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Eishia sits at the front desk of the medical center, sorting through patient files, and smiles as she realizes that there aren't many people who need help today.
Footsteps entering the room make her look up and smile.
“Eishia! I got a job for ya,"
Worry covers her face, but Enjin is quick to continue.
"Not going out, and no one's hurt, the opposite, I need you to teach someone some of your knowledge."
Her voice is soft as the confused look on her face grows.
"It's good that no one is hurt, I thought most of the cleaners already knew what they needed?"
Enjin makes a noise that is a mix of a sigh and a groan before he continues to speak.
"Ever heard of a man named Jabber Wonger?"
That makes her take a deep breath. Wasn't that the boy that Zanka was sneaking off with, the same one that when Zanka would stumble home half dead, she would have to fix wounds caused by?
"The one Zanka fought in the trash beast incident?"
Enjin sighs and nods.
"He is now a member of the cleaners, as you may know. He and Zanka like to..spar, and I think that it would be a good idea for you, Ms. Eishia, to teach him how to fix the damage he deals."
Oh goodness, a new person that she has to talk to and learn how works, along with this person being incredibly smart aswell as strong? She had dealt with the damage caused by him countless times; she saw, regardless of whether he did it intentionally or not, how he knew where to hit to hurt.
"All you gotta do is teach him what he needs for a fight with Zanka, hell, you can tell him to tone it down, if he leaves with, I don't know, knowing how to fixa fucking papercut, I will be happy, he just needs to learn something."
"Do you know how large the spikes on Zanka’s weapon are, along with the sharpness of the blue things on top? I have only seen them, and it would be a good idea for me to know more so that I can teach properly."
Enjin grins; he did not think it would go nearly this well. Of course, Eishia likes to teach people; it was something that she held dear to her, and while nowhere as excitable as her brother, it was clear that even though she had more trouble doing it, she did it well and with joy.. sometimes.
"I have no idea. Jabber would most likely have those answers, though."
"Oh goodness, okay, what's the room number?"
Ah, there the panic is.
"Next door to Zanka's."
“Alright, so the best things to teach them would be-”
Enjin cuts her off,
“Hey, you don't gotta explain it, I trust that you know what you're doing, I'm gonna go to the main room if he tries anything, come get me.”
“But-mm okay Mr Enjin, I appreciate this opportunity.”
He looks over at her with a worried expression, but smiles reassuringly and walks out of the room.
She can do this, she can totally do this!
Quick breaths fill her lungs, and she thinks about the types of things that would be good to teach him. As she walks up the stairs, she plans more and feels just a little self-assured.
Knocking on the door, she hears a voice come from inside.
“Zanki! I told you that you don't have to-”
The voice comes closer, and Jabber opens the door, eyes lowering as the person on the other side is much shorter than he was expecting. He smirks and leans against the door frame, observing her.
“Well whos this little lady?”
Eishia looks at him, he seems.. Different from how she had pictured him originally.
“You’re Jabber, right?”
“The one and only! I asked you first, though,”
She nods and clears her throat.
“Eishia Stilza, Mr Enjin told me that you needed to learn medical things.”
The confidence in her voice slowly fades as she gets farther.
“You must be the infamous sister that August was talking about!”
She nods, he notices that she was standing stiff, and steps out of his room.
“Let's go for it then,”
Humming, she leads them down to the medical center, walking over to the medium-sized white table that sits next to the desk. Jabber sits down and crosses his legs dramatically.
“Do you know what size the spikes on assistaft are?”
He raises an eyebrow and watches Eishia, who has her back turned to him and is rifling through the cabinets.
“Prolly like ten centimeters in length, two centimeters wide at the base, and it tapers down. Talked to her about seeing if we could serrate it once, to really make it hurt when she’d hit me with it- but she said no.”
Eishia takes a breath.
“How much experience do you have with repairing damage?”
“What’dya mean?”
She takes out a suture kit. This may be a good place to start.
“Your weapon-”
“Mankira.”
She nods, trying not to deflate, and brings it over to the table, picking up her personal basic kit as she does.
“Mankira seems to have chemical properties along with the slashes; the wounds you create help the poison to get into the patients blood stream.”
“Correct! 25 centimeters of pure.. I don't know what she is made of, but you get the point-”
Glancing down at his hands for a moment, she looks at the rings that rest on his knuckles, two away from having all of them.
“When you.. Sparr, with Zanka, you make sure to use nonlethal poisons?”
“Nowadays mostly just hallucinogens, but she doesn't like it when I use ‘em, says she wants to “be in the moment-” pf whatever that means, but you know happy wife happy life, so I hardly ever use anythin on her, just plain old blades- speaking of my wife! Why is she not here?”
Eishia begins to set out tools; two pink slabs of fake flesh sit between them.
“Zanka already has significant medical knowledge. I want to teach you basic disinfecting, stitches, how to tell if it needs needles or butterfly stitches, and wound packing. She already is familiar with those.”
She rocks back and forth in her chair as she speaks.
“Mm, stitches and wound packing. Shame she didn't tell me sooner, otherwise I wodda let her practice on me.”
Her eyes widen, and she, very wisely, decides to ignore that comment. She no longer worries about him hurting her, though, which she is grateful for.
“The first step always is to make sure you are in a sterile environment, well, rather the first step is prevention, I'm not going to tell you to stop, but I will tell you to try to avoid giving life-threatening injuries, or receiving. After that, a sterile environment, um, try to stay close to the cleaners' building, or at least some decent place.”
Jabber looks down at the plastic on the table, too yellow to look like Zanka’s skin. He frowns.
“Just making sure that everything is clean, washing it thoroughly should do, there are packs of sterile gloves, but washing your hands as well is a good idea.”
She places a black case of tools in front of him, the inside a purple, a matching one in front of her, except the outside is white, and the inside is pastel pink. Picking up something that looks similar to scissors, she shows it to Jabber, and he picks up the same from his set.
“These are the main thing that you will hold the needle with; you do not want to touch it with your hands at all.”
She then picks up one of the sets of tweezers from her case.
“This is what will be in your other hand, you want to ensure that it is the entirely straight ones.”
Jabber briefly thinks about making a joke about what's wrong with the not straight ones, but he chooses not to and picks up the tweezers.
She places a pink paper in front of him, POLYESTER BRAIDED, in big letters covers the front of it.
“This is your needle; there are several kinds, this is just what we are using now.”
She opens hers, and he follows along.
“When you open it, the string will go everywhere, so when you do it on a real person, once again, please make sure you are in a sterile environment.”
Showing him the hand with the needle holder, he places his thumb and ring fingers into the holes and watches as she carefully picks up the needle. He finds it weird that it is shaped more square-like, probably so the metal can hold it more securely.
“You will probably want to use gloves; however, to just get the motion of how to, you are alright for now.”
Holding the needle steady, she inserts it smoothly into one of the precut wounds,
“You want to go about half a centimeter in most of the time, you want to curve your wrist so that the tip of the needle sticks through both parts of the cut.”
Jabber takes the needle in the holder, the fake skin gives more resistance than he would have thought, probably because it is made out of a plasticy silicone rather than normal flesh. He briefly mourns that he doesn't get to learn on Zanka.
“There is going to be a lot of thread in the little cardboard holder. This is expected, and if you need more than that, then you need to get back immediately. You want to leave about five centimetres of thread on the other side. At that point, you make a knot.”
He follows the instructions, laughing a little bit at her comment.
Immediately after he ties the knot and tries to start the next stitch, the thread breaks, leaving the needle embedded in the skin, drawing a giggle out of Eishia.
“You want to make sure not to use the needle holder at the point where the string and the needle are connected, which can cause it break.”
“Karma, honestly.”
He picks up another of the needles from the box and opens it.
“Damn! Needles bigger on thisn”
“For different sizes of wounds, different sizes of thread are good, since we are practicing that will work just fine as well.”
He restarts, Eishia pointing to the pointy scissors in his suture kit and cuts the thread, then catches back up.
“You’re gonna want to just go through, then loop back up around.”
“Like sewing”
She nods.
“Yeah, but if you get your hands in here, it won't end well.”
He laughs, and they get through most of the other stitches without issues, really a rather simple process.
“So~ how's Fu treatin ya?”
Eishia looks up for a moment, hands paused in the fake skin.
Jabber notices how her eyes widen slightly and how she quickly moves to look back at the pad.
“Bout what I thought,”
He responds again with a smile and lets her get by without answering, finishing off his line a few moments later.
Eishia takes a breath as she ties her own stitch off.
“That kit is now yours. If you have anymore questions on it, feel free to come back later, or if you want to learn more stitches. However, look down at it, see how some of them are wider at the middle and deeper, but how others are just thinly cut lines?”
Jabber runs his finger up the cut in the fake flesh and looks back up with a nod.
“These smaller wounds, you can easily get by with just using butterfly stitches.”
“The little white bandages?”
She nods, Jabber remembers having seen some of them on Zanka a while back.
“Alright, wound packing is next.”
Jabber puts the tools back and zips up the suture kit as she goes to grab the wound packing dummies.
Small, much thicker slabs of fake flesh are put onto the table, a red wound in the middle being stark against the once again, oddly yellow skin.
“Here we are going to have to get more into the contents of the bag- no, if there is a wound so bad that it needs to be packed, once again, please come back to HQ.”
She picks up a black backpack from behind the front desk, with many pockets spread all over it.
“Oo~ gettin a little care package!”
Eishia briefly wonders how on earth Fu ever survived with the raiders. She places it against the table, and she spends a moment gathering supplies from the cabinets: a bottle of clear liquid, containers, rolls of gauze, medical tape, and some other small things are spread out on the table.
“This,” she picks up the clear bottle of liquid and begins to pour some of it into two clear containers, “is a bottle of saline, it can be easily made with distilled water, which you can find here at any point, if you want to make more, of course you already have a bottle that I will give you but, just in case, 3 teaspoon of salt along with one teaspoon of baking soda, that gives you enough to mix into roughly 8 ounces of water.”
She washes her hands and motions for Jabber to do the same. He stands and washes after she is done.
“Bein sterile this time?”
“Yes.”
When they get back to the table, she sits down, putting on a pack of gloves and passing a pair to Jabber.
“It is highly important that when you do something like this, you use only one piece of gauze; you don't want it to get stuck, and the chances of that go up significantly if you use more than one piece, so we stick with longer rolls of gauze.”
“Don't wanna have to go digging in there or anything,” Jabber says, lying through his teeth.
Eishia picks up on the odd tone and the.. odd way Jabber is staring at the fake wound and takes a breath.
“Alright- so you are then going to take one of the unopened rolls of gauze and open it.”
He does, the little white roll settles in his hand as Eishia does the same.
She unrolls it and dips it into the saline. Jabber follows along, feeling how the saline seeps into the almost-fabric texture and dampens his gloves.
“Then you want to wring it out; it should be damp, not soaking.”
Jabber doubles the gauze over and twists his wrists, some of the liquid dripping out of the bowl and onto the table.
“My bad-,”
“It’s alright, we can clean that up after, most of the time wound packing comes with much more mess.”
She smiles gently at him, then places the gauze on a paper towel next to her, picking up the container and carefully pouring some of it onto the wound.
“In most cases deeper cleaning and wound irrigation may be needed, however the key is to ensure that it is fully cleaned out, you want to make sure contaminants are removed, and then you want to use saline, we do not use cotton, do not use Q-tips, you use a smaller piece of gauze to wipe away built up blood and potentioally puss.”
Picking up a square of gauze, she dips it into the leftover liquid and uses it to wipe around the wound.
“Damn whats so wrong with Q-tips then?”
He asks as he follows what she is doing, glancing up at her briefly.
“They may put contaminants into the wound, cotton may come off of it, and with that may cause infection.”
He nods, briefly wondering about intentionally causing an infection for the side effects, before shaking his head. He remembers when Zanka, once dazed from blood loss, saw how he would shake his head and called him an echasketch for intrusive thoughts; the memory makes him laugh.
“Infections are not good,” Eishia gently reminds him.
“I know,”
After that, they get the saline out of the wound. Eishia uses her middle and forefinger to put the edge of the damp gauze on and brings it to the bottom of the wound.
“From there, you want to carefully put the gauze into the wound until you get to the top. Remember to not pack too tightly, fluff, not stuff.”
He nods and follows along, seeing the deep red stains of the fake plastic flesh as he stuffs it; he misses his wife.
“When you fill it, you want to cut off the excess, then use a compress and medical tape to secure the wound.”
“Do you put coverings on stitches?”
As they finish the taping, she hums and shakes her head.
“Not for the first few days, then you want to do something similar to this. You cannot use Neosporin on it once it reaches the ok-to-bangage-stage either, you have to use a special kind; if needed, you can retrieve some when the time comes.”
Once they finish, she begins to clean things up and starts to set other, smaller things onto the table. Jabber smiles confusedly when she puts a few tampons down.
“For gunshot wounds, these are very good for wound packing since they are sterile and work size-wise.”
He nods, laughing to himself as she continues to put things into the bag.
The sound of the door opening and voices makes them look to it-
“Wife!”
Jabber stands and walks over to Zanka, entirely ignoring that Enjin brought her into the room.
However, Enjin seems to notice the same thing he did, looking from the tampons on the table to Jabber and sighing.
“Thank you, Eishia, for handling this little shit.”
Eishia, who has been making eye contact with Zanka for the entire time they have been in there, smiles and nods.
“I love teaching what I know, thank you so much, sir!”
Eishia finishes packing the backpack and hands it to Jabber.
“Why, thank you, ma'am! We all done here?”
Enjin rolls his eyes and nods.
Tugging on Zanka's wrists, he drags her out of there. They could use a walk.
“Zanki!~” Jabber starts voice whining, “Why didn't you tell me you knew all that stuff!”
“Oh god. Shoulda figured that you learnin somethin would just give you new, weirder avenues, fuckin freak.”