DN - Rib Explosion

The sensor ring drops and does a quick pass across my body. The bruise is still there, and the center has turned a little black, but the outer edges are starting to fade to green and disappear. From outside the tube I hear a sharp bark of surprise, and then a stream of what might be (okay, what certainly is) profanity of notable creativity and enthusiasm.

“What? What is it?”

The intercom clicks on. “Danny, you broke three of your ribs.”

“Oh.” Somehow, I would have expected that to be a lot more painful.

“They’ve set themselves—which is amazing, by the way; most people’s bodies don’t do that—and on anyone else I’d say they’d be about one week into healing, but even that is a little slower than how Dreadnought normally healed.”

“Oh.”

“That’s not the fu—freaky part,” says Doc Impossible. “Your ribs were broken from the inside. I mean inside the bones themselves. They exploded. You’ve got scars consistent with bone shard perforations in your liver, stomach, spleen, and kidney.”

Oh. That’s new. “How did it happen?” Doc Impossible is quiet for a moment, and the sensor ring goes crazy, jumping up and down, twirling, spraying me with ten different colors of light before it settles again. “I don’t know. Maybe this has something to do with how long your transformation took. What I can say is that if you were anybody else you’d be dead. Whatever you did, don’t do it again until we understand it.”

- Dreadnought, Chapter 13