Infirmary Hearts

[fallonquinn]

Infirmary Hearts
By: Fallon Quinn

Authors Notes: This is just a side project that I thought would be funny. Take it as a dark comedy for those of us a little tuckered out from the usual might and magic. Enjoy.

Episode One: The Traveling Clinic

Take the recorded strip of your life and flip back through the pages. Stop at any old random place, it doesn't really matter. If the page looks exactly like the one before and the one before it what does that tell you about your life?

You've either wasted a ****load of time or you've wandered so much that you can't remember who or where you are most of the time.

This is the feeling I get when I wake up on the burlap cloth mattress stuffed with hay in the Traveling Clinic. Our ticket to stardom, to fame, is actually a scam. Think of this as an educational picture book on everything NOT to do. The hair tonic we sell to balding Night Elves, rip off, water with pinch of mint to give it a pungent odor.

Talk someone into believing and they'll buy anything.

The nature of my business as a young female professional in the arts and scam industry is to ensure clientele. What this means basically is that little gnome you saw last week, well she had a bellyache, give her some tainted water, she'll be back in three days saying the belly pain is worse and she's vomiting, then give her the cure.

Think of this as a means of survival.

Do not think of this as an evil trade.

"Thief", isn't the right word but it's the first to come to mind.

Not all of us can grow food or fight. Some of us actually have skills outside that area. I was a physician once upon a time, that's just a meaningless phrase now, when I started The Traveling Clinic that's when the money rolled in. You'd be amazed at what people actually come in with, I have to commend them on bravery.

The key to my profession is to lie. Think of this as a clever anagram. I can't say what's really wrong with them so I have to rephrase it, sanitize it in language. Midnight escapades with your wife that ended up with something in your ass that shouldn't be there, that's a "lodged foregone body". The alcoholic at every port-side city along the coast, that's a "recovering addict".

As an Elf I feel ashamed about ripping of my own people, but you'd be surprised how quickly you can get over that little hump once you find a flexible moral fiber. I started the Traveling Clinic three years ago. We can never stay in the same town for longer than a few days. Wake up one day and you're in Menethil Harbor, go to sleep and then you're camped outside of Ironforge or across the sea in The Barrens.

Think of this like a carnival you never wanted to be in.

Think of this like a bad dream that's an actual memory.

The problem with this method is you can't knock up the same cities too many times in a row. People remember, especially the bald ones, they always remember the tonic you exchanged never worked, or laxative just gave them gas. Make a mistake with the wrong customer and you can find yourself on the business end of a knife in a heartbeat.

My bad business began when wanted posters come up. There's nothing like seeing your image drawn onto parchment and tacked to a wanted board in an auction house. So you follow the numbers. Change your name, cut your hair, dye your eyebrows and curl your ears. I've had some many different identities I have to keep a list from town to town.

At two in the morning on the burlap cloth I have to register who I am tonight. Monica? Mona? Ariel? None of these ring a bell so I canvas my tent and ruffle through the hordes of papers I have. It becomes important to keep lists of where you've been and what you've done.

Don't think of this as evidence, think of it as a cheatsheet.

Today I'm Case, no first name. We've been outside for Stormwind for two days. Three days is our limit, and when I say 'our' I mean we. You'd be amazed how many others like me exist in Azeroth. You just have to be creative enough to find them. It started out just me and one tent. Now we have thirty tents, nine "doctors" and twelve "nurses".

Night hours are when the real nuts come out. Everyone to embarrassed to share their problems in daylight.

This is not a scam, this is anonymous witnessing.

I stroll out of my tent and put on the white tunic and jacket, pockets stuffed with parchment and charcoal. There's already a line formed up at the main bulk of what I refer to as the 'Infirmary' which is really an old circus tent we stole back in Shadowglen. The inside smells like sweat, piss and vomit, the three odors you have to get used to if you ever want to make it in the business. Dozens of makeshift cots line the interior, the soft flicker of candles making work possible. Dr. Garvey and Nurse Retchen are near the front taking complaints.

You can almost smell the money.

And tonight, of all nights, is where the real trouble starts. You can work this whole long string back to one pissed of Dwarf named Deus.

TBC...

[Foonyak]

Looks good so far. *waits for more*

[fallonquinn]

Infirmary Hearts
By: Fallon Quinn

Authors Notes: This may tie in a little with my other story, both are in the same sphere of influence so to speak. Enjoy.

Episode Two: The Traveling Trauma Case

Deus face looks about the same way a sheet of unmolded metal looks like after you've taken a lead pipe to it for twenty minutes. The knife sticking out of his stomach is another bad indicator. Occasionally in The Traveling Clinic we get these sorts of things. "Trauma" cases, that none of us are really prepared for.

We are a scam.

When people like Deus come in you have to pretend to be what you once were. I was a doctor at one point. Those habits are hard to break. So when they wheel in Deus the only thing I can think is:

Here comes trouble.

I used to be a good person, honest.

The tent goes into chaos. Chalk it up to emotional overdrive but when these things happen you can zone yourself out. I'm over by the cart when they start to push him into a corner we have rigged with a sliding curtain. A hundred faces stare me down. I pray for disaster, a meteor hitting the tent, erasing me from the face of the planet. Anything but this.

"Anyone know what kind of knife that is?" I ask. The curtain pulls around us. Nothing here but a half-way dead dwarf and death waiting to talk to both of us.

Nurse Retchen ducks under the curtain. "Stiletto, six inch, small one."

The knife's on the wrong side, at least for Deus. His blue eyes roll towards me. I've never had much of a bedside manner and tonight is no different. The blood coming out of him is a thick black color. Black blood is always a bad sign.

See: Ruptured spleen.
See: Liver lacerations.
See: Blunt force trauma.

See me tremble.

"What do we do?" Retchen says.

Nothing, we don't do anything.

"Where's my wife?" Deus coughs out.

"Not here." I say. "Retchen, grab the knife nice and gentle. Mr. Whoever, we have to pull this out but to be frank you're probably not going to make it."

Someone behind the curtain screams. The tent is in uproar. This is probably the biggest thing they've seen all day. I'd be more than willing to trade places with any of them in a heartbeat, but that's the thing about the grief mob I hate, they don't want to participate, they just want to witness.

Tell yourself this is just a bad dream.

Think of this as a bad set of guidelines to live by.

I tell Nurse Retchen to pull. The knife slips out, curved, six inches to the mark. The wound starts to flow like a river. My hands turn into clamps. The ironic part of this, I hate blood. I push on the puncture and black blood swims through my fingers. They tell you in healers school to try and calm a trauma patient. I failed that part of the exit exam.

And still, here goes my big mouth again, "How'd this happen?"

"Harbor." The dwarf grunts.

"What Harbor?"

"You were there a few months ago." Deus says.

Do not pass go.
Do not collect two hundred silvers.
Your get out of jail card has just been revoked.

"What?"

From my pocket I pull out a stick of charcoal and hand it to Nurse Retchen who hurries off to find a candle. The basic idea in emergency trauma like this is to keep the blood on the inside. The burning charcoal smeared against a wound works wonders to stop blood flow. What irks me is the fact that dwarves and gnomes have such small bodies basically any torso shot is a critical wound.

"Menethil Harbor." Deus says. "You were there last month."

I tell myself he's just babbling.

"Your hair was a different color though." His baby blues take me in through the battered mess of a face.

Refer to cheatsheets, where was I a month ago? Where was I a week ago? Who am I today?

See: Dementia.
See: Senile
See: Acute Panic Disorder

Nurse Retchen comes back with a smoking stick of charcoal. I grab it, hands sticky, and smear it against the incision site. The flesh around it sears and then turns a sooty ash color. This is a lost cause. He's bleeding so much it's just going to pile up in his abdominal cavity, I was never a surgeon, never could have been. I should probably mentioned I failed my last week of healers school at this point. One week away and I vanished, ran away.

Why?

Because I don't know **** about medicine or magic.

"Get Garvey." I tell Retchen. The woman darts away again leaving just me and the curtain to contemplate the best way to dump a body in the middle of a clinic that's not really a clinic.

Deus drifts in and out behind me. None of us know magic, even if we did I'm not sure we could undue this kind of damage. What my job turns into now is a modified version of damage control.

"It's bad?" Deus asks.

I tell him, Yeah, it's real bad.

"I'm dead aren't I?"

"Soon."

"My stomach hurts."

"Well you just got stabbed." I was a good person at some point, I know I was. "That's what happens when you get stabbed..."

"The Harbor's gone. Horde."

I don't want to know this. If I could walk away right now I would. The curtain parts and Garvey sticks his human face through it, a long scar running from one ear to his mouth. I've never asked about it but I figure it has something to do with his gambling problem, and probably a large sum of borrowed money never repaid.

"Why's he here? He's dead."

"Not dead." Deus grunts.

"Holy ****." Garvy steps in and closes the curtain. He looks over the body.

"Give him some dope. CMO." I say. CMO is a simple enough code for us: Comfort Measures Only. It's what we give to the dying when we know we can't save them. A joke really. We can't safe you but we can keep you high as a kite for however long you can hang on.

I leave the curtain and wake to the nearest basin. On a nearby cot a small elf girl watches me rinse the blood from my hands and wipe them on my coat. Nurse Retchen rushes past me back to the dying man with two cups of thick white liquid. The hard stuff. I turn to the elf girl and pull up the nearest stool. She looks at me like I'm a monster.

Don't worry kid, that's how I feel inside, too.

Her Mother gives me the same look.

"Just open up and let me see your throat." I say.

The little girl screams, and that's when I remember I forgot to wash the blood off my face.

****...and I was on a roll.

TBC...

[Aggeragua]

I eagerly await more.

[fallonquinn]

Infirmary Hearts
By: Fallon Quinn

Authors Notes: Enjoy.

Episode Three: The Traveling Interrogators

When everything goes wrong you have to ask yourself if you managed to do one thing right. In my case I can't remember the last time I did anything right. Deus in the corner died an hour ago and no ones come to claim his body. Since then I've sold twelve stomach settlers (water, plain and simple), ten batches of hair tonic that we all know won't work.

The man sitting in front of me has an abscess the size of a melon on his right thigh. I'd like to tell him if he bathed more often this sort of thing wouldn't happen, but no one really listens.

"Is it bad?" He asks.

I can't dignify a response. I pull a bottle of thick brown lotion from my coat and quite a price. The lotion won't do anything, and I don't want to drain the abscess. Money exchanges hands and that's when I see the Stormwind defense show up at our front door.

See: Total Nervous Breakdown
See: Extreme Identity Disorder
See: Exit Stage Left

Three men in heavy armor wearing long swords walk into the circus tent. I doubt they're here for salves or medicated ointments. Call it a hunch. Garvey pulls a vanishing act and I realize I'm the only doctor in the tent. Call this a Menethil Shuffle, get the audience to look one way and then go the other, oldest trick in the book. Problem is I missed the Que. and now its my ass on the line.

Don't think of this as a bad situation gone worse.

A human in a tanned skin shirt points my way and the guards weave through the makeshift cots towards me. I've never been good with authority, and I doubt my luck will change any time soon. Sometimes you have to lean out and take it on the chin.

Think of this as a grammar lesson you slept through during school.

The first guard stops a few feet shy of me. "Dr. Case?"

I nod. Knows my name. Mark that in the bad column right next to the picture of me in the dungeon. I pray my hair dye was a good one.

"Its come to our attention that someone died here tonight."

Oh yeah...him.

I nod again.

"Where?"

I point towards the curtained off area. Two of the guards head towards the curtain, the third stays by me, like I'm going to try any funny business. I'm allergic to steel, especially when it's implanted in my gut. I should feel angry, I should feel sad, or nervous, or terrified.

Right now I feel absolutely nothing.

I'm not sure which is worse.

The head guard comes back. "What happened?"

"Someone brought him in. Stab wound to the abdominal cavity, pierced his liver it looks like." I say. All these words coming out of my mouth.

When did I learn to lie so well?

"Where'd he come from?"

"Something about Menethil Harbor and the Horde."

The two guards exchange worried glances. Right about now I want to curl up into the fetal position and start sucking on my thumb. My picture is pinned up in every major auction house. It would only take a second look and a good pair of eyes to spot me for who I am.

"Where's your licsence?" The head guard asks.

I ruffle through my pockets. Tonight I'm Dr. Case, I'm sure she has a license somewhere. Cheatsheets, you have to have these in order to survive, that and a basic degree in manipulation.

"Is there some kind of problem?" I ask. Charcoal sticks and wax fall from my pockets. Bottles of lotion and steel spun flasks, papers and shears. All this garbage I lug around to look like I don't care. It's amazing how much effort you have to put up to keep the appearance of not having an appearance.

"Should there be?"

From my back pocket I pull a folded piece of faded parchment and hand it over. The guard flips it over and eyes me. He glances back down at the paper. "Who's Monica Gayles?"

"What?"

"Your license says Dr. Monica Gayles."

Retrace your steps, when was the last time you were Monica? I can't remember. Two weeks ago? Three? No tonight though. Tonight I'm the douche-bag Dr. Case. Wake up in a different place, on a different day, with a different name, are you really anyone else but who a piece of paper says you are?

Impersonating a Healer: 10 years.
Possession of Illegal Materials: 20 years.
Grabbing the wrong license at the worst possible time: Priceless.

"Terror," isn't the right word, but it's the first to come to mind.

"Gayles is my married name." I say. Think on your feet, improvisation, my job is half bull**** have acting. I have to be good at at least one of them. Odds are on the house that I'm about to be put in shackles and taken away in the next few moments.

"Why don't you use it?" The guard asks.

"My husband's dead." I say. "Never had my permit updated." That's right. Get all teary. "Sort of a memento...he died in the last crusade." My eyes are canals. There's nothing worse than a grown woman crying. Men shrivel from it like opposing magnets pressed together.

Think of this as a selective manipulation.

See: Borderline Personality Disorder
See: Sociopath
See: Me.

A snot bubble pops on my nose. I wipe at it with my sleeve and then cradle myself, one hand covering my mouth. Why I'm smiling I don't know. The tears keep coming though. The guard looks at me and then frowns. You can almost see the muscles holding his face together collapse. He's been in a war, he's married, that much I know already. Play on what you know, if you can see the houses cards use that to your advantage.

The guard hands me back the license of the person I was two weeks ago. I get all choked up for added effect and drop it into my jacket pocket.

"We have to take the body." The guard says.

I nod and wave towards the curtain, too emotional to speak. The smile on my face keeps getting bigger and bigger.

If only my Mother could see me now.

The guards gather the body and wheel it from the tent. I look around and Garvey has magically appeared near the rear exit. He gives me the eye and then waves his finger. The universal sign for lets get the hell out of here before people start raising eyebrows. For once we're in total agreement. He's already giving orders to the "nurses" as I rush to my tent.

In a lacquered rosewood box I keep and assortment of downers. I have this problem with my nerves, sort of comes as a package deal when you work in the illegal sector. Two brown pills slid down my throat. Its poison, in small doses it shuts down most of your central nervous system, down to a point where things become manageable.

This is not getting high, this is paranoia control.

TBC...

[rottentomato]

awesome stuff so far...youre a master of your craft

[fallonquinn]

Infirmary Hearts
By: Fallon Quinn

Authors Notes: None.

Episode Four: The Traveling Blues

Drugs can only keep you at ease an calm for so long. I know this from personal experience. Think of it as a test of tolerance. Garvey says I have a terminal streak, that taking more and more pills is my way of killing myself. One day my tolerance will snap and I'll overdose all over my poor little self.

I can think of worse ways to go.

I've SEEN worse ways to go.

We're three hours away from Stormwind when someone sends up the first warning whisper that we're being tailed.

See: Bounty Hunter
See: Disgruntled Customer
See: Stormwind Homeguard

My horse trembles beneath me. I glance back towards the end of our caravan. Garvey is pointing at something, covering his hand with his body. I can hardly lift my head, must be the black pills. We call them death-heads, they'll lay a horse flat for an hour.

I must have taken a handful.

At some point you start retracing where your life went bad, if you can't find that point, maybe your life has ALWAYS been bad, maybe it was never meant to be good. Who I am from day to day shifts, what I am from moment to moment is a constant stream of depression.

I should be happy.

I should be worried that the guards showed up.

I should be worried that Garvey has been screwing with the take and making his own bank roll.

Right now, I feel absolutely nothing.

Garvey's been skimming from the top of our ****ed up money pit for almost two months now. He thinks no one will notice. I did, I don't care, but I noticed. Another month and he'll be banking more money than me. Our horses turn up a strong rise in the hill. Buried in my saddle bag are two red pills. I pop one of them and pray for disaster. Something. Anything. Ambush from above, something to break the monotony of my day to day life.

I pass out a minute later.

**

Wake up, you're not dead yet.

**

I struggle back to consciousness somewhere in the dark. Where are we? I probably fell off my horse...again. My head fills like the sandman took a dump between the battered walls of my skull

I've had worse hangovers.

Think of this as a bad moment you won't remember two hours from now.

A wool blanket is pulled tight around my shoulders. I'm in some sort of tent that smells like pigs. It takes a second to realize we don't own pigs, and we don't have a tent that has a wood ceiling. I blink.

See: Chronic Blackout Syndrome
See: Acute Short Term Memory Loss
See: Me being abandon by the very people I hired.

****...and here I thought I was doing so well.

Outside the tent is nothing but prairie land that doesn't ring any bells or chimes. That and the pigs. Free range pigs and their ****. Garvey and Retchen dropped me off in a **** field. The smell is enough to remind me there are worse things than death. You could be hung over and left for dead at a pig crapper, oh wait, that's me.

Think of this as all your well laid plans going up in a smoldering block of flame.

Danke Shoen fellas.

The pigs chortle laughter. I wish I was dead. One of them gives me the stink eye and then goes back to eating his own filth. Everyone you know and love will someday leave you behind, this is an inevitable truth. Seems Garvey got tired of me.

I check my pockets and find a small packet of mossy green pills. I pop two of them and sit on a bail of hay watching the sun dance with the horizon line. My stomach starts to rumble just as the last rays of light have disappeared from the sky. It's amazing what you realize once you're left totally on your own.

I have no survival skills whatsoever.

I could con a mother into selling her baby for a bouquet of Kingsblood but for the life of me I can't find clean water or catch my own food. And cooking...give me a break.

See: E. Coli
See: Gastroenteritis
See: Me having all of those things from my own cooking at one point in my life.

Don't think of this as catastrophic disaster, think of this as a picnic gone horribly wrong.

Vengeance isn't born, it's cultivated. Mine is still in the fermentation process. I'm sure by morning my outlook will be one hundred percent different. My stomach tells me not to ask for too much.

I pray for sleep.

**

Some parents teach their children moral values. Some parents teach their children budgeting and expediters. My parents taught me that they were going to leave. My Father cut out when I was four, my Mother stuck around for another ten years and then disappeared. Why I care I don't know.

The pigs wake me up at dawn. A small boy is standing near them, tan skin, brown eyes, a mop of red hair and freckles. He looks at me and then points his stick.

"Who are you?"

Lady Death, I tell him.

"Who?"

"I'm lost." I say. "Where are we?"

The boy glares at me, brown eyes peeled to sharp points. The pigs fart and squeak themselves silly between us. I scrounge for more pills. The itch at the back of my eyes is back again.

"Outside Northshire." The boy leans on his stick taking me in. "You an Elf?"

I point to my ears. "You're a bright one aren't ya?"

"Where are your parents?" He asks.

"I'm a grown up."

"Oh."

"How do I get into town?"

The kid points back the way he came. "Mile or so. You part of that white tent parade that passed by?"

You mean MY CLINIC? The thing *I* started? Yeah, I WAS a part of it, till my dead beat friends decided to ditch me with the pigs. There's gotta be some kind of joke there but I can't find it.

"No." I shake my head. "Not with the parade."

"Good...punks sold me bad lotion. Gave me a rash on my twig."

Yeah, you and me both kid.

"What's your name?" He asks.

"Case." I say. It falls out automatic, flows off my tongue. "Just Case."

"Funny."

I'm not laughing.

TBC...

[Keella]

awesome stuff so far...youre a master of your craft

AMEN! I'm hooked!