faderift | [Open] I can't take the distance

Entry tags:

[Open] I can't take the distance

WHO: Hermione and OPEN
WHAT: Catch-all for the month while Hermione gets used to Kirkwall
WHEN: Throughout Bloomingtide
WHERE: The docks, the Gallows, and exploring Kirkwall
NOTES: Will update with any warnings if necessary. If anyone wants to plan or would like a specific starter, feel free to either PM this journal or hit me up on plurk (

StarryOblivion).

Arrival

While Hermione had never had trouble with boats, she couldn't help feeling nauseated during the entire trip. She was still convinced that she'd left Harry behind in Skyhold, and that she could have done more to find him, and the concern and guilt weighed on her heavily.

By the time she'd disembarked, she was a little unsteady on her feet, and the sight of the Gallows wasn't really helping to foster a cheery disposition. She lingered by the docks for a time, often stopping to stare back across the water towards where they'd come from, but she knew that eventually she'd have to make her way into the Gallows proper.

The Gallows

Though it wasn't as dismal as it had been when she'd been kept a prisoner there in that horrible future world, the Gallows still wasn't the most inviting of places. Hermione didn't consider herself sensitive to that sort of thing, but she could swear she could feel the pain and anguish that lingered, soaked into the walls despite the Inquisition's best efforts to make the place livable. Though she sat in the library more than once and took a few meals in the dining hall and tried to settle into something resembling a day-to-day schedule, she didn't feel wholly comfortable anywhere. It wasn't until now that she realized just how much Skyhold had come to feel like home, and that posed a whole host of other problems in itself.

The city

Though Hermione hated the Gallows, she'd heard enough mixed tales about Kirkwall to be reluctant to travel there. But she knew that staying in the Gallows all day every day wasn't healthy, and so she eventually managed to borrow a set of clothes that wouldn't look too out of place among the locals, and so wouldn't attract any undue attention as she spent a few days familiarizing herself with her new surroundings.

[OOC- For the last option, anyone in her current CR circle is free to venture along with her, and anyone is welcome to encounter her throughout Kirkwall as she tries to get her bearings. She's curious enough that she'll at least pop her head in anywhere that doesn't look clearly dangerous, but feel free to contact me if you want to be sure or want something specific!]

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"Hm." Cosima looks a bit dubious, but what Hermione's describing is, at least, less compulsory that the Circle system, as far as Cosima's been led to understand it. It's not a great choice, but it is a choice. Mostly. And it's not as if she'd know how to keep a child who could do magic safe, left to her own devices.

"What about postsecondary education? Since magic is secret, I can't imagine that like, Oxford will take a transcript from a wizarding institution."

Mages in the Circle weren't allowed to see their families ever again; at least Hogwarts lets the children go on holiday and is no more restrictive than the average boarding school. She'll take that over being ripped away from her parents without any explanation any day.

Hermione cracks a small smile at Cosima's question, explaining, "Most people in the wizarding community choose occupations within the wizarding community, and unless they want to go in for a specialized trade - in which case, there are certainly schools and conservatories for that sort of thing - there's usually no need for higher education. That's not to say you couldn't go, however! Hogwarts has advisors just as any other school might, and if a student really wanted to continue their education in a Muggle institute, there are procedures involved. The advisor would look at the student's overall grades in Muggle Studies to ensure that they're a good match for a Muggle school, assuming they're not Muggle-born. Then, with the help of the Education Office of the International Confederation of Wizards, a transcript is put together citing private education in whatever manner fits the educational guidelines of the specific nation."

"So there's hope for a witch geneticist one of these days," Cosima says with a smile. It's a joke, mostly, though given her own interest in epigenetics, she'd have been very interested in the relative heritability of magical skill if she'd known about magic at home in the first place. It was an interesting puzzle (though, at the same time, she fervently hopes Dyad does not know about magic).

"Do you think you'll go on, assuming you get back home and it's an option?"

"Someday," Hermione asserts, though she doesn't really mean it as a joke. Really, she hopes that someday someone from her world can figure out how to bridge the gap between magic and science, though it probably won't be for a while yet. First they have to concern themselves with everything settling after yet another major wizarding war just twenty years after the first.

"I don't know if I'll ever really stop being an academic, though if I do end up working for the Ministry, there really isn't any sort of official institution to go into for that. They just sort of throw you in and give you real-world experience. Which is fine; I want to be active in the magical community, so any interests I have outside of that can simply wait a bit until I'm settled enough in my career to take night classes when the time allows for it."

"That's fair. You need someone to help that geneticist secure funding, too, right?" Government service has never been on Cosima's radar, in particular, but it's something she can (mostly) respect. Especially because even on glancing acquaintance, it's clear Hermione is the type to try to make things better, not accumulate power for power's sake.

"I think my parents have just resigned themselves to the fact I'll always be in school, which is an exaggeration, I'm eventually gonna graduate when I finish my dissertation. But if you're interested in learning stuff it's also kind of true." She grins. "Maybe with less 'juggling your funding sources so you don't have to take out yet more student loans' in the future, though."

Hermione cracks a small smile in response to that. "Considering that most wizards have the same sort of faith in Muggle science that the average scientist might have in magic, I'd say getting any sort of government funding for that sort of thing might take a fair bit of convincing. But the magical community is also a curious one, so they might be willing to budge on that before too long."

Tilting her head a little, Hermione asks, "What exactly is your area of expertise, Cosima? Science, obviously, with an emphasis of sorts in genetics mostly likely, but I know that anyone who spends so long in school usually tends to have a very specific field of interest."

Cosima lights up, a little, at an audience who might actually have some grasp of what she's talking about when answering this question. "Yeah, I'm evo devo - evolutionary developmental biology. The field basically uses how organisms develop to infer their ancestral relationships - sort of trying to reverse-engineer a most likely evolutionary course that way. My dissertation in particular is about epigenetic influence on clone cells. The old nature-nurture debate in miniature, kind of." She's simplifying, of course, but at least she trusts that Hermione knows what evolution and genes are. "After all, if we're trying to pinpoint evolutionary relationships, we need to have a solid grasp on how much environmental differences can influence development, because gene expression is the basis of a lot of what we do."

Most of what Cosima says actually goes far over Hermione's head - chalk it up to her never exactly having a proper science class unless one wants to count Potions as chemistry or Herbology as botany or Astronomy as-... well, really, Astronomy was about as scientific as they truly got at Hogwarts. But while she might not properly understand the majority of it, she does understand enough to get a vague idea of just what Cosima is studying and to ask questions to hopefully make it a little less vague.

"So essentially... you're trying to figure out where we all came from? I'm afraid I can't say I've ever actually heard of epigenetics, though if I'm going to break down the etymology and use what you just said as context, I imagine it has to do with how the outside world - from climate to culture and so on - impacts the fundamental building blocks that are our DNA?"

"Oh man, yeah, no, sorry. I just got excited not to have to start with germ theory. But yeah, epigenetics is almost exactly that." She gestures in a vague way, and wishes that scrap paper were a thing she didn't feel guilty about, given the price of parchment.

"So we've got DNA, right, which is like the fundamental instructions for how to build an organism. Genes are specific sequences within that DNA that tell your cells to make certain proteins. The classic genetic trait is eye color, right? You get a certain combination of chromosomes from each parent and together they determine whether you have blue, green, hazel, brown, whatever. But a lot of genes can be, um, basically switched on or off by a whole ton of environmental factors. So like, if you're a mammal, what your mother eats while she's pregnant with you, for instance."

She adjusts her glasses, shrugging. "So with clone cells, you've basically got a control. You know the genes are identical, so if you expose them to different environmental influences, you can see the epigenetic effects really clearly. At least in theory."

While Hermione likes to take notes, she doesn't really need scrap paper, not for this. She might not know how many times Cosima has tried explaining her research to other people here in Thedas, but she's almost certain that she's one of the few people who actually understands what the other woman is talking about, without thinking of it as some form of creation magic. Which isn't to say that Thedas is backwards, but well... most here hadn't even understood Hermione when she'd tried explaining the law of conservation of energy.

"What do you mean by clone cells, exactly?" she asks, given that it's the only thing that sounds a little past her own world's scientific breakthroughs. "Do you mean identical cells, such as in the case of identical twins? Or has cloning technology been perfected for routine use in a laboratory, where you're from? As far as I know, the scientists of my version of Earth have managed to successfully clone a sheep, but if there's been any experimentation on human biology with it, I haven't heard of it. Not that I would be surprised, because it isn't as though most scientists would be satisfied with spending so much time and money simply cloning livestock."

Cosima definitely should have expected the question -- it's a logical one, after all -- but it gives her pause. She's told people about her background in Thedas, but mainly people who don't really have the context to understand all the implications. It's been a strange sort of freedom. Hermione, though, is from Cosima's world, or one very much like it. The stakes seem higher, somehow, in her decision of just how honest to be.

"So by about 2013 or so, clonal colonies of cells are pretty common in lab-based settings," she starts, because that part is easy. "You can grow them in a culture -- like a Petri dish. It's something you see in nature, even. Lots of tumors are actually one mature cell just making identical copies of itself out of whack, they're technically clones."

Cosima exhales, then goes on: "So, as far as the general public knows, the sheep was it for us too, as far as big multi-cellular organisms go. But there has been experimentation with human clones in secret. There was, uh, a successful trial about thirty years ago. You're looking at the proof." It's still weird. It will always be weird. Especially now that her brain perversely chirps 324B21 silently every time it comes up.

Hermione's never been one for science, really - not because she doesn't like or understand it, but because most of her adolescent and young adult life has been spent trying to work her way around the history and culture of the magical world. She might be a fast and avid learner, but there's really little reason to get too heavily involved in the sciences if they likely aren't going to play a part in her adult life.

Given that, she understands most of what Cosima says very well, even if it's not her particular area of expertise. But that end bit is where things get a bit hazy.

"Thirty-... but if you're from-... sorry, I didn't catch the exact year you're from, but if it's sometime after the 2000s, that would mean that a successful human clone had been created while I was still a child. Secret or not, there's no way to keep that sort of-...." And then the rest of it seems to catch up with her all at once, and she blinks, looking Cosima over a bit curiously. "When you say I'm looking at the proof, do you mean you're a clone of someone else?"

"1984," Cosima confirms. "Assuming we're from the same world, but yeah, it was kept secret from the general public. I didn't find out until recently myself. My parents thought they were getting regular IVF, there were a lot of ethics violations -- and a lot of money -- involved." She rubs her hands together, an absently self-soothing gesture. "But yeah, I don't know who our original is, but there's over a dozen of us. I've met about five personally. It's as intensely weird as you might expect. And as legally as well as ethically murky, since whoever made us has attempted to patent our genetic structure."

Meaning Cosima and her sisters are, technically, someone's property. Or at least someone would argue that they are, though Cosima's dubious it would hold up in court if things ever came to that.

Shocked by the revelation, Hermione looks Cosima over for a brief moment, though hopefully not long enough to make the other woman feel uncomfortable. "Over a dozen?" she echoes. "Using the same genetic code? Meaning there are over a dozen women who look and sound exactly like you, living their own lives? What would anyone gain from such a thing, especially from doing it outside a laboratory? I mean... yes, you're clearly a very smart, beautiful woman, but over a dozen clones outside of a controlled environment is overdoing it a bit."

"Yeah, it's like ... imagine you had an identical twin, but you were separated at birth. Then do that 11 more times. One of them's a soccer mom in Canada, one of them's a cop, some of them don't even speak English. I'm the only one I've met so far who wears glasses."

As to Hermione's questions, she spreads her hands. "I don't know exactly what the experiment's about, but given that they kept us in the world instead of in some sort of lab, I assume they're looking at epigenetic expression, on some level. Nature vs. nurture on a huge scale. But I agree, it's a ton of variables. Then again, I like my work small enough to keep under a microscope. And not, like, violating every ethical norm on the books."

Hermione's got enough to cope with, so Cosima's not going to go into the illness or the assassinations or Neolution right now. Cloning alone is plenty. After a moment, though, she laughs.

"Shit, you know, this entire time I've been thinking about how to get home. But apart from being away from the people I care about, I guess I really am better off here in some ways."

Despite Cosima's laughter, Hermione doesn't find anything funny about this. It's one thing for her to use something like Polyjuice Potion to temporarily make her look like someone's twin, and the case of having several people take it to look like a half dozen Harry Potters had certainly had its uses. But this wasn't temporary, nor was it about manipulating physical appearances. This was about someone's life. The lives of a dozen people, actually.

"How did you find out? Other than stumbling across someone with your face, that is. Uncovering the whole truth - or at least all that you know now - likely didn't happen all at once."

In fairness, it isn't funny, but laughing is more socially acceptable than "frustrated screaming."

"One of my sisters is - was - a cop. I don't actually know how she first found out, but she had access to facial recognition software at work, and began to cast an increasingly wide net looking for us." Cosima adjusts her glasses absently, remembering. "I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me, at first, but Beth sent me pictures. Copies of what information she'd gotten her hands on. She especially wanted my help because some of us were coming down with a disease and I had the background to actually look into it." She softens a little, speaking of Beth. "I couldn't blame her for being paranoid, but she hit the point where she wasn't willing to trust anyone who didn't have our same face."

The fact that Cosima changes to past tense makes Hermione stiffen a little. Ah. She has no siblings of her own, and true, this Beth person might not have been a sister in the traditional sense, but she's seen what it's like when someone loses a sibling. It's a pain that she isn't equipped to imagine, and as such, she opts against asking what had happened to her. The curiosity is slightly maddening, but her sense of tact outweighs her curiosity, at least for now.

"What sort of disease? An established one, or something unique to your particular genetic structure?" Of course, those questions might not be the most tactful either, and the expression on her face is contrite as she adds, "Sorry... that's not the cheeriest of topics. Then again, given that it sounds as though there was a heightened sense of danger surrounding you, I suppose none of this has been exactly 'cheery.'"

"It's okay. The healers here already know, or as much of it as I can explain." Which answers the question as to whether Cosima has the disease herself. "As far as I got back home, it's a part of our genetics. We were designed to be infertile, but the disease manifests as a problem with our epithelial tissues throughout the body. That's, uh, like ... the linings of a lot of your organs, your blood vessels, your glands. For us, it usually shows up first in the lungs."

She exhales."Anyway. This is ... I don't mind talking about it if you want to know. But I didn't mean to, like, dump my messed up life story on you out of nowhere."

The idea of human beings being designed to be infertile or meant to be anything else other than people is disturbing to Hermione, but she doesn't bring that up. Instead, she's more concerned for Cosima, shaking her head as she replies, "No, really, that's all right. I just... didn't know." And it's interesting, even if in a morbid sort of way. But she's not going to tell Cosima that.

"Are you exhibiting any sort of symptoms? Have the healers been able to help you?"

"Yeah, to both. Even before I came through a rift, I was starting to exhibit respiratory symptoms, not totally unlike tuberculous, but not contagious. But with some trial and error, we've figured out spirit healing every two to three weeks keeps me pretty functional. I was working on a potential cure back home, but I hadn't gotten very far and Thedas isn't really up to gene therapy yet."

Even Cosima can't be totally breezy about the fact that even magic can't entirely cure her. That'd be too easy, she supposes. She's not ungrateful for the help she's been given, and doesn't care to dwell on the state she might be in if it hadn't been available.

The notion of contagion is the last thing on Hermione's mind, but she supposes it's good that Cosima isn't likely to spread an unknown and incurable disease throughout Thedas. She's less concerned with herself and more about one: Cosima, two: the people of Thedas, and three: the fact that there are some who would see such an epidemic as an excellent reason to be against rifters.

"Given that magical studies is so readily available here, have you considered trying to combine magic with the science you're more familiar with? That is, granted, I know you're not a mage, but there are many books on Herbology and Potions - or, um... botany, I suppose, or whatever they might officially call it here. Each herb has their own special property, as do other organic materials, and that's something that anyone can study, mage or not."

Cosima smiles a little. "I've been doing what I can, yeah, but I'm mainly prioritizing research about the rifts and the anchor shards now. Especially after what we saw..." In the future sounds bleak, and in a future isn't much better. She assumes Hermione knows what she's getting at anyway.

"Back home, a cure would have been for my sisters too. Here, it's just for me -- even if I found a cure that incorporated magic, there's no guarantee I can get back, or I could duplicate it there if I tried. And my life's not in danger as long as I'm here, unless I'm somehow kept from spirit healing indefinitely. It makes more sense to focus on something that threatens a lot of people. I mean, I think so, anyway."

"That's very... noble of you," Hermione decides after a pause. Thinking over the best way to put it delicately, she adds, "But your life is just as valid as your sisters', or of anyone else here. It's good to have a back-up to the spirit healing; after all, what if we'd been in the Gallows for an extended period of time?"

Realizing that they are, technically, in the Gallows for an extended period of time, she corrects herself. "I mean... back then. Or... at that time. You know what I mean. Considering how long we've been in Thedas, it wouldn't be a terrible idea to think of things in the long-term, which means that your health is just as important as the next person's, especially given what an invaluable asset you are to the Inquisition."

"I know what you mean," Cosima says, with a shrug. "And like I said, it's not like I've stopped entirely. But I'm a geneticist, not a witch. Though," she adds, wry, "I wouldn't be shocked to discover Anders has been working on something on the sly without telling me."

Because Anders.

"I don't know, I'm not going to turn down help if it's offered, but I don't feel super indispensable most days. I'm just trying to keep up." People have been kind, and she's attached to other rifters; Kirk, Jamie, Church. Even Hermione, though they don't know each other as well yet. But Cosima feels there's a difference between doing extra research on her own time and rerouting Inquisition resources.

"...I should probably stop agreeing to field missions, though."

[Open] I can't take the distance

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