xp_logs | Let There Be Light (Forge, Dr. Voght)

Upon being brought back to the mansion, Scott is immediately rushed down to the infirmary. Amelia discovers that he needs more than just bandages and IV fluids, and prompts Forge to come up with an innovative solution.

"When I page you urgently," was Amelia's cool comment as Forge appeared in the doorway, "I expect you to arrive swiftly, Mr. Forge. Something to keep in mind," she concluded with a teleporter's fine disregard for the limitations of ordinary movement from place to place.

"I need you to add some equipment to this room," she went on, and moved to the side of the bed to insert an IV in the arm of the bed's unconscious occupant. Scott didn't so much as flinch at the needle. There was an alarming gray tinge to his skin, beneath the bruises and the blood, and Amelia tsked, looking up at the monitors. "And I need you to do it quickly. Sunlamps, John Henry. He needs as much UV as possible as quickly as possible."

"Can't all teleport," Forge muttered gruffly, pulling a spool of printouts from one of the machines into his hands and looking it over. "Okay, I'm no geneticist, but I know how to read these mitochondrial enzyme patterns. And if these are current, he's going to need more UV light than I can pack into this room. Seriously, I could wallpaper the place with UV panels and he wouldn't absorb it fast enough. He needs full-spectrum sunlight, and artificial lights just can't pump enough photons out."

He folded the paper over, circled a reading and handed it to Amelia. "My layman's opinion? If his enzyme levels keep dropping, he's going to go into some version of a diabetic-type coma."

Amelia stopped moving for long enough to look at the paper. Her jaw tightened slightly. "Damn," she murmured. "You're right. Suggestions?" She went back to tending Scott's other injuries as she spoke. Multitasking was not something she had a problem with. "If he slips into a coma I am not vouching for his wife's reaction." From anyone else it might have been an attempt to lighten the situation with black humor. From her, the comment came out sounding deadly serious.

"Yeah," Forge agreed. "Dr. Grey's looking like she's ready to go all supernova on anyone who crosses her path if this goes wrong. Like she'd grab the sun out right out of the sky and..."

Yanking the paper back out of Dr. Voght's hand, Forge turned it over and made some quick calculations. "Of course! Direct sunlight plus reflected sunlight plus ambient sunlight in a fresh oxygen environment... Doc, how soon can you move him if you did your little green whoosh thing?"

Amelia raised both eyebrows, but then frowned, thinking. "... fifteen minutes," she finally said. "And we'll need to get the equipment he'll need moved to wherever you're thinking - although I imagine the team that brought him back is lurking in the hall and can be enlisted." She was frowning at some of the marks on Scott as she spoke. "What do you have in mind?"

Forge pointed to the bare walls of the infirmary. "The downside of having the medical section in the basement. Where do you think he can get light, and lots of it, in the presence of all-natural oxygen scrubbers?"

"... the greenhouse," Amelia said, pausing again for a moment and then nodding. "That will do. Go out, tell Jean to move the basic package of equipment and a bed from the room next door up to the greenhouse. If you have any brilliant ideas as to how to maximize the UV dose even up there, get to work."

There was a flash of anger in her eyes as she turned her attention back to Scott, focusing on the electrical burns on his arms. "I can not," she said, her accent thickening slightly, "imagine what they thought they would get out of him when they kept him out of the sunlight that long. I suppose they would not have had access to his medical file. But he would have been close to delirious very quickly. Hallucinating, most likely, and all that they did to him would only have exacerbated the problem."

Pausing to think for a while, Forge nodded. "The storm windows! I can make UV-only reflectors out of them with a small generator, and... right, I'll get on that. I'll be in the mechanics lab, barge on in when you've got him set up."

Rubbing his hands together with an expression of joy that seemed to only come when he was put under immediate pressure, Forge headed for the door. "Move it, move it! Lifesaving time, people! Stop the praying, God has sent me to tell you we're going to win this one."