Superheroes need medical care as much as anyone else — in fact, given the dangers of their mission, they often need a lot more medical care than the man on the street. Unfortunately, heroes who conceal their identities behind masks, who live their lives in the shadows, and who are often wanted by the police or pursued by fanatical enemies usually can’t just waltz into the local hospital or doctor’s office and get patched up. Fortunately for the superhero community one dedicated doctor spotted the problem and came up with a solution.

Doctor Todd Khaine is a caring and compassionate physician who turned down numerous lucrative job offers to work at the Khaine Medical Clinic, a semi-free medical facility for the impoverished people of the city and the surrounding communities. Founded by his once wealthy family in the early Sixties, it has a long and proud tradition of service to the community, and Khaine wanted to be part of that. Still, as satisfying as his work was, it lacked a certain intellectual challenge, and he always felt he should be doing something more as a way of giving back to a city that had given his family so much. The solution to Khaine’s problem — though he didn’t recognize it as such at the time — came one fateful night in 2001 when he and a date were walking back to his car from a late dinner. Suddenly a mugger jumped out of the shadows, knocking Khaine to the ground and threatening him with a gun. The man was
demanding money in a crazed voice, but Khaine feared that even if he gave the robber his wallet, he might get shot anyway. In a flash a superhero swept down from the rooftops, hitting the mugger with a flying kick that knocked him
unconscious and into a pile of trash in a nearby alley. That would have been the end of it... except that before the mugger passed out he reflexively squeezed the trigger, catching the hero in the stomach with the bullet. Bleeding profusely, the hero might have died right there on the sidewalk had it not been for Dr. Khaine. Improvising surgical tools from his pocketknife and his date’s tweezers, and bandages from strips of cloth torn from his own suit jacket, he removed the bullet and patched up the wound, stabilizing the hero long enough to get him to Khaine’s car and drive him to the hospital. Once at the hospital the hero got full medical care... but Khaine also witnessed him having to cope with what seemed like a dozen different problems caused by the fact that he was a superhero. Hospital administrators kept pestering him for an insurance card or other means of payment. Police officers responding to
the hospital’s report of a shooting victim wanted to know his real identity and see his permit to carry firearms in public. Hospital workers who were superhero fans kept stopping by to take his picture or try to get an autograph. A couple hours later when no one was looking, but long before he should have even been walking, the hero snuck out the window and vanished.

Superheroes need their own hospital, Khaine thought to himself. It was a great idea — but also a very expensive one, and he simply didn’t have the money. He briefly looked into the possibility of getting charitable funding, but no one
he broached the idea with wanted to have anything to do with a secret (and possibly illegal) medical clinic. One day he had a visit from Leon Felino, the billionaire owner of Tomorrow Corps. Leon had heard about Khaine's plan and wanted to fund it. Now he could afford to put his plan into action. Working through a series of shell companies,
Tomorrow purchased a small building not too far from the Khaine Medical Clinic. While keeping the outside of the building looking like a typical office, it was outfitted with the standard equipment for an emergency room in a high-violence neighbourhood, since they expected (correctly) that most of the work would basically be trauma medicine. With his clinic all set up and ready to go, Khaine realized he wasn’t entirely sure how to get the word out to the superhero community but still keep the clinic’s existence secret so supervillains, the police, and hero fans wouldn’t
disturb it. Again Leon took care of this though Khaine doesnt know how (Leon is El Tigre and spread the word to heroes he trusts). Realizing that sooner or later word about the Critical Care clinic was likely to leak out, Leon also suggested several alternate sites to Khaine and advised him to remain prepared to relocate quickly at all times. Slowly but surely, “business” increased to the point where Khaine was busy nearly every night. Eventually he had to hire a staff and other doctors to help him. As of mid-2017, Critical Care has become an important resource for the superheroes of your city. Though it’s had a few close calls the secret of its existence remains safe... for now.

Although it started as a simple one-man operation, Critical Care has grown to encompass over a dozen medical professionals who secretly serve the superhero community. The budget for Critical Care comes primarily from the Tomorrow Corporation, but many wealthy superheroes voluntarily pay for their treatments there or donate money to Critical Care’s trust fund. Roughly speaking, Critical Care can be thought of as having two branches. The first is the
“office staff ” — two doctors and three nurses who work at the clinic near the Khaine Medical Clinic. They provide most of the major medical care, keep the facility clean, and so forth. Thanks to the fact that they don’t have to file insurance paperwork or deal with a hospital bureaucracy, and that medical records are transcribed from dictation machines, they can spend nearly all of their time on patient care and other vital tasks.
The second branch is Critical Care’s squad of Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) who administer medical care in the field.

Critical Care’s physical facility — “the clinic,” as it’s known — is still located in the four-story building the Tomorrow Corporation bought several years ago, though Dr. Khaine and his staff are ready to abandon it with just a few minutes’ notice if necessary. The building has a somewhat rundown appearance, though that’s mostly a sham; Khaine has had it renovated and repaired to tip-top condition inside and keeps the outside in poor condition to discourage the curious. Critical Care masquerades as a telephone answering service office, thus giving it a reason to have lights burning there all night. There’s a tiny “reception room” just inside the front door in case anyone comes in to inquire about phone services, at which point the “receptionist” politely turns the potential customer away. The receptionists are also trained to recognize superhumans in need of medical assistance and to call the staff if necessary.

There are three entrances to the clinic besides the front door. First, there’s a back door in a secluded alley. This is where most patients enter, since it’s concealed from the street. It leads to an emergency room where a duty nurse performs intake and triage on the patient. The back door is not unlocked, though — a hero who wants in has to press a buzzer and be seen on a two-way video screen by the duty nurse. In practical deference to the possibility that some
injured heroes may not be able to stand, there’s also a buzzer near ground level. Second, for heroes who need even more concealment there’s an entrance from the sewer system. It leads into a “clean room” where the hero is subjected to a rapid antiseptic shower. There’s a two-way camera at the entrance to the clean room, just like the one in the alley. Third, there’s an aerial entrance on the roof that allows the Heli-Ambulances to enter and exit (plus a high-speed elevator to take patients down from the fourth floor landing pad to the emergency room). A two sliding doors rapidly retract and close to open or seal the hangar. This entrance only opens for the Heli-Ambulances; it’s not a general entrance for flying heroes (though one could certainly enter or exit while the doors are open, a period of 1 Turn from the time they start to open). Despite this wide selection of entrances some heroes find their own ways to get into the clinic. Heroes who can become intangible often just walk through the alley wall right into the ER, and heroes so often teleport in that the staff has set aside a small corner as their “landing zone” so they don’t accidentally materialize in an object or person.

The first floor of the Critical Care clinic contains the emergency room, plus several private patient rooms off of it where heroes can be taken for specific treatment after their initial intake. Most visits to Critical Care don’t require a hero to leave this floor; Critical Care’s three doctors can stitch minor wounds, treat cuts and bruises, set most broken bones, and the like right here. Critical Care’s second floor has rooms for diagnostic equipment and two small operating theatres. Seriously-injured heroes are immediately transferred here by high-speed elevator so one of the doctors can get right to work saving their lives. The third floor contains more diagnostic equipment plus a “recuperation ward” with 15 beds. Most of the beds are in one dormitory-like room, with only curtains to separate them, but there are three private rooms for patients who may put other patients at risk of infection, radiation powers or the like. The fourth floor includes the hangar for the Heli-Ambulances, offices for the doctors, equipment storage, and a few areas where
the staff can put more beds if necessary (though they’ve never had to).

Besides some of the specialized equipment described below, Critical Care contains a full range of standard medical equipment to diagnose and treat various combat medicine conditions and illnesses, plus equipment specially designed
for use on superhumans. For example, not all superheroes can submit to an MRI scan, so Dr. Khaine has worked with gadgeteer heroes to create a similar machine that uses a pulson energy field instead of magnetism. Critical Care’s
equipment also typically works on a much wider range of body shapes and sizes than similar machines in an ordinary hospital. Although it has many advanced systems, Critical Care is not set up to provide long-term care of illnesses and chronic conditions; it primarily focuses on trauma medicine. It doesn’t have the lab facilities to study serious diseases, for instance. A hero who presents with a problem Critical Care isn’t equipped to treat is so informed and advised to visit a standard hospital or to contact the Centres for Disease Control. If the Critical Care staff feels that a
patient is contagious and should not be allowed to leave on his own, it transports him to an appropriate facility via Hover-Ambulance. On two occasions Dr. Khaine has had to tranquilize an unruly hero whom he felt posed a serious public health risk so that hero could be taken to the Khaine Medical Clinic. This cost him a little credibility in the eyes of some heroes, but most members of the superhero community recognize the necessity for his actions and don’t hold them against him.

One of the big questions concerning Critical Care is this: which superheroes get to know about it? Doctor Khaine wants to make sure that people who need Critical Care’s services know about it, but he doesn’t want it to become a target for supervillains. At first El Tigre simply spread the word to heroes he knew and trusted, relying on their discretion and judgment when it came to passing on the information. That’s worked pretty well, and over the years heroes “in the know” have developed an informal policy: only after a newcomer has been fighting crime and villainy as a superhero for at least six months, thus establishing his bona fides, should more experienced heroes introduce him to Critical Care. Of course, that policy is flexible enough to allow for some variations. If a new hero works with and earns the respect of existing heroes of good judgment, they might tell him about Critical Care earlier. A new hero who’s badly injured might get taken to Critical Care for treatment regardless of whether he’s learned about it already. Khaine would rather risk the clinic’s exposure than allow a hero to suffer or die from an injury the clinic could treat. Because it’s such a valuable service for them, superheroes work hard to keep Critical Care a secret. They don’t talk about it casually, they take as much caution as they can when they go to visit it, and they don’t go to Critical Care for injuries they can get treated for in conventional facilities without raising suspicion. If a supervillain or other dangerous
individual were to learn about Critical Care, the city’s superheroes would take pains to make it very clear to him what would happen to him if he tells anyone else. Some mentalist heroes might even be inclined to wipe that memory from the villain’s mind, even though they’d normally never even consider that sort of psionic tampering.

Khaine, his two doctor colleagues, and the other medical professionals who comprise the Critical Care staff are drawn tightly together by two things. The first is a genuine desire to help the superhero community by keeping heroes “in good repair.” The sometimes stressful conditions under which they work, combined with the need to maintain the facility’s secret, give the team a high degree of morale and camaraderie. The second is the Hippocratic Oath. While only the three doctors have actually had to swear the oath, the nurses and other Critical Care workers generally agree with the sentiment. The truth is that while Critical Care doesn’t cater to supervillains, if a villain in need of medical care stumbled into the place, Khaine and his colleagues wouldn’t hesitate to offer treatment regardless of their personal safety or the need to keep Critical Care secure. Only if a villain posed a threat to other patients would they refuse to help him. A few Critical Care personnel, most prominently Robert Ross, have no desire to help villains at all and would watch them die rather than provide medical care to them.

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