic questions right, and lots of very hard ones, and seemed to struggle a bit in the middle. What do you want, more combat basics?" She tapped the pad a few more times, and then slid it back over to Ace. She lowered her voice a little, and gestured to the pad. "This is what happens when you have a neural jack and Agent Smork; you tend to over-prepare." The screen now lit up with MedPack Facts: Healing Agents And You.

Darya slid into a chair and looked down at the datapad in front of her, and began to work. This was an exam, and so she did it in complete silence, tapping the stylus in front of her, even as Dusty made her smile slightly. (Int+medicine:11, rolled a 5, pass by 6).

The questions linked to cybernetics were easy, but the other points she found harder.

Ace studied the datapad carefully. Not all of this was new to him, but enough was that it was an interesting read. Before now he had just injected the medpack and had done with it without really thinking about how it worked, but the biology behind it was fascinating. Ace read the leaflet twice before handing the datapad back to Sosie.

"That was interesting reading. A little dry even though it tried so hard to be colourful but interesting stuff non-the less. What else have you got?"

Sosie grinned at Ace, extending a hand to Darya to collect her finished test. "Want more, eh? Hm.." She fiddled with Ace's data pad upside down, pulling up a list of other good and bad injectables for agents. It went over drugs like Devilfish, Toxin Purge, Neurotrans and more, and after ward provided a "game" that involved dragging little packs of various drugs into a cartoony version of an agent into the right places, followed by little explanations on how these substances worked. It also came with warnings about which ones were psychologically addictive or caused complications. It was quite a tidy pile of work, and the game made encouraging sounds. It had a little Two Snakes logo at the bottom; the doctor had taken this 'game' from their training materials.

She looked over Darya's work with a smile, and wordlessly slid her thumb over the screen. She handed the pad back. "You're good at this too. And.. obviously better with the more robotic side of things. How about.. Non-augmented people?" Sosie had brought up a bunch of information on dealing with "Common Collateral Damage Injuries in Civilians: How To Reduce Causalities and Save Lives". It appeared to be a pamphlet on stopping wounds, binding bones, and providing emergency medical care, a cross between first aid and field surgery.

"Thank you..." Said Darya, taking the pamphlet and sitting down at a table, reading through it. She did it carefully, making notes as she went, and at the end she went back and tested herself, covering up the notes she'd made and rewriting them. After she'd finished this, she got back up and walked over to Sosie. "Do you have any testing material, or something more in depth for this?" She asked, holding up the pad. "I'd like to know how to do this stuff...properly...Parvati and I had to deal with an accident on the sky bridge, and all I could do was say what was wrong...and I had to use this to do it..." as her third eye opened up.

Ace had started off reading the information and playing the game, but before long he realised that he was staring at Darya, and had been for a few minutes. His face went slightly red as he went back to the little game Sosie had given him, but it wasn't very engaging and it was not long before his attention had wondered back to Darya again. He looked at the third eye, curious as to how it worked. He tried to go back to the game, but he just couldn't.

"Ms. Sosie? Thanks for the reading material, there is a lot to cover. I'd appreciate some sort of test on this too, perhaps at the end of the session. I'm not sure though, are we just going to be reading things all the time or have you got any practical, hands on activities we can do? I find I learn things quicker by doing, rather than reading."

Sosie took Darya's datapad thoughtfully, tapping her fingers to her lips. Her gaze was transfixed by Darya's third eye. "Hm.. I have a practical book from medschool about treating injuries in people without cybernetics? It's a lot longer than these little informative blurbs, but it has testing material in it. And.." She paused to let Ace speak, and smiled a little at him. She hadn't missed him staring at Darya. "Though, yes, hands on experience is best especially for helping non-agents. They are so much more fragile, feel pain, and blood just.. won't stay in them. Diagnosis is the hard part, and book learning does help with that.. But with that nifty eye of yours it would be a lot easier. Hm. Well, here, why don't you look through this and.. I can see if you really are interested, getting a practical course for you. I know of a few clinics around where you could help. It might be more useful." She brought out her own beaten and battered PDA, and tapped it with her thumb. After a moment, the data pad made the bleep of a transferred file. "There, it's on the home screen."

She spun in her chair a little, kicking off the table in a thoughtful if childish manner. "And for agents.. Now, Ace, what would you like to study hands-on?" She wiggled her brows once, though had decorum enough to face away from Darya, who was looking at the datapad. "Anything in particular you want to get more use out of in combat?"

"Yeah, there is one thing. When I killed Ida I didn't know what to do. I panicked because I couldn’t tell if she was dead or just dying. I want to be able to tell the difference and know what to do about it if on a mission one of my team is critically wounded or dies."

Ace glanced briefly over at Darya and then back to Sosie.

"So where on a person is it best to poke to find out if they are still alive or not? And how do I insert a needle intravenously?"

"Ahaha, I saw the video." The doctor grinned, eyes twinkling. "CPR, huh? Hm.." She stood up, and tapped her chin. "Do you have the Biostatus monitor installed? That's the easiest way. I can change the UI so you can easily tell. Strip away the technical information and leave you base details. I have the GameMod installed on mine. Bell, can you load the page?" Bell nodded once, not picking her head up form her slow slow bone naming. Sosie pointed to the holowall behind them. "See, like that."

There was a webpage loaded, with a screenshot of an agent's vision. The biostatus monitor took over the bottom left hand corner, with bars that shaded from green and full (fine) to yellow, orange, red, and empty black, not unlike the MMORPGS of the pre-corporate wars. "It's simple, and then if you click the team mates' names, you can get expanded information, like there." She gestured to another image, showing a human form listing types of damage, heart rate monitoring, temperature, and more. "The third eye cybernetic, like Darya has, is also useful. But without that.. well.. You know how to check for pulses, right?" She bent down and pulled a plain, mostly full dufflebag onto the table. It made a clunking noise. She opened it, revealing a bunch of medpacks.

Darya sat down next to Dusty and Bell, continuing her slow and steady progress. Once again, she took notes for everything she read, up until she reached a testing section, when she wrote her answers done very quickly, before checking in the back of the book. Smiling, she wrote the number 76/100 on her PDA and dropped it next to Bell on the table, before continuing onwards.

"A custom interface might help, I suppose. Defiantly removing some of the clutter from the HUD would be appreciated. That's not going to help with team mates who don't have it installed, but it's a stat. Ida did, and I couldn't understand the read out. Alright I'll work on that. Thanks Ms. Sosie."

Ace beamed at her and then wondered over to the holowall to read up on how to adjust his cybernetics, talking low to himself into his Smeaker while his left hand controlled the holowall and his right made notes on a datapad.

Sylviane walked into the room quietly, aside from the click as she took a photo of the learners. "Excuse me, Sosie. Could you teach me about the human approach to medical treatment? Given my mistress' behaviour, I feel that it is a field I should improve my knowledge of."

Sosie laughed a little at Syl, and picked up another datapad and threw it it her. Maybe I should have put a starting time on my announcement. "There's a test there. Follow the instructions. Just, do your best and use only the information you'd have available on the field."

The doctor grinned a little at Bell and Darya, and turned to Ace. "When you're done, if you want, we can go over where to inject medpacks." She tapped the bag with her right hand while her left hand began to undo the first few buttons of her Multymeat branded shirt. The demonstration portion of the lesson looked like it was going to involve stabbing the teacher.

"That'd be great Ma'am. Just as long as you don't ask me to shoot you, or stab you to make sure you are injured. I'm nearly finished with this one. Just give me a few more minutes."

Ace turned back to the holowall and continued reading and making notes, apparently unphased by Sosie's strip show.

"Oh, no. I wouldn't ask you to shoot me. Especially not here, next to our mainframe." She gave Ace a smile, and began to roll up her right sleeve. "I'm going to do it myself. If anything, Bell should see an Agent would where she doesn't have to worry about someone's immediate death." She turned and gave a smile to her daughter and Syl, though her eyes found Pinkie. The doctor looked.. thoughtful. She rifled around in her bag and pulled out a scalpel... And placed it delicately on the table.