synflux | open | first medibay shift

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open | first medibay shift

WHO: Ratchet and you!
WHAT: First shift in the medibay
WHERE: The medibay
WHEN: early in March
WARNINGS: Medical stuff? None otherwise

If you have a reason to come into the medical bay, there's a new face around. Ratchet is acquainting himself with the place, learning where things are, triage protocols, and building a workspace for his ten-foot self over in the corner so he doesn't have to hunch over the tables they already have.

He will also be in his human form, with his ambulance body tucked into a corner, helping to tidy the smaller, regular-sized instruments and supplies that are used regularly.

If he isn't doing that, he'll be sitting and reading up on organic medicine, just in case anybody squishy comes in with an injury of some sort. He knows the real test will be the next kaiju fight, but for now he's just making himself comfortable. Please feel free to disturb him.

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"Oh, yeah, rush the brain scan, that's a great idea," Ratchet mutters, immune to the swearing. He starts taking scans, laying a broad hand on Johnny's chest to keep him still as the machine runs.

"Describe your symptoms to me, please--all of them, not just the ones I can divine by looking at you."

"I heard that," Johnny says before calming down a bit. All joking aside, this is not a laughing matter. His head hurts badly, and he can feel blood and bile at the back of his throat. He's in awful shape, and Johnny has no idea why.

If he is supposed to be an engram, how did LILITH get him? According to his memory, he was last lodged deep within V's cyberbrain. Dex shot his host in the head, and the Relic triggered immediately. If it hadn't been for the Relic, V would have died immediately, but he didn't. Suddenly Johnny found himself trapped within the merc's mind, like a prisoner. No one could see or hear him. It was like Johnny was a ghost trapped within a shell.

"Well, you already know about the nausea." Johnny sighs, closing his eyes briefly. "The migraines began soon after, along with the tears in my vision. Everything becomes hazy and...weird." He knows that's not the most descriptive description but it's difficult to explain the fogginess that overtakes him from time to time.

"It's like my mind is trying to connect somewhere." He whispers quietly, his face scrunching up in pain again. "T-Trying to connect to the host but I can't. V isn't here."

That scan might produce some fascinating results. Johnny, despite being an engram, is primarily biological. However, he does have some strange nanomachines running through his bloodstream. That, plus the fact that the majority of his brain appears to be cybernetic at this stage. Whether or not this is cause for concern is unknown; however, LILITH did have to reassemble his body piece by piece.

Edited 2025-03-12 01:11 (UTC)

"Well, your brain isn't bleeding inside your skull, so that's good," Ratchet says encouragingly, patting Johnny's shoulder very lightly. "I am seeing heightened electrical activity in places that don't make a lot of sense, but I've never looked at a cybernetic brain like this before. It doesn't look like you're having a seizure, but there are a few wires definitely crossed. Otherwise, there's nothing physically wrong with you."

Ratchet collects the painkillers into a tiny cup and adds a couple of anti-nausea pills before he sets them in front of Johnny, not pushing him to sit up and take them just yet.

"From what you're telling me it has to be the chip, unless the cybernetic part of your brain is also malfunctioning and I don't think it is. I wish I knew what it looked like when you weren't having migraines and altered vision so I could see exactly what I was working with." He frowns, feeling helpless and refusing to show it. "For now, just try to relax. Is there a way for me to access the chip to see if it's malfunctioning?"

If Johnny's brain was bleeding, he would very likely never leave the intensive care unit. There was only so much his brain could handle at this point, especially after all of the stress and anguish. Having his body being reforged by some superpowered AI, only to place his engram within it says a lot. It wouldn't be surprising LILITH used the DNA code from the engram to clone his new body. That certainly wouldn't be the first time that happened.

"So everything green, huh?" Johnny asks as he cautiously attempts to sit up. He's still dizzy as hell, but he doesn't feel like vomiting up anymore. "I guess I have to get back here a bit later when I feel better." He grumbles before reaching for the painkillers. He chokes down the pills without hesitation and without using any water. It's clear he's used to downing pills like this on a fly.

"Um, I guess so." Johnny murmurs as he considers how to respond to that inquiry. "Maybe you could sync with my brain and take a look?" He advises, drawing a black USB cable from his metallic palm. Despite the enhanced technology, his arm continues to use dated cyberware from the early 2020s.

"Feel like taking a risk?"

Ratchet watches him swallow the pills dry and tries not to wince, helping Johnny sit up and steadying him with a hand on his shoulder. He stares down at the USB cable for a moment before he transforms a set of ports out of his wrist and picks it up.

"Hell. Sure, why not, let's give it a shot."

The second Ratchet jacks in; he's in for a treat. Not a good treat, either. He's in for a world of hurt as that strange blurriness instantly takes effect of the autobot. It happens so quickly, almost as if the big guy just loaded a virus into his system. That's the Relic in its full glory. It's hastily trying to take over the autobot's body in record time. Whatever firewalls or anti-virus software Ratchet has is quickly losing ground against whatever the fuck Johnny has floating around in his cyberbrain.

"Holy shit--" Wait a minute. Why does everything look so much smaller now? Johnny pauses for a moment as he glances around the medibay. His vision cuts out for a second but before he knows it, it's back to normal. It flickers in and out like this for a while before a strange sequence of green code suddenly flashes across his eyes. Then suddenly, everything looks all small again.

"Doc, did you bother to upgrade your software before coming here? Cause holy shit, this feels weird." Johnny suddenly pauses as he glances down at his hand or rather, what he assumes to be his hand. It looks all metallic and blocky all of a sudden. It looks absolutely nothing like his cybernetic arm.

"...Doc?" He glances around again in dismay. Why does it feel like he just grew ten-foot-tall all of a sudden?

Well, that wasn't a good idea, Ratchet thinks faintly, his vision glitching and his firewalls tumbling down. He braces himself on the edge of the slab and tries to steady himself again but everything cascades into a whirlwind of static and vertigo for a moment before--

He's suddenly staring up at... himself. He reaches up to rub his nose--his nose itches, and it's soft under his fingers when he scratches it. He looks down at his own body--Johnny's body--then back up at his own body in mute horror.

"What the hell is going on?" he demands in an unfamiliar voice, his head pounding. He rubs an eye, feeling the weird give of it under the heel of his palm, and snatches his hand away again. Everything is so squishy. "What happened?"

What. The. Fuck.

Johnny almost does a doubletake as he sees himself peering up at him. It's similar to the times when V looked in the mirror and saw Johnny staring back at him. It's strange, extremely strange, and even stranger because he's currently trapped within a ten-foot-tall robot. Johnny is almost too startled to speak, fully immobilized inside Ratchet's body.

He doesn't know what to do. Like, what the heck is he supposed to do? Johnny has no idea what is going on, and he is currently experiencing a sudden bout of vertigo. Everything feels so far away and little. Being this tall is terrifying, and Johnny feels as if he's about to throw up.

"Oh my god, I need a fucking smoke." He curses before searching around for that 'loosie' that Ratchet placed down on the table.

"Gimmie a light, doc." He grumbles as he places the cigarette in between his, well, Ratchet's lips. "It's going to be a long night."

"The hell you do, you're not putting that garbage through my ventilation system," Ratchet snarls, scrabbling to his feet on the medical slab and snatching the cigarette out of his--Johnny's--his mouth. He has to steady himself after the sudden movement. Being in a human body is a little similar to being in his human-shaped holoform, except he can feel his heart beating (too fast) and the skin on the palms of his hands is sweaty. Johnny wasn't lying, he did have a motherfucker of a headache.

Ratchet is about to yell at Johnny some more before he feels his nose itch again. Before he can scratch it there's a sudden pressure behind his eyes, and way faster than Ratchet can do anything about it he's taken a huge breath, his diaphragm tensed, and his face explodes.

It knocks him off his already wobbly feet to sit back down hard on the slab, stunned for a moment as he brings his hands up to his face, feeling frantically for anything that's gone wrong--but all the bits are where they should be, and the tickle in his nose is gone. He sniffs, making sure his sinuses are intact, before he looks up at Johnny with watery eyes, his voice a little strangled when he speaks.

"Change it back!" he demands, sounding a little panicky now. His brain registers that what happened to him was probably a 'sneeze,' and wasn't life threatening, but he didn't want to take any chances with someone else's meatsack. "Change it back right now, get me out of here!"

What is with the doc snatching his cigs like that?!

Johnny lets out an annoyed grumble once he is yet again denied a decent smoke. All he wants to do is will the nausea away and hopefully stop the chip in his brain from glitching out. That's all. However, Ratchet here, or rather...well, himself, is determined to make everything much harder for him. It's bad enough that they've magically switched bodies but now Ratchet is making him look like a complete idiot.

"Ugh." Johnny let out a disgusted sigh once Ratchet sneezed all over him. Technically, that's him doing all that with Ratchet's consciousness trapped within his body but it's still gross.

"I look fucking pathetic." He muses aloud as he leans down a little to get a better look at himself. "Runny nose, red eyes, probably a scratchy throat too. Maybe I'm sick?" It seems the tables have turned, Johnny is playing the role of the robot doctor and poor Ratchet is stuck in his handsome meat suit.

"Well, at least I'm still hot." Johnny couldn't help but grin a little as he looked for the USB port in Ratchet's arm.

"Alright, calm down! Let's just do the data swap shit again and see what happens."

What is with Johnny trying to smoke in the medibay!?

"Well I'm sorry your small, fleshy body is malfunctioning, but it's not my fault," Ratchet says indignantly when Johnny looks down at him in disgust. He gets up again and stands his ground as Johnny leans down, but he has a healthy new appreciation for how intimidating it is when he does that, to say the least.

He does feel strange, his throat tight and his head pounding, a pervasive ache all over his body--he thought this might just be how organics felt all the time, but apparently not. "You have a communicable disease?" he demands, wracking his brain to try to remember this set of symptoms, but it's not like he can just access his memory banks exactly the way he usually would. Everything in here is weird and fuzzy and imprecise. "I'll get you some decongestants, give me a moment."

He hops down off the slab--and my, he really is very tall compared to most organics, it's more obvious like this--and makes his way over to the now-regular-sized cabinets, getting a couple of pills and taking them with water. He's focused on his patient first, like usual, no matter how much he wants to get out of this body. The headache is starting to subside, at least, along with the nausea, so at least the drugs are working. He makes his way back over and sits down on the edge of the slab, looking shaken but a little more in control of himself. He eyes the USB cable in Johnny's wrist dubiously.

"All right. Let's give it a shot," he says, reaching out for his own arm and plugging the USB back in, his whole body tense.

"Small? Small!" Hear that growl? Johnny doesn't take kindly to being called small.

"Listen, I'm 6'1, lean and mean, with an impressive fucking cock! There's nothing small about me." While the size of said asset is rather debatable, Johnny is pretty tall. Not exactly the tallest, but he's considered tall.

"A what now? Communciable disease?" Johnny blinks his eyes slowly, or rather, in this case, Ratchet does. "You're making it sound like I have the plague." He complains while watching Ratchet, or rather HIS BODY, walk across the fucking room. This is bizarre, even for him. Johnny feels like he's having an out-of-body experience, and he technically is.

"This is so fucking weird." He mutters as he watches himself walk around the medibay without him. It's so odd that Johnny is getting queasy simply seeing Ratchet stroll around as him. However, he can't help but admire his own physical appearance. Once Ratchet finishes taking the pills, Johnny takes a moment to calm his nerves as Ratchet jacks into his body again.

"Okay, let's hope this works." Much like last time, his vision gets distorted with all sorts of errors and green-coded text. Whatever clunker Ratchet is using for an operating system is starting to reboot. It takes a while for everything to come back online, but once he does, Johnny finds himself staring up at the autobot instead of looking down at himself.

"Oh shit..."

Edited 2025-03-12 17:07 (UTC)

"Oh, for booting up cold, please don't make me think about your reproductive organs right now," Ratchet groans. "The flu or a cold are both communicable diseases, and it seems like that's what you might have, so calm down. Come on, let's get you back in here."

The sensation isn't any more pleasant the second time around, but when Ratchet's optics boot again he's back in his own body, thank... something. He pulls back from Johnny and transforms the ports back away into his wrist, bringing it to his chest protectively.

"There," he says, with tremendous relief. His voice sounds clear and echoing to his own ears, instead of the weird muffled sounds he made as a human. "All right. We're never doing that again. Now how are you feeling?"

What? Wasn't Ratchet proud to have the biggest cock in all of Kyoto-base? Yeah, no. Even Johnny wouldn't lie through his teeth about something like that. Even still, he can't help but sigh with relief now that he's back in his body. While being a ten-foot-tall massive robot has many advantages, Johnny likes to be largely organic rather than electronic. Ratchet has an excellent sound system, though. That was pretty cool to hear his voice projected like that. Johnny is an audiophile after all; the clearer the acoustics, the better.

"Why are you backing away like that?" Johnny asks with an amused smirk. He can't help but chuckle at how Ratchet put some much-needed space between them. Honestly, he can't blame the big guy. That was pretty scary.

"Well, my throat kind of hurts, but I'm feeling a bit better." No more nausea for the time being, just more dizziness. That's why Johnny remains seated for the time being.

Look, Johnny, this guy is ten feet tall and made of living metal. Maybe don't get into a contest with him about whose junk is the biggest.

"Because I don't want to get turned into a--" Ratchet discards several less-than-polite words in favor of "--human again, thank you. Even if I did learn more about your condition while I was in there." He rummages in a drawer and comes up with a throat lozenge, depositing it carefully into Johnny's palm.

"Try that instead of cigarettes for a while and see how you feel," he says dryly. "The chip doesn't appear to be malfunctioning--whatever the hell just happened is apparently a new feature, not a bug. Your symptoms should subside in due course, you aren't dying, congratulations."

"Don't want to get turned into what?" Johnny narrows his eyes in suspicion of how Ratchet was going to end that sentence. However, the doc wisely decides to omit that thought and settles with 'human' instead, leaving Johnny to just guess what the big guy was really trying to say.

"Man, every scifi book I ever read was wrong about AI wanting to be human." He grumbles under his breath as Ratchet returns with some medicine to help with the sore throat. Smoking while sick is probably the worst thing Johnny could do. So, he pops the medicated candy into his mouth and decides to chew on that for now.

"A new feature, huh?" He laughs in sheer disbelief. "I guess the Relic has evolved." That's moderately terrifying. However, Johnny is relieved to learn that he will not die.

"Well, shit. Thank you, doc. I wasn't expecting a chunk of metal like you to be a good doctor." He smirks before hopping off the medical slab. While Johnny doesn't feel like a million eddies yet, he certainly feels better now.

He is traumatized, Johnny, where's the gratitude?

"I'm not an AI," Ratchet says, sounding only faintly annoyed after having to make this correction roughly forty-seven times since he got here, even if he doesn't love being called a 'chunk of metal'. "And you're welcome. If your symptoms persist please come back, but I can only give you medication for them--I am not doing that again and I don't advise you try it with anybody else."

Johnny smirks as he looks at Ratchet. This old robot isn’t half bad, you know? While Ratchet is nothing like Milt, he does have a good heart like his old ripperdoc. That alone is enough to win over Johnny, implying Ratchet may have a new choom.

“Don’t feel like taking another dive?” Johnny teases Ratchet by swatting him with the USB cord. Eventually, he stops and makes his way towards the door. But before he leaves, Johnny glances over his shoulder with a little smirk.

“I figure alcohol is out of the question. So I’ll bring you a can of premium car oil instead.”

Ratchet bats at Johnny's metal hand and huffs air from his vents. "I think one sneeze was quite enough for me, thank you," he says, watching Johnny head towards the door. "Make sure to rest and drink a lot of fluids--like water, not alcohol. And no smoking until you're better! On the bright side, I know how that arm works now so if you have any trouble with it you can come back and I can tune it up."

Ratchet looks a little surprised at Johnny's suggestion, but he shakes his head after a moment. "Not necessary," he says a little gruffly, shrugging one shoulder. "I'm just doing my job."

Edited 2025-03-12 23:21 (UTC)

Did Ratchet really use one of his air vents to sigh? Oh, that’s hilarious! This is the most fun Johnny has had in ages and it shows through his impish little grin. Bothering Ratchet is going to be his sport of choice. Someone needs to keep the big guy busy, right?

“Don’t worry, I’ll give the cigs and alcohol a rest.” He lies so effortlessly, almost like it’s easiest thing to do. While Johnny is bound to have a smoke or two, he probably won’t smoke everyday. Nah, he’s going to be getting such much needed shut-eye.

“Don’t worry, I won’t spike your oil with olive oil.” He jokes before slipping out the door. Just like that, Ratchet’s first patient ever takes his leave.

Edited 2025-03-12 23:30 (UTC)

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open | first medibay shift

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okay here we go!

oh boy oh boy

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