Chapter 54: The Way Out
The day's research seemed to be going poorly at first, as even with all four of them working on it, it was almost noon before they discovered anything useful, but at the very least, none of them had any further desire to leave that room anytime soon. They all knew that the environment of a lab was far more likely to be disease-free than the outside world.
In the end, it was Lucia who found the next important piece of information; a progress report by one of the docters who'd been working in that lab. He was a short, heavyset-looking man with a bald head, who was dressed in a gray shirt with an odd image and some lettering along its front, and about ten seconds into his report, they were all listening intently.
"This may prove to be very important, or perhaps very unimportant, but while testing a specimen in a sealed environment and one infected with the virus, I discovered that they had different reactions to honey. Some had gotten mixed in with their food, and while the normal specimen ate the honey eagerly, the other one tasted it and immediately began to suffer a strong allergic reaction around its mouth and chin. I tried the experiment several more times on several more specimens, and discovered that honey, applied to the skin of any infected animal causes a rash to develop, while normal animals suffer no ill effect from it. Unfortunately, in the process, I've also discovered that I have the virus as well, and so do most of my colleagues. I'm afraid that it may be too late for us, but hopefully, you'll be able to use this information at your lab. If nothing else, this bloody virus can't travel by video signal."
The next important illusion was found just a little less than forty minutes later, and again, it was found by Lucia. It was a middle-sized woman with black hair and shockingly-red lips, dressed in a very long, white jacket, and she looked very concerned, but not personally afraid, which probably meant that that illusion had been recorded during the early days after the creation of the virus. She took a minute or two to explain that the current goal of Lab 14 was to eradicate the Kapler virus, or at least block it from infecting anyone else, then in a few more moments, she said something that Katie hadn't really been thinking about much.
"Remember," the woman continued in just a moment, "it's not enough for us to find a cure. All that would do would be to provide a temporary reprieve from the effects of the virus until we catch it again, and there's always the chance that it could mutate and grow more dangerous as a result. Remember, this thing was designed by a scientist, and intended to kill people. What we need is a means of totally immunizing ourselves against the virus, so that we're not at risk of catching it a second time; a permanent solution. I know that you won't rest until you've found it, and neither will I."
When she heard that, Katie's heart sank, because while she was good at making potions, they could only be given permanent effects by a star gem, and she'd already taken one of those, and wouldn't be able to use another. On top of that, even supposing that she found a cure, would they be able to get away before the virus attacked one of them again? It could, after all, spread to them through contact with moisture, and...
All at once, an idea had dawned on Katie, and she immediately pulled out her book and began leafing through it, looking for one of the ingredients that she remembered seeing a while back; a potion effect that was rare in the modern world, but exceptionally effective. Of course, it would mean using up more ingredients, but fortunately, that Lab had been offering her more than enough of those.
It was nearly three o'clock by the time Katie announced that she was almost ready to test her first attempt. First, however, she used some honey to test and see whether any of them had caught the disease, and as it turned out, only Gergio was still clean. All the rest of them were infected, which explained the momentary lightheadedness that Katie had experienced when she'd first arrived, and her more recent problems with forgetting where she'd put things, and with blurting out things that she hadn't intended to say aloud. She'd been noticing those symptoms since the night before, and Lydia had seemed a little distracted for the last hour or so, but if Katie hadn't already recognized those symptoms, she wouldn't have thought it was anything serious.
Soon, however, Katie had handed a small bottle to Lydia, who drank it quickly, stepping away from everyone else. Then, in a moment, she'd poured another potion bottle over Lydia's head, and after waiting about five seconds, spoke to her friend directly.
"Did that work? Are you feeling better?"
"Yes, I think so. I don't feel quite as dizzy as I did a moment ago."
Still, Katie tested the results of her cure a moment later, by putting a little honey on Lydia's arm, and watching in satisfaction as no rash showed any sign of breaking out on her skin.
"Hah!" Gergio exclaimed in amazement and delight, "You've done it!"
"Unfortunately, no." Katie replied, however, "This isn't going to be permanent unless... unless we can get out of here without being re-infected, which means that it's not safe to let anything with moisture on it touch us until we've gotten to the next world. I... I... I need a drink."
Quickly, Katie picked up another of the vials she'd been working on, taking a sip from it, and sighing after a few more seconds as the potion did its work, and she found herself able to think straight again. At last, she continued her explanation.
"I've been having a hard time with it, but I've been trying to develop a potion that will shield us from the virus long enough to get through the next gate. The problem is that a lot of the shielding potion effects I'm familiar with either rely on water or don't block moisture effectively. Of course, there's one method that I'm sure would work, but I should warn you all; it would hurt a lot."
Gergio seemed to be scoffing just a little, while Lydia nodded her head firmly. Only Lucia looked like she was scared, and even she, after a few moments, sighed and nodded.
"You guys are tough." Lucia said at last, "I've been in a lot of danger before now, but I'm not really used to being in pain, like you probably are. Still, if... if... Well, I'd rather be in pain than dead, at least."
Katie finally smiled at that point, then turned back towards her potions, intending to continue her experiments.
"It may take me an hour or two to get ready." Katie explained, "I want to see if I can find a safer way to get us out of here. You can do whatever you want in the meantime, though if I were you, I'd spent a few minutes looking through those illusions again, to see if we've missed anything."
Gergio, however, decided to head out into the hallway where the gate apparently was, and practice some of his shouts. Katie and the others could hear him using a shout from time to time, but he wasn't making enough noise that it would interfere with what they were doing. In the end, Lydia had decided to follow Katie's advice and look at a few more of the illusions, but after the first couple proved to be mere standard science reports, and rather dry, she discovered one that had apparently been intended as a motivational speech, and it really shed some light, for her, on just what had happened in that world, and how things had gone so sour, so fast.
The illusion was of a man in spectacles and black hair with a slight balding spot on top of his head. He wore a suit with a jacket, and had a mustache, but no beard, and apparently, he was very well-liked.
"We've heard a lot of fine-sounding speeches tonight, on both sides of this issue," the man said, "but before I make any speeches of my own, I'd like to ask you all a question. Rhetorics and speeches are all well and good, but can my opponents -prove- what they've said? Can they present evidence that what they've said is true? Remember, the bar for all of these issues is always simply a matter of whether they can be proven scientifically. I say, there is no need whatsoever to endow our actions with any sort of moral character, beyond the simple, emotional changes that occur in our brains, and which can be shown on brain maps. Tomorrow, if someone were to kill a hundred people just for fun, for example, would that be 'wrong,' in any sense other than that we find it personally distasteful? I don't see how it could be. How would you go about testing something like that? We've all learned to accept that science, and science alone is the standard of knowledge. Let's try not to get distracted by discussions and accusations about what kinds of experiments are moral or immoral."
Lydia had to stop the illusion at that point, using a button that was right in the center of the display, because even with the mental weakness she'd suffered under the virus, she could see numerous problems with what the man had been saying, and apparently, Katie saw even more.
"That poor man." Katie remarked sadly, not looking up from her beakers, "He's not thinking right at all. He seems to think that you should only agree with something if you can test it. Well, I can't test that. It doesn't make sense. In fact, I can't test most things. The life of Tiber Septim, for example. I have no way to test whether he ever lived, but it's obvious he did. I'm not sure what he means by 'science,' but if it means something like alchemy in our world, then it's really just one way to acquire knowledge about the world. That doesn't mean that it's alright to do whatever you want with it."
"It's no wonder they suffered a fate like this one, if that was how they were thinking." Lydia remarked with a sigh, shutting off the device again, "It sounds like they were letting themselves be mastered by their 'sciences,' rather than learning to master them. In the end, their master destroyed them. I suppose they thought they could use science to solve any problem. What surprises me is that his views were apparently so popular."
Katie was silent, however, for several seconds, and when she finally spoke again, there was a noticable degree of sadness in her voice.
"I think it might be even worse than that. It's possible that the people of this world had begun to treat their learning as the highest of all good things; the end goal and standard by which to measure everything else. They were half right, I think. The goal of learning is to discover the truth, and the truth is certainly good, but any learning method that we develop and use is only as good as the people who use it, and most have limits, in any case. Alchemy, for example, can tell you what ingredients do, but it can't tell you how far away the stars are. You need an observatory for that. I'm afraid they may have made a similar mistake, becoming so committed to their method, that they forgot how to reason effectively. I can imagine something like this happening in Skyrim; an alchemist becoming so engrossed in his craft, that he starts to think that there's nothing in the world except potion ingredients."
After that, Lydia just stood in a corner and waited for Katie to finish her work. It took a while, and the sun had already set by the time she was finished. Also, Lydia had started to notice a change coming over Lucia. She seemed to be growing somewhat antsy and impatient, looking distractedly around the room; even more than a normal child her age. In fact, Lydia was a little worried that she might be about to snap when they needed her the most. She, after all, was the only person who'd been infected by the virus, and still hadn't been treated. Lydia didn't expect Lucia to take any rash actions yet, but she still kept an eye on her just in case.
Lucia was beginning to look suspiciously at everyone at the end of three hours, when several dozen bottles were arranged around Katie on the desk, and Gergio had finally returned, breathing a little harder than he had been before; apparently from whatever training he'd been doing. Immediately, he walked over to Katie, looking a bit impatient.
"Are you finished yet? I'll like to leave this world as soon as possible."
Katie nodded after a moment, though she still looked sad.
"I haven't found any safe way to do this." Katie admitted after a second, "The transition is going to be painful, I'm afraid. Still, there's absolutely no chance of this thing spreading to any other worlds if we do things my way."
"Good." Gergio replied, "Let's go."
However, even as he said those words, Lucia seemed to be backing away from them, and Lydia took a step closer to her, feeling anxious.
"Go? With you?!" Lucia asked, looking frantically from one of them to the next, "I won't! I can't believe I've been doing this up to now; traveling with all of you warriors and magic-users. I've got to be out of my mind! Any one of you could snap me like a twig!"
"You know we won't, though," Katie replied, trying her best to sound reassuring and calm her young friend down, "because you trust us."
"I barely know you!" Lucia shouted, looking terrified and angry, "No, you stay back! I can leave you all stranded here. Keep away from me!"
Lydia and Gergio had both started to advance towards her, but Lucia had taken several more steps away from them, and in a moment, had turned and run away from them as fast as she could go.
Fortunately, however, Lucia hadn't been looking where she was going. Almost as soon as she'd turned to run, she slammed hard against one of the illusion machines, hit her face on the side of it, and fell back onto the ground, holding her nose and crying in pain. Before she could recover her bearings, Katie was on her, and forcing her to drink from a small, blue bottle. It was a few seconds before the potion had its full effect, but it ended with Lucia realizing what she'd been about to do, and crying for a minute or so into Katie's knee. However, as she cried, the machine that she'd bumped into activated, and another illusion was displayed above it; the illusion of a man that they'd all seen before, in other illusions; used as an illustration of the cause of the virus itself; Jans Kapler.
"This is Dr. Jans Kapler." the illusion said, looking nervous and confused as he spoke, "I don't know if anyone will ever find this recording, but if you do, I want you to send it to every lab in the world. I never meant for my virus to spread beyond the capital building and military complex, and I can see now that it has. I'm afraid that I don't know of anything that can cure it, because it contained one ingredient that I've never seen before; daedric shell."
"A young financier named Mina Ferra came to me with the shell one day, and said that she'd once had plans for it, but that it was useless to her at that point, so she wanted to give it to a worthy cause. I don't know what she expected me to do with it, but I found that when it was powdered and mixed with hydrochloric acid, it drastically enhanced the virus that I'd designed, which at that point, wasn't contagious yet, except through shared blood, which is hardly practical if one wants to use a virus as a weapon. I suppose I could have tried to find some other way to get back at the emperor, but... I'm tired. I didn't know it was going to turn out this way. If you ever see Mina Ferra, stab her in the heart for me. She must have known more about the shell than I did... She must have suspected what the shell would do; what effect it would have."
At that point, the illusion faded, and Katie swallowed hard. It was time for them to leave.
Handing each of her friends a potion bottle and instructing them not to drink until the gate was open, she pulled open the door that lead to the hallway, in which the gate was apparently located. Soon, they were all in the hallway, and Lucia was touching her amulet.
"Remember," Katie said, "no one steps through that gate until they've taken the potion and the effects begin. I promise that the potion won't kill you, but it's going to hurt a lot. Are you ready?"
Even Lucia didn't hesitate, so horrified by the way she'd just been acting, and as the gate opened, revealing snow and stone beyond, she only paused for a few moments, before she drank the whole potion at once.
Sure enough, just as Katie had predicted, an intense pain began to build from inside, just as soon as the potion took effect. Her head began to clear again, but it didn't feel like it, thanks to the enormous distraction caused by the pain, which built more and more, spreading throughout her whole body, until finally, it felt as though her very fingertips were about to explode in flames.
Then they did.
All at once, open flames burst from the bodies of all four travelers, searing flesh and scorching cloth, but Katie still motioned for all of them to stay where they were, until her throat was parched and her tongue felt like sandpaper. It was only then that she pointed for the gate with one bright, flaming hand, and Lydia jumped first, looking truly desperate, in spite of her previous determination. Gergio's posture had changed to a slightly anxious one, though he seemed to be forcing himself to stay calm, in spite of the scorching agony that he must have been experiencing. However, just as Katie was about to make her own leap, she looked back, and saw that Lucia had collapsed to the floor, and was rolling on the ground, as though it would do anything against those magical flames. She must, Katie realized, have been half-mad from the pain.
Knowing that there were only a few seconds left before the gate would close, Katie rushed over to where Lucia was squirming on the floor and grabbed her under one arm, then jumped through the gate just a second later, still in flames and still completely unaware of where they'd end up next.
Katie found herself landing, face forwards on stone, though the intense agony that covered her whole body by that point made it hard to notice the minor pain of the impact. She just lay on that stone floor, feeling her flesh char under the effects of her potion for second after horrible second, until finally, the pain on the inside of her body ceased, and after that, it only took a few more seconds for the flames on the outside of her body to die down as well. In just a few more seconds after that, all of the damage caused by those flames had been healed, and Katie was lying on the stone floor in one piece, with Lucia, also in one piece, under her arm.
The potion had been a pretty complex one, with several different effects, all mixed together in the same potion bottle. The most important, of course, was the cure, but just as important, for safe passage to another world, had been the fire. When wreathed in flames, no moisture would be able to cling to them or carry the virus to any other planets. Of course, they still had to survive the trip, which meant that a healing potion, lasting just a dozen or so seconds longer than the fire, had also needed to be added into the mixture, and it had ultimately gotten them where they needed to be, though Katie had to spend a few seconds checking her potion bottles to make sure they'd all survived the flames unwarped and unboiled, even after she put Lucia down. Lucia didn't seem to be crying anymore, just a little dazed-looking. Fortunately, only one of Katie's potions had suffered any damage from the fire, and it was relatively unimportant.
Of course, the final test was still to come. Soon, Katie had removed a bottle of honey from her bag. The honey was very hot, but seemed to have survived the trip in all other respects, so she put a little on her arm, and was relieved to see that it left no mark behind. She wouldn't listen to anything that anyone had to say until she'd done the same thing to all three of her companions, and discovered that all of them were clean too. Of course, she'd planned for it to be that way, but nonetheless, it was good to be sure.
"That was insane." Lydia remarked at last; the first time in a long time that she'd voiced an open complaint against her thane without being told to, "Katie, we survived, and that's a relief, but that was still a mad plan."
"Well, like I said, I wanted to come up with something safer, but this was the only sure way that I could think of, to get us all out of there in one piece."
"You should have at least told me what the potion would do." Lydia replied a bit ruefully, but Gergio had turned to face her by that point, and his condescending smile was a little hard for even Katie to look at without feeling some revulsion.
"You've never been caught in the middle of a dragon's fire, have you?" Gergio asked snidely, but it was Lucia who responded first, not looking at any of them.
"No, and I don't want to be. That was horrible, and I hope I never have to go through it again."
"I thought it might start an argument if I told you what I was planning." Katie explained, but Lydia was still looking upset, and in the end, she decided to focus, for the moment, on figuring out where they were, and give her a chance to calm down.
Also, for the time being, Katie decided not to tell Lydia about the other thing that she'd discovered while she'd been in Lab 14. While there, she'd made it a point to look over the various ingredients in the lab stores, and had found one called "protoplasm mixture 12," which had seemed like just a glob of slime at first, until she'd passed her book over it, and seen that it had a very rare spell effect indeed; the very one she'd been hoping to find. Not only that, but as it had turned out, the ashes of Marcus had had the exact same spell effect, and Katie had mixed up a potion out of the two ingredients. Still, it wasn't as strong as she would have liked, and encountering Marcus had put another idea into her head.
When Katie had offered to make Lydia one of the most powerful people in Skyrim, she'd been thinking in terms of warriors, and the kinds of weapons and power that they could bring to bear against monsters, but suddenly, she was remembering what Marcus had accomplished, and how mighty he'd become, in spite of his many weaknesses. It had given Katie a new perspective on what power really was, and the nature of what she wanted to offer Lydia had changed along with that perspective.
"No. Not yet." Katie thought to herself as she started to take a look around, "I want it to be even better."
Thoughts of how to improve Lydia's master potion kept circling through Katie's head as she looked around and discovered that they'd ended up in a tower of some kind. It was huge; as tall as some of the mountains that surrounded it, and it wasn't very wide; no more than a couple dozen feet across in either direction, The tower was square-shaped, at both the top and the bottom, and the roof directly overhead seemed to have been shaped like a normal house roof, though it was hard to tell from underneath it. The stone floor that they'd landed on was almost at the very top of the tower, and there were small half-walls on all four sides of it, but nothing to keep a person from falling down if they should decide to climb over those. In fact, the walls were so open, that even Katie could have climbed over them with ease, and it seemed as though the main purpose of that place was to give one a good view of the landscape. The only reason the roof was still staying up was that each corner of the room had a sturdy-looking pillar, which was supporting it, but aside from that, none of the walls of that place reached the ceiling.
Katie spent a few moments moving around to the various sides of the room they were in, and looking down over the edge of the tiny walls, then up towards the roof, and sure enough, it was a huge distance down, and only a few yards up to the roof of the tower. They were at almost the very top, and worst of all, there didn't seem to be an obvious staircase or other path down.
"It looks like we're going to need to fly down from here." Katie observed, turning back to face Gergio, who was looking down the edges of the tower as Katie moved away from them, though his smile didn't falter as he did so, "I may have to carry you after all."
However, Gergio was still smiling when he said, "No. I don't think so. I'll see you at the bottom."
Then, in just a moment, Gergio had stepped right over the edge of the tower and was gone.
Katie rushed to the edge of the tower at once, just in time to see that Gergio had already fallen almost halfway to the ground, and to hear him shout the words "Feim Zii Gron!"
Then suddenly, Gergio seemed to have almost faded away. He was still there, and still falling, but Katie could see right through him, and a moment later, when he hit the ground, he just got right back up as though nothing had happened, and looked up at Katie, still smiling. Even a few moments later, when he turned back to normal, he still looked fine, and didn't seem to have taken any damage from the fall. Katie was impressed, though she didn't show it, instead muttering under her breath, "you and your magic voice," before turning back around, to see that Lydia had already picked up Lucia in her arms and started flying down to the base of the tower, apparently still angry.
Katie didn't regret the way she'd gotten them all out of that plague-stricken world, but she still felt sad as she flew out one of the walls as well, following her friends to the ground, and wondering silently if they would ever view her as a friend again.
Author's Notes; Katie and her friends are now in other worlds, which aren't present in Skyrim.
As a student of all five methods of proof (deduction, induction, mathematics, science and perception,) I often find it aggravating how often science is elevated to a supreme position among them, as though it could in some way replace the others. The fact of the matter is, there are certain things that science will never be able to tell us. It can tell us how to build a biological weapon, but not whether it's right or wrong to use it, for example, and this is the result.
The actual idea of a plague world has been floating around in my head since the days of Star Trek TNG, though I tried to put extra effort into its implementation here. In particular, the use of the daedric shell to amplify the effects of the virus is yet another indication that the daedra have some level of access to all of these worlds, and Mina Ferra was an iteration of another character, who I originally intended to use for more in later chapters of the story. I never got around to it, unfortunately, and she never gets mentioned again, though just between us, "Mina Ferra" may just be a pseudonym.
