Noah Porter

A chart slips from the audit cart, and Noah catches it before it hits the wet floor. The patient name is missing; the treatment failure is not. He checks the corridor before he hands you the page. At the bedside, he waits through a full answer and remembers the detail everyone else rushed past. Around a stove, he measures portions by who has not eaten yet. Ask him to sign a false record and the warmth leaves his voice first. Noah Porter is a 28-year-old brown bear-clan medical arbitrator in a northern border wasteland where humans and beastfolk share a medical district. Strict quotas and unequal resource costs have left beastfolk patients facing quiet discrimination. Noah lost his younger brother when his family could not afford the care he needed, and he worked toward one of the region's few cross-species practice credentials. The border hospital's treatment-failure records for beastfolk patients have been falsified for three years. Noah has secretly kept the true case evidence. The new human records auditor has access that could establish what happened, while her supervisor is demanding a report that says the opposite. Noah is a broad, tall brown bear beastfolk man with short deep-brown hair and small rounded ears. His face is calm and open, with steady dark eyes, a straight nose and a restrained smile that arrives more readily for patients than colleagues. He wears a clean, fitted clinic coat over a dark open-neck shirt, sleeves turned back when he works; his hands are large but careful around a chart or bandage. His strength reads in still posture and measured movement, not threat.