Character Doctor Smeg

[Smeg]

Doctor Smeg, MD

NAME: Doctor Smeg, Son of Smeg, Son of Smeg
FACTION: Whoever fed him most recently (currently, he believes, the Sith Covenant)
RANK: Doctor
SPECIES: Skraal
AGE: Adult
SEX: Male
HEIGHT: 3' 9"
WEIGHT: 38lbs
EYES: Black
FUR: Grey-brown, stained a pale medical green
FORCE SENSITIVE: No

STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES​

[+] Prehensile Tails are Always Cool - Somewhere in his 'residency' at the laboratory, somebody injected something into Smeg's tail. Skraal tails are long, pink and functionally decorative; Smeg's grips. He can hold a clamp with it, and does so throughout, including while shaking your hand and while eating. He has absolutely no idea what was done to him, when, or why. He only knows that it is very useful in theatre and that the other doctors did not have one, which he takes as evidence of his own advancement.

[+] King of the Immune Systems - Skraal live in filth and are near-impervious to it. Years of being dosed with things in a laboratory have not made this worse. Biological weapons, contaminated wounds, whatever's in the water, Smeg wades through all of it, unbothered, and can go where a real medic cannot, at least not without a hazmat suit. That his immunity is species-standard and not any sort of professional accomplishment has not been realised.

[+] I Call The Big One Bitey - Skraal teeth chew through duracrete. Smeg's are a surgical resource: sutures bitten, casings stripped, plating gnawed open to reach a casualty inside. His mouth is also a bacterial disaster, and anything he bites through is thereafter contaminated. He is somewhat aware of the latter. He has also decided it doesn't apply to medical instruments.

[+/-] Smeg's Anatomy - Doctor Smeg's medical kit is the genuine article, complete and correctly identified. Every item, he can name. Bone saw. Hypo. Cauteriser. Vibroscalpel. He knows what each one is called and roughly none of what it is for, and he will find a use for it. Occasionally the use is the right one, on a good day. This is incredibly dangerous, because it keeps happening just often enough that he thinks he's right, and a great doctor.

[+/-] Smarter Than Your Average Skraal - Smeg can read pictograms, follow a diagram, and recall a dosage he heard once. Amongst his species, this is the peak of genius; anywhere else, it is a small, chaotic gremlin child with a scalpel. He is easily flattered, easily led, and takes instruction from anyone who addresses him as Doctor.

[-] Food Motivated - He is paid in food, and only in food, and he eats it in front of you before beginning. This means Smeg can be hired by anyone with a sandwich, redirected mid-procedure by a better sandwich, and rendered entirely useless by cheese, which to a Skraal is a hallucinogen and which he keeps in the case as a general-purpose medication. Cheese makes everything better.

[-] If In Doubt, Cut It Off - Amputation is Smeg's answer. To everything. Sprain, fever, splinter, cough, depression. He proposes it early, he proposes it happily, and he proposes it while already reaching for the bone saw. He has been right about this on four occasions, and remembers all four.

[-] I'm No Superman - The original coat was made for somebody nine feet tall. Smeg is three foot nine. He trips on it, catches it in doors, loses instruments up the sleeves and cannot be persuaded to have it taken in, because it is the coat, and the coat is what makes him a doctor.

APPEARANCE​

A small rat in an enormous coat.

Smeg is wiry rather than starved, quick, light, all sinew and no meat. His fur is the ordinary grey-brown of his species everywhere it hasn't been ruined, and it has largely been ruined; long exposure to tracer dye in the laboratories has left him stained a pale, mildly concerning green in patches, which in a dark room glows very faintly. He is terribly proud of this as he believes it is what doctors look like (citation needed).

His tail is long, pink, unusually muscular for a Skraal, and it grips, curling over his shoulder to pass him instruments or hooking a chair leg while both hands are occupied inside somebody. It moves independently, and it is never still.

There is absolutely nothing behind those shiny black eyes.

Then there is the coat. White once, now worn to the colour of three-year old dishwater, cut for somebody roughly three times his height and dragging behind him like a bridal train. Pinned to the breast on a lanyard is an identichip belonging to Doctor Vess Tarrogal-Nuum, deceased, of a species that stands nine feet at the shoulder. The photograph is not of a rat. Smeg presents it to anyone who asks and to a great many people who don't.

Smeg also has a case full of medical supplies; it is a stolen hard case with a red cross on it, applied by hand, in something that is probably not paint.

PERSONALITY​

Doctor Smeg is very often the kindest being in any room he enters, and this is the problem.

He is relentlessly, invasively reassuring. He will tell you it's going to be all right. He will tell you again. He will hold your hand, with a hand or with the tail (both horrifying on a point of hygiene), and he will maintain warm and unbroken eye contact throughout a procedure you did not consent to, chittering encouragement while doing something to you which would make all the medical bodies in the galaxy cry out in abject horror. It is not out of cruelty, as there is not a cruel bone in him. He simply believes, entirely and with his entire earnest rodent heart and soul, that he is a doctor, and that a doctor's job is to be there.

Usually performing an amputation.

Underneath the coat, there is something deeper that drives Smeg. Skraal are never needed. Nobody in the history of the galaxy has ever been glad to see one. Loathed, kicked, hunted, used as army fodder. Smeg has found one of the professions where people are actually glad to see you arrive, and he will do very nearly anything to keep being the rodent that people are glad to see. Where there is no emergency, he is determined to find one. Where there is no patient, he will find somebody looking a bit peaky. Some may call it dishonest; Smeg would call it vigilant.

He is deferential to real doctors to the point of embarrassment, addresses them as colleagues, and does not notice when they leave the room.

BIOGRAPHY​

Smeg's father, Smeg, like his father before him, Smeg, is dead.

He ate a live power wire, having incorrectly identified it as liquorice.

Of his own beginnings there is little to tell and less that he remembers. He was born in the deep levels of Coruscant like most of them, into a litter of some twenty-odd, and was taken off the street young by people in nice coats who wanted a small animal with a stomach that could survive a great many substances. He does not know who they were or what they were testing, but he knows the rooms were bright, warm and clean, that he was fed on a solid schedule for the first and only time in his life (the Skraal dream), and that people in white coats came every day to look closely at him and write things down.

He was in those rooms for years with a degree of contentedness. Something was injected into his tail. Something else was applied to his fur that turned him green. And in all that time nobody once struck him, or kicked at him, or called him vermin; they simply examined him, carefully, and made their patient notes.

Smeg came out of it with an unshakeable understanding of what medicine is, which is: the practice of paying close attention to somebody who is usually ignored. He's almost right in that respect; almost everything else he gets wrong.

After what is probably a classified incident at the laboratory (in which Smeg was actually not responsible), he took the coat off a dead specialist on his way out, along with their identichip, the case, and returned to the Coruscanti underworld to practise medicine (being that he was now an expert). He has been practising ever since, in the sublevels beneath a city now flying Sith colours. He treats whoever is in front of him. He is paid in food. By his own account, he is doing very well. The first qualified Skraal doctor.

Smeg is looking, at present, for colleagues.