DPXDC Prompt #58 Part 3
Gotham Academy High School was the sort of school where almost everyone was elite in some way or another. Some of them were from old money like Damian who held himself up to a very high standard in his academics and was the top of the class. Others from new money like Dash and the rest of his cohorts became very hateful of somebody like Danny who was given a scholarship by Bruce Wayne, in their eyes Danny was taking advantage of Damian not even knowing that Damian approached Danny for companionship two years ago.
This also meant that everyone including the teachers would compare Danny and Damian to each other even though they weren’t brothers. That didn’t matter though as Danny was associated with them so that was all the reason they needed.
Danny groaned as he sunk into the seat next to Damian. The lunchroom was filled with chatting students and Danny was glad he shared the next class with Damian, which happened to be English. Dash never bothered Danny when Damian was around, probably because Damian had threatened the jock. How he was threatened Danny didn’t know, Damian never told him what happened and he was a little scared to ask.
The guy hadn’t stopped harassing Danny since he and Jazz transferred a couple years ago. The school year had barely begun and Dash had made Danny his primary target like he was making up for lost time over the summer. Danny sighed as he dropped his paper bagged lunch on the table with a little plop. Jazz had packed for him this morning hopefully before his parents arrived and contaminated the entire kitchen.
“Dash again?” his sister asked across the table, she was seated next to Tim.
“I was paired against him in dodgeball again,” Danny lamented, his head resting on his arms that were crossed on the table.
“Danny, could you just talk to Mr. Lancer or something?” Jazz asked before she took a bite from her sandwich.
Danny sighed again and unpacked his lunch, “I have but no one will listen! They all act like I’m lying or something.” The teachers at this school probably wouldn’t listen to a charity case like him. Dash was a football player and had plans to become captain of the team. Everyone at the school loved Dash and it was precisely why everyone except maybe the four students at the table they were seated looked down and sometimes even bullied Danny.
Danny ignored it all eventually, it was better just to let the jock tire himself out.
Once Danny and Damian finished eating they made their way to English. Luckily it was easy to carry the material for a class that only required a small binder and whatever book they were reading, in this case it was ‘gone with the wind’. Danny didn’t really care about reading old literature like this but he did what he had to maintain the grades he had. He’d endure anything, even Dash’s bullying, to become an astronaut.
Danny could hardly concentrate today through his afternoon classes. For some reason he had a bad feeling that something was going to happen. He tried his best to ignore it, he was probably just tired or something. Soon the school day was out and Danny packed up whatever homework he had for the day and headed outside to wait with Jazz. Damian and Tim were probably wrapping up their classes. Tim had an AP class that ran an extra 30 minutes and Damian’s last class was art, they were doing a painting and it wasn’t unusual for Damian to finish up what he was working on as he found out over the last few years that he enjoyed painting.
“… Do you think it’ll work?” Jazz asked a hint of hesitation in her voice. Danny knew she was talking about the portal, the both of them had talked about it before. Danny glanced over at his sister, he could tell she was having trouble sleeping lately, her face looked tired and her posture was stiff with her arms crossed in front of her. Both of them had anxiety about the possibilities the portal possessed, and they were especially worried that their parents wouldn’t take it well if the portal didn’t work.
He was equally concerned that it would work. “I hope not…” he said eventually. It was something that brought the siblings closer as the whole of their family fell apart. How their parents managed to pull off getting the funding in the first place seemed to be a miracle. Everyone called their parents crazy and dismissed all of their science as ludicrous garbage.
Danny wondered how they even managed to stay under Batman's radar, he thought that something like this would be cause for the vigilante to look into it but maybe the thought of ghosts was just that outlandish that even the dark knight himself thought it to be crazy too. Danny himself didn’t believe in anything his parents published, some of the papers even seemed to be biased somehow, even though his parents hadn’t ever actually encountered a ghost. That last part was probably the reason no one bothered to actually investigate his parents, there wasn’t really much to investigate.
The siblings waited in silence and eventually Tim and Damian showed up after their classes and the four headed to Alfred waiting by the car.
If anyone tried to start a conversation with Danny he wasn’t paying attention. If he was being honest, his parents' portal scared him a lot. He wasn��t sure why he felt so nervous about it, both him and Jazz renounced the thought that ghosts could exist. Something deep down in his guts told him that he should turn and run, that what his parents were attempting was taboo and that his parents were tampering with forces unimaginable.
No one was going to listen to a fourteen year old though so Danny kept his feelings to himself and ignored them.
Soon they were pulled in front of their apartment and true to their word, Damian and Tim asked Alfred to park nearby. Danny and Jazz took a hesitant glance at each other as they walked into the house.
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You don't have to respond to this if you don't want to, I know it will start unneeded drama but I just found it soooo interesting that, since the transphobic blog lets you see their likes, most of their likes are TWC related. And it's not like that fandom is notorious for being a toxic hellspace, no sir.
to be frank it's not just twc, the IF space as a whole is pretty notorious for being toxic at this point. whether you're on tumblr or reddit or the forums, you're going to find these kinds of people lurking around.
that was why i did post that person's username because i could see them interacting with various other authors, and it's best to just block them before they send you something stupid, too.
just like any large online community there are going to be a lot of trolls trying to get attention by sending inflammatory messages or leaving cruel comments wherever they can; i've been getting that kind of stuff sent to me or left in reviews or comments for years now. and currently losers online are having a fucking field day with everything that's going on right now - racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, transphobia, even gore, i've gotten it all in my inbox over the last few months and i've seen others get even worse. these people are pathetic and not worth your time. i've gotten better at not responding to stuff like that, but it is hard to resist that instinctive anger, and that's exactly why they do it & exactly why you see it in every single fandom/online space.
all of that to say, just ignore and block them and you'll have a far better time online than if you constantly try to argue or reason with them because they don't care, their only goal is to make you miserable. even if you think you have some epic clapback, it's not worth it, you're still giving them the attention they clearly desperately want and potentially exposing others to harmful rhetoric. just block 'em, babey!
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I'm on the tail end of physical therapy for a broken leg that required surgery. It made me wonder if there was anything interesting in Ancient Egyptian medicine that you'd read about treating broken bones.
Oh, certainly! Ancient Egyptian treatments for broken bones were very similar to our methods nowadays - that is, they splinted and immobilised fractures after reduction. The treatments for a broken jaw and a broken nose in the Edwin Smith Papyrus (the largest collection of surgical treatments among the medical papyri) are in fact the exact same a few millennia later. For a broken nose in particular, the physician put two rolls of linnen moistened with oil into the nasal passages to keep the shape of the nose intact after bandaging and during healing. Nowadays, we use vaseline gauze the same way.
There's an interesting case in the ESP where the practice of a closed reduction is actually described. This is case 35, a fracture of the clavicle:
You should prostrate him [on his back], [with] something folded which is in [between] his shoulder blades. You should spread out his two shoulders in order to stretch apart his two clavicles until that fracture falls into its place.
This is, again, a practice that has changed very little over time. Interestingly this case does also describe a splinting, but a splinting that seems incongruent with the actual type of fracture:
You should then make for him two splints of linen, and place them, one of them to the inside of his upper arm, and the other to the under site of his upper arm. You should bind it with imrw* and treat him afterwards with honey every day until he recovers.
That would have done very little to stabilise the clavicle. However, the next case, number 36, deals with a fracture of the humerus. This case first details a reduction, but that reduction is the exact same as the preceding one in case 35, just with the term for humerus substituted for the term for clavicle. A fractured humerus is normally set through the use of traction, and then splinted in the way described in case 35.
Nunn, among others including myself, is of the opinion that this is a scribal error where the splinting for case 36 was appended to case 35, and the reduction for case 36 was incorrectly copied from 35.
But overall, lots of evidence that nothing much changed about the setting and treatment of broken bones!
*We haven't been able to precisely determine the meaning of the ingredient imrw so far. As a term it's only found in the ESP and it is likely some type of mineral ingredient since it's written with the determinative for mineral substances. Nunn suggests it may be an equivalent of plaster of Paris used for splinting as we do nowadays, which would be supported with the phrase "you should bind it with imrw" in case 35. I don't agree with that, not only because "bind it with [x]" sees common use elsewhere for any number of poultices and bandaging in the medical papyri, but also because imrw is used in the treatment of other cases that don’t deal with fractures, such as case 15; a slashed cheek with damage to the zygomatic bone. The Grundriss der Medizin der Alten Ägypter simply lists it as "an unknown mineral substance". Brawanski wants to read it as an "astringent bandage" with the note that the determinative could be ambiguous, so he suggests a reading of a bandaging with metal shavings. Meltzer renders it as “alum(?)”, based on similarities to the Coptic term for alum. Personally, I think it's likeliest a mineral/metallic substance, one that possibly inhibits bacterial growth, akin to e.g. red ochre, and which was used in bandaging and poultices.
Good luck with the rest of the physical therapy and rehab! Surgery-requiring fractures are a nsw.t=f m pH.wy=s
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