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4. 14. Nurse Robins

3. Interesting People: Introducti

2. A wish for something interesti

1. You Are What You Wish

Interesting People 14: Nurse Robins

avatar on 2021-12-05 15:10:09

627 hits, 86 views, 2 upvotes.

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Most people don't know hardly anything about your school nurse, Elise Robins, beyond that she's another pretty face who's only worked at VLHS for half a year now. Here and there you might find a few male students who get all infatuated with that "Sexy Nurse" appeal she has and snoop at her a bit more inappropriately, and of course some professional consideration from the faculty about her qualifications, but that's it. She only moved into town last summer, with no family and no reputation, and just quietly slipped into her little niche as a forgettable member of school faculty, then faded into the background. Nobody but school-skippers really pay any attention to some lowly school nurse anyway.

Of course, she likes it that way. It wouldn't do for a mad scientist to come under much scrutiny, especially not one as infamous as Victor Frankenstein's protégé.

Yes, she's much older than she appears, and indeed was around waaay back during the said doctor's troubles with his reanimated creature, though at that time she had an entirely different name and appearance as a man named Edward Raven, who worked as a little-known apprentice to Dr. Frankenstein in the years leading up to the experiment that would be his Magnum Opus and his downfall. Ed wisely and quietly distanced himself from the doctor and his Creature once it became clear what a disaster said experiment was becoming, but not before compiling enough notes to examine and begin to partially replicate his old professor's successes once on his own. Never to the point of fully creating an entirely new life from scratch, like the doctor had; Ed was much more interested in the implications of the work for the living than the undead. Consider that at the time, Dr. Frankenstein was the only person on Earth capable of entirely disassembling a whole person into their constituent pieces and putting them back together good as new, in the same way lesser men might boast of their ability to take a car or a computer or a watch entirely apart and put it back together just as they found it, or perhaps with newer, shinier replacement parts or even their own custom modifications to the device.

Dr. Raven, with time and patience and a doctorate earned in the meantime, eventually made himself into the second person ever capable of managing such a feat, and employed it to great effect as a renowned surgeon for some years afterwards. He was centuries ahead of his time as a transplant surgeon and as a cosmetic surgeon, and thanks to his old professor's secrets of reanimation, never had much to fear if his patients temporarily died on the operating table. Wealth and fame swiftly became his, and these could have been had in absurd degree, were it not for the fact that a veil of absolute secrecy needed be kept over the surgeon's very morally ambiguous methods (at the time, these would have seemed outright demoniac). Necromantic arts in his operations were employed quite liberally, for one, but arguably far more objectionable things than that stemmed from the simple fact that organs, tissues, and limbs needed for transplantation cannot come from nowhere. One practice he had first learned from his old teacher, and then mastered and refined far above any ambitions of the old Frankenstein, was the means by which he'd secretly procure said organs, tissues, and limbs from the dying and the recently dead. These things, he stole greedily, from any source he could reach without overmuch fear of discovery. It could have been from bodies brought to the morgue for autopsy; from secretly exhumed coffins, recently buried; from his own patients, if he felt these couldn't be saved; even from animals at the slaughterhouse, if these had bits that were suitably compatible with man's. All were, in time, entirely disassembled into basic pieces, measured, preserved, labeled, and finally filed away into what Dr. Raven would eventually consider to be the anatomical version of a wardrobe.

See, Dr. Raven had taken a lesson from the catastrophe suffered by his old teacher. He was very very aware of the disastrous sorts of scandal that would break if the true nature of his works were ever discovered by the public at large, and knew he'd need another way to extricate himself from the crisis when it finally came bearing down on him, but this time, simply slipping away wouldn't be nearly so simple (What? You thought the lesson was something about "not playing God?" She's a prodigy at playing God, guys, and certainly doesn't see the issue with it if one knows what they're doing). So it was that Dr. Raven commenced creation of an entirely new and youthful body, like old Frankenstein had, but unlike Frankenstein he was not so interested in imparting an entirely new life to the body as transferring an old one into it; specifically, his own. And thus, after forging an identity for one "Edith Rivia" in the legal as well as the bodily sense, Edward Raven was all set to vanish without a trace the moment his crimes against nature were discovered and persecuted. In fact, he ended up doing this even before being discovered in any real sense: he was under suspicion, sure, but more than that he was simply getting old, and wanting to be young and spry again, as he'd made Edith to be at first. From then onto this day, she considers the occasional changing of assembled bodies she undergoes, together with its overall anti-aging effect, to be a necessary and routine maintenance through which a form of effective immortality can be achieved with proper care.

Frankenstein's protégé has changed identities and bodies a few more times since then, though more minor replacements, partial enhancements, and other self-performed operations have tended to be far more common than replacement of the body wholesale. As a rule, they've tended to stick closely to the medical field and death in general, be it as a nurse, pathologist, researcher or what have you, both because this area most strongly agrees with their innate talents and experience, and because they still need to keep up some version of their anatomical wardrobe wherever it's hidden away. Your school nurse, for instance, has one in a storage facility on the outskirts of Lake Point, or rather, she's in the process of building one up there: she had to ditch her previous identity in a hurry and lost safe contact with the last anatomical wardrobe in doing so, and thus will have to build up reserves of tissues and organs from the deceased of Lake Point for the new one. Don't worry, she's in no rush to do this at the moment: as an unassuming school nurse with all connections to her previous identity severed, she figures nobody has any reason to suspect her and is trying to lay very low while the heat from the most recent scandal blows over (This, by the way, was an attempt by the "missing" Dr. Elijah Richards to incorporate the latest of stem-cell research into his own anatomical wardrobe and semi-necromantic medical techniques, which was partially discovered and blew up badly in his face; you may see references to it in the news now).

So, yeah. If you find yourself magically transformed and wanting to get back to normal the hard, bloody way, Nurse Robins just might be the one to talk to, but I warn you, she has some... interesting opinions on bodily integrity and a relaxed attitude toward vivisection, and definitely isn't an anesthesiologist, to say nothing of the fact that she probably won't react well to someone knowing her secret.




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