#zhang maxine the glorified 3D printer

[its-max-okay]

TWIST MY ARM || plot drop .o3

Thursday 22 October 2020; Afternoon. You are halfway through your shift when an emergency patient shows up at the Triage Center. His left arm from the elbow down is missing and the stump is bleeding heavily. He is also missing several of the fingers on his right hand. He has avoided answering any and all questions about how he received these injuries but after looking them over you’re fairly certain they were blown off by an explosive device, possibly one he was working on.

This patient is a Club Strongarm and has already paid the non-Spade fee for healing. 

Partway through an exhaustive anatomy study with a couple of the lower-ranked Emitters, Max might’ve been lowkey praying for something more exciting to happen. Even a sprained wrist from the training grounds could’ve spiced things up; she would’ve settled for a Command Sergeant Major with a papercut, quite frankly, but what she was ultimately delivered was much more of a handful than that.

There were two things Max was positive she should not be taking this much delight in: one, that her source of excitement was the fact that someone was horribly hurt; and two, that this was going to be her first real shot at attempting to regrow a patient’s limb. It was funny how reluctant people were to chop off so much as a finger for the sake of her practice. She couldn’t even talk Kev into it, and there was a lot he was willing to do for her.

Granted, she’d really have preferred her first go at this not be with the likes of a Strongarm, and a really fucking shifty one at that -- but beggars couldn’t be choosers, obviously, and Max wasn’t about to look a gift amputation in the mouth.

“Back right-hand room,” Max ordered, leaving little room for argument as she stepped to the side and pointed with conviction. The two propping the injured man up followed her lead without argument. A third Emitter started to fall into step, but Max caught her by the elbow to lean in and murmur, “I need you to sedate him. Put him all the way under. I don’t want him to move while I’m working, but I also don’t want him to wake up for a good while after I’m done.” Max raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “Understand?”

The woman’s eyes widened for a moment before she nodded, and quickly. “Yes, Sergeant Major.”

“You’re going to help him?” Kev murmured dubiously from where he hovered at her elbow, and Max hesitated only briefly before nodding.

“We’re obviously gonna need to get more information out of him, and I’m hoping nothing can guilt trip into answering questions like, hey, you ungrateful bitch, I grew your whole arm back; throw me a bone.” Kev only looked more dubious. Max shrugged, undeterred. “Anyway, come on. You’re gonna watch.”

Kev paled.

By the time Max brushed between the curtains to assess her newest patient, the man was already heavily sedated and his shirt cut back, the wound hastily cleaned but still bleeding. Kev made an uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat that Max ignored, dragging a chair loudly from the corner to plant at the man’s side before cracking her knuckles.

This was liable to take a while.

‘Thick skin,’ she thought absently to herself, Anton’s words coming to mind as a slow sweep of her hand worked to stem the flow of blood, pinching together muscle fiber and flesh until she had a neater foundation to work on. The man’s skin didn’t look any thicker than it ought to -- and gods knew they all had a pretty clear view of that -- but as Max let her eyes unfocus and started to build on what was lost, she could feel a soft, stubborn resistance.

This was going to take a while.

The rest of the Triage center fell away. Max hadn’t even noticed if any of the other students had snuck in to watch, nor was she likely to notice if any additional emergencies felt like taking place beyond the sanctuary of their drawn curtain. She had one focus and one focus only, and that was unspooling thread after silvery thread from her core through her fingertips to fortify and pull together flesh and relentless bone. As before and as always he worked layer by layer, inside-out, taking breaks from the exhaustive thickness of his bones to fold softer layers of muscle and skin around them.

The longer she worked the heavier and heavier Max’s elbows leaned at the edge of the bed, shoulders sagging and breaths growing shallow. She’d made it so far as the wrist, and while reworking the twin radius and ulna was a whole task in and of itself, the wrist was going to be a particular bitch. There were so many individual bones in such careful alignment -- and maybe this guy didn’t deserve full range of motion in his joints for whatever dumbass thing he’d done to land himself on their doorstep, but Max was going to give it to him, anyway. Maybe she’d leave it with a weird little click when it moved a certain way; something to remember her by.

‘Asclepius, give me strength.’ The thought -- the prayer -- was intrusive, unbidden, but the sentiment stood: if the Old God was watching, if he really cared enough about one foul-mouthed Emitter and the crystal core nestled deep inside her, he could spare half a minute’s attention.

Whether or not her god heard her, apparently Kev did. Maybe she’d accidentally murmured her prayer aloud or maybe she just looked especially rough; either way, she felt the young Healer’s hands settle gently, almost reluctantly, at her shoulders. Max drew a shaky breath through a ghost of a smile and dug her heels in.

She visualized the carefully penned anatomical structures in her father’s journals, ones she’s painstakingly copied and re-copied and committed to memory. Scaphoid. Lunate. Trapezium--

Max flinched even as her thumb formed and sculpted the next delicate piece of bone, feeling the edges of even her expanded core start to fray. She wanted a chance to push her new limits, and she was getting it -- she only hoped she wouldn’t find them before she was finished.

“Trapezoid. Capitate. Hamate. Triquetrum…” Max sucked in a breath, briefly interrupting the recitation she knew by heart, knew in her sleep. Kev’s fingers gave her shoulders a reluctant but fortifying squeeze. She continued. “Pisiform. Fuck.”

Nineteen delicate bones to go. ‘Could just make it five,’ she thought to herself with a wry, borderline delirious amusement as she continued. ‘Five weird finger-sticks…’ Max cut the thought off before she made herself laugh. The metacarpals and phalanges, at least, were relatively uniform and didn’t need to slot together so particularly and delicately as the carpals.

Max could feel her esophagus tightening as she smoothed new skin over more delicate knots of muscle. ‘That’s new,’ she noted distractedly, feeling as though the rough, fuzzy edges of her expanded core were starting to bleed into and lash out at what was closest in protest of its prolonged use. It was stronger, obviously, but more petulant -- much like its owner.

By the time Max had finished the left arm down to the fingertips and neat pink fingernails, her entire insides felt like they were sandpapered raw and rebelling against her. The problem was, she wasn’t quite done. They weren’t quite done.

“Other hand.”

“Max--” Kev started reluctantly, ever the last to attempt to school her on her limits.

“Other hand.”

Kev left her only long enough to step in and reach over the man’s body to grab his opposite hand, and Max took a measure of pride both in how quickly he moved and how little he balked at the charred stumps of fingers.

With the practice from the first under her belt and the better general shape it was in, Max made comparatively quick work of the Strongarm’s other hand and the remaining few fingers even as her breaths grew ragged and thin. She didn’t even have the energy to swear when she finished, which was telling -- her head simply bowed, eyes squeezed shut and prickling, before she pushed the man’s hand off of his stomach to flop back to the other side of the table.

Kev was saying something, either to her or those nearby, and while she couldn’t hear exactly what Max still felt the briefest, most exhausted surge of pride. He’d stuck it out, and better yet, he hadn’t puked over her shoulder.

She could feel his gawkish arms trying to guide her out of the chair, and Max moved with the touch and without complaint. “Alert the General,” she insisted blearily, leaning her weight into Kev as they made their way towards the opposite far corner where he could help her onto an empty cot. “I know he’s busy… but…” The Emitter struggled to focus as she stretched out, head sinking into the pillow with a prolonged exhale, feeling her muscles and organs shifting around the shrapnel edges of her depleted core. Her face twisted into a grimace, one that only relaxed with the weight of Kev’s hand on her shoulder again. “He doesn’t have to come, but someone’s gotta… tell him what happened… and who we got…”

The high Emitter fell quiet for a moment, eyes shut and apparently relaxed. Kev shifted uncomfortably at the side of the bed, and would’ve stepped away if she hadn’t suddenly grabbed the front of his uniform.

“And get me a goddamn sandwich.” A pause. “Please.”