Praxed

Praxed isn't a Core world by any stretch of the imagination, but it's part of a cluster of fairly developed colonies about halfway to the outer rim. The capital, Logan City, is a rambling sprawl that rarely reaches above two or three stories, but large enough to deserve the name city, and has the best and largest hospitals on the planet, as well as the planetary space docks spread across the hills overlooking the valley. On the opposite side of the city, the Valencia Hospital looks down cheerily on the mazy streets, white-fronted and shining.

It's a bustling, grubby place, with an active marketplace and a fair cross-section of travellers for a Rim dirtball.

When Serenity lands, her crew has a busy agenda. The first thing--the reason they are here--is to meet with the Tet Consortium, and Malcolm Reynolds fetches Roland Deschain and heads for the docks to wait for their contact bright and early. But there's other business; following their experimental work with with the new shields, Wash and Kaylee are refueling the ship and doing the kind of comprehensive diagnostic you have to be dirtside to do, and as planned, Simon, River, and Anthy Himemiya head for the Valencia Hospital.

It's going to be a busy day.

[Reader's note: These subthreads follow each other in chronological order, but this one goes in between them.]

Valencia Hospital

The Valencia Hospital on Praxed is the charitable work of a group of Dao-Catholic nuns, and was one of the earliest buildings in the community of Logan City. From a small wooden lodge converted into a clinic on the side of the eastern hill, it's grown into a gleaming white-washed idol looming benevolently over the city's sprawling marketplace, directly opposite her hillside docks.

The clinic has gently but firmly rejected all Alliance funding despite increasing pressure; the current administrator, Brother Zhongzi Dan, has steered a difficult course of appeasement and resistance with official Alliance medical boards, all the time somehow scraping up funding to keep his hospital as equipped, staffed, and stocked as it can be under the circumstances.

All this is to say that Simon Tam is able to run a fairly comprehensive diagnostic on Anthy Himemiya with no trouble whatsoever; whether or not medical science can give an insight into her particular troubles is an open question, but at least he's got the data.

[Reader's note: These subthreads follow each other in chronological order.]