come_sailaway | [Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

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[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

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Palamedes watches Ava carefully, but a tiny smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth. He clasps his hands behind his back. “As I’m sure you’ve heard, I have been collecting blood samples from volunteers for the past few months in hopes that by studying them I can learn something about the physiological affects of what we have all experienced on the ship. Your Peter Smith is one of those volunteers, in fact.”

He picks up one of the petri dishes. “In previous experiments, I’ve maintained a strict vacuum around each sample to avoid contamination, but this time, I wanted to study the rate of cell death in my samples. So about three weeks ago I got rid of the vacuum and merely kept the surrounding air moderately refrigerated. Under normal circumstances, the living red blood cell count should have dropped dramatically in that time frame, correct?”

Yes, he is drawing this out more than he has to.

There's the tiniest smirk as Peter being referred to as hers. "I'm sure I'll forgive him for sharing bodily fluids with another." And there might be a suspicious sort of squint that he better not be planning anything else with his blood samples, thanks.

"Right," Ava peers at the dish. "Except nothing here decays or rots, does it? Even my molecular condition has been, as Friday put it, paused. So you're observing that the blood isn't exhibiting the expected signs of apoptosis."

Whatever his thoughts about Ava, which are decidedly mixed, Pal can’t help the pleasure that shows on his face when she quickly catches on. He nods eagerly. “Precisely. We’ve all seen the results of the lack of decay aboard the ship, but this is the first time I’ve observed it under controlled conditions in living cells of organisms that originated in other universes. Length of time aboard has no effect, either: this individual,” he points to a sample, which is labeled with a three-digit number, “has been here for only a couple of months, whereas this one has spent nearly a year aboard.”

He picks up his notebook and flips to a new page. “Tell me about this molecular condition. What do you mean it’s ‘paused’?”

Ava nods along, understands the need to isolate an observed occurrence to fully trust the results. Even if the outcome is seemingly obvious. She remembers César taking blood samples as well, not sure whatever conclusions he came to. "So what do you make of that?" Ava asks. Her own feelings toward Pal are likewise a bit mixed, but more wary than outright negative. She's told him as such before, but that doesn't mean she doesn't find him rather interesting. She's sure he has a rather valuable perspective on things. "Is there a step further you're going to take this?"

And despite the mixed feelings, despite her own sensitivity over the subject, she sighs. "My body's molecular structure is unstable. It's how I... phase. I exist in a complex quantum state, but it does a lot of damage and the older I've gotten the less capable my cells are of fully restoring themselves. I was days away from completely deteriorating into nothing..." and nothingness has always been a painfully loaded word for her, even before the newly horrific context. "But here, I'm fine. It still hurts, I'm not healed. But it doesn't get worse. Friday said something about it not being fair. But I think it's related to our being out of time. Creating that stasis. Nothing can grow either. Because there's no real progression."

Palamedes starts to write, but after a few moments he goes still. Slowly, he raises his eyes, something curious, scrutinizing, and sad in his expression. He is reminded, above of all, of the lyctor who had taken Dulcinea’s place at Canaan House. Thousands of years before their paths had crossed, she had been near death, and had made a terrible bargain with God that had granted her immortality without a cure. You have been in pain for ten thousand years, lyctor. Pal had looked into the woman’s eyes and seen how that pain, that stasis, had driven her to madness.

“I see,” he says. The words are gentle, but contain no false sympathy. Ava hadn’t asked for such a bargain, but she had gotten it all the same. Friday is right: it isn’t fair. But it is, admittedly, awfully interesting. “That does strength my theory. And this idea that we are kept in stasis, it fits with broader conceptual understanding of this pocket universe the Captain is keeping us in.”

He finishes writing in his notebook and sets it aside. “I’m not sure what can be made of this information, at least not yet. But it gives us a sense of the parameters of this prison of ours. I think I can confidently say that we won’t sicken or grow old here. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing entirely depends on one’s perspective.”

He earns plenty of good will for using the term pocket universe, a reflection of her own conceptual interpretation. And slightly less for referring to it as a prison, as much as she understands. It's not inaccurate. It's just loaded.

"Mn, yet we still eat and sleep. Biological functions appear to be operating on the surface. Even Security gained an entire digestive system," which will forever disturb her. "But sometimes I wonder how much of it we actually... need to? If we're actually confined to the limitations of our bodies, or our mind's belief in what those are. Maybe that's something you can experiment with next."

“A fascinating point,” says Palamedes, nodding enthusiastically. “I can imagine that testing blood glucose levels may serve as a reasonable proxy. At the very least, it would indicate whether or not the body is responding to nutrients in the way one would typically expect.”

He drums his fingers, quiet for a few moments while he considers his next words. “Before I appeared here, I was in a different sort of pocket universe—a much simpler one. I was never tired or hungry, and time had no meaning. Such things weren’t necessary to its design or my purposes.” Pal chews on his lip. “My point being, if we’re right, then the Captain has chosen to give us the fantasy of bodily needs. It has, for lack of a better way of putting it, been programmed in.”

"That explains why you're far more open to the concept," Ava observes. "Not everyone is so open to the flexibility of reality. But I guess you can use that as a control point in the experiment. I'd offer my own, but... I hear what people are trying to do with blood these days."

Palamedes cocks his head to the side.

“First of all, I keep all my samples secure and only use them for my express, stated purposes. Second of all: what, exactly, do you think anyone else would do with your blood?”

"Cloning, blood rituals, voodoo?" Mostly she's just thinking of the Captain signing a damned blank contract in blood. "Look, I don't know anything about magic, but I'm not about to find out the wrong way either."

“Point taken,” Palamedes says. “But I swear to you that I am engaging in no blood rituals or voodoo, and that my scientific questions require no cloning. I would be happy to add your blood sample to my study, if you were amenable.” A beat. “I may even be able to discover something about your own unique physiology.”

He doesn’t expect Ava to agree, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

"I doubt you could discover much about my unfortunate condition that isn't already highly researched and studied, I'm afraid. The neat thing about being a scientific anomaly is having entire labs and teams dedicated to picking you apart, bit by bit, and poking and prodding and hooking up to all sorts of ridiculous machines. And no offense, your set up is a bit... amateur for all that. You can't even imagine how much it took to keep me alive and functional."

Palamedes looks at her for a long moment.

“When I was ten years old, a friend of mine was given six months to live. She suffered from a congenital cancer for which no one had found a cure in ten thousand years. I developed a series of treatments, constantly improved upon, that kept her alive for the better part of a decade.”

He shrugs. “I don’t blame you for your skepticism, but I have experience in this area. And I am very good at finding what hundreds of scholars before me have failed to notice.”

"It's not just my skepticism of your capabilities, Palamedes. But I have no reason to... trust you. And I know you have your own conflicted views about me. I've been strung along before by promised cures. I'm not going to allow anyone that opportunity to exploit me again. And maybe it won't be you. But I wouldn't put it past Clarke."

Ava’s answer is, more or less, what he expects. “I could try to convince you that you’re wrong—that my only motive in helping you is to ensure that every person on this ship finds freedom—but I won’t waste my breath.” He flashes a rueful smile. “But I will ask you this: what’s the alternative? If there is another expert aboard you trust better, then by all means, seek their help instead. Otherwise, you’re leaving your fate in the Captain’s hands for the rest of eternity.”

"I wish I could trust you. But a savior complex is not a compelling enough argument, no." Because you can't save everyone, and at some point you're forced to weigh options, and Ava knows hers won't rank highly against triage. She has no reason to expect otherwise.

"But the Captain of all people could use it against me. Tell me that I owe him or that I should be thankful. Ask things of me, ask me to act against the rest of your plans knowing my life hangs in the balance. Yet he hasn't. Quite the opposite, really." She hesitates. "No, I don't have an alternative."

Palamedes accepts savior complex with barely a flicker of his expression. People whose opinions he trusts far more than Ava’s have accused him of as much, and hearing it only makes him more determined to prove them all wrong. Saving everyone is just another seemingly impossible puzzle for him to solve.

“Then what do you want to do?”

Saving everyone was what Skulduggery had sold her on too and she might have believed it if everyone was willing to cooperate with collective efforts, but all she's been met with is resistance and pushback... After all her dismissive behavior, Cassandra had tried to insist somehow she valued Ava's life enough for that not to get in the way of her plans, and yet Ava doesn't trust that either. She knows her life is a bargaining chip, something to keep her loyal and compliant to whoever holds it.

And right now the only one demonstrating the ability to keep her stable is the Captain and he's her friend and so she's grown complacent for that to be fine for the moment. Not a solution, except in the vague thought of hiding within his realities for as long as she can manage. But the worries have been flaring up again, increasingly often. As mutineers talk of destroying this place, of escape to where she cannot follow. "Rita says I better figure it out. For Fio."

“She’s right about that, and I don’t say that lightly. Fio is vulnerable.” And Palamedes will mourn if Fio is sucked into the Captain’s machine and disappears, a day he fears will inevitably come. He doubts Ava would believe him if he said as much, though, so he leaves that matter where it is. “The Captain calls himself a scientist. As matters stand, he controls your fate, and whatever either of us might think of him, I imagine we both agree that that is a lot of power to give one person. Has he offered to look for a more permanent solution to your condition? If so, I wish you both the best of luck. If not…” He spreads his hands.

“I’m not asking you to choose sides. I’m asking you to let me help you so that you can actually make a choice.”

Fio has a lot of people looking out for her. Ava knows that. Knows she won't be completely abandoned, no matter what happens to herself. But she thinks of the votes somehow deciding her parent of the year in a way she hasn't been able to comfortably acknowledge because she doesn't think Fio herself sees her that way. She thinks of how Siffleur talked about the fates of mothers was to suffer for their children. She thinks of how it's not even for her own sake that it's so important. It's because Fio deserves better, not because Ava ever has.

"No," she replies, eyes cast downward. "Why would he? It's not a problem here." She doubts he believes in any chance of them escaping. "And I'd never ask that of him." She'd never ask anything of the Captain, not after the one failed attempt at a wish. Not after finding out how he'd been used. She never wants him to think that's why she keeps coming back, seeking out his company.

"I'll... think about it, okay?"

“How convenient,” Palamedes says lightly, but he doesn’t push the matter any further. He has to believe that sooner or later, Ava will understand that the Captain has her trapped, even more than the rest of them, but he cannot force that realization upon her. For now, he just spreads his hands. “Thinking about it is all I ask. Thank you.”

It's only two words, but Ava doesn't like the implication behind them. "My condition hasn't ever been his responsibility..." she reasserts, crossing her arms across her midsection. "You don't even know him." Ava doesn't view it as any deliberate action upon the Captain's part to prevent her from leaving more than anyone else. He didn't make her this way. The Captain likes her, he's said as much. And has said he'd feel denied of something if he never saw her at his door again. But...

She's uncertain suddenly, and turns away. Views this as an attempt of Palamedes to cause her to doubt, pick at her insecurities, turn her loyalties. So that she'll turn to him instead. And he can insist there's no other motive in the offer, but her mind reminds her of every single way she's been taken advantage of. Ava sighs. "Good luck on the rest of your research."

"With great power comes great responsibility," Palamedes says without the slightest hint of irony. "Whether you asked for it or not." But he won't debate morals or motives further, not today. With a sigh, he turns back to his test tubes. "Thank you. And know my offer stands. Do let me know if you change your mind."

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[Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

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