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Plague Rat – Chapter 3, Page 22

Description

Panel One: Narration: "Later" Cal and Dr. King are walking down a hallway. Dr. King asks, "I know it's been a long day, but has DJ shown you around?" "Not yet, but I haven't asked," Cal answers.

Panel Two: Dr. King smiles, surrounded by happy sparkles. "Well, then!" she says, "Let me give you the grand tour!"

Panel Three: Dr. King is holding open the door to a dark, empty classroom and gesturing to it. Cal stands in the doorway, looking around with wide eyes. The room has high ceilings, with an ornate lectern at the front. There's a large whiteboard behind the lectern. Rows of tables fill the rest of the room. Each table has two chairs at it. The walls are light-colored, with dark, paneled wood beam accents. Dr. King says, "We have a variety of classrooms here! You'll have your regular subjects and lectures in rooms like this."

Panel Four: View from inside a lab-style classroom. Class is in session, and we can only see the front of the room where the teacher is. A pale woman with blue eyes and wearing a lab coat, safety glasses, hood, mask and gloves - The uniform of a field scientist - is leading the class. She's gesturing to the whiteboard, with has some equations and molecular symbols on it, as she faces her students. In front of her is a lab table with a sink attached to one side. On the table is a microscope and a scattering of books, papers and binders. The room has a large double doors for the students to come through, with windows. Cal is peeking through one of them, and we can see Dr. King through the other. She says, "We have a lot of lab rooms, of course. You'll have at least once lab each semester."

Panel Five: An open, mostly dark panel of a semi-circular, ampitheatre-style room. Dr. King and Cal's silhouettes can be seen in the upper right as they stand in a lit doorway. Dr. King says, "We even have two medical theatres! One is for live surgeries and this one is for cadavers." The room has four tiers, and each tier has seats with curved, solid-front tables lining the sections. In the center of the room, where the light is focused, is a woman dressed in a plague doctor uniform seated in a wheelchair. She's next to a gurney draped with a white sheet. It's obvious that there's a body under the sheet, and the teacher is talking to her students seated in the shadows. There are six visible students, three in the front row and three in the back. They are a mix of doctor, scientist and nursing students. In the front row, in the far corner, is a plague doctor student sat apart from the others. He is highlighted with a white glow to indicate that Cal has noticed him. Cal says, "Hey, there's DJ!"

Panel Six: An inset panel of DJ in his uniform, leaning forward and taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook with a fountain pen. The view is from slightly above, as though the viewer is seeing him from roughly the same angle as Cal and Dr. King. She says, "Oh, that's right! I put you together. Well, you'll be back in a week."

Author Note

Time for the tour!
 
The hardest part of this page was trying to decide how I wanted to balance the Gothic style with the more modern elements that you'd find in a regular college.
 
In my head, the school was originally built as a large seminary (hence the Gothic archtecture) which evolved into a regular college around the present day. After the plagues hit, it became a refuge for Carriers because it was a secure, walled structure, and gained the name Yersinia. Carrier numbers grew, and they naturally spilled into what was the small college city around the school as the area emptied due to plagues and regular human migration. They built walls around the town, which grew into a city. The college became not only a place to organize field crews, but a place to train them, as well. Thus, the Yersinia Medical Academy was born. So, there's a mix or modern-looking office spaces and facilities, with a lot of Gothic elements interspaced around. To keep with that, the rest of Yersinia is also a mix of modern and Gothic buildings, with (ironically) a lot of the Gothic styling being younger than the buildings that would look more familiar to us. It's also why you'll see semi-medieval and Gothic elements in a lot of other places, too. It's a popular aesthetic, so it'll pop up in fashion, furniture, etc.
 
If there are any vaccines available, you know what to do!

-Bran

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