Although Griffith Young is not a nurse, he does have significant medical training.

He's in a long line at airport security. Congress recently passed a bill making security more stringent, about which the supporting voters said they weren't sure would actually help with the abysmal stats on testers managing to bypass the are-you-a-terrorist check but they think would make them look like they were taking problems their constituents cared about seriously, and they didn't have better ideas that they thought could pass, and that they figured that people care less about being inconvenienced than they care about people at least sort of trying to solve problems. It's really frustrating. He mutters to his neighbor in line that he thinks his representative made a bad decision he would like to disincentivize but doesn't really have a solid plan to. His neighbor tells him that she doesn't have adequate evidence that he's diagnosable with compulsive talking but she wants him to go through the screening process anyway because it's an annoyance that's thematically related to him interrupting her attempts to sext her husband while in line.

It is at this point that Griffith vanishes into thin air.

The amount of nausea Griffith experiences is both far worse than he expected from air travel and also not caused by air travel. The cause of it is unclear but confusing and unpleasant. He manages to keep vomit from leaving his mouth long enough to flail for a bag in his backpack, which is even more unpleasant but does keep vomit off of his clothes and … the rather under-maintained and old-looking medical office. Why is he in one of those. Why does it have some kind of weird darkness instead of a wall.

And then the door opens. A girl wearing a chaimail shirt, jewelry with some significant gems, and oddly lightweight and practical clothes enters. She has a dagger at her hip, while the boy accompanying her has a sword. The boy looks like he's having a fine time but is feeling kind of impatient. The girl has a rather serious expression and looks like she's seen way too much.

"Hi." she says. "You're at a secret magic school and it chose you to be its new medic. Tell us about yourself so we can help you get acclimated?"

"I'm Griffith Young. I normally work at a cryopreservation company – we fill extremely-recently-dead bodies with antifreeze and store their heads in liquid nitrogen – except I'm probably going to be fired if I don't come back from my scheduled vacation, which is disappointing. I'm more risk-averse than most people are and make tradeoffs about risk mitigation that make people think I'm dorky, which is annoying but not annoying enough to make me stop. Related to this, and plausibly related to the magic school choosing me to be its medic although I have a very poor understanding of magic schools and am worried you'll judge me for this even though it's secret, I do have some emergency response training, though I was really tired on the day they covered fire extinguishers and don't remember very much…"

The girl looks at the boy. The boy is not actually paying attention to Griffith and does not return a meaningful look.

The girl decides to try an experiment. "I'm River Grafton, and this is Orion Lake. And you don't have to worry about the fire extinguishers, the government recently banned them," she says in a joking tone.

Griffith looks stunned. "I expect politicians to behave badly but not that badly! Do you happen to remember why they did that? You probably don't know how Representative Barstow voted but I hope it was against. I guess that means my fire extinguisher skills won't be tested but now I'm concerned about fires!"

Well, this level of credulity does seem likely to be a protective factor. Good work, upgrades team.

"It was a pretty domain-limited ban, don't worry about it. Anyway, there's a lot of risks here from listening to people or reading things, I'll get back to you with a whitelist but for now there's some good earplugs in that desk drawer which you should wear, and don't read things that aren't from me. For your safety."

As Griffith reaches for the earplugs, River remembers some important parting words. "Listen to me and stay in here unless you're getting food or using the restrooms and you'll definitely be safe, okay?"

Well, Griffith values his safety. He puts the earplugs on.

New York, meanwhile, does a hasty planning session.

River comes back with the same companion, drawings of all authorized safe people, and a rulesheet.

How to safely staff the Scholomance infirmary

Put together a list of statements people would need to communicate to you for you to treat them. Phrase them in "I think I have…" form: some people here make mistakes that can lead to wasted resources, especially when they're sick so in order to avoid wasting resources you should check that they didn't by looking at their medical state, not by listening to them. We will use signage to indicate that people ought to communicate with you by pointing at this sheet.

If people try to share information with you through unauthorized channels (pointing at individual words, removing your ear protection, etc) do your best to prevent it (close your eyes, etc) and request immediate help (such as by screaming). (Remember, if people have something safe to communicate with you, they can contact us as a trusted relay.)

Ask for medical supplies as needed from the Void. It fetches lost items, so it can produce weird results, but even if what you get is partially used or differently labeled than you're used to, it's workable.

Retrieving food and water as well as bathroom breaks are safe if you do them as quickly as possible. If anything weird happens, note it down once you return.

Mage students need more nutrition than you do, so will often have nutritional issues. The cafeteria food will be fine for you, though.

We're handling security for you, so in exchange you should charge for services and give us a cut. We'll cover this week for free. After that, we'll assess about how much value you're producing and ask for our share. If you'd like us to also screen further information for your safety, that will cost extra.

If there are any issues, please let us know.

"I can think of one issue. Can I get safe information from the Void, like guides to procedures?"

River looks through some of her notes, then indicates 'yes'.

"I'm going to ask the Void for information on running an infirmary because I haven't done that before. I think this is going to be unpleasant for me but it does seem like someone needs to staff the Scholomance infirmary. I'm a little worried that you wrote these procedures today, what have people been doing before then?"

River points to "not" and "safe" on the rulesheet.

And after some conversation, "Nurse Young" (he isn't a nurse, but that's how New York labeled his office) gets to work.

Workshopping a health query form with New York takes multiple rounds, and they have the oddest phrasing concerns.

Ever since his meeting with River, his longest conversations have been with the void. It has plenty of books relevant to his new responsibilities, favoring the worn, which is too bad, and heavily annotated, which is helpful.

Other than that, the void has had an eclectic array of medical supplies, but getting the nutritional products the student body clearly needs from it has been difficult. There's plenty of vitamin supplements to go around, including some gummy multivitamins, popular even when stale. The school vending machines pull from the void's limited food supply, though, and it's hard to get extra beyond that. The vending machines don't give out sugar-based not-really-medicated throat drops, glucose pills, flaxseed and fish oil supplements, and a handful of other caloric medical products, though, so he can at least try to give the most obviously starving students preferable access to those.

There's a lot of patients requesting care. In addition to the standard malnutrition, they mostly have either recent wounds that need basic care, or less-recent infected wounds. He's hoping to make a dent in the latter group going forward by helping the former.

There's also a lot of people who just see him as a pharmacist, a role requiring less effort on his part as they come in with strong opinions on what medications they'll need. Some have chronic health conditions, and there's widespread demand for contraceptives and stimulants, both of which the void seems happy to use him as a tool to shower the student body in. After some thought, he decides to handle the eclectic range of stimulants available by strictly rationing the most universally effective and scarce ones and assigning stimulant-seeking students to double-blind trials of the less reliable but more available drugs for now. (He's got plenty of caffeine pills and a decent supply of various forms of nicotine, but the cafeteria does have coffee and not everyone's interested in nicotine. Still, he prefers the caffeine pills over the coffee and he's not the only one.)

Nobody's been trying to talk to him. The annotations in his textbooks are the most social contact he's been getting. There's not anything from prior holders of his office, which is too bad, though if this place is full of infohazards they weren't adequately shielded from he supposes it makes sense.

(Of course there isn't any information from prior infirmary workers. The infirmary needs to be cleaned up after each staffer to get adequate performance from the next one, as New York figured out a while ago.)

And New York meets with "Nurse Young" again. He's been keeping meticulous records, and also figured out how to get a few more calories out of the Void, which is pretty good. Nurse Young can take payments for New York according to this fee schedule or give them the amphetamine supply or the lion's share of the glucose tablets and throat drops, in order to pay for security, which he'll need. Further services are available for sale if he wants. He should not make too many assumptions about which resources New York does and does not have access to, the economy here is weird compared to the economy outside. Gems are more available than clothing, for instance.

He'd like the prices on music, and a pet animal ideally a dog but he's flexible, and a hand-crank generator for his phone and e-reader, and a higher-power generator for his laptop if possible, and some recreational books, and safe socialization opportunities, and some potted plants, and a better set of bedsheets, and a deck of cards, and some laundry detergent.

They can look into arranging a harp performance from a student known for possessing a harp. Otherwise they're not sure what's available. Some students do bad magic with animals. If they're going to find animals for him he'll need to promise to not let students get near them and have the animals visible so everyone knows he's not hurting them without them having to talk to him. Nobody's brought a fuel-burning generator that they know of, but someone does have a hand-crank generator he can pay New York to rent time on. (They could check the sale price for him, but it's going to be pretty high.) The hourly fee for book screening and socialization is such-and-such. Bedsheets are expensive. Cards are cheap if he's okay with hand-drawn on cardstock. What set of cards is he used to?

It sounds like things are pretty expensive here. Good thing he's producing a lot of value. He can definitely have animals be visibly cared for and safe. He thinks he can get funds together to rent some time with the hand-crank generator for his e-reader. He'll pay for some social time.

A normal deck of cards is 52 cards in four groups, spades and trefoils in black and lilypads and losenges in red. Within each group, cards are numbered 1-13. The ones tend to display large versions of the symbol, and 11 through 13 are the face cards, with pictures of anyone who doesn't hold political office (probably someone working for the card publisher), a queen (or some other female officeholder or officeholder's wife) in ceremonial dress, and a king (or some other male officeholder) in ceremonial dress. If he's paying for drawings he'd rather just draw them himself or have some placeholders, though. There's also two 'free' cards, one in each color, which usually have advertisements for the publisher.