Drew blinked several times as he listened to the woman speak. That couldn’t be…could it? He started to feel increasingly far from his own body, more so by the moment, and he could feel his lips seem to move of their own accord as he said “Aliens? Have we been invaded?” The question seemed ludicrous even as he asked it, but things just felt so surreal that he wasn’t quite sure what was happening. Words spoken near him began to take on an echo, fuzzy at the edges, like voices heard down a hallway. And then the headache arrived.

Oh yeah, the headaches. He remembered them now. They seemed to come and go without any rhyme or reason, leaving him feeling drained for days afterward, but were quickly forgotten otherwise. Nobody had ever been able to pin down what caused them, but at least his parents had been very understanding when they occurred. His father had even investigated special diets to help, even if it only reduced the down-time after one of those occurrences. It was why they had moved out to these islands, something to do with population pressure and other related issues causing stress on his growing brain. He couldn’t quite remember where it had come from, but his parents had told him everything they could recall about the matter. A college town had more than its share of stresses, without a doubt, and he wanted to be as armed against it as possible.

This was a bad one. It felt like it started in the center of his brain and was trying to push its way out of his skull in all directions. There was also a strange buzzing sound in his ears – strange, hadn’t he heard that it was supposed to be ringing, not buzzing..? – and a very faint fogginess overlaid his vision. He stepped back out of Esk’s way silently, leaning against the table, not knowing that there was an expression on his face that looked, frankly, stunned, nor would he have been able to explain that it came not only from the realization (and evidence) of an alien presence on his world, but from the vicious headache distorting his senses with pain. Closing his eyes and massaging his forehead, he turned away from the doctor and leaned a little harder on the table, feeling a tickling sensation that he couldn’t make sense of until something struck his hand.

Looking down, he saw a drop of blood, and without thinking brought his hand up to his nose, realizing he had a nosebleed. His training kicked in at this point, making him tilt his head back and pinch his nostrils shut, breathing through his mouth as he walked into the back room to get some paper towels. That had never happened before, he mused, and in the distraction didn’t notice that the headache had eased somewhat. It was still a miserable thing, squatting inside his skull like a heavy stone on a broken limb, but as he walked into the bathroom, he could see his pupils returning to a more normal size. He got the cold water running, leaning on the edge of the sink and staring at himself in the mirror. What the hell was going on today…?

He took the officer’s card, grateful for the businesslike demeanor presented to him. It helped, when he could feel the medication taking hold. It had not begun to unravel his self-control quite yet, but as the emotions of the two women began flying about he allowed the effects of the medication roll over him like the tide. It was weird, he thought, that every time there was a mention of something alien, his headache got worse, but when he didn’t think about it or was distracted from it, it subsided. Of course, his analytical faculties were beginning to dissolve beneath the onslaught of the medication, but he could still think, in a fashion. It was a foggy, disconnected fashion, but it was thought nonetheless.



They both had points, he pondered…ponderously. It was like trying to wade through peanut butter, but he did make progress. His mouth began to speak without the intervention of his mind, and he would otherwise have been alarmed over that fact, but this was not an alarming thing beneath the haze of chemicals flowing through his body. “’S not xenophobia, ma’am. But you’ve gotta admit, a person with a bag full of chemicals, pushing hard to make you take them, doesn’t seem too friendly. Pushy people piss me off, aliens or not.” Ow. “And when someone who’s acting like a drug dealer tries to force their drugs on me in the middle of a vicious headache, which I have been getting on and off pretty much my entire life by the way so you’d have to actually have medicine which can actively rewire my brain to stop them from ever happening again and if you TELL me you have drugs for that I’m going to stand up and punch you because I’ve been told my entire LIFE that such things don’t exist,” pause for breath, how did he get that sentence out without more than one pause?



“You may have the most advanced medicine in this part of the galaxy, but if you make it clear you’re just taking pity on the poor little natives you can’t possibly expect us to be grateful, because the ‘benefits’ are not worth being treated like backwards barbarians. Look up human history sometime, and especially the records of what happened to missionaries in older days who went to preach to the ‘poor barbarians’. They usually failed catastrophically to understand the people they were dealing with, offending nearly everyone and getting themselves killed more often than not.” He yawned then, surprising himself a little. He had less than an hour to get to his apartment before he actually passed out, he knew then. The headaches drained him, and the soporific side-effects of the medication would absolutely wipe him out in fairly short order.



And still the words spilled out, in spite of his sense of caution. “Nobody likes being talked down to, lady. It’s not hard to talk down to anyone if you try, and especially when you think you’re coming from a superior place. So many people forget that other people are actually….people.” He was starting to repeat words. Bloody hell! “Just because you’re more advanced than us in something, doesn’t mean you’re better. Better people don’t do things against other peoples’ wills just because they think it’s ‘for their own good’. Helping someone who literally can’t do for themselves is one thing. Forcing someone to accept treatment when they have functional possession of their faculties is another. Medical ethics, lady.” It was getting harder to put words together, and dealing with this subject was both painful and wearying.



So he turned his gaze toward Esk and answered her question. “’M not high. I’m medicated. See, when I started getting these headaches as a child, my parents took me to doctor after doctor to find out what was going on. Something about how my brain’s wired causes problems under certain circumstances. ‘Electrochemical dissonance’, they called it. Headaches, worse than migraines sometimes, that just come and go, without warning and with very little that actually helps, because it’s actually the brain straining against itself, pretty much. Dad had a lot of pull with a lot of people, and finally pushed hard enough to get someone to formulate a special medication for when it gets really bad like today. Don’t remember ever having a nosebleed before from it, but there you go. Reason enough for the medication. Neurochemical suppressants, muscle relaxers, it’s a doggie-pile. So no, I’m not high.” He sighed and leaned back into the couch as he murmured “Keep getting headaches like this, and I may not be able to be a paramedic.” He blinked then, as his brain caught up with the words he’d just said, and the realization caused him to sink lower into the sofa as the thought of losing a chance to really help people began to turn him melancholy.

The phone rang several times, then the click of someone answering came through, and a mature, slightly gravelly voice came through. "What's wrong?" asked the voice, the 'emergency contact' setting having carried a signal with it that specifically lit the answering individual's phone with colors indicating trouble. Drew's phone was at the literal peak of Terran technology, provided by a parent at the leading edge of such realms of development. However, the voice answering the phone was clearly expecting Drew to speak, not someone else using his phone for such a call.