Fraser is honestly also not sure he’s equipped to help with situations right now, given how he probably shouldn’t be spending time in other patients’ rooms, in case the iso precautions aren’t sufficient.

...It turns out it is the kind of situation where his help is both safe and badly needed, though. There's a kid in the ER - actually there are a couple of college kids in the ER, motor vehicle accident, drunk driver and even drunker passenger.

The driver has severe injuries to his legs and pelvis and is being stabilized for the OR. The passenger has a catastrophic head injury and is being assessed as a potential organ donor, assuming they can keep him alive that long. Fraser shouldn't help with direct patient care for either of them, but the unit is badly in need of someone whose patient is stable enough that they can afford to park at a desk and take charge of the enormous quantity of phone calls and paperwork required. 

Fraser can at least park himself in Pod Two so he can keep an eye on his patient and make sure she doesn't start bleeding from her eyeballs or something else horrifying. He gives her an apologetic look through the window above the little desk and then gets to work. 

A few minutes later, Samora might be able to catch a glimpse of the potential-organ-donor patient being hustled down the hall past Pod Two to the one admit room in Pod Three, mostly naked with just a sheet over his lower half and festooned with tubes and wires. (The other kid is likely to be in the OR half the night and they're hoping to transfer out one of the more stable patients before he's back.) 

Oh no, that man is either dead or very close to it. If he passes within 25 feet of her she hits him with a Stabilize and hopes she was fast enough.

(He will just barely come within 25 feet of her.)

Fraser gives her an apologetic half-wave and relocates his clipboard of paperwork to Pod Three where he can carry out fetch requests as well as phone calls, though based on what he overheard he’s really not sure if they can keep the kid’s body technically alive long enough for any of this to matter.

….Apparently they can, though? The fluids or pressors or something must be doing their job, and obviously this poor dumb 18-year-old idiot (he wouldn’t say that out loud but someone can still be an idiot even if they’re dying) has a great, healthy heart. His blood pressure and heart rate are hanging in there. O2 sat is 100%; it must have been a difficult intubation, his face is pretty messed up, but nothing wrong with his lungs. Just his brain, which - for him - is tragically the only part that matters.

It’s going to be a long night.

Fraser belatedly realizes that he doubts anyone ever explained to Samora how to use a call bell, but Lisa will be nearby and she can, like, yell, hopefully she’ll be able to get someone’s attention if she desperately needs something?

The only thing she needs is for her goddess to be able to reach her here. She tries to remember anything else about Arcadia beyond the fact that it exists and comes up empty. She knows there's a place called the Mana Wastes where magic works differently, but she doesn't know what the differences are and she doesn't recall ever hearing that nobody worships the gods there.

Sometime after two am, Emma comes over to Pod Three looking moderately upset and stops by Fraser's chair. 

He looks up. "- What'd I do this time?" 

     "Not you." Sigh. "ER janitor from day shift showed up again there just now. Because he started vomiting horrible slime." 

Fraser sits bolt upright. “Well that’s bad. Is he -" 

     "Well, so far it's no worse than flu-like symptoms and exceptionally disgusting puke. They’re admitting him to an iso room on telemetry and hitting him with antibiotics. …He admits he probably touched the sword without gloves when he was tidying up the trauma bay, and might not have washed his hands right away.”

“Eeesh. - we do know Marian doesn’t have it?”

    “Not so far - she’s sleeping over in one of the call rooms, said it’s a long bike ride to her place and she doesn’t think she could make it if she were sick and wouldn’t want to put an ambulance crew at risk. So I think we’ll know right away if she does start having symptoms.” Sigh. “Really hope she doesn’t, the census is really heavy and 6C is short-staffed and wants to hog most of the travelers.”

”Yeah.” Also Samora already knows Marian and they’ve established they can communicate. Also Samora would probably feel terrible if it turns out she gave Marian the slime disease. He frowns. “Should we tell her? The patient, I mean.”

     “Huh?” Emma looks startled. “What for? Seems like it’d just stress her out.”

“I think she’d want us to tell her.” Also maybe she’s a Dungeons & Dragons “cleric” who can heal people once the sun is up.

    Shrug. “Go nuts, I guess.”

It in fact takes Fraser almost another hour to extricate himself from the situation in Pod Three; telling Samora seems less urgent than organ donation logistics. He brings another bottle of IV Tylenol when he heads over, she’s due for it and he bets her fever is back up.

What’s the slime situation like? How does Samora seem to be doing otherwise? He won’t wake her if she asleep but he kinda expects she won’t be.

Her fever is back up, but she's awake and alert and gives him a little wave when he walks in. Her various slime containment devices have been accumulating slime at about the same speed as before, maybe a little bit faster.

She can get Tylenol, and he'll do another round of very careful, very PPE'd slime disposal - better than letting it overflow the drains and ileostomy bag and get everywhere. Ugh. He delegated her midnight antibiotic dose to Lisa, and confirmed in the chart that it was given, and so far they still have no idea if the antibiotics are helping at all. She doesn't seem to be deteriorating further, at least not quickly, but the rate of slime coming out of her cannot possibly be sustainable. 

...And then to try to communicate the upsetting news that her disease is, in fact, contagious, and someone else has it.

Maybe he can do this entirely via Google Images and get away without drawing? He'll drag the computer-on-wheels back over to where she can see the screen, pull up the image of the sword, and then google for "janitor mopping a floor" and point at them and act out someone picking up an invisible sword, and - then an image of an hourglass and a sunset, to convey time passing, and then an image of someone throwing up. He points at one of her drains full of slime. Does that convey it?

Oh no, the person who cleaned her sword got sick? That's--she needs to heal them before they spread it to anyone else. She was already planning to prepare two copies of Remove Disease tomorrow, if she gets spells. Maybe she should hold off on using one on herself until she's cured the other person, in case she needs two tries? But they won't let her out of quarantine until she's cured herself, and the other person is probably in quarantine too now and they might not be able to bring them to her. She can leave a fourth circle slot open and put a third Remove Disease in it if one attempt fails, delay the Sending to her party for a day . . . 

Samora nods stiffly. Inheritor, she prays, please help me make things right. Don't let these people suffer for their kindness to me. It's not the kind of prayer that gets answered.

Yeah. It sucks. Fraser also wishes that this wasn't the case. At least Marian isn't sick (yet), he suspects Samora would feel even worse about that. 

He bows his head apologetically and then should probably duck out again to go do MORE PHONE CALLS. There are a lot of tests that need to be done that are an enormous hassle to try to arrange when it's three o'clock in the morning, but - it's currently looking hopeful that they might be able to match organs to at least five different people on waiting lists. 

At 5:30 am they finally get ONE PIECE of good news: the cultures the lab grew overnight of the novel pathogen do, in fact, seem to be susceptible to the standard broad-spectrum antibiotics. Not that susceptible; the piperacillin-tazobactam is maybe 40% effective and the vancomycin is a little more effective than that; but it's not literally useless, or at least shouldn't be. 

That's something! Samora has still definitely gotten worse since being on antibiotics, but she's contending with a lot, given the nasty gut wound and the massive blood loss and shock that would definitely have weakened her initial immune response to anything, the janitor is less sick than that... 

Also no one said anything about the janitor bleeding from his eyeballs so it's probably not the Slimy Doom after all (well, of course it isn't, because that theory is batshit, but it still feels reassuring to Fraser's brain.) 

This doesn't seem worth bothering Samora about to try to communicate; Marian can attempt it on day shift if she wants. Which is now, finally, thankfully approaching. It's been a long night. 

It would be so nice actually if all their problems went away when the sun comes up

He makes phone calls and waits for the night to be over. 

Samora's slime production slows down a bit. Her face stays grim. She takes more notes in her foreign language and doesn't say anything to Fraser.

(The plan to prepare Tongues was based on thinking she might want to escape and possibly bring people with her; now that that's not the plan she can instead prepare a Share Language, which will only get her communication with one person but is second circle instead of fourth and lasts all day. That makes room for either an additional Remove Disease or a Restoration . . . )

Marian is on the unit at 6:30 am. She had a deeply unsatisfying but very thorough shower last night in the sit-down shower unit on 3C med/surg, and is wearing OR scrubs and her hair in a lazy bun. She…honestly might have gotten more sleep last night than she would have if she had biked home? She doesn’t bring her laptop to work so her opportunities for wasting time on the Internet were more limited, and she went to sleep at like 9 pm. 

The cafeteria isn’t open yet. She’s going to make herself a bad coffee with three of the wimpy instant coffee packets from the patient kitchen, and go see how Fraser’s night has been.

….Exciting, it looks like. Fortunately the excitement doesn't seem to have been centered on Samora's room? Samora has a new NG tube - and ewwwwwww indeed the wall receptacle has a concerning quantity of slime in it, which gives Marian an uncomfortably clear idea of what prompted that decision - and it looks like her fever is creeping up like it does when it's been hours since her last Tylenol, but other than that she doesn't look worse? Marian will give her a little wave and then sidle past Pod Two to check out what's going on in Pod Three. 

(Sunrise will be in about twenty minutes, though Samora's room continues not to have an exterior-facing window and she won't be able to see the sky starting to get lighter. She might get a hint that daylight is approaching from the incoming day shift nurses, though, or the fact that at 6:35 the charge nurse flicks all the overhead lights back on.) 

(If she could see the sky she would know exactly how long to hope for, but that wouldn't change much either way.)

Fraser is indeed totally in Pod Three along with what feels like half the staff on the unit. Marian slides up behind him. "Hey. I'm back."

"And not sick! Congrats on your hand hygiene meeting the bar, apparently." Fraser has a pdf of one of the hospital protocols up on the computer and is referring to it while making notes on a clipboard of paperwork. 

"What's going on– wait, shit, did someone else get sick?" Oh nooooooo. 

"Guess we're starting with the bad news, then - yeah but he was being a dumbass. ER janitor, touched the sword and didn't wash his hands. - antibiotics do work on it though, that's the good news. Not super well but it's got some sensitivity to piptaz and vanco." Fraser scoots back his chair. "Also. Please, please, next time you have a nice young lady and a Foley to be d'c'd, can you please do it yourself? So I don't have to feel like a creep?" 

"Oh." Yeah that had not even slightly occurred to Marian as a problem! "...Sorry." 

Shrug. "We're all good now, just, she -" Still sitting back in the chair, he does a dramatic impression of Samora looking alarmed and crossing her legs protectively. "- Oh, also, before I forget, what was the D&D alignment chart about? The one Samora drew. I didn't want to chuck it in case you were referring to it for something but it was very mysterious." 

"The wha– oh, the sandwich meme thing?" Riiiiiight of course the sandwich meme is a reference to something pre-existing. Marian might even have ever read, like, a fanfic or online serial or something that had references to D&D alignments, it's just that fanfic sort of happens in a different mental universe from work and it would really not have occurred to her to make that connection.

...She's still not making the connection, actually. 'Samora drew a D&D alignment chart' explains so few things! "Uh, we couldn't figure it out either. Are you sure it's that?" 

Shrug. "I mean, no, but Dr Chadha seems pretty sure, and he actually plays tabletop games. Which, by the way, if you ever did want a hobby, I bet you could ask him about joining a game and he'd probably propose marriage."