Shield General

Rough Layout of Shield and adjacent Reproductive Clinic

The first hospital on Escutcheon.

Overview

Shield is a 50-bed hospital with an adjacent facility, a 20-bed reproductive clinic with float chambers. Formally named Escutcheon General, but by now is known as Shield General, or Shield, it is the first modern hospital on Escutcheon and is located in Forecourt, in Firilith.

• Surgery
• ER
• Burn Care
• Long-term Care

The hospital complex occupied the lower southeastern corner of Forecourt, and its gardens ran all the way to the walls. They're "amply supplied with benches for tired patients. There are small courtyards with fountains; fields with benches overhung with flowering trees; and through a strange tunnel of narrow sticks woven together with climbing vines that was, apparently, the start of an attempt to attract small birds and other pollinators." There's a bower with a wooden bench swing, and there are children's swings on the other side of Shield, by the reproductive clinic.

Technology

• The hospital issues its own telegems, a gold and white cloisonné shaped like a caduceus.
• Medimage platforms
• Chatcaavan gel tanks are a later addition, during the Fallowtide period (after Lisinthir's visit with his heirs). Liolesa authorizes that when the Attendant is hospitalized. ("They seem better suited to their gel tanks… we should probably acquire one." "Have your wife see to it. I’ll make sure the money’s there.")

Ambulance Service

"Its ambulance volunteers called themselves the Shield Carriers. The jay they’d appropriated to reach areas without a Pad had a motto scrawled on its side: “Putting them on their shields AND coming back with them."

Main Hospital Layout

• There is a 'healer's lounge.'
• There's a hospital changing room.

"The inpatient rooms faced the east, and each room had access to a shared patio, with half-height walls and benches for visitors arranged have flowers in spring, Armin imagined, but for now were lying fallow, moist brown soil sparkling in the morning light. Until the garden bloomed again, a water garden filled a long trough and several stone amphora overflowed with arrangements of winter roses."

Inner Courtyard/Cafe

Did you know it had a small fountain in it? You do now! Also: "The hospital had a canopy it could erect over the courtyard for poor weather, but as it was a projection, it wasn’t often used so as to reduce the load on Shield’s generator."

Reproductive Clinic

The adjacent clinic is considered part of the hospital.

Patient Rooms

The patient rooms have halo-arches, and the ceilings are filmed with a reproduction of the sky outside (as long as it's nice out).

Float Chambers

These are cozy chambers with cushioned benches along two of the walls and chairs against the other. The tech that suspends the float is in the ceiling; this also includes the imaging technology that projects visualizations of early floats (later term floats are visible to the unaided eye). There are several milkily translucent panels along the wall facing the door (on the other side of this wall is the machinery and the technicians' stations.

The chamber creates an enclosed field that floats near the top center of the room; this field can be touched, and through it one can feel the heartbeat (mother's at first, later the child's as well).

People need to be on a pass list to be allowed entrance to a specific float chamber. Otherwise visitors must enter accompanied by a parent.

Personnel

Hospital Staff

• Head of Surgery: Lafayette KindlesFlame
• Aura TotheQuick, a surgical healer-assist, "Inevitably a Tam-illee, given the original composition of Laisrathera."
• Falden: he/she takes KindlesFlame to surgery prep when he arrives to Escutcheon straight into Haladir's crisis. ; Falden also intercepts Jahir when he arrives after Sediryl's whipping lands her in the hospital, to tell him that KindlesFlame wants him in theater two.
• Sehvi has an office in the reproductive clinic.

Administrative

• Mellie Grant, a black Seersa who drives the ambulance
• Arjda, a Harat-Shariin receptionist at the reproductive clinic. Male, clouded pard, likes pastries.