The Outer Divide RP ◄

This is Dr. McCoy.

No thanks to our charming neighbours behind the blue dome, we have both a treatment and a preventative vaccine for both stages of the plague, so put any plans to torch any more of the damned city on hold.

If you're new around these parts and/or you haven't been exposed or infected, come to the hospital and we'll vaccinate you.

If you or anyone you know is sick with the second stage, come to the hospital and we'll dispense the treatment for it. First stage too, but if you don't remember that we've been able to treat that one for some weeks now, you should arrange for a hearing and memory test while you're at it.

On the subject of tests, if you've been around enough that you reasonably should've gotten sick, come to the hospital. We'll vaccinate you, but we'll also want to screen your blood to make sure that you aren't an asymptomatic carrier -- we've found a few of them so far. If that's the case, then you're a walking, talking vector to reinfect people until we can give you a course of drugs to clear the bug from your system. This isn't something to be ashamed of, it's just something that you need to get sorted out. Don't be an idiot out of some sense of misbegotten pride or guilt or whatever screw's come loose.

McCoy out.

[There's no video for this, but the background noise is clearly a hospital, between the intercom pages and the general noise of too few healthy people trying to treat too many sick. Bones is back in his native element, it seems.]

This is Dr. McCoy. We've got some new directions on this disease outbreak, but they aren't all that pleasant. This is Yersinia pestis that we're dealing with -- the Black Plague, bring out your dead, all that medieval ghoulishness. Not being medieval, however, we have antibiotics and can treat the plague if you're not an idiot and don't try to tough this out. If you're running a fever, if you've got a wet cough, if you've got chest pain and can't breath and your muscles feel like fire, get to the hospital. We can't keep you unless you're on death's door, but we can give you drugs and send you home to recover. Take the full dose, even when you start feeling better, or I'll personally put a boot up your ass if you cause antibiotic resistant plague because you can't follow simple instructions.

Unfortunately, you won't likely be out of the woods yet. This isn't garden variety plague, some geniuses genetically modified it. I don't know which strain they're working with yet, but I do know that they engineered a second stage, likely viral, into the Yersinia bacterium. Taking the antibiotics to treat plague will likely let it into your system all the faster, and isn't that just a pretty little paradox?

Take the antibiotics anyway. Treating whatever this second stage is will be harder. We're going to do it, because no long-dead madmen are winning this one on my watch, but until we can tailor an antiviral, your best shot is to cure the plague as quickly as you can, and save your body's immune response and reserves for fighting off whatever this is the old fashioned way.

And that brings me to my final point...

[He pauses then, as if aware of just how potentially bad an idea this is, before shoving on ahead anyway.]

You paranoid bastards behind the dome. I know you've eavesdropped in the past, so listen to this now. I know that anybody keeping a force dome running with that much power has to have a higher level of technology than what we're suffering with out here. Give me access to a lab, and I can end this. We've got gear that can keep me isolated from you. If you really are superior to the rabble out here, then prove it. Find some common humanity and let me put an end to this plague.