[Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

[hellonspectacles]

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

Comments

[hellonspectacles]

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.

[skaikru]

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.

[hellonspectacles]

“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.”

[skaikru]

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."

[hellonspectacles]

Slowly, slowly, Palamedes lets Clarke entreaties drag his gaze to hers, and her offers her a rueful smile. “Thank you for your faith,” he says wryly, and despite that, he means it. Sometimes, despite all his friends and allies on the ship, Palamedes feels awfully alone in this dreadful place. As is so often the case, Clarke aptly reminds him that he is not.

“Thanks,” he says quietly, and he squares his shoulders. “Even if it doesn’t help us in our ultimate goal, we have learned something, have we not?”

[skaikru]

Don't thank her so expressly, her faith is arguably cheap and — for gods at least — comes with the what can you do for me condition in bold print. The basis of their earlier friendship had essentially been Clarke just asking for his magic, after all. To determine if she'd died, what she lost when she did die, what he could do to make Jenny in her storm form easier to kill, what he'd learned from relics, what ghosts he could summon and truths he could share.

But the times, they sure do change. It's not about her wanting Pal to feel less defeated and keep his nose to the grindstone, it's just wanting him not to feel defeated at all.

He regathers himself slightly, rolls his shoulders, and searches for the silver lining. To which she helpfully contributes: "We have. If we're truly in stasis, that means disease and viruses aren't going to be a common thing. Cancer's basically a nonfactor. We're not aging, even if we count the birthdays we pass. And no one here's ever going to get pregnant."

[hellonspectacles]

He nods, further reassured. Sometimes even Palamedes Sextus needs to be reminded that he isn’t shooting off on a fool’s errand. And Clarke, thankfully—like Natsuno, and Jade, and Camilla, and Harrow, and Juno Zeta, and Dulcinea Septimus, and anyone else he has ever put his trust in—will certainly tell him if that ever becomes the case.

“I have to clean up here, but after that…dinner, maybe?” He flashes her a small smile. “They serve me drinks at Hurikane now, and I can probably trick them into making you one, too.”

[skaikru]

"You turned twenty one?"

In regards to clean up, most of the time Clarke would be very ready to help; probably not even ask if her assistance was needed or not, just spring in and start stacking petri dishes. But she's enough medical and cross contamination awareness to curb that instinct; doesn't want to disturb Palamedes' samples, even when some of the blood is her own. She just sort of scoots out of the way on the rolling chair she'd commandeered, and watches him tidy samples.

An uncomfortable weight makes itself known in the bottom of her lungs. She'd literally just had a conversation with Max (fleshy, not omnic) about celebrations and —

"...I know you just concluded that there's no such thing as aging here, but it still feels weird not to have celebrated your birthday." You didn't tell me, as a conversational undercurrent.

[hellonspectacles]

"I didn't know!" Palamedes protests over his shoulder as he begins to clean up. "The calendar here doesn't line up properly. But I suspected the date must have passed, and I did a little experiment. Last week I ordered a beer at the Drunken Sailor, and it worked. Odd, don't you think? It's like the ghosts can track the passage of time better than we can."

[skaikru]

She will work through whatever slightly uncomfortable feelings are currently manifesting in her chest in regards to not knowing something so simple about him — a birthday in this calendar system of his original. It's just going to take a minute, during which time she sort of peppers in some throw away commentary.

"Well, they've been here longer than us, they're probably used to it."

Then a touch more confidently: "But sure. Let's get something to eat, then let's go get drunk."

One more beat of silence, and right around the time Pal's squared away all his lab supplies and is ready to go, Clarke adds: "My birthday's October 30th, by the way." Because it feels fair that he know, and she's trusting him to understand why it hadn't been brought up at the time. Sequestered in Cabin 105, nursing burn wounds, living in fear of possessed passengers and mourning the loss of friends right before consigning herself to the Halloween party? Yeah, not the headspace in which you want birthday congratulations.

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes stops what he’s doing and turns round to face Clarke. He leans back against the counter, gaze soft and understanding, knowing he doesn’t need to say I’m sorry or even that fucking sucks. The whole month of October had been a horror show; by the 30th, they had been attached at the hip, exhausted and terrified, abandoned by their other friends due to ghostly machinations. Celebration had not been on their mind.

He turns back to the sink to ask his hands and says matter-of-factly, “Then we have two birthdays to celebrate tonight, don’t we?”

[skaikru]

"Nonsense."

And as he washes his hands, she drifts up at his back and smooths a hand down his spine. Half affectionate, half meticulously noting each notched vertebrae like a remedial course in human anatomy.

"Only one of those birthdays matters, the one that's getting us wasted —" Almost sing-song, a little too much influence from every passenger here who was born in the modern 2000's era. "— tonight. Come on, let's go."