Vonfrood Residence
"Vincent! Would you be a dear and bring your mother some tea?" A shrill voice shouted from the master bedroom.
Vonfrood looked up from his monitor and sighed.
"Coming, Mother!" He called back.
In the kitchen, the head of city council tipped his mother's tea kettle over her tea pot, allowing the white and pink flower tea pot to fill with the amber colored hot beverage. He set the teapot on a silver tray, put the tea pot lid on to keep the tea hot, placed a cup and saucer on the tray, along with some lavender cookies: his mother's favorite.
Mama Vonfrood laid in her plush bed as her son placed the tray on the nightstand for her.
"Thank you, my little froggy." She said.
Vonfrood winced.
"Mother, please." He said.
"Never. You'll always be my little froggy." She said before beginning to cough.
"Are you alright, mother?" He asked.
"I'm fine, sweetheart, I'm just feeling a little under the weather."
Vonfrood didn't believe her and went to the medicine cabinet in his mother's bathroom. He found what he was looking for. The thermometer.
"Open up." He said and as soon as his mother did, he stuck the tip of the thermometer under her tongue.
He waited until the thermometer beeped, signaling that the temperature was ready to read.
He took it out and read his mother's temperature.
"I'm going to have to call the doctor. Your temperature is 101 degrees." Vonfrood said as he rushed out of the room to call the family doctor.
He wanted his mother to be alright.
At Who-U
Dr. Larue and her colleagues opened the fridge and took out the tray that had the petri dishes of bat saliva and placed them on the lab table.
For weeks, the three scientists have been trying to make a vaccine for Whoronoavirus and so far, they've been unsuccessful. Hundreds of people a week have now have been admitted to hospitals in the tri-who area and now their lives were in Dr. Larue's hands. Everyone was counting on her to create a vaccine.
How a vaccine works is that you haveto take a virus or bacteria and weakening them so that they can't reproduce or replicate themselves very well.
So far, she's created 7 different vaccines that have been proven safe by the Who Food and Drug Administration, or Who-FDA in her career. Not even in her 30s and she's been successful so far.
Various degrees from academic studies and awards hung on her office wall.
Dr. Mary Lou Larue, student prodigy in science and history, who graduated high school at 15 with various scholarships, who invented a machine that turns stress into electricity, who helped the mayor save the town when it was discovered that there were worlds beyond theirs, and head teacher of 4 different science curriculums at Who-U, couldn't solve this problem.
With a heavy heart, ready to give up, she swabbed a sample of bat saliva with a lab swap and placed it into the alcohol based defuser. Once the majority of the saliva had dissipated and all that was left of the sample was a glob of clear gelatinous DNA, Dr. Larue placed it in a test tube and placed it into her blood seperation machine.
She usually used the device to separate blood from plasma to find diseases in blood, but she was growing desperate to find a cure.
She closed the lid of the blood seperation machine and pressed the spin button.
While the machine spun for 30 minutes, she occupied herself with emails on her ancient monitor.
The timer beeped and she went to get her sample.
The test tube was emptied onto a sample glass for her monitor.
She set the glass with her sample into her number machine. That machine examined the sample and told you how many diseases were inside the DNA and how effective it was.
A process that could've taken days was now cut down in a matter of hours.
While her machine examined her sample, she occupied herself with lesson plans that she would give instructors for online classes.
By the end of the day, her machine was done and she looked at her monitor to examine the results.
100010110101010101000111101010001011010101example:23856529/"WHORONAVIRUS"#27-1010010010001111010001111000101010results:Negative111010001001010001111
Dr. Larue blinked tiredly. She was about to turn off her monitor, but that one word caught her attention.
"Negative?" She asked. "That can't be right."
She refreshed her page.
After a minute of coding, it said the same thing.
Negative.
That was a good thing.
She sat back in her chair, spellbound.
Could it be? Did she invent the cure?
Only one way to find out. She had to do that test again.
"Hey, Professor Larue. We're ordering food from Tonya's Place. Did you want anything?" Another professor from the English department asked as she peeked her head in the door.
"Order my usual. And could you make some coffee? I think km going to stay after hours on this project."
"Right away, Dr. Larue."
As soon as the door closed, Dr. Larue got to work.she picked up sample number 28 and got started.