A puzzled look settled on her face when staring at the bloody mess on her operation table. She retraced the steps in her head to figure out where she had gone wrong whilst carefully stroking her chin with the three fingers of her right hand.
What was it? The specimen had been securely strapped to the table. When she had started with her research project into this peculiar species, she had forgotten this from time to time, and it had always become quite a messy situation. She had hated the cleaning up part, especially, but it had all improved after she rewatched some of the footage from what they called hospitals. She had not only added some restraints to her table for securing the specimen but found out about something called anesthetics to keep them unconscious during her experiments even after acquiring them during their nocturnal resting cycle. She was bloody sure that she had done it in the correct order, today: specimen acquisition, securing it to the table, applying anesthetics and finally starting the procedure by opening up the chest cavity. In the beginning, it had taken her a few attempts to find out that it worked better if she applied the anesthetics before the procedure, but those had been just minor glitches.
Those beings fascinated her. They were so resilient that they were able to recover from wounds and injuries which would easily kill one of her own kind or require extensive medical procedures, and augmentions. Their bones regrew and mended themselves inside their bodies, even without invasive treatment. Their bodily fluids refilled at an alarming rate, toxins were filtered out by some of the organs to be excreted afterwards, and tissue regeneration bordered on magic. In her youth, she had broken her arm, once. It had been only due to the high standing and financial means of her parents, that she had received the necessary medicines and equipment to mend the bones. But those beings achieved this on their own and in a fraction of the time it took the doctors to fix her arm.
Arms, they had been the starting point of her journey, discovering the regenerative abilities of those aliens. She had started with some of the digits at their anterior extremities; removed them, kept them in suspended reanimation and reattached them afterwards. It was incredible how fast they bonded again with the tissue of their former host, even if she swapped their places when reattaching them.
The current specimen had not regained its vital functions, as of yet. In the middle of today's experiment there had been a considerable spillage of what the aliens referred to as blood, even though she had reattached the vessel to the organ which kept the blood pulsing through their system immediately. She had observed this procedure at least a hundred times before, and it seemed to be a rather common one on this alien world. Normally the aliens brought their fellow creatures into something they called hospitals where they were moved into a special room, and rendered unconscious. She called up her images of those rooms and checked, if there were any differences between her equipment and the instruments displayed on her screen. Item for item she checked her setup, traced the lines of her blades, compared the screens and displays with the recordings. Everything checked out fine. Her confusion grew. The equipment was fine, the collocation of the organs of this specimen followed the schemata in the books she had acquired, even her timing followed the scripts perfectly. Was it a translation error on her behalf? Her grasp of their language wasn't perfect, but she definitely was getting the hang of it.
Being unable to discover any mistake on her part, she shrugged her shoulders, and decided to spend some more time doing research on the matter - she only had to figure out, if it was another episode of Scrubs or ER.
