>>5836605You spend the next several days seeing nobody and attending to nothing, except for Muffins. You slept, and worked, and slept, and worked, sometimes utilizing <Daylight> to delay the periods of rest to squeeze in additional research. It was arduous, and exhausting, but well worthwhile, for what you learned.
>16 vs 12/17>Partial successIt wasn’t that you suddenly knew how to cure the dragon-pox, or Izirina. That would have been unreasonable to expect… Even if, admittedly, a part of you had been hoping for such a result. Rather, you understood the NATURE of the infection… And as a result, a bit more about Izirina, and her Reptilian ‘makers’ and their methods.
For one thing: the plague was ABSOLUTELY engineered, and its progenitor was a CHIMERA, designed blatantly as a weapon targeting your father's race.
It wasn’t like any chimera you had ever seen, though—it was primarily some sort of invertebrate, you suspected a fluke or mollusc or even a cnidarian such as a sea-jelly. Like many of those organisms, it seemed to have multiple different forms it could take, depending on generation and environment—or so you hypothesized. You hadn’t secured the first form—larger and free-swimming though you suspected it to be—but you could infer its existence from the smaller ‘larvae’ in your sample—larvae that readily buried into tissue and cells you introduced to their container, be it cuts of fresh meat or drippings of your own blood. Once this had been done, the larvae revealed this to be more of a specialized reproductive-soldier caste, immediately dying and spawning a THIRD form, more akin to a virus or cancer within the cells themselves; this infectious lifeform then worked to hastily and haphazardly replace mammalian tissues with reptilian ones, its disorganized and chaotic approach creating anomalies, abnormalities, and fluid-filled cysts throughout... Themselves full of the small, swimming ‘larvae’ form.
Dipping a cultured organ into the solution revealed the full implications: it transformed half-way into something more appropriate to a great lizard, or a DRAGON, and more often these changes made it clear that, if it were alive, it would function improperly… Or not at all. As a reproductive phase, this effect was most pronounced upon the reproductive tract… Which was why Izzy couldn’t have sex, or (as you had long suspected) become pregnant.
