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It's never a good sign when you wake up on the floor. That'll teach Guppy to eat whilst walking around.

He sits up and winces, putting one hand to his forehead from which blood oozes. He looks at his fingers in surprise. Did he trip and knock himself out? Or pass out and fall?

Where am I? He glances around, blinking slightly.

Beat.

More to the point, who am I?

He pulls himself onto the seat and looks on his person. No identification in his wallet, but there's a picture. A happy looking group of four. His parents and grandparents perhaps? Some rubber gloves. A couple of cat biscuits. A stethoscope, now there's a clue. He picks up the coat he was carrying and looks in the collar, just on an offchance. And, he thinks, strikes lucky.

Okay, it looks like I'm Atton Rand... and possibly a vet.

With that question answered, he turns his attention to the blood dripping off his eyebrow... but he doesn't know what to do.

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"Oh. I'm sorry Zhaan."

He nearly falls off the bed, his head still spinning horribly. He puts his hand to it, blood oozing over his eyebrow onto his fingers.

Zhaan gets out one of her own disinfectants from a cupboard, as well as a bit of gauze. She applies the one to the other and starts wiping the blood from Guppy's head. The stuff comes in an unfamiliar bottle and probably smells strange to Guppy, but it has the sting of peroxide.

"Do you want me to use a skin fuser, a bandage or some of my organic sealant?"

"Ow." he squirms, then looks up.

"A skin fuser? That's just weird, I'll stick with a bandage please."

"You showed me how to use a...all right." Getting frustrated is not going to help. "A bandage it is, then," Zhaan says, getting a large square band-aid which she places over the cut. "There. Now I want to see how well your brain is functioning. Can you count to twenty for me, please?"

He does so, without too much difficulty. Lying back on the bed to try and ease the feeling of faintness.

"Do you remember what you had for supper last night?" Zhaan asks. "Or your name, for that matter?" Short-term and long-term memory questions.

"I don't know about supper, but my name is Atton Rand." he says with conviction.

"He's one of the bartenders," Zhaan says. "Your name is Gupreet Sandhu - Guppy, for short. You're a doctor here. How in the name of the Goddess did you come up with Atton's name?"

He begins to look distressed.

"It's the only name I had on me." he whimpers. "I..." he sits up. "I have to find my home, my family."

He gets out his wallet and shows Zhaan the picture.

"These people, are they my parents? Am I married? Do I have kids?"

"I think you may have said something about your parents, but you never said anything about being married or having children." Zhaan realizes that she actually knows little about Guppy's life outside of Milliways. "When you're not here, you work in a hospital in...Holby, I believe it's called?"

"A hospital? They'll be able to fix me. Can't sit in this pub all day." he says, standing up.

If Zhaan has brought up Guppy's notes on the computer, she may find that as well as the fact that he's been in for everything from brutal beatings to smoke inhalation, that there is a little note that pops up with the following important hint: 'Tends to faint after bleeding'

Which explains why as soon as he stands up he turns very pale and neatly collapses.

Zhaan catches him mid-slump. "You need to stay here," she says, maneuvering him back onto the bed and - if he'll cooperate - into lying down on it. "I don't think you'd make it out the door."

He doesn't protest; he can't really.

"I... I'm scared. Please help me find my memory."

"It's all right," Zhaan says soothingly. "You don't have to worry about anything here. I may be able to help you with your memory, but only if you are comfortable with telepathy."

Telepathy? Skin fusers? The fact that this woman is blue was scary enough. But now he's really starting to panic, beads of sweat on his forehead and quick, shallow breathing.

His instinct tells him to run, but he knows he'd never make it out of the room.

His nervousness is catching. Fortunately, Zhaan has a great deal of experience with maintaining mental discipline. "I didn't think you would be," she says. "I won't do it, then. Nor will I do anything else without your express consent." She hopes that assurance will calm him down.

"Where am I?" Suddenly the little things important. "Why does this pub have a hospital in it?" He calmed a little when she said she wouldn't probe his brain.

Then he suddenly sits up again.

"Wait! I know what this is! I've been abducted by aliens!" Big fearful eyes. "Please don't probe me, I'm a very inferior specimin."

At some point, Zhaan is going to look back on this and laugh. Not right now, though.

"No, you haven't been abducted by anyone." Well, technically, Milliways does abduct people. But it wouldn't be a good idea to get into that. "You're in Milliways. A bar at the end of the universe. There is an infirmary here, among other things, because some people stay here for extended periods. You aren't one of those. You are able to come and go between here and your own world as you like."

"Oh..." Beat. "...insert whichever deity I believe in."

He looks at her.

"What should I do?"

"Staying here would be best," Zhaan advises him. "You seem to be in shock, understandably enough." At that moment, she gets an idea. "I want to ask you a few more questions," she says. "Another sort of test. Tell me, when a patient is put under general anesthesia for surgery, how does one make sure they keep breathing?" It's clear she's asking this to quiz him, not because she herself doesn't know.

Guppy looks at her blankly for a moment.

"Um... one of those... bag things?"

Oh, frell. Guppy's really far gone if he can't remember what intubation is. Then again, while the procedure (or its local equivalent) is known to every temple initiate on Delvia, it may be part of more advanced training for a human doctor - and Guppy told her that he is still a student.

"Partly right," she says, because it may calm Guppy down. "You insert a tube into the trachea and attach a bag to it to help the patient breathe." She mimes squeezing a bag. "It's called intubating."

He's not a student, he's a junior doctor. I.e. he's qualified to work on his own but inexperienced and still has exams.

"You're not going to do that to me are you?" he asks warily.

"Why would I do that?" she asks. "I am not going to anesthetize you and you have no trouble breathing." Zhaan sighs. "You are a doctor, so I thought it was something you'd remember. Adn then that you might remember other things."

He sighs a little, and looks on his person again, for anything, any clue. He stops and looks at a small scar running around the tip of one finger.

"I seem to be someone who lost part of a finger once." he observes. Rolling up his sleeves he looks at his arms. "Not an IV drug user. Another scar on my arm. Do I get into fights?"

He goes through his pockets again for anything he's missed. There's a room key and a small model rabbit, both of which he examines.

"And I seem to have a room somewhere. And apparently I like rabbits. Are you sure I'm not a vet?"