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~ The skunk gripped the empty mug that formerly contained imaging gel tightly between her hands, and barely kept her breathing under control. She could still taste the gell, and she was nervous but couldn't allow herself to panic. The ship shuddered, right on cue, while the lights in the medical exam room flickered in tune with the rumble. Heavy charge, every hour or so. Getting the aft condensing coils to unseize from the acceleration rods, as they surely must be, was someone else's problem. She had her annual exam, and failed to jump the hoops to weasel out of it. Her attendant, one of the nurses, stepped into the room with his nose down in the clipboard. "Scans came through fine... organs good, except for one kidney's function...", the rat flipped a couple pages deeper, "...which lines up with the bloodwork. Too much bismuth in your blood...", returning to the scan. The skunk remained worried. The scan was where he'd know, if her fears were true. The rat continued. "Generally good health... well, organs and skeleton wise, at least... looks like you sprained the hell out of your shoulder a bit back." The nurse looked up to her, "Is your shoulder recovering well?"

~ The skunk nodded meekly, "Erm.. yes. Yes. I went to medical when it happened. They gave me a look over, and a light lifting waiver. On the mend." Her feelings began to more closely align to her barely calm exterior. He would have led with the big thing, if it had come up on the scan or blood. She probably wasn't pregant. Unless the nurse was just now reading her record and hadn't yet noticed the alert. The rat returned to the pages, flipping back and forth between them for some long moments. "...And you're not sleeping well, I assume?" He waved a pen at the air in a circle, as if to indicate the constant rattle and complaints of the ship itself as the obvious cause, somewhere in the distance a pipe could be heard to burst and belch out steam as if on cue. "Not much to do, if that's the case. But it's worth noting, for the future." He scribbled something down when his glance up to her was answered with a curt nod.

~ With a sigh, the rat set down his clipboard. He still held his pen as he slumped down into a chair. "You're the first maintenance person who's actually had their regular checkup, you know? You folk get exemptions like they're candy and spent casings, around here." He paused to glance around a moment, before leaning in close, "Level with me, this is my first tour on one of these coastal barrage skiffs; why is everything always breaking, broken, or on fire?" His question was one of honest curiosity mixed with staggering ignorance, and caught the wrench wielding mustelid off guard. Her mind shifted gears from biological panic, to mechanical matters. These things were simpler, in her mind.

~ The skunk calmed down with a breath, "Because we've been parked here for seven months, and the main guns were only intended to be in fired constant barrage for hours, and only built to handle it for days. Maybe a week, when they were new." The rat seemed even more confused. She widened her explanation to match, "...and if we stop firing, well, if enough of this small fleet stops firing, then those Beaks will get their battlecruisers out of port and we'll be scrap, then our fleet will be scrap, then our hold in this whole sector will be scrap, and the sink of the Ninth and Thirteenth Fleet will be for nothing. So we keep firing, and we keep welding the pieces that fall off back on." There was grim determination in her voice, by the end of it. She had friends aboard those ships; as did everyone who wasn't fresh out of some backwater academy.

~ The nurse leaned back in his chair, having followed the math and domino path. He didn't have an answer, so retreated to humor. "That doesn't explain the cooking." He grinned with a nervous laugh, and reached over to sign the bottom of the form. "You're in reasonable health, except you've spent too much time next to something with a lot of bismuth in it. Have your supervisor fill in whatever that equipment must be in here", the rat indicated a box in the form, "...and you should spend some time not near it. If your supervisor can't far enough away from it, we'll catch the problem in the follow-up in two weeks before it can do anything permanent and sort it out then." He handed her the top copy of the form, keeping a carbon copy for himself.

~ With the signature, and carefully folded medical report, she skunk's nerves fell limp. She wasn't pregnant. She wasn't going to go infront of a court martial. That time, well, those times under the forward exhaust shielding bulkheads were merely pleasurable memories rather than the seeds of her undoing. She silently swore an oath to her gods and goddesses to only roll in the hay with ladies and eunuchs, for the rest of her tour. "Thank you.", she replied as the rat gathered himself up from the chair and consulted his phone for the location of his next patient.