Okay maybe he hadn't quite opened the door so much as gotten it about half way, seen someone walking by, and quickly pulled it mostly shut again. Nat took a deep breath and tried to re-gather his willpower, hand resting on the doorknob.
Walking out the door in the morning shouldn't be so much of a production for such a simple outcome — but it was. And after a decade or so of it being a regular event, Nat was completely sick of it having to be a thing. But the alternative — becoming a total shut–in — was marginally worse in his analysis, so he forced the anxiety down, and pushed the door open again. Then took a quick surreptitious look to make sure the hall nearby was empty. The coast being clear this time, he put one foot in front of the other, and stepped out into the halls of the Bell House of Healing.
That was the official name, on display to anyone standing outside the main building, reading the words inscribed on the stonework over the large double doors. Just Bell House to those who spent any time here, doctor, patient or otherwise.
Bell House was a hospital, of sorts. Albeit a small one primarily staffed by skilled doctors from an itinerant tribe of quasi-religious nomads, the Nalgan. Their tribe had apparently gotten stuck here — how here related to their point of origin hadn't been clarified — after the Cataclysm. When asked, they insisted they would return home as soon as practicable, and so refused to officially settle — instead moving their rolling camp from village to town to city outskirts and back again. This helped explain how they had so many trained doctors for such a relatively small tribe — normally an uncommon profession — as their tradesman only took jobs suitable to a nomadic people that they could learn and practice in a roving camp. For permanent staff, Bell House had only one or two doctors, a handful of nurses, and a dozen or so various others — orderlies and cooks and groundsmen. Most were residents of the nearby town of Gravlin, two kilometers almost due east from Bell House's grounds.
Though primarily a research hospital and clinic, Bell House was still well-appointed. As a clinic, it wasn't a place that catered only to the rich but also served the local community. Most of the doctors on staff were either learning or part-time researchers who would work a reason or two and then rotate out; the constant variety and lack of long term staff made for a real cast of characters — since people without close-by roots tended to be more conservative in their actions than those who would likely have years between visits.
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The bulk of the work was done by whichever Nalgan doctors decided to show up that day and treat the patients sitting in the waiting room — which sounded like a recipe for disaster but in practice worked out fairly well, excepting the very occasional outlier such as when food poisoning struck a dinner crowd and the next morning someone had to be sent to the camp to ask for additional help. The Nalgan were a bit strange to Nat, but he could feel the vague outlines of an epiphany starting to form that he might later solidify into a concrete, actionable realization. Something important about a freedom that came from being able to decide if they wanted to work or not on any given day.
Thus, the only true residents of Bell House were those who could not, for one reason or another, leave after the night bell rang. Once the exterior doors were all closed and locked from without everyone on the outside of those walls was thankful to return to dine and sleep in their far more comforting homes. Homes that didn't usually have so great a percentage of people moaning in pain, screaming in the wee hours of the night during a mental breakdown, or occasional bladder control issues after a seizure. The only consistent thing about those who stayed even a night was their lacking a certain modicum of luck at that moment.
Bell House could have been a madhouse filled with horrors run by amoral doctors intent on abusing the patients in unethical experiments, but it wasn't. Sure, no-one not there working a job, and some who were, was happy to be there — the same as any hospital. But ultimately, other than some light mad science it was a fine place to seek healing; you can't win them all — there was never really enough mad science to go around. It was as good as one could ask for without a personal fortune to spend, and better than most. It was, however, still a place that collected and housed illness, mental or otherwise. Perfectly healthy people are sometimes not the best company when suffering from some minor inconvenience. The residents of Bell House were by and large well past simple inconvenience, and thus some degree of chaos was to be managed every day, with rare exception.
