Jai is a Mercurian doctor, a specialist in infectious disease and a member of the Beltway Quarantine Collective's Interplanetary Infection Control and Response Team, tasked with deployment to active infection sites to administer care for and containment of viral contagion. Working directly with patients in quarantine zones, Jai's demeanor is a surface-level of gentle calmness masking a deeper layer of black humor, often taking the edge off an uncertain situation by making light of the bad times without diminishing their weight or significance- it's a bit of a tightrope to walk, but with a bit of experience they can get a feel for how receptive a patient is for a bit of grim levity. If a problem is severe enough that Jai and their team have come to your community, you probably already know things aren't great and you don't need to be coddled, but a lighthearted chuckle can be a good medicinal supplement to good medicine. Back home they have a pair of dogs, two large herding breeds, named Pickle and Brine; they keep holographs of their dogs on them in a sterilized holoprojection module because whenever they talk about Pickle and Brine their patients ask to see them, and they always respond to this like, oh, well I just so happen to have some pictures of them, if you'd like to see. That bit is always a hit.
The Beltway Quarantine Collective is an institution founded by a coalition of Inner Belt medical colleges with the aim of preventing planetary illnesses from hitchiking onto other worlds in the age of the commercial starship. Operating out of a string of space stations orbiting the Asteroid Belt, the Beltway Quarantine Collective offer a safe harbor for starships which are found to be carrying invasive biological specimen which can wreck havoc on a planetary ecosystem which is not prepared to deal with them. These items can be plants or animals, but team's like the one Jai serves in handle the spread of viral and bacterial infection, and their duties often find them working in tandem with their peers on floral and faunal specialist teams. The Interplanetary Infection Control and Response Team is a branch of the Beltway Quarantine Collective which travels to starships or planetside locations in order to assess, contain and mitigate further spread of disease outbreaks wherever they might occur. Because of their role in entering viral hotspots and the inherent risk of exposure to infectious disease, the Interplanetary Infection Control and Response Team is staffed only by starfarers from species with exceptionally-high natural resistance to non-native infection This shortlist generally includes:
- Mercurians, whose baseline internal body temperatures exceeding even the fever state of other species protects them from illnesses by cooking them on contact.
- Europans, whose full-enclosure EVO suits are entirely impenetrable to outside contaminants entering their system, and who contain any internal illness from escaping.
- Caelians, whose jelly-like internal organs and body systems are so unlike other organic starfarers that illnesses are unable to take root, should they breach their breathing tubes at all.
- Androids of all makes, who are simply not susceptible to organic illnesses in the first place.
Even having the robust immune system of a Mercurian, Jai and the rest of their team still wear full protective gear when they are deployed to an infection control site. "It's not enough to have one line of defense and call it a day, you need to have layers to catch whatever surprises might slip through the first line." As a frontline doctor working directly with infected patients, Jai takes the spread of disease extremely seriously, their gentle nature becoming quite sharp very quickly when they find their staff not in compliance with protocol. You might be okay, it might be fine this time, but you don't know that, and you don't know when the breach is going to happen, and when it does the impact it could have on whole communities could be devastating. You take it seriously every time because any time could be that time, this is not optional and you are not exceptional. Layers are how you build containment and protection, layers are how you keep people safe when you're knowingly entering a hot zone, and while Jai will always enforce best practice for protection, they've learned to use their Gift of Sol as a final layer of defense against breaches of disease containment.
Jai's Gift is the seemingly-humble domain of Moisture. They can read the presence of water in a given body and intuit its purity or contamination on sight. This doesn't seem as powerful a Gift as some other Mercurians carry- anyone can see water!- but when you grow up in the lower caves it can be life-saving to tell at a glance if the air down a tunnel will be too thick to traverse safely or if there is no capacity for the air to absorb evaporated sweat. Jai can tell when harmful gases are displacing moisture-holding atmosphere and, crucially, they can tell when something dangerous is riding on a cloud of wet lung butter horked out of a cough. In their Firewalker Form Jai is able to control where and how ambient moisture congregates; they can influence atmospheric water droplets to condense into homogenous pockets, allowing them to contain an airborne cloud of disease, or they can choose to dispel the ambient moisture of their immediate surroundings out into the atmosphere around them, effectively drying out a quarantined space in a way that prevents diseases from hitching a ride on wet air, but also ends up making everyone else really itchy to be in for too long. By manipulating atmospheric moisture they can create columns of safe passage through infected air or deadly gases by expelling or introducing moisture-rich air into that space. They try not to rely on their Firewalking as a first-line protection in controlling infection, reinforcing the idea that their staff should take personal protection completely seriously every time! But in case something happens, Jai will burn some calories to contain an airborne contaminant if it means preventing an unwanted vector from spreading.
When Jai isn't in active deployment or they're not on call, they love to travel and see the many worlds of the Sol system. They tend to visit a lot of places under dire circumstances, it's nice to travel outside of work and see a world in its natural state, to try the foods its people have created, enjoy their hospitality, traverse their terrain and catch breathtaking views of the rare and beautiful miracle this little speck of life hanging in space has cultivated. Pickle and Brine love it too; they're big dogs with a lot of energy, and sometimes Jai can have a hard time keeping up with their bottomless reserves of Dog Power, but it's worth it to see the sights of Sol with their beloved companions. Bringing them all over the system makes for an impressive holograph album- sometimes patients will recognize where they've been, and tell their own stories about the spots in the backgrounds of Jai's dog photos. It's inspiring to hear just how interconnected we all are, how wherever you've been or whatever you've seen, there's a thread of people who have followed that same path and written their own stories with pens dipped in the inkwells of those same places. The intersections of our lives are joyous and beautiful, and that's why we mask up and wear the full protection every time we're on-site, Jai will tell their staff. We don't want to risk sending something foul down the line, we know how fractally those lines branch out, we know how many lives those lines touch. We're all connected, so let's keep the lines clean. Scrub down and mask up. Let's get to work.