“Does it hurt when I touch here?”

“Yes.”

“What about here?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, how about-“

“It’s already bruised to hell, of course it hurts.” Elise couldn’t help but get impatient at this sort of thing - almost dying was one thing, but having to deal with this sort of roundabout was its own type of evil. They just wanted to go home. Why weren’t they letting them just fuck off?

“Jesus, Elise, I’ll just have to let you lie there next time. You did your work, let me do mine.” Finley, the medic, retorted.

Elise hissed in pain as Finley continued to poke and prod at their shirtless body; they were already far too annoyed at this ordeal. “Can you at least start putting some ointment on or something?“

They were in a makeshift first-aid center; technically, this was inside a CERCNA sprinter van, but seats could be pulled down and something akin to a medical table could be raised in the middle. Elise glared at the the two others sitting in the back, watching them instead of doing anything useful. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing your jobs?”

Damien, already pulling out the footage on a small laptop, shrugged. “I get motion sick, you know?”

“Then why are you even here?” They groaned and rubbed their eyebrows. “…Don’t take that personally,” they added, sort of half-heartedly.

He shrugged good-naturedly. Elise was known for normally expressing themselves in a nasty tone. You had to be like that in order to go toe-to-toe with Chimeras and their ilk.

Augustine, the other one, shushed them as she continued to talk to HQ or whatever. Elise didn’t particularly care; it wasn’t their job, after all.

Quietly, Damien mused “We have more information on the nature of that Chimera. Supposedly his name was Richard Bowley. Some used-car salesman in his thirties. He came into contact with a xenal lifeform around a month ago… never had any real friends or family, but coworkers reported he increasingly became more distant as time went on…. strange behavior, too…”