Profession

Announcement

As I continued in my coursework, I started amassing supplies for an aid station in my basement. There was plenty of room down there, and I stuck it in the space between the nerve center of the house and the pantry area; the pantry wasn't large because I didn't can a lot, mostly just jam, jelly, and marmalade, and I kept overflow staples down there as well. I got a treatment table, a standing cabinet for first aid supplies, and a desk with a stool and tablet for making treatment notes. I didn't bother with a cot, because anybody who needed to be monitored could be taken upstairs to a comfortable room rather than stuck in a basement. I had a kit in a bag in case there was a scenario that I could get to, and I had purchased a portable tissue accelerator as well, an important tool, and a defibrillator for dire emergencies. There was a blood pressure indicator, oximeter, thermometer. I wasn't going to put in a full surgical suite even if I could have done it on the QT because I didn't expect to need it for very long. We'd decided that we wouldn't start, with the costumes and all, until we had information,a game plan, and the ability to act fast. Nobody wanted to drag this out. It meant that serious injuries would result in the need for a trip to the ER, but I was designing costumes that would make it easy to remove the elements of body armor in the worst case scenario, leaving just a plain, rather odd-looking garment, but odd clothing was so common in New York that it wasn't actually remarkable. Vigilantes were officially illegal, but the cops only busted them if they got too violent or dangerous, or if official notice had to be taken, like on admission to a hospital.

The coursework was academically interesting, and I started to look around with a new eye, sometimes catching signs of jaundice in a passer-by on the street, recognizing a use injury in my dad's shoulder from racquetball. It was gratifying to have a useful skill, finally.

Amid this bustle, the government published a document describing the broad outlines of the conflicts between the Shi'ar, Skrull, and Kree empires. All three had battered each other (and in the case of the Shi'ar, themselves) into wretched states. It was true that the Shi'ar had detonated an unimaginably devastating bomb in Kree territory, killing billions, but that this seemed to have been done with the connivance of the Kree ruler, who thought it would jumpstart their evolutionary stagnation. Sick. There wasn't much left of any of them; their near-constant states of war for centuries if not millennia had left them rather desperate for trading partners. Ok, actually, they'd all intended to capture Earth and use it to prize open the Nine Realms for exploitation (and THAT would have ended badly for them). So now, with the truth revealed, they were here as petitioners for help in getting their empires back on a footing to provide their citizens with more than the bare minimum needed to sustain life--and in some cases, aid to get the population up and growing. Why they thought a single planet could do this was honestly perplexing to me, but they cited our imagination and drive more than the planet's raw resources. And, of course, they sought the cooperation of Asgard as well. After the document was published, the national, state, and local governments together with the three alien species established a fund to pay for repairs necessitated by the bad behavior of the aliens and the government. I applied to the fund as a matter of principle and, following my family's usual practice, donated the money to city charities. There were so many things going on that it was hard to keep track of it all. The UN agreed to consider how we might help or if it was prudent to do so; the three alien races were allowed to create islands off the coast and place embassies there, backing off their ships and repairing damage to the satellites. The isolation made everybody feel better about them, and it was hoped that the necessity of creating islands and buildings on them--and blueprints had to be approved first--would keep them out of trouble for awhile. And if they were told to leave, New York would have these islands and buildings to use, so that was kind of a win no matter how you looked at it. Additionally, they had to provide an identity database of every being on their ships as well as any sleeper agents already here and any Earth allies--names and biometric data and addresses where applicable--and nobody had diplomatic immunity, meaning that any of their citizens caught committing or assisting in a crime would have the book thrown at them.