Utrecht Visscher - 001

[frontier_doktor]

Public | Audio

[His message is quick, because he's nervous and new. Visscher came back for the project to rebuild, just in case more of the same misfortunes happened. He doesn't know if it's a good idea or not, but he might as well reintroduce myself.]

Most of the people I knew when I was first around seemed to have departed.

But I am Utrecht Visscher. I am a qualified physician in my universe, and a general practitioner by interstellar standards.

It's a pleasure and I will do my best to assist.

Comments

[frontier_doktor]

You sound as though you very much miss the old one.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

I do, but in the way that one misses an old beloved home town after they've been away for twenty years: through the golden haze of nostalgia and with the knowledge that if you went back, even if nothing there had changed at all, it wouldn't really be as you remembered it anyway.

But things were easier then. Civilization kept people safe, at least in my part of the world. No one had to be afraid of raiders or razor rain or hellbugs.

[frontier_doktor]

According to my parents, civilization wasn't very safe. They suffered greatly for the schisms in Europe. You must have lived on a better part of Earth.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

Britain was very safe before the Pale Wars. Oh, there was the occasional murder here and there, like in any society, but even that was uncommon. People mostly couldn't even own firearms and even the police walked around with just a stick for a weapon. People were a little bit afraid of terrorist attacks, but they rarely amounted to much from what I remember.

The last time there had been any really major number of civilian deaths on the island was probably...[He pauses and puffs out a breath as he does the calculation]...eighty years before the Pale War, the blitz during the Second World War. That's four generations of peace and relative safety.

[frontier_doktor]

My parents came from cold war Earth. The atmosphere was so tense and intolerable they chose to follow an alien into the future rather than remain there.

You were blessed with a very good location.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

[He takes many seconds to respond, distracted by flashes of memory. It had been good. Until it very much wasn't. When he replies, his tone is a bit lower, a bit more closed off.]

It was very good for a while.

[frontier_doktor]

When I was young my colony suffered a disaster. My parents were killed and I was separated from my sister.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

How old were you? What happened? An attack?

I'm sorry, you don't need to talk about it if you don't want to.

[frontier_doktor]

Just misfortune.

[He isn't honest there, but it seems wiser than admitting the truth. This man seems very bent against aliens, and in a mixed community such as this that might not bode well. He doesn't want to encourage it.]

I was ten. I was taken in by a disaster relief medical team and have been dedicated to the medical practice since.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

[He nods, although it can't be seen over the audio line.]

I was rescued by the Earth Military Alliance when I was fifteen, then joined up with them as soon as I was old enough.

[frontier_doktor]

Did you lose your parents as well?

[truth_is_the_enemy]

Not then. I was away at school in Devon and my parents were in London. They died a few years later in a bombing, but I was an adult by then. Not that I didn't grieve, but not as bad as losing one's parents as a child.

[frontier_doktor]

I barely remember them, to be honest. They left me a good-bye message, and I recall them being very affectionate.

It's been quite a while now.

[truth_is_the_enemy]

The people who raised you afterwards, they were good people then? They took good care of you?

[Niles has seen people who have taken in children not their own and raise them like their own sons and daughters. But he's also seen people take in orphaned children and take advantage, keep them as servants or sell them as slaves.]

[frontier_doktor]

Some of them.

[It depends on how you defined "good".] I went to several places. If anything, I learned good work.