Poulette – Strange Attractors ++++ We're getting there.. ++++++ A chipped beaker splintered in the stained steel sink, as a tray full of soiled metal instruments was dumped on top of it with a crash, the tinkle of breaking glass going unheeded. The omnipresent cooing of doves had stopped, and the silence was oppressive like an indrawn breath. At times like these even the birds kept watch, to see which way to dodge. Medic was angry. Angry and frustrated, to the point of embedding forceps in the wall, point-first. It had all started because those misbegotten dummkopfs had dared to question his abilities, his qualifications! And after all he had done for them, all the little gift projects he had slaved over! When the Engineer had come to him privately, asking for help in securing the labyrinthine sewers against incursion, where his sentries could not reach, he had provided. His lips thinned cruelly in a smirk of pleasurable nostalgia as he recalled the poetic use of the opposing Spy for raw materials; what better use for a thief than to catch another? Medicine for him was about fusing poetry with Science. The beauty of transmutation was ecstasy and agony and transcendence. So when the Sniper and the Spy had confronted him in this, his sanctuary, the trespass was worsened by their accusations. Not only had they questioned his motives and hurled gross insults, but slyly implied that his skills were fit only for breaking, not making. To make matters worse, they had brought along the giant Russian, who did nothing but stand and grunt like paid muscle, cracking his knuckles in some parody of a physical threat. Let him see if he got within sniffing distance of an Ubercharge anytime soon. As if any of them could have done better, as if any other doctor would have the inspiration, the sheer genius to create fantasy out of whole cloth, to craft meat toys for the ungrateful passel of brats he had to call his teammates! Medic grunted with effort as he hurled a warped bonesaw, teeth clogged with dried blood and tissue, into the sink to follow the other implements, then stripped off his latex gloves. The sudden spurt of rage died as quickly as it had come, leaving Medic exhausted with its passing. He sat down on one of the laboratory stools, scrubbing tiredly at his face, ignoring the stickiness of drying blood on his forearms. He looked up at the viewport on the incubation tank – hastily and grimly rejigged from the sensory deprivation chamber it had been, by the harried Engineer – watching the his little Turmfalke. She floated, curled foetally, the nerves and ligaments trailing ragged from the bone stumps where he had broken off her wings, pale hair hanging like horsetail cloud in the currents from the circulation pump. She had fought when he had come for her, like she had not fought in many, many months, and he had been forced to sedate her with the syringe gun. Her gaunt face lay slack under the breathing mask, deceptively serene. Her resected fingers and flayed palms waved in the currents in an uneasy mimicry of gesture, the overgrown blood vessels fanning out like tendrils from the raw tips. It was not going well, Medic was forced to admit. His Turmefalke had been his most ambitious project yet, a twisted Galatea he had created to be pliant and joyous in her servitude. Every line of her had been meticulously moulded to design, and here he was destroying his artwork. He had teared up in the reconstruction of her legs, removing the graceful scaling, grounding her flatfooted to earth again with tendon implants. He had sobbed when he had removed her shining owl eyes and replaced them with her own prosaic, peasant-brown orbs. As if to add insult to the injury of engaging in this destruction of his glorious creation, the fact was that it was proving downright impossible. It had all seemed so easy, so smoothly in his recollection, when borne along on the wings of inspiration. But his hands now felt clumsy and awkward as he dismantled structures, planing back scar tissue in sheets and ropes. At the beginning, he had taken the bit furiously in his teeth. The first regrafts had gone well, but the regeneration bath had done its work too well, her healing tissues overgrowing into puckered, wattled tumours. The Medigun’s vapours would only have exacerbated this, so he had painstakingly excised every growth with his own blunting scalpel, day after day. The chemotherapy and adjustments he had made to the tank had other effects too, sending her metabolism into free-fall. He had been battling infection in the bedraggled Turmfalke for the weeks he had been working to return her corpus to mere clay. It seemed as though every other day he was racking his brain to invent new cocktails of antibiotics and worse to preserve her collapsing immune system. Medic sighed and rose from his moment of rest, tossing the soiled gloves – more to keep his nails free of debris than anything else – into the incineration bin next to the sink. With easy familiarity and without turning, he opened the glass-fronted fridge and lifted out three vials from their accustomed spot, preparing a transfer syringe for administration to the shunt port installed under his Turmfalke’s thin collarbone, via a line through the tank’s port. In this his inner sanctum, Medic in his ongoing exhaustion allowed himself to be less vigilant, more cavalier in his methods. This reliance on habit, on the way things always were, would most likely be the reason why he did not notice the carefully resealed vials in the boxes, not even a mere hair out of place. Why he did not notice the tiny smudges around the gauges of the regeneration tank, or the slight alteration in the tint of the liquid in the tank, that could not be attributed to the fluorescent lamps. Or perhaps, to give him due credit, he had simply become accustomed to the infinitesimal accumulation of tiny changes, of smeared fingerprints and hairline scratches where none had been before. It was a war zone, after all, and there was seldom time for regular audits or inspections. As Medic depressed the plunger to dispense the fluid in the syringe into the shunt, his free hand tossed the now empty vials into the bin, followed by the transfer needle. With weary motions, he loaded the metal instruments into the autoclave, setting the sterilisation cycle, before proceeding to wash his arms clean at the sink. His foot nudged the sterilisation bin as he scrubbed, the clinking of settling glass loud in the quiet laboratory. As he strode out of the room, one hand reaching for the light switch, to join the rest of his team mates in the night’s slumber, it never occurred to him that the bin had been, perhaps, a little fuller than it should have.