Parasitosis

[Rev Solomon]

Continued from Be Careful What You Wish For

"Shuttle Exodus to Challenger flight control, we're clear of the planet's atmosphere. Can I confirm that you have a landing zone cleared for me and medical personnel standing by for our arrival?"

"Roger that, Exodus, medics are on their way now. You have priority clearance to Docking Bay 2."

The Theta-class T-2c shuttle rocketed out of Lethe's upper atmosphere and toward the Venator-class Star Destroyer Challenger. She'd had to abandon her original mission of ferrying supplies from the surface of the junk world up to the ailing Wheel; instead, she now carried Reverend Solomon and two very frightened padawans, one of them clinging to life by the tips of her claws.

Solomon plotted the approach vector to the Challenger's landing bay and swiveled in his seat to look back into the shuttle's small medbay. "Just a little longer, Akasha. Kala, how's she doing?"

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha Khan was no longer writhing under the pain of the toxic little creature that was still sinking its way into her chest - she didn't have the strength anymore, though she certainly felt the pain. The pain was the only thing keeping her awake - she felt as if she were lying on a knife's edge with a black abyss to either side. If she fell asleep now, she would probably never wake again.

"Kala," she said, her voice a near inaudible croak, her eyes rheumy and unfocused. "Don't... don't take the pain away. I need it... its strength..."

The Orryxian feebly gripped Kala's hand with her paw, her claws leaving needlepricks in the Nautolan halfbreed's skin.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

More than anything else, Kala hated feeling useless. And since Anbira's arrival and their subsequent rescue, that's all she did feel. Red-rimmed eyes had dimmed from bright lilac to a dull, dark grey-blue as the steady trickle of tears had finally stopped.

She was kneeling beside Akasha, a hand on the Orryxian's forehead, eyes half closed as she monitored with her senses. That told her far more than the tiny monitors that clicked and whirred around them both. It...wasn't good. The creature glowed a sickly red, threaded through with a pulsing black. It was the inky black that reacted and pulsed more strongly as Akasha faded further, and each time Kala tried managing her best friend's pain.

It was looking more and more grim, and forced her voice to tremble as she answered the Reverend. "Not good...the thing is growing stronger and she's weakening faster. Nothing I can do is helping...only makes it worse."

The hand holding one of Akasha's paws felt a slight bit of movement, and a moment later, the faint sting of pain as claws dug in, though weakly. "Ok...Ok, I'll stop. I'm sorry, Akasha...sorry I even spotted that stupid alley to begin with." Kala whispered, pulling her senses and the faint trickle of energy back into herself.

[Chaz de Coventina]

A medical emergency.

Under the right circumstance, those words were capable of inciting acute panic in even the most experienced physician. Contrary to the picture the holodramas painted, at it's heart medicine was a simple game of like meeting like. Figuring out the way the pieces of the diagnostic puzzle slotted together was a refreshing mental round of fun but after that it became a dance with steps that were so familiar they could have been performed in a drug-induced coma. Discover A. A responds to B, C, and D. Combine A with any of the prescribed options and receive outcome E. If E is not the desired outcome, return to step two and choose from remaining options until advantageous solution is found.

But the E-word changed everything. Emergency meant that the single most valuable weapon in a doctor's arsenal was being taken away: time.

"Do we have an ETA?" Chaz de Coventina, freshly commandeered from the Challenger's central medbay, traveling at a brisk jog that forced the Alliance officer charged with guiding her to move awkwardly in his uniform in order to keep up. There was a look of quiet readiness on the medic's sharp-angled face, an anxious bend to her mouth that wasn't altogether nervous but rather suggested that the misanthropic woman might be looking forward to whatever terror was on it's way.

"They're docking now, Doctor."

"And no further details on what exactly to expect?"

"All I know is that it's an emer--"

"Nevermind," Chaz interrupted, grip tightening on a small trauma medpac. "It's more of a surprise, this way. I love surprises."

She smiled grimly at his bewildered expression and picked up the pace, Docking Bay 2 drawing closer n the distance.

[Rev Solomon]

The Exodus rose though the gap in the belly of the Challenger that opened into Docking Bay 2 and swung onto the nearest open landing pad with an urgency that strained the old Theta's repulsorlifts. No sooner had the craft touched down than its ventral hatch began grinding open. Moments later, Solomon and Kala appeared, guiding a hover gurney down the gangway and onto the flight deck. On the gurney was a stricken adolescent Orryxian female, marginally conscious, with a loathsome, tumor-like creature sucking greedily at an open wound in her chest.

"Which way to the medbay?" Solomon shouted. A deck crewman pointed to the large double doors where Dr. de Coventina and a small retinue of medical personnel were bursting forth.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

The sound of Doctor DeCoventina's voice issuing crisp orders was the most welcome sound she could imagine in that moment. Only Ilias, a Jedi Healer himself, would have been more welcome.

"Doctor DeCoventina?!" Kala said, her voice a mixture of terror and guilt, forcing her words to emerge stuttered and uneven. "It...its an orbalisk...its called an orbalisk...and...elec...eletricity...seems to work on it...couil...could...couldn't gen-generate enough of a charge...with my practice saber...b-b-but an-anythingelsejustmakesitworseincludingForceenergy.. ."

The last emerged in a rush as Akasha's hold on her hand tightened and her friend gasped in agony. "This-is-all-my-fault." she whispered faintly in Nautolan, and refused to be parted from Akasha's side.

[Chaz de Coventina]

Kala was trying her best to give an accurate report but the combined effort of her stammers and the momentary paralysis born from the sight of the grotesque, pulsing mass entrenched within a bloody nest of fur and flesh meant that Chaz gathered very little from the exchange.

"A what?" She snapped, auscultator flying from it's limp perch around her neck and settling into position like a well-trained sandhawk. The smooth, rounded flat of the mechanism pressed against Akasha's chest, transported the shallow, gurgling echo of her breath into the doctor's ears. There was a distant drum of heartbeat in the background, arrhythmic and much too faint to be of any reassurance.

Chaz brushed off an offered wrap containing gloves - they would take too long to put on - and grabbed the other side of the gurney with one hand to help throttle it along. Her free member lifted the medpac to her mouth and she tore it open with urgent teeth, spitting the stiff scrap of material out onto the floor as they went.

"What's her name?!" Chaz barked at Solomon, dumping out the contents of the emergency kit onto an arc of space near the Orryxian's hip. "How long has she been like this?"

[Rev Solomon]

"Her name is Akasha Khan," Solomon replied. "The parasite is an orbalisk. It bit her just under an hour ago, she's been declining ever since."

Even as he pushed the gurney along the preacher was trying to reach into Akasha with his senses, chart the progress of the orbalisk's toxins, maybe even lend his strength to the girl as Kala had been trying to do, but the aura of the Dark Side surrounding the cancerous creature snapped back at him like a viper coiled around its prey. He could only hope and pray that a medical solution would present itself where the Force had run dry.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha's breathing was rapid and shallow, and the people around her looked indistinct against the glare of the rapidly passing light panels in the ceiling, their voices like a garbled comm channel playing from the bottom of a well. But the pain - the pain was still sharp and fresh and irreverently cruel.

"Kala," she gasped, searching for the pale glint of her roommate's hair. "Kala, the Dark Side... it's too strong. Can't... can't fight it. Can't fight..."

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

For a split second, Akasha's voice echoed in her mind as if it were Rin's. She found her voice paralyzed and her darkened eyes wide with terror and remembrance. Her twin had sounded just like that before he died in her arms, cut down by the stormtroopers hunting their father. His spirit as broken as his body was.

The memory made her pain double, but it snapped her back into herself.

"That's not true, Akasha...its never too strong. Your anchor in the light is so much stronger. Stay with me, and I swear I'll fix this somehow. You can't leave me alone now...you can't." Kala said as she nodded, her free hand gently stroking Akasha's forehead.

Swallowing hard, she lifted her gaze to the Doctor once more. "I think the key is electricity. I rewired my practice saber in an effort to get one to stop attacking me and it worked, but not for long. I think if you can generate enough of a charge we can get it to let go before it reaches...bef...before it reaches her heart."

[Chaz de Coventina]

Just under an hour. The fact that she was still alive was startling, judging by the advanced state of toxic shock her system was leveled at.

"Akasha," Chaz gave Kala a brief nod before leaning over until she was within the girl's line of sight, made her work a little to make static eye contact. The gurney's compressors whined as they hurtled around a corner. "Akasha, can you look at me? There we go - good, that's good."

Actually, it was about as far from good as it got. Akasha's pupils were blown, twin orbs of inky black dilation that were glazed over in disoriented fervor. Was she hallucinating? Memory supplied an overheard whisp of the disjointed conversation between the two girls, something undecipherable about light and dark and Chaz nearly chalked it up to symptomatic manifestations before remembering that this was a space convoy, where strange and mysterious creatures existed. Like Jedi.

"I'm going to give you something, Akasha, an isotonic injection to boost your fluids," even as the words were spoken, a hypodermic injector was pressed against the limp neck and depressed with a sharp hiss. In her current state, Akasha was probably unaware of anything that Chaz was saying but that was alright; talking out loud was a way of thinking through a hailstorm in logical sequence and would allow for one of the secondaries to make notations.

The medbay's dim glow was like a beacon calling them forth and they raced toward it, unapologetically cutting off a squad of technicians approaching from an adjacent corridor.

"Out of the way!" Chaz yelled. "Kala, run ahead and power up a defib unit - not exam room three, nothing in there works... You, man - whoever you are - has Akasha been given anything?"

[Rev Solomon]

"Two CCs of cardinex," Solomon replied, "and she swallowed a few mouthfuls of hydrade when she was still upright."

Two CCs wasn't enough for an infection like this, and Solomon wasn't sure any quantity of conventional medicine would loosen the creature's grip on her. There was a very real possibility that Akasha could die from septic shock, but the orbalisk was a parasite, and surely that wasn't its design. It was using its venom to acclimate the girl's body to its own, to turn her into a sessile breeding ground for its own offspring.

Unless, of course, Akasha was strong enough in the Dark Side to establish a symbiosis with the creature. But she was a Jedi padawan - surely that was impossible?

Solomon cast a worried look at the Orryxian girl's face. Her eyes were only sluggishly following her surroundings, and in Kala's absence her paws had returned to her sides, and her claws were making ribbons of the gurney cushion beneath her.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"I'll be inside, Akasha, don't worry..."

Gently but quickly prying Akasha's claws from her hand, she nodded to the Doctor and Reverend Solomon before taking off like a shot. Ignoring the sting of pain and the blood trickling down her wrist, she barely waved to Magda before racing into the nearest exam room, which was number two.

She slapped the lights up with her elbow as she entered and took a split second to orient herself properly. Mounted on the wall at the head of the exam table, the defib unit mercifully whirred to life. Kala couldn't stand to watch the charge build so she busied herself setting out everything she thought might be useful. It gave her a purpose, and for a few minutes, she forgot about the pain building in the Force pathways of her mind.

Umm, Kala...your mind...there's...its not right...

Don't have time right now, Rin...Akasha's dying...all I've got is a headache...

But its not a headache, Kala...its your gif-

Kala slammed a mental door closed before he could finish, and continued her frantic preparations.

[Chaz de Coventina]

They careened into the medbay with urgency a thick cloud around them. Magda's copper skin paled to a dull iron shade at the intensity of the party. She took one glance at the prone padawan and the fierce expression on de Coventina's face and began to move, scattering a stack of slim datapads on the desk in her rush. Before it was demanded, she drew the privacy partition that was scarcely ever used, creating a duraplast barrier between the bank of exam rooms and the clinic foyer.

"One," one of the medical techs prepared to help hoist the limp felinoid off of the gurney and onto the exam table. "Two..."

"Now!" Chaz slipped her arms beneath Akasha's trunk and lifted, the girl's frame a dead weight that was unsettlingly still as they placed her on sterile sheets. Only the orbalisk moved, quivering greedily, a living horror that leeched repulsively in the girl's chest.

"Start a line, two units of hespan," a chorus of beeps and squeals erupted in the room, vital monitors springing to life as Chaz attatched probes to one of Akasha's arms. She released a clasp at the head of the table and motioned for Solomon to do the same on the other side; it gave way and with a heave the uppermost half began to rise, elevating the fading patient until she was as upright as her wound would allow.

"We need an antivenom ampule and for blast's sake, someone pull up her records so we're not hit with anaphylaxis," Chaz instructed, yanking open a drawer and whirling back with a vibroscalpel in one hand and a slim-toothed cylinder in the other. This latter was tossed to Solomon with little ceremony.

"Shave around the wound. We've got to slow the spread of whatever the hell that think is releasing otherwise her heart won't be strong enough to survive a shock. Kala, what's it up to?"

[Akasha Khan]

Gentle fingers peeled away the bloody strips of Akasha's shirt surrounding the orbalisk, and then there was a high-pitched electric buzz that she couldn't identify until she felt the razor scraping her chest, taking large mats of black fur with every pass. The exposed skin was deathly-white with veins of red surrounding the wound like a spiderweb. The stink of necrosis was already heavy in the air.

Solomon's shape was a great, indistinct shadow leaning over her from one side, and on the other she could see people she didn't know in medical scrubs scurrying around like ants whose hill had been kicked over. Kala's hair was a curtain of shimmering gold over by a bank of glowing medical instruments. But there was another presence in the room she couldn't account for, someone standing in the back behind Solomon and the bustling orderlies. Akasha caught glimpses of the figure now and then, and she tried to crane her neck to see around the moving bodies, but her muscles wouldn't respond--

A gap opened up across the medbay, and standing against the wall she saw a woman in a black cloak with a pale face and a crooked smile on her blood-red lips.

"No... No!"

Akasha's glazed eyes went wide, and her heartrate spiked as she writhed on the medical bed, kicking feebly with her feet to escape the specter of Idesca Corvera.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

"Two fifty and climbing."

Kala replied quickly, turning back towards the medical bed as Akasha's skin was carefully shaved for a clearer view of the wound. It looked dead already, and reminded her vividly of the witch's own decayed, infested body. The horror of it brought her a strange sense of calm she wasn't expecting, as if she were accustomed to dealing with such a thing.

Stepping up to the bed, she took Akasha's paw in her hand, holding it tight as she tried to brush her mind against her friend's in a vain effort to calm her. Hoping that the communication wouldn't make the orbalisk work any faster, since it wasn't directly impacting it.

//Akasha...its alright...you're safe...I'm right here...try and relax...//

[Chaz de Coventina]

"Damn it - restrain her!" Chaz roared, catching hold of one of the girl's weakly flailing limbs. The antivenom vial was knocked aside and clattered to the floor, rolling beneath the table in momentary freedom as priorities shifted. Panicked writhing wasn't only disruptive to procedural measures, it put Akasha at risk - any motion would only serve to advance the spread of deadly toxin in her body.

Whatever it was that had gotten Akasha's dander up had certainly unearthed a reservoir of fear. It cast a sheen over her unfocused eyes, bright and coloured with an instinctively resistant determination that terror brought.

Someone pressed the ampoule into her hand and Chaz didn't hesitate, now that sturdy restraints pinned the girl immobile. She grasped Akasha's chin with one hand, the other plunging the attached sharp of the serum into her neck. "Keep talking to her, Kala, bloody well yell if you have to but just get through. When that charge reaches 300, grab the paddles."

Truthfully, Chaz didn't expect the serum to make a difference, not this far along. Without a knowledge of the venom's active molecules, there was no guarantee that any impact would be made but if all you had to throw at a charging rancor were rocks, then you damn well threw them and threw them hard.

Solomon had cleared a neat square around the wound and with speedy precision, Chaz began to slice away at the festering tissue. There was no need for an anesthetic; Akasha would feel nothing. Beneath the scalpel blade the sickly grey flesh gave way easily, coming apart in twisted ribbons. Destroyed though it was, the skin around the wound had been saturated with the orbalisk's influence and would only intensify the attack on Akasha's system if left alone.

[Akasha Khan]

Akasha fought against the restraints only until exhaustion and agony caught up with her, but Idesca remained. The witch raised a pale, slender finger to her lips.

The Orryxian flinched as something closed around her paw, but then she heard Kala's voice, or rather felt it press the words gently against her mind.

"Kala," Akasha whispered, "she's here. Idesca. Her spirit is here. She's... she's taunting me."

[Rev Solomon]

A cold shadow moved over Solomon's heart at the sound of Akasha's voice. He moved around to the headboard of the medical bed, out of the way of Chaz and all the other medics working furiously to keep the girl alive.

"Doctor, if you don't need more from me, I'd like to help her in my own way."

With only the most perfunctory of nods from the doctor, Solomon reached down over the headboard and laid two of his fingers against the sweat-damp fur on Akasha's forehead.

"Merciful God in heaven," he muttered, "look with pity on this your child. Save her from the designs of the enemy, that the Dark may have no hold on her."

His own influence crept through Akasha's body, working to strengthen the parts of her that the orbalisk had not yet corrupted.

[Kala'ndryl Ryj]

Kala's gaze narrowed as she took a quick glance around the room, looking past the people she was accustomed to seeing there. Looking to the walls and the corners, her gaze missing nothing...except...was there a shadow that didn't quite belong on the back wall, or was she just hoping it was there?

Well, if it was, she hoped it could hear.

"I know, Akasha. Tell the bitch I can smell her. And she can't frakking have you. Not on my watch." Kala said sharply, watching Solomon and feeling the energy he was trying to bolster Akasha with. She only hoped it would help as long the orbalisk wasn't affected directly.

Lilac eyes blazed brightly as she looked up at the monitors, watching as the defib unit finally hit three hundred on its charge meter. Nodding more to herself, she let go of Akasha's hand and reached for the paddles. An alert tech quickly restrained the shaking paw, a fact for which the blonde was thankful.

This wasn't going to be pleasant, even if it worked the way she thought it would.

But second guessing herself wasn't going to help matters. Kala believed it would work, and she would be damned if let her best friend go without a hell of a fight.

"Clear!"

Paddles placed squarely on the orbalisk's back, she pressed the buttons and watched as the orbalish thrashed and stilled for several seconds.

It didn't let go.

Panic gripped her heart as she stared up at the defib unit and it helpfully pressed its own button and quickly recharged.