faderift | The rose I sickened with a scarlet fever [Open]

She's made it to her office, which isn't far from her sleeping quarters, and the prospect of a thing she can actually do has given her a bit of a push back toward energy, if not exactly back toward health as such. She had a few lyrium samples she'd been working with before all this began, and between her and Anders they'll have both an affected blood sample and a control. She's already setting up her notes, precise columns, when he arrives.

He's there a short time later, all of his hair tied back in a messy ponytail, a couple of vials of blood in his hand which might explain some of the nerves he's feeling.

"First and foremost, let me know if you get too tired and need a break. This is important, but your health is important too. Secondly," he holds up the vials before placing them down, "mine, since it's unaffected and I have no idea what... regular... blood would look like, and Rey's."

The first is the red he's used to, the latter is purplish.

"You're in command here, so tell me what will help and you'll have it."

"I promise I'm not going to run off and make French fries." It's a joke, albeit a quiet one. Still, she flashes a sparse smile. "As long as you're actually sleeping sometimes too, and not being a giant hypocrite like half the doctors I knew at home."

She doesn't actually expect him to answer that, it's just a point worth making.

"Okay, I've got lyrium samples already, because I was working on them with the red lyrium project before the sickness derailed everything. So we should prep the blood slides. If anything happens with Rey's sample, we can use mine as a backup." She's focused, and it seems to ground her, for all she's been wrung out by the experience thus far.

"Nate would hunt me down if I wasn't sleeping."

He's lucky he has Nate for many reasons, but sleep is definitely one of them. He wouldn't be sleeping if not for his husband. He gives her a faint smile that's tinged with worry and stress.

"Let's mount the blood." He offers Rey's sample to her, taking his own and carefully putting it on a slide, copying what she does. "I'm operating on the assumption that normally her blood would be similar to mine. I haven't felt anything strangely unfamiliar in healing any Rifters before, you included, so I'm assuming human norms. I'm not certain that's the best assumption to make, but I don't know how else to approach it."

"Yeah, since I don't know of any unaffected Rifters at this point, I think we're going to have to take a leap on the baseline. But from everything I've seen so far, I think that's a safe assumption to make."

She actually still has the latex gloves she arrived wearing -- she's preserved them mainly through not using them, but this seems like a decent time to pull them on. As she gets to work setting up the slides, she ask, "Depending on what this yields, it might make sense to get a sample from a templar too, if we can? From what I hear, it seems like their symptoms are presenting a little differently."

She lost a week to the first flush of her illness, but she's been paying attention since.

"I've actually got a runner bringing up blood from our Templar volunteer now, so by the time we're looking at these, it should be here."

The gloves get a curious look, but he'll have to ask her about why she's protecting her hands later. They have illness and cures on the slate; it's not time to satisfy personal curiousity.

"Simon's apparently being helpful." His voice is wry. A few years too late, but of course the Templars get helpful when it's in their own self-interest... and he cuts off that path of thought. It isn't going to help. "Prior to this illness, going back to Rifter blood, I've treated a few of you. Including you. I think I would have noticed if your blood was this different, and I've seen some bleed. After this, when everyone's gone back to normal, I may want to see each Rifter for a very thorough note-taking session."

It's optimistic to speak of 'after this,' but he's determined it'll be the case. There's a knock on the door as the runner slips in, dropping off the last vial.

"I know what blood looks like at home, so if your blood looks normal to me, I think we can take that as 'good enough' confirmation as a baseline." She glances up at the runner, but then turns her attention back to her slides. Once everything is prepped, she goes to the microscope. "We were working on doing some observations of people with anchor shards for the Rifts and Veil project before all this, but it might be worthwhile to establish some baseline health stats for Rifters for health reasons too."

She starts with the slide of his blood first. "OK, your blood looks pretty much like I expect, so at least there's that." Small favors. "Do you want to come look at it before I switch out the slides?" If she gets sicker, it'll be better to have someone capable of following up who saw this first set of data, she thinks, but doesn't say; she and Anders are both aware enough that she might be running out of time without her saying so.

"Yes, please." He's already losing patients in Darktown; he doesn't need to lose more here in the Gallows so he won't. He's decided. As if his decision has anything to do with it.

Anders leans forward and is instantly fascinated. Hundreds of little circles are scooting around; he's seeing things that are usually in him. "Maker. That's... blood. I don't know what I was expecting," he says, amused, as he straightens, "but I can't say it was that. Maybe we can tell Thedas that as mages already have circles in their veins we don't need to also be in Circles."

There's a beat. "Are those... cells, too? Different types of them from the plants, obviously." As he asks he grabs the Templar blood and starts repeating her earlier motions to prepare that one too. It only makes sense for her to get first look at everything since she's the one who knows what they're looking at.

"Yeah. You'd get a better view if I had a good way to stain the sample, but the little circles you noticed are red blood cells. The fluid they're in is called plasma; it's mostly water, but it's also got some sugars and proteins in it. Someday I'll have to explain transfusions and blood types to you, but I don't think it's gonna be super helpful today."

Even if a transfusion might help, they don't have the technology to do it. She might as well suggest a full-body CAT scan for all the good it would do.

"Blood's got what we call white blood cells too. There are fewer of them and they're bigger than the red blood cells. They're a big part of the way the body fights off disease, so we might get a look at them in the other samples." She takes Rey's sample and switches it out.

"...huh. That's... interesting."

"You see something?" There's hope in his voice despite his efforts to sound detached. "Is it something you've seen before? Or know of? Or..."

If working with blood has actually gotten them somewhere he very well could be thanking the Maker later, and all the stress of talking on the network about blood would have been worth it.

"Anything, really. Squares? Triangles?"

"There's definitely lyrium in this sample, which is probably why it looks blue," she says, deliberate, without looking up from the microscope. "But it isn't... ugh, for lack of a better word, it's not healthy lyrium. It's all twisted up and breaking down." She peers closer. "I'm still looking, but there's not obvious evidence of the blood cells becoming lyrium cells, though. Nothing, like, halfway in-between. It's blood cells and lyrium."

She should let him take a look, certainly, but she's still trying to parse all the information she's getting. She supposes, in the absence of stains, she should be grateful for lyrium's vibrant color, which at least makes it easy to spot.

"So their blood is still fine?"

That may be the best news they've had so far. It's not them, it's the lyrium in their blood being taken out. How or why Rifters have lyrium in their blood is a mystery still, but they've got something now.

"And the lyrium is being destroyed. So the Templars are genuinely having withdrawls because they're not getting its full effects." Like putting in only part of an elfroot leaf rather than the five a potion calls for. "We have to stop whatever is warping the lyrium. ...And by extension, perhaps, warping magic considering the effects healing has."

"I mean, the blood is fine in the sense that the actual blood cells don't seem damaged, yeah, though my understanding is that having lyrium in your blood when you haven't taken any lyrium is still concerning..." She trails off. "What the hell is that, though?" she asks, mainly rhetorically.

"Come here, come look at this." She doubts he'll be able to shed any real light on what she's seeing, but at least having a second person describe it might help her confirm what she thinks she's observed.

"Um," he says even before he's in position. If she doesn't know, he's really unlikely to know, but Anders shifts over and leans in to look anyway. There's the blood again, there's the mangled lyrium cells along with a few whole ones, and there's something new.

"Um," he says again, and then it moves. It goes up to one of the lyrium cells, and his eyebrows climb. "It's... Maker, is it attacking? Some sort of... shark in the blood, swimming along and eating the lyrium? Cosima?"

Anders straightens back up, looking at her. "Does that, does your world have that?"

"Yes and no. Cells or small multi-cellular creatures that attack other cells? Yeah, that's the reason for a lot of diseases. But that particular creature, no. I've never seen anything like that before. And it seems to be eating the lyrium, and since my world doesn't have lyrium, it couldn't have adapted in my world."

She has a thought, and reaches for paper and ink. "I don't know... it's like it's infecting the lyrium. But that's... you can't infect an element or a mineral." She jots something down aand then moves back to the microscope. "The, um. I'll call them lyriophages for now, I guess. Whatever they're doing to the lyrium could be having effects on the host's bloodstream that explains some or all of the symptoms. But I don't know how the lyrium got in the Rifters in the first place."

Edited 2018-02-11 00:43 (UTC)

"Lyro... forgive me, but I'm tired and blood sharks seems far more amusing than it has any right to seem so I think I'm going to keep calling them that." He appreciates her science and knowledge immensely, but he's had exhaustion giggles threaten him a couple of times during this and he wants to tell Nate about blood sharks while laughing himself to sleep tonight.

"More seriously... I don't know. Could you have gotten it by being exposed to the Fade? When you crossed through it? Or... Um." There's a knock at the door, and Nari's there.

"I've still no idea about how you have lyrium in your veins," he says after, "but let's look at this as we ponder?"

The rose I sickened with a scarlet fever [Open]

For Anders

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