[ Yakov finds his way to the aid station after returning his plate. He is, after all, a medic, even if one day ago he thought that part of his life was finally, mercifully behind him.

The people here, unlike most of the wounded on the Eastern Front, are generally those with a chance of being helped. It figures that nothing except another war could compare to that which created the hideous welter he was so shortly ago responsible for trying to repair. The residents of this place are quick to exchange his red cross armband for a blue one when they cross paths with him, offering up clean strip of cloth that's actually white, not tinged gray-brown; Yakov, to his credit, accepts it without argument. Without much of anything, really: he doesn't have anything useful to say, and he's still taking it all in. And then he resumes stitching, rinsing, debriding.

Most of the cases here, excepting traumatic injuries, seem to be of a distinctly tropical variety. The patterns of the rashes are work for a doctor or a village elder, not a medic who, before the war, had no medical experience at all. It's for that reason that Yakov sticks to the gashes and scrapes, at least until he catches a familiar, distinctly topographical rash on an exposed calf from the corner of his eye while walking through the aisle of the ward.

He doubles back and briefly introduces himself to the man, bending down to run a gloved finger over the colorless patch of tightly clustered bumps with a frown before turning to the nearest aid worker for a second opinion. ]

That looks like a nettle sting.

[ If your character comes into the aid station wounded, they'll find that Yakov is quick to address the immediate issues until someone with medical experience beyond emergency stabilization is available. If he catches a sliver of fear in the eyes of a patient as they wait for a doctor, he'll wordlessly rest a hand on their shoulder; if they look like they need to hold someone's hand, he's willing to do that, too. ]

[ The blank silence of the wet heavy air crushes Yakov like the pressure of the ocean's deepest reaches as he stares up at the gray ceiling of his new accommodations. There is, of course, the trilling of some pervasive insect, the occasional hoots and screeches of some sort of monkey or bird, the more familiar sound of croaking frogs—but the backdrop of distant mortars has been yanked away all at once, leaving a void in its wake. The jungle is, if anything, more alive now than it was when he arrived, in diametric opposition to the human body's schedule as if to make a point of how out of place he is here, how out of place they all are.

Space travel. Sure, it's something they'd thought about from time to time, but not too deeply. Not when there was so much so profoundly wrong in their current environment. Yakov reaches for the pamphlet on the crate beside his bunk and opens it to the dogeared page he left off on an hour ago, skimming the familiar words in the semidarkness.

Characters who can read Cyrillic may notice the title, or, more likely, its author: What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement by V. I. Lenin.

The pamphlet, unlike the larger canon of Comrade Lenin's writings, has a finite end. Yakov quietly sets it to the side, mindful of the fact that someone else is mercifully asleep a few feet away, then gets up, slipping his feet into his boots and wandering down the hallway with an unlit cigarette dangling between his bony fingers.

He makes his way to the edge of the communal housing block before he lights it and shakes out the match; he's always preferred to smoke while looking at something. In this case it's the half-darkness enveloping what one might generously refer to as some kind of patio or courtyard, a place that, crawling with humans though it may be, has already been permeated by the creeping tendrils of the verdant landscape.

When the blur of a humanoid figure appears in his peripheral vision, Yakov wordlessly extends the hand holding the cigarette without turning his head. That gesture, at least, is familiar. ]

[ Yakov proceeds through the high scrub as one would expect a soldier to—head lowered slightly to account for his own height, semiautomatic pistol held in front of him while cocked and loaded. He moves as quietly as he can, alternating between scanning the horizon and glancing down at the dense clumps of yellow grass for signs of movement—though south Siberia isn't as riddled with snakes as other parts of the country, he still learned to watch for adders and moccasins in his youth, an instinct that transfers easily to this kind of environment.

The meter-high threshold for plant growth eventually gives way to a strip of gray-trunked trees with masses of endlessly forking branches that half-obscure the cliff face behind them; the yellow ground, hard and dry though it may be, is increasingly carved by dozens of overlapping animal tracks, some with cloved hooves, some with paws. All of them point toward or away from the treeline.

Which, he realizes upon reaching it, actually marks the severe edge of a ravine, at least twice as deep as he is tall. The animals were approaching it for the thin trickle of water at its lowest crevice. ]

Fuck, [ he sighs, running a hand over his forehead. Yakov tilts his head back, regards the gash in the land's surface with veiled frustration. ] There's no way to cross that. We have find some way to go around.

if you have an idea that's not on here, hit me up by pm or shoot me a message on discord at grinchhands mcgee#7599! yakov's likely to be seen helping where he can, mostly at the aid station but also with fortifications, very basic structural repairs, etc. ]