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  • 📅 December 2024 is YE 46.9 in the RP.

RP: Lazarus [Lazarus] Unapologetic, maybe

Aiesu clutched the hand-rail, pulling herself to her feet as she felt the weights in her synthetic knees move to balance her until she settled upright. Her shoes trapsed down the steps of the bus onto the concrete below lacking her usual grace as her heels met the ground first with a thud Aiesu was rapidly growing sick of, longing for her blades.

She turned to glance back at Sana as she followed behind -- and then Miles behind her.

"There's three departments we could go to. Which one?"
 
Upon stepping out into the rain, Miles removed the glasses he wore, since they were mostly for show, and slipped them into his shirt pocket to avoid getting droplets onto the lenses. With Aiesu's words, he thought to the treatment plan, at least for her legs, and spoke in response; "Whichever department has the best suite for mapping, altering, and programming neurological information. Most of this fitting is not so much dimensions, I obtained those back on Ondine, it is more about fitting the prosthetic to your neurology, and perhaps setting up a few 'work arounds' if need be."
 
The little L'manel pitter-pattered toward a sign, to which she spent some time reading and deciphering. She clicked her tongue -- pointing one way, then another. Finally, she disregarded both and walked straight through what would appear to be a hedgerow behind the sign, fighting through it and disappearing.

Unnerved, Sana turned her head to look back at Miles, unsure what she should do with a shrug of her shoulders.
 
"... Every good bit of Nepleslian sense I have says we should not follow her... I mean that's mostly on account of a fairy tale I once heard about rabbits and holes... but I haven't taken any acid and I'm feeling pretty sober all around, I think we can handle this." Miles spoke, with absolute certainty, as he took to pursuit of Aiesu, with the intent of not losing sight of her altogether, or at the very least, being able to follow a fresh trail.
 
On the other side, Aiesu was fishing through a ring of keys, trying to find one rather specific. She slipped it into the lock, twisting with a click and stepped inside -- resetting the latch on the door as she did.

Following behind Aiesu, Sana could see what presumably were cadavers left and right in body-bags on the checkered tile flooring. She soon used another key, moving into an office. She was only there for a moment, tapping something into the computer (presumably forgery) before she locked the door behind herself on the way out.

"Just remember, twelve-oclock, okay?"

Despite the odd looks the trio got, she walked with a confidence she usually didn't have -- then tapping on a glass plate in front of a busy receptionist.

The receptionist glanced at a crude black and white poster, featuring Aiesu's picture before staring back at her through the glass and snorted.

"I'm sorry, you're banned from here until further--"

"Its not for me. Its for him" Aiesu said, nudging Miles forward.

He obviously wasn't impressed.

"Do you have a reservation? All equipment must be reserved in advance before usage and you have to have paid your deposit in full."
 
Upon arriving at the door, Miles' cybernetic brain worked on a little bit of a fact check.

This is life sciences building three, this door is on the... South? Yes, South facing wall. There was a glance about the area. This is a shipping and receiving access door, marked for 'Biological Samples'. He was piecing together where he was in the grand-scheme of the campus layout. One thing was for sure, the route that Aiesu took was something of her own little burrow, and that was amusing enough for Miles as they strode through the room usually only occupied by cadavers and interns tasked with putting them there to wait for pick-up and disposal.

There was a slight eyebrow raise from Miles as they came to a stop at the office which by both signage and documentation indicated the Department Head's office. ... Wonder why we took the back door? She has made it clear in the past that she has clout around here. Though, that question did not last for long, as Aiesu made her turnabout in emotional strength, with her confident approach upon the reception desk... and the prompt and brisk way she was informed about being banned.

Wildharpsurgeon said:
**** Wildharpsurgeon started hassling causticLucidity ****

Wildharpsurgeon: How does a department head get banned from their own department?
Wildharpsurgeon: I mean, did you make an intern spontaneously combust or something? Were you eating cadavers? You were eating cadavers weren't you?
Wildharpsurgeon: I got the score here though, I'll see your appointment tampering, and raise you being a total asshole.
Click to expand...

"Yes, the appointment is for my use of the facilities and equipment." Miles spoke, without any sort of hesitation, he was in his native environment as well. Casually his hand unbuttoned the back pocket of his slacks, before he produced a thinner and slimmer wallet he used for identification papers. He opened up the bifold wallet, and presented the receptionist with a clear picture; "Doctor Miles Gunn." though, the verbal introduction was not the portion that he was being an asshole about.

Displayed clearly for the receptionist was Miles' picture from a year prior, that picture was upon identification papers used as a travel, residence, and work visa. What stood out, was the seal of the Lorath Matriarchy in proper, along with the seal and signature of the Lorath High Priest, Velor, not even rubber stamped, but legitimately hand-placed upon his paperwork. Miles then slid his thumb to bring out far more recent documentation, indicating the signature and authorization given by Aiesu's stepfather, and campus administrator, Ty.

"I think I won't have any problem being fit in for a twelve o'clock usage of pretty much anything I need for as long as I need it, right?" Miles' expression was deadpan, but the look in his eyes spoke that he was in no mood for a receptionist who was too big for his britches, nor the bullshit that was involved with a society that had doubts about his capability purely by the merit of him being a foreigner, a male, and a quarter of the age of most adults. Besides, he was a Nepleslian, Nepleslians were never in the mood for receptionist bullshit, unless they were hot, or offering refreshments, or were hot and offering refreshments... or sex, yeah, those were good exceptions.
 
The young man buzzed them in, a steel cage-door falling open ever so slightly as the lock released.

"Second corridor, third door on the right. Not that you'll need any help with her following you" the receptionist snorted, going back to his crossword.

Aiesu teased the door open, slipping through. After moving through tired sterile walls, they eventually arrived at a set of doors, to which she knocked. Receiving no response, Aiesu opened the door slowly, peeking through the gap to see the room was (unusually) empty. She waltzed in like she owned the place, hoisting herself up onto the big med-bed in the middle, relieved not to have to bark at whoever had actually booked the room.

"So!"
 
"Thank you, and good day." Miles spoke, as he shut his bifold wallet with a snap and returned it safely to the pocket in which it belonged. There was a smirk upon his lips, as he followed along with Aiesu, stepping through the steel gate, as he gestured for Sana to follow along.

Once beyond the gate, and in the room which they had been assigned, Miles looked around and assessed what tools were available. Kakutama Heavy Industries equipment, United Manufacturing Cooperative equipment, some old United Outer Colonies kit, knock-off Yamataian equipment... ship grade... hah the Empire still makes me laugh, and then the in-house goodies. I'm pleased. What was a smirk on Miles' lips, transitioned to a full on smile as he leaned against the desk which also served as a housing for a nanomachine sequencer.

"Well, if the local Helashio help has any competence..." Miles leaned back a bit on the desk, looking to a shelf, and as he looked he spotted a number of cases which were quite familiar to him, and labeled as belonging to him and also had labels indicating point of origin within the campus, and destination. "Ah, good, they brought up your new limbs." he spoke with a rather pleased tone. "Thanks to the collar we put on, we can actually cut back on how much time we need here, since it has been monitoring your baseline neural activity since it was installed."

"Aiesu, could you perhaps do us both a favor and link up your headband to the local network, so we can get a more detailed look-see and perhaps conduct some simulated sensory tests for calibration purposes?" As he was speaking, Miles made his way to the main workstation in the room, sitting down and going about logging in, preparing for the work ahead.
 
The L'manel grumbled, eyes rising toward the ceiling briefly as she clicked her tongue impatiently.

"Its very slow..." she grumbled, feeling herself disconnect from her constructs in a very obvious way for the sake of the scan. Silently, she cursed the headband for its limitations.

"Alright, done."

Sana orbited the room, admiring the equipment with a strange interest not even most medical personnel would share.

"Can we book it again later?"
 
As Aiesu disconnected from her other selves, Miles operated the workstation before him. It was a charming display of old interface technology mingling with updated interior hardware, as he operated an actual tactile keyboard, switches, and knobs.

Wireless I/O on... frequency set to her quantum reception band... bandwidth... oh wow, she's right, it is slow, but the data loss is non-existent. Miles' skilled hands continued with the console, before he looked over his shoulder to Aiesu. "I've set the interface to... ah..." Miles glanced back at the monitor, needing to double-check his understanding of the Lorath text which he had read; "Hospital reserved frequency number nineteen. Sync up, and we'll start the sensory simulation. I strongly recommend you try your best to lay, stay still, and don't let the false nerve impulses weird you out."

After giving the instructions, that was when Miles rolled his chair beside Sana for a moment, putting his arm around her waist before looking up to her face. "Well, I do need to conduct a routine maintenance, upgrade, and optimization cycle on you with a proper work suite. I don't see why we can't reserve some time... maybe we could have some fun with their flesh printing equipment and their nanomachine kit." As Miles spoke to her, his hand went from being on her hip, to grasping her bottom and giving a caress as he grinned wickedly.
 
Sana smiled back in that knowing way, the way that Aiesu hadn't yet learned to decipher between the foreign couple.

Instead, she tried not to focus on the snapping sensation of toes and knees she wasn't accustomed to having - thigh muscle clenching as her musculature ran through a sort of induced power-on-self-test not unlike a computer at its boot-screen.

Indeed, the L'manel stared at the small dice-like glassy touch-CRT display with its many faces which hung on an extruded metallic arm from the ceiling like a massive bone-thin chrome leg with a head where its foot should be.

Each of the five bezel-less face-plates (since the back held the thing together, obviously) was of a different colour like a square pearl tainted with ink in its making, pulsing lines of text and code. Slowly, the thing opened up into plus shape, flattened out into a pattern making it seem like an face, one she expected to tell her something she didn't want to know.

Even so, she read the text skimmed on each display as the colours merged toward green on black - text skimming and flickering as the system began loading. Eventually, those faces projected a three dimensional volumetric image of what presumably was a Lorath brain, only slightly different than the cobbled ball of think-guts that made a Nepleslian brain.

In Aiesu's mind it was somewhat larger and better formed than that of her attending physician and she admired it thoughtfully as she contemplated further abuse for his person to better demonstrate her reluctance toward this procedure and her skepticism in regard to his credentials. At least, that was the nicely worded version of how things happened.
 
When the render data was processed by the neural mapping suite, Miles eyed the projection system as it fluttered to life. It certainly was a 'charming' volumetric system, clearly not quite as refined as a Yamataian one in regard to size, hardware, and render time. Despite the hardware issues, the resolution was just as crisp, if not more so, it seemed the Lorath used the extra space granted by their larger hardware to actually take advantage of being able to work in more rendering nodes.

With a short sound of a slapped backside, Miles adjourned the short lover's meeting between himself and Sana, as he rolled his chair to Aiesu's bedside, then stood up as he found himself looking upon a render of a Lorath brain. Certainly, superficially, it looked the same as most humanoid brains, but Miles knew better. His hand reached out, as he gestured and the sensors embedded in the projection grid removed the exterior meninges. Once the outer layer was removed, that was when some of the subtleties became noteworthy, at least to a trained eye, such as Miles' own, or Aiesu's.

There was a considerable density to the Lorath cerebellum... which was located where the 'human' parietal lobe would be located, and was quite robust. What also stood out as noteworthy was the size of the occipital lobe, neatly cradled between the sensory cortex located in the Lorath midbrain and the cerebellum, firmly perched upon the olfactory lobe and temporal lobe. There was an issue though, as the render clearly indicated portions of the brain tissue which were distinctively inactive, almost withered even, and were connected almost like a hard-wire between the cerebellum and motor cortex; it was the portion of the Lorath brain which handled coordination of flight behavior. There were clusters of tissues though, embedded around the Lorath hypothalamus and brain stem, and was connected and adjacent to the portions of the Lorath brain responsible for concious thought and behavior, as well as a degree of autonomic functions which were able to be manually interrupted.

Upon the volumetric display, most of Aiesu's brain was illustrated with a soft green hue upon the various components of her anatomy, a 'help guide' from the computer indicating healthy structures. Though, the tissue clusters present near her hypothalamus were partially rendered with a green overlay, but many were glaringly red, with neurons that extended out like some sort of crimson spiderweb, even progressing down the brain stem. Upon continued tests made by the computer system, the number of 'red spots' gradually began to increase. Many indicators were in the motor cortex, but the ones that worried Miles most were nestled around what he knew was the regulatory components responsible for the Lmanel capability to shape shift.

"So this is what it is like to be inside of your head." Miles joked, as he rotated the display, and looked upon the immediate concern; her motor cortex, and the cerebellum beside it.
 
"Intimidating, I know" Aiesu ponderously oozed as she eyed the ceiling tiles. While they were certainly very familiar to her and quite charming no doubt, she'd seen the ins and outs of her own mind in this very room so many times over the last fifteen years now that almost nothing the doctor could really say that would surprise her. Her attention had to settle somewhere.

And for now, ceiling tiles won over her own brain.

But why was she staring at those tiles in this room at this moment?

Indeed, Aiesu knew her short-falls. Pitfalls, she corrected herself. She worked with tissues, chemicals, logics and behaviours: She was focused around patterns. That was her job: To find patterns.

Miles job as a consultancy here wasn't as something she couldn't do herself but rather, as something she wouldn't do herself. She saw no need for it and was certainly no fan of risk. Miles' Job wasn't to find new patterns but plug older more mundane and very obvious ones that would completely forgo a genius such as her's together in such a way that she never would have thought of it herself.

A few pinpricks of light lit up in an unexpected pattern in the ghostly readout Miles was wrist-deep into as her pleasure centres lit up with a hidden breath of stifled laughter as she tried to picture one such ceiling-tile landing upon Miles' head.

"So how does it feel to be wrist-deep in your superior?" she said, slowly glancing over toward Miles piggishly. This was more like the Aiesu he knew.
 
"Oh, most certainly alluring, to say the least." Miles replied, with a grin across his features, not the imperialist pig-dog grin he had been sporting back in the dorm, but the kind of grin reserved for a doctor, or an older brother, the kind of grin that said; 'I'm just pulling your leg, oops, it came off'.

There was an old Nepleslian engineering practice which also doubled as part of the medical process as well, it was the desire to seek out a fresh set of eyes, or take a break from a problem and return to it later to evaluate it without a preexisting mindset. It was a cultural divergence from the Lorath, who tended to beat their heads against problems until the problem surrendered, well, at least that was the tendency amongst their scientific community which was largely populated with males, who tended to lack the Lorath female capacity for practicality and wisdom. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of the scientific community was infectious, even strangling the good sense out of the female scientists and researchers of the Matriarchy, and worse, intermingling with a feeling of superiority which was present amongst the gender.

What the departure was upon Miles' involvement was clear; he had none of that crap as luggage, and he could see the problem for what it was, without being hesitant in the slightest about spouting a hypothesis, one spoken with a small frown; "Aiesu, you've got some broken pieces in here." Miles did not speak those words with any tone of jest, or humor, but it was the tone that was reserved between two professionals wanting to be entirely clear with each other. "I can install your legs, but it will be merely treating the symptom of the problem." With that, Miles rotated the brain render, before showing Aiesu the spider-web of malfunctioning neural tissues which extended out from the uniquely Lmanel portions of her brain, and more so, he pointed out the thick branch of red, which ran right through the Lorath equivalent to a thalamus, that from Aiesu's view of the display, would stretch out for seemingly miles, and would delve deep into a portion of the brain which she would know without a problem; the Lorath equivalent to the frontal lobe, the behavior center of the brain.
 
"Dendrite failure. Surface insulation resistance. Its why you can't patch neural tissue from one person into another"

Aiesu could hear herself saying the words. But they didn't seem real. They came mainly for Sana's benefit, eyes on the woman before they slowly settled back to Miles.

"Its a perfectly acceptable risk-factor of high-contrast aspectation. People live with this every day. Its perfectly normal."
 
"No points for partial solutions Miss Kalopisa." Miles spoke, as he began reviewing a scrolling set of hovering text which he called upon from the computer, reviewing data regarding chemistry balance, tissue resistance, and a number of additional factors which he was easily able to grasp. "Lmanel do indeed suffer from a degree of these issues, its why your people developed the elective limiter program, however..." Miles pointed to the thick band of malformed neural tissues which ran through Aiesu's brain. "This is not normal, it would usually branch out more, it seems that there is an issue here along your tissues responsible for carrying alpha-band brainwaves to the glands responsible for active RNA re-sequencing."

Miles pressed his lips together as he thought on the brain anatomy, before he picked up a focused trans-cranial EM projector, essentially, a device which used a highly focused pulse of electromagnetism to artificially stimulate a collection of neural tissues. It really was only useful when networked to the computer which was handling the image rendering process. He configured the projector to isolate the behavioral and memory center of Aiesu's brain which was deeply intertwined with the problematic neurons. Carefully he held the device to the point of Aiesu's skull closest to the problem. "Aiesu, I'm going to activate the projector, tell me of any memories, feelings, or any abnormal sensations which you may feel." Miles instructed, as he activated the projector, intending to artificially stimulate the brain tissue into a state which would allow for some degree of conscious recall.
 
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