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[biochemastery]

WHO: Tyl Regor and Knock Out
WHERE: A lab in Jeopardy
WHEN: Mid-October
WHAT: Tyl opens up in a big way.
WARNINGS: Medical, needles, (self-)surgery, gore. Y'know. The usual.

You know what they say about curiosity and kavats.

Sure, curiosity killed some of them, but the others conquered! And he was obviously in the latter category. He had a wonderful old, ancient body, one with clean genes and all its limbs. Obviously, he had to poke around inside it.

He'd put together the tools he'd need--all the sharp bits, the grabbers, the spreaders, the scrapers, the painkillers--and, most importantly, he'd been stockpiling some of his own blood and serum. Because sometimes curiosity tried to take a swipe at you, and you ended up needing an emergency transfusion. And he was not about to trust his veins to someone else's red stuff.

Speaking of red stuff! "Itinerary's all here," he passed a file over to Knock Out's communicator. "All the cuts, all the samples, all the science I want from me." For now.

"Gonna save the worst for last--pancreas takes forever to heal. But! With these nanites in us, I wanna know how long it takes. How much punishment these parts can handle. Won't totally translate to human subjects. More like an upper limit."

Comments

[redcosmedic]

Knock Out surveys the tools and supplies that Tyl has laid out, finds everything precise and orderly and efficient in a way that satisfies something deep in his coding. He'd always strived to maintain a neat Medbay himself, not always possible during wartime, but he imparted it where he could.

He peruses the itinerary file, finds it fairly similar to what he'd have suggested and nothing to propose improvement on; Tyl clearly knows what he wants and what he's doing. Knock Out has already offered Tyl the complete set of scans that he'll end up garnering from watching the procedure, and Cybertronian medical scans are near unparalleled. It seems to him like an easy trade off for the insight Knock Out will gain on organic bodies, upper limit or not.

"If you mess it up too badly, apparently they'll also bring you back from the dead," Knock Out quips lightly, recalling the conversation he'd had with Riptide about it.

Sorry for the delay!

[biochemastery]

"That too! Not sure how that works. Makes me feel like a Queen." Which was a very risqué thing to feel, one he'd probably not admit to back home. Queens didn't tend to like other people feeling that.

"But I don't intend to. Self-surgery's not easy, but it's not new. Done it enough times," he rambles on, casually stripping out of his clothes. What's a little surgery between friends? "Wish I had proper augments for it, though. Working with basic hands is always such a chore." Oh, right! Gloves. He had a box of those, he'd need a pair, since his body didn't even have a sterile coating right now either. The inconveniences he had to put up with.

"You're lucky you kept yours. I have such a beautiful collection, and 's all stuck back in my lab with no way to get at it," he pouted, breaking open a container of antiseptic to prep the surgery site. Ugh! Cold. Oh well. He'd be numbing things up soon enough, so he wouldn't have to deal with it for long.

Speaking of which. "And this body doesn't have intake ports to make this stuff easy, so it's gotta be spinal anesthesia. Gonna need some help on that." He was reaching behind himself, counting vertebrae. right around level with the iliac crest, lumbar vertebra #4 should be... aha! "It's all in the document somewhere. Gotta slide between the bones and ligaments here." He left a blot of the orange-colored antiseptic gel on his back. No topical numbing first, he wanted to be able to feel how things were going back there before everything went numb.

"It'll switch off the pain in about five minutes, then we can start cutting me open!" ...Of course, spinal anesthesia only worked for part of the body, so he was gonna have to tweak a few things once he got in there. That was gonna be fun.

Re: Sorry for the delay!

[redcosmedic]

"Sometimes the only way to get something done right is to do it yourself, even if that's on yourself," Knock Out agreed readily, in response to Tyl's remark about self-surgery. Unless the damage was either critical or physically not accessible, he preferred to do his own repairs as well. He's indifferent to Tyl removing his clothes, not beholden to the human rationale of modesty.

The note about intake ports is interesting for him. "Mecha also have medical ports," he commented, coming around behind Tyl. "And also hard-line connection ports. Useful, but they require navigating firewall protocols in most cases, and few anymore are comfortable with that."

Using the antiseptic blot as the focal point, Knock Out carefully palpitates the spaces between Tyl's vertebra. The touch of his claw-tips are cool against skin, but not as cold as metal should rightfully be. It seems impossible, or at least implausible, that someone so large would be able to find a target measuring only millimeters. But after a moment, the prick of the prepped needle slides between the bones and finds its mark, emptying the syringe's contents smoothly.

"You remind me of someone I used to know," Knock Out remarked while waiting for the anesthesia to take hold. "Another medic, named Flatline. He was always talking about his experiments."

[biochemastery]

"Oh, absolutely. Can't trust anybody else to know what your insides should look like!" Especially when you were the only one around with a sense of aesthetic! That wasn't a problem today, though.

"Got those too. Most only got basic models--sensorimotor hookups. Techs and scientists get more." He still liked to get his hands on things, see them with his own eyes--well, plus all the filtering his mask did for him, obviously. But sometimes you just needed data in your augments right that second and nothing was gonna stop you.

He broke off talking for just a moment as the needle slid in, biting his tongue slightly as it worked its way through all sorts of things that the body never expected to get punctured. It hurt, but the most fascinating thing about it was how it hurt. It felt different than he remembered it had in his normal body, before he'd grafted so many parts to his spine that a needle would never get through there again.

And then the quiet moment was done, and he was back to chatting. "Someone you used to know." He settled himself into place, making sure all his tools were within grabbing distance. "Got a story there, or just a series of disappointments?" Because if it was the latter, didn't sound like him.

[redcosmedic]

"Medics have firewall override protocols," Knock Out agreed absently. "They're necessary, given injured mechs rarely have the wherewithal to drop theirs in the midst of getting blown halfway to scrap."

"Not much of a story," he shrugged. "He liked experimenting on unsparked protoforms. He was always convinced he could create new and better soldiers for the war, but most of the time his efforts produced... let's say, lackluster results. His commanding officers were rarely pleased with him; protoforms aren't exactly an unlimited resource. There was nothing wrong with his methodology, the creations just never seemed to take properly. But the way he'd describe his work, get so excited for this test or that output... that's where you remind me of him."

Knock Out verified with the surgery itinerary and passed Tyl his first tool. "I haven't spoken to him in... seventy, eighty thousand years, maybe? It's been a while. I don't recall where he was stationed last... he may be offline now, who knows."