come_sailaway | [Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

Entry tags:

[Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

Who: Palamedes Sextus and you!
What: Blood science!!
When: Early February
Where: The infirmary, or anywhere you feel like finding Pal
Warnings: As you might have guessed, there's blood.

[I. He Blinded Me With Science]

For months now, anyone who enters the Serena Eterna infirmary would have noticed the set of test tubes and petri dishes lined up in one corner of the room’s counter, and labeled with a large note:

Property of Palamedes Sextus, Room 105. DO NOT TOUCH. I will know if you do.

The test tubes each contain a sample of blood taken from a ship-board volunteer: young and old, human and non-human, alive and dead. The petri dishes are for his various experiments. Once upon a time, his question had been simple, or so he thought: could you tell if someone had died, either on the ship or before arriving, by studying their blood chemistry? But like so many matters about, things have gotten much more complicated since those early days.

And they are about to get more complicated still.

Pal spends most Saturday afternoons in his makeshift lab, and today is no exception. Back in January, he had started an experiment regarding the rate of cell decay. Everyone knew that the food on the ship didn’t rot. Everyone knew that people who died returned to life—usually. But what happened to the living on a cellular level? And could that affect be manipulated to guarantee resurrection upon death?

Humming tunelessly to himself, Palamedes inspects each sample in the petri dish, visions of cell clusters dancing in his head. Each time, he notes the thanergy and thalergy levels. Each time, he counts the number of living blood cells. He double-checks the numbers, triple-checks them, quadruple-checks them.

There’s no getting around it: after a month, absolutely no cell death has occurred.

Pal takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes a sheen of blood sweat off his forehead.

“Well, fuck me.”

[II. Wildcard!]

Want to hang with Pal, but don’t have a reason to visit him in the infirmary? I welcome your prompts! Pal is often in the library or drinking tea in Sand Dollars, or curled up in a chair in the lounge. Gimme what you got, or hmu on Plurk

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Not a lot of squinting going on here, tragically, and any promise is almost entirely contingent on how good a mood she leaves this infirmary. Because right now Clarke is all wide eyed impatience, a mirror image of Palamedes as she flicks her gaze from the bone to his face. Probably about ten seconds from folding her arms and beginning to tap her foot.

Ripping the rib out of Skulduggery's spine hadn't brought the catharsis she'd hoped for. The stunt with the moon rock and Sun El had only brought on heartbreak. She really needs something she attempts to be productive and successful.

"On?"

"On what sort of 'anything' you have in mind."

Leaving aside his own experiment for now, Palamedes carefully takes the rib out of the tray. One side is ragged where it has been torn away, but otherwise it's a pristine specimen. Pal doesn't require psychometry to make a guess at who the bone once belonged to.

"Just out of curiosity, how did you end up in possession of Skulduggery's rib?"

Anything mostly meant anything, like she was ready to select from a dropdown menu of options (skipping over mini skeletons doing the cancan, of course) more than had anything specific in mind. Other acceptable options would be use it to turn Skulduggery into a puppet or reshape into a knife. But Pal's gentle callout prevents those ideas from being chewed over enough to eventually make their way between her teeth.

Excessively casual:

"He gave it to me."

Palamedes looks straight at Clarke, unblinking. That may be the most unlikely thing that she has ever said.

“Clarke, did you kill Skulduggery?”

He isn’t entirely serious. But he isn’t entirely not-serious, either.

And she looks back, arms still crossed and eyes flat until her gaze travels up and away — settling on something behind his left ear. Thoughtful, almost daydreaming.

"It's not like anything here can be truly killed, right?"

Pal just continues to stare at Clarke for another long moment. Then he sighs and takes off his glasses, cleaning them against his sleeve.

“If you killed Skulduggery Pleasant, then the Captain would immediately send us all to the bottom of the sea. Or turn us into ghosts. Or create a flesh-eating bacteria to kill us in the most painful way imaginable. Yet here we stand. QED, you did not kill Skulduggery Pleasant.”

Pal puts his glasses back on and inspects the rib, pursing his lips slightly. “I may be able to learn something about his construction, or perhaps the way his soul is anchored to his skeleton. But I can’t make any promises. I’ll see what I can do.”

The demonstration of logic doesn't feel far off, and in part the reasoning was a factor into why she didn't even try in the end. That, and a section of her soul really doesn't want to lean into the preconceived notion that Skulduggery, Ava, and Darcy all seem to share about her. She didn't want to kill out of anger or a contrived sort of vengeance, even if it'd felt so god damn tempting.

Clarke gives Palamedes a light little shrug. And this is the moment where she'd usually flop herself onto his couch were they situated in cabin 105, but instead just shifts her weight on her feet; settles a little, that bristling energy smoothing over now that he's laid out plausible course of action. She feels a little better with the possibilities laid out in front of her, but still deigns to ask:

"When you're done with that, can you use necromancy to reshape it?"

“Probably.” At first glance, there’s nothing unusual about the rib, except that it’s well preserved for its age. “I’m not quite as adept with bone to which I have no genetic link, but I could probably manage to do something with it.” He lifts his eyes and cocks a brow. “Why, what do you have in mind?”

What kind of insanity are you dreaming up this time, Clarke Griffin?

She sees that look almost immediately, and it's returned with a mild sort of offended.

"God, nothing bad. Just — can you make it into a headband?"

Palamedes just stares at Clarke for a long moment.

"...You want me to make you a headband. Out of Skulduggery Pleasant's rib bone."

Stop looking at me like that.

"That's what I told him I wanted to do with it."

But the mask of casual flickers in the silence that follows that explanation. Wavers, almost snuffs itself out like a candle against a particularly strong gust of wind. What settles over her features instead is more moody, more like the affect that Clarke had worn for the first two weeks after the winter lodge murder spree. She still viscerally objects to to looking him in the eyes right now, but eventually forces herself to because, well, it's Palamedes. And if she's being truly out of order here, she trusts he'd tell her.

So, once again, with more than surface honesty:

"Every time he looks at me, I want him to remember what he did to me. And what came of it." That rib bone hadn't been painless to remove, after all.

Palamedes’ expression immediately changes.

He doesn’t look away, but his grey eyes soften. He tips his head to the side slightly, every sharp line in his face shifting from a playfully-tinged suspicion to gentleness and understanding.

Palamedes doesn’t hold Skulduggery responsible for the murders committed in that snowy mountain paradise—that’s the only reason he hasn’t gone after the man himself. But Skulduggery needs to remember what he did. What he’s capable of. What he could do again. And who better than Clarke to deliver that message, again and again?

He nods once, and the tiniest of smiles ticks at the corner of the mouth. “I’ll make you a headband, Clarke. Of course I will.” Pal would have done it anyway, only because Clarke asked. But knowing why lends him new purpose.

The real kicker is Skulduggery doesn't actually remember the event at all, but to pretend an alter ego built out of your own emotions wasn't really a part of you anymore seemed like cheating, self assuaging bullshit. He knew he'd done it, and she'd done her best to paint a visceral mental image. Sometimes it's a real kick in the guts that the skeletal man doesn't have flesh and muscles and nerves encapsulating his skull; with even the slightest real indication that words had hurt him, maybe she wouldn't have resorted to violence. But.

They are where they are now. Pal looks at her with a gentle sort of understanding that makes Clarke feel equal parts ridiculous and validated. It smooths some of the ragged edges of her residual fury. It's appreciated. She knows to expect arguably the best human bone headband in existence now, probably perfectly shaped to fit her skull. This feels like the sort of faith that Darcy had scolded her about.

"Thanks."

A beat. "Only if you can't do anything more interesting with it, of course. Like, if you can turn necromancy into voodoo magic and make him punch himself in the face, that's also great."

Just a little bit of the worlds driest humor to reset the record; cut the tension, shift the conversation. Clarke's arms are still tightly folded across her chest, but she steps around the surgical tray and begins to drift towards the countertop Pal had been bent over just a few minutes ago.

"So what were you so excited about when I walked in?"

The corner of his mouth turns up in a smirk. “I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, we shall have to settle for revenge via hair accessory.”

Palamedes sets the bone aside, and with it, the matter of Skulduggery Pleasant, the murders committed by his alter ego, and all discussion of what punishment he may or may not deserve. “Ah, yes! You’ll find this interesting.” He gestures her over to where his blood samples are laid out. “We know that food doesn’t rot and materials like wood and metal don’t seem to degrade, right? I was wondering what that meant for living human cells. The results are absolutely fascinating.”

Clarke takes his gesture as an invitation, and even goes so far as to pull up a rolling doctor stool and sit down at the edge of the counter. Props an elbow on the countertop and stares at the blood samples like they might spoil Palamedes' scientific reveal. But even if they do hold that secret in their little vials, she can't see it. The Ark's medical bay had been maintained as well it could be, but it was still rotting away like the rest of the ship had been. If they'd once had the most advanced machinery known to mankind, at the end it'd all been dismantled and they'd not even had enough painkillers to soothe the passing of the dying.

So, yeah, no. She has no idea what she's actually looking for in these petri dishes. Stares intently for a few seconds, then turns expectantly to look at Pal and wait for him to fill in the gaps.

Sorry, Clarke. Sometimes Palamedes gets so excited about his findings that he forgets that not everyone can glance at a blood sample in a test tube and immediately understand what is unusual about it.

Pal looks back at her expectantly for a moment too long before he realizes that she's waiting for an explanation. "Oh! Right. According to my tests, there has been no sign of cell death in the last month. Each sample contains precisely the same number of living blood cells as it did when I began my experiment."

...huh.

"Well that's..." Good? "...definitely abnormal. But in line with why it's so hard for you to use necromancy on the ship, right? No cell death equals no thanergy equals nosebleeds. Right?"

“It is entirely too peculiar for words, is what it is,” says Palamedes, even has he continues to beam. Peculiar is just a different way of saying awfully interesting. “And you’re right—not everything adds up. I always surmised that the thanergy levels on the ship were low, but they aren’t nonexistent. If this universe were truly static, we couldn’t get injured. Our fingernails wouldn’t break. Technically, we wouldn’t even be able to digest food.”

He scrubs his hands through his hair. “I still have a few details to work out before I have anything like a theory, obviously. But this is a fascinating breakthrough, don’t you think?”

There's that phenomena where you spend too much time around a person and slowly start to adopt their traits. That's apparent here in the shift of Clarke's vocabulary — revenants, and the amount of times she says fascinating — and the way she drinks coffee like Palamedes drinks tea. One day she may even trade in tight, moisture wicking athletic wear that'd be good in a physical fight for a comfy, oversized sweater because he makes them look good.

But it is not here in the love of a mystery. Pal is enthused over the layers to peel back to find the truth, while Clarke's simply impatient and wants the answers already in order to figure out how to mold them into something useful. So he all out beams, and she just sort of... grimaces.

"It sure is something. I —"

Give her a moment, as some gears turn. Sure there's inconsistencies, but the more she thinks about it the more it becomes a red flag just how little people have gotten sick around here. And that leads her to —

"You're telling me that I shot myself full of antibiotics every day, for two full weeks after getting stabbed, with those ominous looking needles —" A gesture across the infirmary, towards a tray of syringes. "— and probably didn't even need to because sepsis and necrosis might not even be things here?"

“Technically you already knew you didn’t need to do that,” Palamedes says breezily. She could have come to him, after all, if she hadn’t been so stubborn. “But essentially, yes. Obviously, acute necrosis is still possible: people can die from blood loss, a punctured lung, a snapped spine.” He winces just slightly, keenly aware that Clarke has experienced them all. “But bacterial and viral infection seem to be nonexistent, which removes the possibility of sepsis, or, for that matter, any need for antibiotics at all.”

To her credit, Clarke only slightly rolls her eyes. They'd been friendly around the time she'd nearly been gutted by Pratt out on the walking deck, and Clarke would argue it was secrecy over stubbornness that kept her from asking for help past urging Jade to cauterize her wound. But they're basically the same thing, and now she knows better.

And hey! At least she doesn't remember the sensation of her spine snapping and paralyzing her from the waist down, because that'd technically happened to an ancient viking! Small mercies.

She thinks for a beat, a mutters aloud: "That grace maybe could extend to things like cancer and Alzheimer's..." Train of thought briefly drifts to Ava Starr, who'd said she was sick and dying in her own world but hasn't seemed to deteriorate on board the ship. Huh.

Then to Pal properly, "That's cool."

Palamedes flashes her a pleased look. “Indeed. It would explain why there has never been any sort of disease outbreak. Given we are all drawn from different places and times, the chances are quite high that someone would have brought a virus or bacterial infection with them that could have decimated us. I assumed we had just gotten lucky, but now I wonder if something else in at play.”

Alzheimer's isn’t a diagnosis that Palamedes has heard before, but cancer—well, cancer is something he is intimately familiar with. And he knows a little bit about Ava’s condition, enough to understand what this means for her, too. “If someone were on the brink of death when they came here, they might welcome the Captain’s imprisonment, at least at first. I would like to think that no one would accept a longer life at such a cost, but—” He purses his lips and shakes his head. Even before the Serena Eterna, Cytherea had taught him what choices people would make for survival, and shown him what those choices could do to one’s soul.

Also relatively familiar with Ava's condition, but too lost in thought to draw the lines there immediately. She's too focused on what all of this might mean further down the line. No death translated into no life; cells in stasis might do good for their food never rotting and the normal course of sicknesses obliterated, but would that mean they'd never be able to have children as well? Would the younger population never reach their final growth spurt? If they were immortal, they probably couldn't age no matter how many birthday parties were thrown. And in the event they ever did make it off this hell ship, would those side effects of being yanked through time and space as a snapshot of a soul persist?

Still conversational though, she hears Palamedes trail off at but — and follows up on the sentiment automatically.

"It'd be an attractive perk."

Then a sigh, leaning on the counter and focusing properly on Pal, and asking with the same timber she'd asked about Skulduggery's rib: "Can we do anything with this?" This discovery, this knowledge. Would it help or was it just another edge piece in the puzzle they all currently resided in.

“We can tell anyone worried about disease outbreaks that we’re probably fine,” Pal says, knowing that isn’t very much at all. He exhales, slightly deflated. The more he thinks about his discovery, the less actionable it feels. Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have bothered him, but now, when everything seems so urgent, discovery for its own sake feels small and petty.

He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “It gives us a better grasp of the parameters of the Captain’s pocket universes. Theoretically, that could help us destabilize them…but I can’t yet tell you how. I need to work on it.”

She can sense Palamedes' frustration. Not that it's hard, a big sigh and rubbing at his nose in that way that unseats his glasses for a second is a pretty telltale sign of bother on anyone. But she cares more for his displeasure, and seeks to abate it. Even if only a little.

"...hey." The sort of utterance that lowkey demands look at me. Then a little half smile and a tilt of her head.

"You'll keep working on it, and if there's anything to find there, I'm sure you're going to find it. You're the only one I know who's looking at things none of the rest of us would probably even consider, and you're the only person I'd trust to come up with a way for us to use this in some way that'd actually help."

[Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

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