Deliquesce
Chapter 27: Eleven
Rated: M
Warnings: Nothin
A/N:
DamnBlackHeart: But wait.. there's more! Unfortunately y'all are gonna have to put up with my mad ramblings for a little while longer ;) Thanks for your review!
HelloKitty70705: After so long, here's an update! Sorry for the wait, I'm absolutely atrocious about updating regularly despite the fact I've got like 2 more chapters typed out and ready to go.. I'll be uploading a few more chapters tonight. Thanks :)
Willy went back to the room. His eyes rested upon Ember lying on the slab, covered by a sheet. A thin, pale wrist poked out of the side.
Willy tucked that wrist in, and put a hand on her forehead. It was hot, despite the ice she was covered in. His eyes closed.
"I don't know what to do, Ember. I'm sorry." He told her gently, his voice not loud enough to reach her ears even if she were awake. Every effort he had made so far could only serve to prolong the transformation. The progress he had made tonight was something of a breakthrough in itself, but it was far from enough. He'd bought all this time for her, but for what?
To perform the impossible. Something that could eradicate the virus was, in fact, impossible with his limited resources and technology. This was a chocolate factory, not a research facility. His job was to make weird candy, not cure dead people. His job was to think about impossible things and think of ways to make a possible substitute. Willy's eyes shot open.
Oh.
"I know what to do." Do what he'd been doing all along. Make the seemingly impossible, the possible, possible.
How was it, Wonka wondered, that every scientific research facility that he had contacted before they all died off said that a cure was impossible. They had told him everything they had done so far and he had used that as a basis for his own tests.
And that was where he went wrong. The only reason they thought it was impossible was because they were looking at it from the wrong angle, and Wonka had gone along with that.
This is what you get when you blindly follow the blind, he thought.
It was impossible, if you looked at it from certain points of view. Absolutely impossible. 4 + 6 doesn't equal 11, but 5 + 6 does. 11 was never an impossible number to obtain, but recycling the same incorrect method everyone had used and expanding on it didn't make it any more right.
He had to start over from scratch, but that was okay. He'd never done well following other people's rules anyway. He returned to his search with new vigor. New motivation, and a new outlook.
The solution had been simple. So, so simple. The joy Wonka felt from discovering the solution was equal to the frustration he felt from not seeing it in the first place.
Antivenoms to snakebites are created by giving low doses of the venom from the snake and administering it to a horse or a pig over time, which then produces antibodies to the poison. These antibodies are then extracted from the animal's blood to use as an antidote.
Antivenoms are not created by taking a person who was bitten by a snake a long time ago and using the echoes of what they were infected by to produce a cure. Sure, the bite of an infected person passes on the infection just as the bug passes it on, but the poison that was present in most of the human population was different to it's source. It had been diluted, it had adapted and evolved to thrive in the human body. The only person who had access to the cure was the person who had access to Loompa Land. And that person was the one and only Willy Wonka.