[January 2060] H2Onorable Cause (Solo: Smiley)
Smiley grabbed one of his secure burners and made a phone call to a number he didn't like using, but whatever response he could get from the MPA was going to be more than from any government or corporate answer to a Sinless wannabe doc calling about a bunch of sick trogs.
"Righteous? Yeah, this is Smiley. Yeah, the Doc from the Barrens. No, I ain't got donations fr you, when the frag have I had the nu- never mind. Listen, I got another half dozen trog n troll kids from Meritt sick.
Yeah, they'll be fine, it's Giardia and Cholera-12. Antibiotics and a ton of fluids. But for every kid they bring in there are probably 20 untreated. If you've got something else wrong with you this'll kill people.
Yeah, I said Meritt, Shiawase site fed. Same as the last time, and the time before that. That treatment plant was second rate when itw as build, and that was in the damned 30's!"
Another "they'll see what they could do". Smiley hung up and prepared another order of crappy third rate antibiotics and salene. Useless for most purposes, but good at treating the water out of that useless purification system. Maybe he could hit up one of the few charitable centers that sometimes bankrolled him?
It was about 20 minutes later he got another call back.. from the MPA.
They had a full team ready to act for once. They just needed a plan of action. The MPA was great at wrecking things or stealing data, but how did they magically fix 50 year old badly maintained critical infrastructure when they didn't have the money?
Smiley said he'd get back to him and thought about it.
Getting purifiers to all the people in the Barrens was a joke, for reasons that didn't need to be mentioned. Similarly, trying legal action or media attention was a joke as well: no one cared about sinless orcs in the barrens. Shaming Shiawese into it was another thing that wasn't going to happen either.
They could try and arrange a nasty pathogen killer from a back alley source, but the cure might be way, WAY worse than the disease. Plus if any major corp got the idea someone was futzing around with bioweapons in the barrens, they'd get squashed flatter than krill patties.
Nah, the best bet, stupidly, was probably to upgrade the Shiwaese plant without anyone knowing. Right now the place spent most of it's money on security, doing the bare minimum to maintain the city contract. Upgrading the 50 year old hardware with 15 year old hardware without anyone knowing might be the best fix.
First though, they'd need the plans to the place and a water sample near the source.
[9 blank lines suppressed]
The sane way is to get as much info on the plant as possible. We do some recon,