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Read to everyone:

Powering up a MedBed takes some time. Most are covered in stalagmite stone, moss, and even standing water inside the bays beneath them. The glowing boxes next to each show nothing but a jumble of distorted shapes, which are completely unreadable. However, when a character wearing a Focus lays a hand on an excavated bed, it links with their Focus to provide diagnostic controls and reporting. Multiple Focus devices can be linked to the bed at once.

This also causes the semi-transparent dome above it to attempt to retract. Centuries of sediment and other elements prevent the motion, causing the dome to flash red, and the Focus overlay to show an error. It takes more time to clear away enough debris to allow the dome its full motion. Once you have, your Focus overlay switches to an animation of a person laying down on the bed.

Jineko hops up onto the bed, not missing a beat. The dome rotates back into place, glowing a soft purple, while its Focus overlay shifts to Scanning. An outline of a Jineko-shaped person appears on the dome. Medical terms and numbers point out various attributes, though most don’t mean anything to you.

At this point, Narrators may wish to adjust the following if they have customized Jineko’s background.

A spot just above the outline of Jineko’s tailbone lights up with streaks of red, growing a label which reads Spinal Damage. Just above the red streaks, a yellow circle pulses, labeled with Sensor Pad, matched by yellow circles behind each of her knees. A whispy line between them labeled Neural Bypass: Active slowly fades in and out.

Interacting with the diagnosis on the MedBed reveals additional details, but they won’t mean anything to characters. It’s also unclear whether a functioning autosuture could permanently repair the damage.

As you assessed before, MedBeds cannot be moved, and the parts in the bays beneath them are not intuitively separable without significant time (days or weeks) spent learning how they work.

Narrator note:

From a narrative standpoint, MedBeds are intended to provide a long-term story hook, where it might take any number of quests to find parts to fully repair them. Similarly, they provide hooks for tension between the characters, who will want to use the MedBeds to help injured people, and the innate fear of Old Ones technology that would have to be overcome by those people. The limits of what a working autosuture and MedBed could do are up to your imagination.

While the Focus and sensor pads have controls in place to try to keep diagnostic results private to the patient unless told otherwise, MedBeds assume that any linked Focus is either a patient or a clinician. This is a stylistic choice for a simpler narrative, and should not be considered a hard constraint. Players who would prefer the MedBed to adhere to similar disclosure protocols should feel free to modify the story to reflect this.

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