Dr. Ferric's Clinic: An afternoon appointment.

[Narg]

"--Frankly I'm amazed you got here yourself, Mr. Rockwell."

Alister suddenly focused in on what the doctor was saying. He had been having these problems lately. He would find himself looking down at himself more often than not, at least a garbled reflection of himself in what seemed like the lens of a kaleidoscope. The dissociation was oftentimes brought on by stress. If he worried for long enough, which was now often enough, Alister would sit for minutes on end outside of himself. Perhaps his soul was trying to find its way out of its prison, perhaps it was this fucking disease finally getting to his head.

"Honestly, buddy" The doctor said taking off his glasses, "I'm gonna have to level with you."

The shakes had been getting worse too. Alister could barely hold a fork sometimes, and his writing looked like shit. It would take hours to type even a short paragraph, and he could barely send a text that hadn't been horridly butchered by autocorrect to the point of utter miscomprehension. The half-hour it would take to correct such a text oftentimes wasn't even worth the message being sent.

"Alister, I've been treating you for a bit now, and it's expensive stuff I'm giving you. Not shit that the FIDDS (Forlorn Isles Department of Drugs and Substances) would let on the market legally. You do know that."

Doctor Luke Ferric had a sympathetic look in his eyes. He was a mousy man with a long nose that came to a sharp point, shallow, thin features and small eyes. His goatee was unkempt and white as snow, just like the wispy hair atop his head. He had a thin frame and only stood at about five feet and five inches. He was wearing a tie with sunflowers printed on it and a periwinkle dress shirt underneath his doctor's jacket. He had been good to Alister the past few months. He had been honestly willing to take on the challenge of Alister's disease. The drugs he prescribed were at a discount to Alister, and he was genuinely concerned for his wellbeing. This was the only person who had given Alister the time of day for years, and one of the closest people to a companion or friend he had ever had.

"You need treatment. Real treatment Alister. These drugs aren't working. They're abating the symptoms, but the blood work that came back... It isn't good. The pathogens I've been seeing in the blood, which I still can't fucking figure out--pardon my French, have still been multiplying. None of the retrovirals I gave you really have much of an effect. They don't suppress the disease at a rate that makes this treatment viable. This is the most aggressive blood pathogen I've ever seen. Nothing I saw at the Mayo clinic even compares." 

The walls of the room, more accurately described as a large closet with a small desk and two chairs, were filled with shelves. On these shelves were all sorts of bottles. They all were written on personally by Dr. Ferric in some sort of code. He, by memory, knew the specific contents of each bottle. The man, a true medical genius, had somehow ended up selling illegal pharmaceuticals in the Portuguese quarter in Oddhaven. How this had come to be was beyond Alister's imagination.

The drugs he sold were experimental, not yet approved, and insanely expensive. His devotion to Alister truly showed in the fact that last months treatment had been both the most rigorous cycle yet, and entirely free.

"I can't keep doing this. I can't cure this disease with the means I have now. I can't keep giving you these drugs at a discount. I've got people who need to be paid back and I can't do it at this rate if I keep giving you these drugs for free. I don't know how to say this any other way Alister. There are a few options before you.

"Your first option is that you figure out how to pay full price. Though in your condition I can't see how you could possibly work enough to pay me in full.

"Your second option is that you start getting whatever affairs you have in order, and quickly at that. You've got maybe two months.

"And your third option is that I refer you to someone I know. Someone who has already expressed interest in your... scenario. And you do exactly as this person tells you."

Dr. Ferric took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, that had started tearing up.

"I haven't had to give this speech in a long time Mr. Rock--No. Alister. I will admit I have come to care deeply about your wellbeing. I thought I could do more for you. I wish these weren't your only options."

[Alister Rockwell]

There was a creeping sense of doom that had settled into Alister's spine, oh, months ago now. After that night at the club, things had worsened and Eddy had cut him off - mob bosses didn't have much need for an enforcer who couldn't hold a gun (or a knife) after all. There went his antibiotics, immunoboosters, painkillers, even the fucking Valium, and probably his last real hopes. What pathetic amounts of money he had left didn't really last long - there went his shitty apartment, too. Good riddance, except now he was sleeping in his storage locker down in Old Harbour and spent every night alternating shivering, shaking, and sweating until he, occasionally, fell off to sleep.

So yeah, he was used to feeling like he was going to die.

But that didn't mean he wasn't going to fucking kick at heaven before he knocked on its doors.

Alister, as a general policy, hated relying on the kindness of strangers, for anything, but it was the kindness of Luke Ferric that had kept him going as things got worse and worse. Begging on the street didn't bring in much money, but all the same the back-alley doc had said it was enough and given him some experimental shit that had taken the edge off, but hardly fixed him. Eventually Alister had realised there was no silver bullet, and he'd be lucky just to find out what was killing him, so really, being given a third option other than "pray" and "die" was the best news he'd had in weeks.

He was silent for a little while, after Ferric finished, trying to fight through a screaming headache and figure out what to say. 

"You know me," he managed to grunt at last. "Option three. Who, where, and when?"

[Narg]

Alister could see Dr. Ferric's expression darken slightly. "You know, Alister. I almost wish you could find a way to just pay me in full. Honestly, I... wish that option three wasn't the only one. The woman is... eccentric. To say the least, and she's gonna demand a lot from you. She specializes in bloodborne pathogen research. Anything that can be transmitted through blood is something that she is entirely enamored with. When I was doing preliminary research on your condition I went to her in hopes that she had seen something similar. To her credit she had seen similar things, and your treatment regimen was based on a lot of her suggestions, but she had never seen something quite so... aggressive. She asked to be updated on your status. Naturally I refused, no matter how illegal my practice I still value doctor patient confidentiality, but she hasn't let it go. I don't know why she's so interested. Normally she treats most things with incredible indifference... when you meet her you'll know what I mean."

Dr. Ferric started collecting the files and charts from his small desk as he spoke to Alister. "This gal... Dr. Saoirse O'Connor, she tends to get what she wants Alister. Funding, supplies, Roeststadt Medical provides it all. She knows the director I hear, and I've worked with her before. She's terrifyingly brilliant and knowledgeable... You'll be in good hands. You'll be in good hands."

Dr. Ferric seemed to be reassuring himself more than he was Alister. He started searching through the drawers of his desk and eventually pulled out a cell phone, obviously an unused burner. He handed it to Alister, "She doesn't want her... connections with me public, so she'll get ahold of you on this and tell you where to come in. Us ruined unsavory types only talk with her staff through means like these... She can be a real fuckin prick--Oh sorry my language again. She knows about the HIV but is more interested in the disease your body is struggling to fight off. I'll get in touch with her. She told me when we last talked that she could get a treatment regimen ready in a couple of days so it's rest for you until she gets in touch."

With that Dr. Ferric grabbed a bottle from a shelf, dumped out ten pills and put them in a plastic baggie then handed them to Alister. "Two a day, it will at least help with the shakes and the pain till she gets in touch. I don't know about the dissociations though." He handed Alister a phone charger and a rechargeable battery. "I know where you're living doesn't really have power... I brought a real good blanket for you too. You have to take it, Doctors orders. Its in the trunk of my car. I'll drive you home."

With that Alister and Dr. Ferric walked through the joke of a waiting room, out the door, and slowly up the stairs out of the basement clinic to the narrow alley above. The sky was pink from the evening sun and the Gulls called out in the distance as the short doctor did his best to keep his tall sick friend standing. Alister tried to walk on his own for a bit but eventually found himself putting his weight on the shoulder of the wispy haired man. Dr. Ferric muttered to Alister, "Just let me fucking help you, ya prick. Let me at least do this before you go." And walked out of the alley into the small parking lot where an old lime green Volkswagen bug sat. 

Dr. Ferric opened the passenger door to the car and helped Alister in. He got in on the drivers side and started the engine. He waited the couple of minutes it took for Alister to finally buckle the seatbelt and then slowly backed onto the road and headed towards waterfront drive.

The drive along the coast was quiet, and the sunset serene. The doctor listened to Beatles tunes on a cassette, playing quietly in the car. He cracked the window slightly when the cassette jammed, it wasn't as if Alister was going to be able to fix it in his condition, leaving the two to silence, the wind, and whatever was left to say.

[Alister Rockwell]

Alister watched the coastline slink by, one hand gripped tightly around the handhold to stop it shaking, knuckles turned white. The other was behaving for once. He wasn't really thinking - just sort of processing, and slowly at that. What he needed was some gin to take the edge off of everything, settle the shakes, let some of the pressure out of his skull. He thought he had another half-bottle lying around somewhere in the locker, he'd have to try and find that. The journey passed with only the wind passing between the two men, until, passing the docklands, Alister managed to ask,

"Can we have the radio?"

After five minutes of listening to some late-90s pop that was far too cheerful for Alister's liking, he managed to say something again. Ferric turned down the radio to hear, and Alister repeated himself.

"I said, there's no way I'll ever be able to pay you back for this. Unless you're fine with my ghost haunting you over unpaid debts, when I bite it you're not seeing ayd of the libra I owe you. So what's your angle?"

[Narg]

The exit for Old Harbour gave them a couple more miles in the ride. Alister's storage unit was by no means near the freeway. At least that helped him sleep better at night. Dr. Ferric sat in silence for a minute, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He finally spoke up, "I know it might be tough for you to imagine this Alister, and I know you've never really trusted me, but I got into this doctor thing, originally, to help people."

Don't go chasing waterfalls came on and Dr. Ferric hit the power on the radio. "I hate that song," he muttered before continuing his thought. "I'll put it the way you wanna hear it though, Alister. There are a lot of 'angles' out there. The ones you know are money, drugs, power, whatever you can think of regarding the vices of men. My 'angle,' or so you call it, is of a different sort. See I used to be a very good doctor Alister. Both in morals and practice. I worked the cutting edge in America, studying all sorts of new diseases and coming up with treatments for the untreatable at the Mayo Clinic. I worked in blood disease primarily as both a pathologist and an administrator of treatments.

"I found something, something I didn't expect. There were these... people. People who had an odd type of blood mixed in with their own. Non human blood. It gave them all sorts of physical prowess and, dare I say, supernatural ability. They wouldn't tell me how they came into contact with this substance, and once it was flushed out of their system they lost all of these odd abilities. I tried to publish, but without any evidence or easily replicable results I was laughed out of the community. Probably like you would laugh at the notion. I spent years worth of resources and funds trying to chase down the results I had gotten years before. Eventually I lost funding and my job.

"Working with you, Alister, on your disease, it... fulfilled a need I had. A need to solve a puzzle, do my work, be a real doctor again. That's why I'm so... Heartbroken I guess? If I had the resources I had years ago I'm certain I could do better for you. I'm certain I could identify the disease at least, maybe even cure you. And with the data I've collected from you--Here's your 'angle,' since you need one so bad--I could reputably publish again. I would help you, help protect Oddhaven from whatever this disease is, and be a real doctor again. I could right my wrongs and get back what little reputation I had.

"But more important to me is your wellbeing. I could keep working with you to try and publish, and you could die in the process from lack of adequate care. I also have men who I need to keep paid, and they don't care if you get better, Alister. So the best I can do is hand you off to Saoirse, the woman who cost me everything, knowing that she'll do right by you and give you the treatment that I just can't.

"I'm sure that awful song is over by now." With that Dr. Ferric turned the radio back on and made the turn onto the road that the storage unit complex was on.

[Alister Rockwell]

"Oh, you're just a regular Peter Pan aren'tcha," Alister muttered, although there wasn't much bite to it. He didn't buy the altruistic act, but at least it all made sense now - there was no money to be gained from Alister, but Ferric could still chase the mystery that cost him his career, and that would be worth even more. Hell, the tests and treatments Alister had gone through were probably going to be passed on to somebody who could get Ferric re-instated, or even just give him more than enough cash to off-set what Ferric had lost treating him.

It didn't really matter, Alister decided - he'd gotten a bit more time than he would have had otherwise.

He remained silent until they pulled up in front of the storage facility housing Alister's locker. With his (currently) less-shaky left hand, Alister stabbed at the seatbelt until it unlatched, then pawed at the door handle until he got it open enough to force it the rest of the way with a foot. He wasn't going to let himself be coddled and carried inside like a damn sickly child.

"Thanks for all the help, Doc," he said sincerely as he got out of the car. "See you in the next life."

[Narg]

"Well if Saoirse does all right by you it may be sooner than that," Dr. Ferric said popping the trunk of his Volkswagen, stepping out of the car, and grabbing a fluffy thick duvet quilt and handing it to Alister. "Two a day for those pills, no more, the dose is already crazy high. Should be safe though, you're a big guy and funnily enough the disease hasn't killed your kidney. You take the fucking blanket, it's part of your treatment, and besides, Anne will kill me if I come home with it knowing you didn't."

Dr. Ferric got in his car, rolled down the window as he was pulling away and said, "Expect a call in a couple of days. One of her people will get in touch. Stay warm, and don't drink too much. No more than three shots to take the edge off O.K.?"

With that, Dr. Ferric drove off down the road away from Alister, backlit by the orange sunset. It was late and the attendant, Andy, was the usual one on shift when Alister came in. He looked up from his magazine, his eyes widened as he saw Alister and he slid open the glass, calling out and waving as Alister walked through the gate like normal. 

"Hey, Alister! I need to talk with you!"

[Alister Rockwell]

"For fuck's sake, Andy, I told you I've got it paid off for another two months," Alister growled and went to shove past him. "I just need to get..." He paused when he saw the confusion on the attendant's face. "Oh, something else. Uh, sorry about that."

He stopped outside of the open window and leaned against the cold stone walls of the security office for support. He was pretty sure Andy knew he was sleeping here, but minimum wage in the Isles (which had been slashed down to about 5 libra an hour in the last few months) really wasn't much motivation for people to care about their jobs.

[Narg]

"Some guys was looking for you... told me his name was Eddy? He was a chap with a plucked out eye, and two big guys. One with a broken arm and the other missing a hand. Told me that they just wanted to talk. I didn't believe 'em one sec. They said you was livin' here or somethin', which is nonsense," He said winking at Alister, "So I told 'em to get lost or I'd put his remaining eye up his asshole. Didn't seem to wanna tangle... didn't really look like they was in the mood, ya nahmean? So they got in this shot up BMW and drove off. Fuckin' weird. You seem like a dude who needs a break, so I thought I'd give ya' heads up."

[Alister Rockwell]

Eddy? The fuck does he want? He cut me off. Better keep a loaded gun nearby.

"Thanks for the heads up, Andy. Say, got any fags?"

His storage locker was well towards the back of the twisting facility, and was fairly spacious at that. Opening the locker with a keycode - the keypad alone added an extra 50 libra a month to the bill - Alister rolled the shutter door up, then down again and locked it from the inside. Since moving in, he'd divided it into two areas. A hanging curtain black concealed the contents of the front area from prying eyes while the door was up, several shelves and boxes containing 9mm pistols, a few lower calibre revolvers, some shotguns, a hunting rifle, an old-fashioned American cowboy repeater, even a few sticks of dynamite, paired with a good amount of ammo and a couple of bullet-proof vests. On top of that were cricket bats, some brass knuckles, knives, even a few samurai swords that Alister had said "why the fuck not".

In short, it was enough weapons and ammo to wage a small, one-man war. It was also probably enough to finance more treatments, but he could only sell so much so fast, and as lax as Oddhaven's gun laws were, he didn't want the rozzers following him back and finding the dynamite or some of the more exotic ammo he had.

Separated from the front area by another, much thicker curtain was the tiny living area Alister had with a sleeping bag, folding chair and table, and a solitary electrical outlet that he was on the verge of overloading with a stolen space heater that didn't even fucking work, his phone charger, and a shitty knock-off iPad (MyPad, he thought the bootleg brand was called) charger. The rest of the space was taken up by a wobbly clothes rack with about five different things on it, and some cardboard boxes. He tossed the burner phone onto the table, rummaged around for his lighter, and lit up the cigarette Andy had given him. Then he fished around for the bottle of gin and laid down on the sleeping bag to start calming his shakes.

The thing he liked most about this place was that nobody gave a fuck unless they had to. Half the security cameras were busted and 'too cost prohibitive to upgrade', which was great for Alister since he could just the bathrooms in the facility. They also hadn't noticed when when he took the battery out of the smoke alarm.

Oh yeah. Remembering Andy's warning about Eddy, he rolled over and checked that the 9mm lying beside his bed was still loaded. He might have been short on time, health, and money, but one thing he wasn't short on was ammunition.

[Narg]

The drugs worked a like a charm. The aching left Alister's body only minutes after he took the pills. The shaking was still noticeably there, minimized though it was from the drugs. The gin was bitter and took the edge off of Alister's headache. He tucked himself into the sleeping bag, which was starting to smell, and eventually decided to use it more as a mattress than the only warmth he had. The blanket that the doctor had given him was warm and heavy. It was an odd comfort in a seemingly uncaring place. The pattern was a patchwork of right triangular pieces alternating between white, black, red, and grey. Not only that, it was fantastically warm. Perhaps it was simply that the concrete was no longer sucking out as much of his body heat from beneath him now that the whole sleeping bag was acting as an insulator beneath him (and the smell wasn't nearly as potent), or maybe it was that the love from Ms. Anne Ferric was really coming through the hand stitched fabric.

Alister stared at the ceiling as he tried to fall asleep. He found himself counting the dents in the top of the storage unit and almost falling asleep many times. These painkillers, or whatever they were, had Alister feeling the best he had in a month. He wondered why the doc. hadn't just given them to him before. He eventually concluded that Dr. Ferric would have simply started going on about something like kidney strain or expense. But as at much at peace as he was with his body, Alister's mind was racing, and keeping him awake. The prospect of a new mysterious doctor, Saoirse O'Connor, worried him. Would she demand the kind of payment that Dr. Ferric didn't from him? What kind of new drugs would he have to take? Not only that but the prospect of Eddy coming around and searching for Alister in person was very troubling. It was so troubling in fact that Alister started to feel the all to usual floating sensation. No matter how comforting a 9mm was, it wasn't enough to stop Alister from dissociating.

The dark room started to kaleidoscope as Alister floated out of himself, the patchwork of the quilt filling the whole room with red, black, white, and grey triangles and his body lay there, motionless and confused.

Continued in this thread