Sitting quietly at a back table, the green-skinned form of the tiefling named Lyle Rihannsu drunkenly grasps his heavy and nearly-empty tankard; the many fresh stains on the table indicate it isn't his first. Raising it, he toasts the empty chair in front of him. "Proud and noble Hellknight, great warrior of the forces of Law, greater enemy of the forces of Chaos and Deceit... and you still manage to die owing me money" Lyle mutters through a thick tongue. Breaking into a small smile, he toasts the chair again. "Fight well in Hell, Nicolo. I've no doubt it's heaven for you, and after an eternity's fighting with your ghost all the demons will desert and make for the Abyss." Raising his tankard, Lyle shoves the remains of his beer down his throat, and THUDs the tankard back onto the table, shortly followed by his head.
An elf sits in the room, his dark green hair swaying as he moves. Taniriel listens to the stories, a small smile on his face. When the opening comes, he tells the story of when he met Sir Cosma, laughing at the contrast between the lengthy discussion about the ruins and the violent swordplay with goblins. When he finishes, he raises his glass high, To Sir Cosma, the scholar and the warrior. The rest of his drink slides quickly down Taniriel's throat.
A human leans against the near by wall. On his hip is a holster. The leather device is tightly wrapped around, securing a single shot smoothbore pistol. Most of his body is hidden by the large trench coat he wears, most of his face concealed with his wide brim hat. Irizati certainly stood out here, among the men with their swords and their heavy armor. He leaned against the wall quietly nodding to the stories, not sharing his own. He lifted a small glass of something he had been ordering from the tavern owner and took a drink when the others did.
His eyes drifted occasionally to the elf and to the man with green skin. Irizati has seen many strange people but the green skin was certainly a novelty to him. He shrugged and chalked it up to being a long way from home.
He was a long way from home. He tipped his hat in respect when ever a lady walked by or in agreement with the various people as the made a point here or there. Mostly he stayed quiet as they spoke of hell and demons, he was not a believer in such things. He gave the leader of the hellknights a small nod of respect between drinks.
In a less occupied section of the tavern, Bubo is sitting alone. The table next to him is full of chatty guests, all of them already having drunk their fair share of alcohol. The ratfolk merely listens, not engaging in conversation despite their attempts. Most have learned to leave him to his thoughts like some of the maudlin guests who've taken to silently reminiscing about Nicolo.
Throughout the night, he has already turned away several servers and offers of drink, preferring to sip from a flask he carries, pulling down the mask around his snout to take sips. He's attracted some attention, not only due to his race, but also due to the heavy coverings he wears. Bubo shifts uncomfortably when he catches another gazing at him, who looks away as quickly as politeness allowed.
I haven't had the chance to pay my respects, the ratfolk thinks, concentrating on the flask between his hands but also hyperaware of the vial sitting in one of his front pockets. Not privately. I don't know if I'll get the chance.
Perhaps later or tomorrow he'll visit, if he's allowed to. It's lucky enough that he was able to attend when he was not the one invited. For now he waits, somewhat anxious but relaxed.
At first you are not sure if the man at the bar is a guest or a guard. He wears the decorated leather of an apprentice hellknight but you notice it is dusty and a little travel stained.
In a lull in the conversation you hear him make a toast. "To Sir Nico, and to debts unpaid." He drains the cup of heavy dark red wine.
Irizati listens casually to the conversations around him. First he listens to the bard and his story of the desert. Irizati has had some experience in deserts and listens carefully to this tale.
He notices the blue skinned woman... she is hard to miss but he avoids staring, keeping his hat tilted low enough his eyes are hardly visible to begin with. His ears perk up at the mention of guns. When the woman leaves he sits down in her seat and nods politely to the signifier, "Escuse my ease-droppin' ma'am but I heard some talk of firearms, always did enjoy conversation that reminds me of home."
He glances again at the exotic blue woman who's seat he now occupies. His eyes linger for a moment on her and her sword before he catches himself and returns to the conversation at hand.
Bubo takes another sip from his flask, noting that it's almost empty. He doesn't listen to the bard, instead flitting his attention to the conversations about Nicolo which he thinks are far more interesting though with variable believability.
He overhears the signifer's identity as Nicolo's newly knighted squire and looks in her direction. He recognizes her from the ceremony and ponders on whether to approach her, to ask if he could pay his respects in private or at least to leave the vial as a token in his memory.
She would know whether I'd be allowed, Bubo thinks. He hesitates to approach her and drains the last of the liquid in his flask. He wets his lips before replacing the mask again then stands and is hit with the sweet ache that comes from moving after having sat for too long.
Later, Bubo decides and approaches the counter to refill his empty flask.
" 'scuse the improper salutations. The woman who trained me... a mentor of sorts she preferred 'ma'am'. " He gives her a polite nod to signify he meant no disrespect.
"Gunpowder is a tricky thing... the formula is quite easy but getting it just right."he pauses for a moment and gives a sheepish smile, "That's the tricky part, ain't it always?"
His right hand goes down to his holster, instinctively checking to make sure it is there, "But yes I am from Alkenstar, Alkenstar City to be exact. Sir Cosma was in the region a few years ago looking for some damned thing. I don't even recall what it was now. I was assigned to escort him through the wastes. We had quite an interesting time. He was a sharp man, got us out of quite a few... situations."
As an employee drops off another small glass he puts it to his lips and takes a drink. "How about yourself? Colleagues I assume?"
The aasimar excuses herself, having suddenly remembered something, and makes her way over to Lyle. To Taniriel, who is standing close by (either that or she doesn't want to talk to the drunken humans who are closer), "Do you've any idea when he'll wake up?"
Taniriel looks up at the woman with the blue skin. When who'll wake up?[b] He says looking over the crowd. [b]I don't see anyone asleep. Then he turns back to the woman, I'm Taniriel by the way. He puts one hand to his chest and makes a small bowing gesture.
Irizati smiles politely, a finger pushing up his hat a bit so his eyes more visible. He has the tired look of a man who has spent far to many nights in a camp, or on the road and not enough in a proper bed. He shakes her hand. In a firm voice he adds, "I am Shieldmarshal Irizati Calhoun, of the Grand Duchy of Alkenstar, Though back home they just call me "Eerie" or Shieldmarshal."
"Mind you I am rarely this often so formal, but your organization strikes me as one that prefers formality." He glanced at his drink before picking it up and taking a quick drink.
"Steal something? No... I don't believe so. He was looking for an artifact or some such thing. Anyone who owned it was long dead when we got there."
Bubo's ears twitch reflexively from inside his cowl as he eavesdrops on the conversation, trying not to let his attention get redirected to the other conversations in the small lulls of their speaking.
Soon, he's at the counter and waits patiently for someone to serve him, ignoring the curious looks he may receive.
"Could you refill this for me?" Bubo says when he is accommodated, holding out his metal flask in a gloved hand. "Just water, please."
"Ah, hitting the hard stuff eh doctor?" Malcolm Smiles at the masked figure. "Must be hard to drink through that mask."
"Not a doctor," Bubo immediately corrects. "And no, I am not. I'm not fond of . . . alcohol."
The ratfolk's voice is somewhat muffled and echo-like from the mask he wears. He casually inspects Malcolm as he waits for his flask to be refilled.
"It is hard to drink through this mask but I've gotten used to it. And you? I suppose you've drunk your fair share?"
"Well the knights are buying and old Nico was fond of the odd dram. So I think a bit of ale might be fitting for his memory, or water as you prefer."
"Not a doctor? But is that not a plague mask you're wear?..... No it isn't..... Sorry, my mistake."
Bubo hums in reply, half-listening to the conversation. The server appears with his now-filled flask and Bubo takes it from him, before lowering his mask a moment to sip again.
"No, you are correct," Bubo says, putting away the flask in one of his pockets. "This is a plague's mask, or a doctor's mask as it's more commonly known. I've taken to wearing it due to . . . the nature of my work."
"Oh? What is your work?"
"Plagues."
Bubo lets a moment pass before speaking again. "Or more generally, diseases. Not as a doctor would—I don't aim to know how to cure or heal them. I want to understand them, to know how they work and what causes them. There's a difference. I suppose you could say that a doctor learns how to make the sick healthy. I learn how to make the healthy sick."
"So you see why I'm wearing this." He gestures at his mask. "And what about your work . . . hm, I'm sorry, we haven't introduced ourselves, have we? My name is Bubo Sraga."
He offers a hand for Malcolm to shake.
Malcolm takes the offered hand carefully.
Malco..
He turns to face the interruption. Coming to 'at rest' attention as he sees who it is. "Sir!"
Iri nodded his head, "Like any duty it has both given me a lot... and taken away a lot. But someone has to keep order. Especially outside of the city in the wastes. And I am the man for the job it seems."
He adds in accented common, "oft time, at any rate."
Bubo turns when he is addressed and recognizes the signifer, noting Malcolm's response.
"Yes, that is correct," the ratfolk says to Moira, nodding to her politely and offering a hand for her to shake. "I am Bubo Sraga. It is a pleasure to meet you, Sir . . . ?"
Tamara, pleasure to meet you. Then Taniriel looks over at the tiefling, I see what you mean now. Whenever he does wake, he will likely have a major headache to deal with. Taniriel laughs.
Irizati's ears perked up again as he arched an eyebrow, "The wastes?" he asked curiously.
He glanced down at his drink, picked it up, put it to his lips and finished it off.
This'll be good.... he thought to himself.
Bubo shakes her hand firmly even as confusion enters his mind. He turns his head to look at Irizati.
"Pleasure to meet you," Bubo says, releasing Moira's hand. "I think you've mistaken me for my uncle, Bol Sraga. He died the year previous, which is why I am here in his stead. I'm afraid I am not privy to what he has been researching and cannot sate your interest."
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Oh." Bubo takes a moment to gather his thoughts. "I did receive some samples from Nicolo—I mean Sir Cosma—but I didn't know where they were from. I … am flattered he mentioned me. I was not expecting. …"
Bubo wonders how to explain. He doubts they truly cared about cell membrane structure, colony morphology, the intricacies anaerobic versus aerobic respiration. They most likely knew little of them. But they were paying attention and Bubo could not resist the opportunity to speak to minds that were open to his ideas.
"Within you is a multitude," he starts. "You are a colony of at least ten trillion beings called cells. They are the basic units of all living things. They are organisms so astonishingly small that you cannot see them without special equipment."
Bubo feels his posture straighten with pride, his patience extending, feels the sheer joy of talking about science that had been layered with dust. He had an audience.
"Miasma and contagion theories of disease hold that diseases were either of the form of miasma, proliferated through the air, or of a contagion, where diseases propagated through touch. Both are true in a sense. Poor sanitation can cause foul odors which are associated with disease. Some diseases are spread through touch. But both theories do not adequately explain disease."
His work was not unimportant, but it was largely ignored. How could something so tiny be relevant? Why would they be of any concern? It was painstaking to find knowledge gathered by previous scientists and alchemists on the topic, poring through book after book with most of them containing only passing references.
"This is where germ theory fills the gaps. Remember: you are composed of trillions of cells. You are a sum of these parts. You are a whole of many. What if your body was invaded? Your cells against foreign cells, waging war against each other. If your cells won, you remain healthy. If they lose, you suffer from a disease depending on what cells invaded you, on which parts of the body, and so on.
"The miasma and contagion theories are popular so most doctors you meet wouldn't know or even give you the time of day if you mentioned this knowledge."
Medicine was a noble pursuit but most doctors were ill-suited to working endlessly on doing tests, running reactions, setting up experimental designs, and running statistical analyses on data. Science and alchemy were hard and only those who enjoyed it were able to suffer through the overwhelming messes of raw data and failed experiments. He remembers spending endless hours on his work, hours spent selling his wares as he waited for cultures to grow, searching for rare books and alchemic formulae that explained.
“Why do you care about something so small?” Bubo remembers his uncle Bol asking him about his enthusiasm for the subject. He'd gotten confused about why his nephew seemed so excited about them.
"It's not so much about their size," he remembers answering, "it's their strength."
He knew, above all else, size matters. Everything about a being was affected by their size, and that included strength. Here were such small beings that could not exert any perceivable force and yet still capable of bringing people to their knees. It seemed incomprehensible and strange and so very exciting.
Nothing is big or small, Bubo had read later in an obscure text, except by comparison.
"The abundance of organisms in nature varies with their size," Bubo continued. "Organisms are limited by resources and the larger an organism, the less room there is for them. But inversely, the smaller an organism, the more room there is for them. What microorganisms lack in size, they make up in numbers.
"You may think ten trillion is a large number. And it is. It is large, so extremely large that most find such a number hard to imagine. And this is only one body and you fill only so little space in our world. There are innumerable microorganisms and they are everywhere. Inside you, in the water, in the soil, in the air, in the food we eat. Everything that is is touched by them."
Bubo takes a deep breath. "This is a blatant simplification of the foundation of my work. Now that you know that, I can discuss what I found from the samples Sir Cosma sent.
"I identified a large number of bacteria. I did not limit myself, of course, to only bacteria. I also identified viruses, fungi, and parasites.
"I've ignored most of the microorganisms that are commonly found (which were surprisingly few) and further eliminated those which are harmless or helpful, determining their roles through taxonomic categorization, and concentrating only on the pathogenic or otherwise destructive class of organisms."
His voice grows excited the more he speaks, not seeming to notice that he slips into more and more scientific terminology. It seems he doesn't get the chance to talk about his work often.
"From this, I further identified and confirmed their roles with a combination of observation, staining, and selective media culturing. Further study was done by exposing test animals, mostly rats, to a causative microbe so I could study a disease's pathology and pathogenesis. I've done a few studies on epidemiology with some of the more infectious agents as well, exposing sample population of rats to them. Studies on etiology was done, of course, fulfilling Koch's postulates simply to confirm if it was the exposed agent which caused the disease."
Bubo pauses in his explanation. He feels somewhat embarrassed at having gotten carried away.
"In any case, my work is well described but not well understood—I can tell you what happens, but I can't tell you why or how. My findings of the samples Nic—Sir Cosma sent to me are one such case. They are … very strange.
"They are ever-shifting, and most of them are, if not deadly, then at least potentially lethal. Their pattern is frustrating and illogical. There should be no reason why such a large number of them co-exist in a small space. The ecology of such an area would be mad and I can barely fathom what kind of trophic level interactions occur. Even stranger, they have no obvious agent of infection which makes one wonder how they came to be in the first place. And yet, they do.
"One could cause total tissue breakdown, appearing to manifest as caseous necrosis but then switch to liquefactive necrosis after a period of time, maintaining a slow painful death at first but then suddenly turn the insides into nothing more than soup. Another seems to stay benign in the liver, completely contrary to its apparent structure, but then spontaneously turn malignant, attacking the body while metastasizing quickly into surrounding organs until the victim bleeds to death in their own skin.
"One seems to cause a 'Dancing Plague', causing the subjects I've infected to dance themselves to death. Another seems to be just a simple variant of cholera despite most everything else being lethal. And then not even a variant at all, but common tuberculosis in the same sample. And still more: a paralyzing disease that renders one increasingly unable to move until they die from suffocation due to their stiff lungs rendering them unable to breathe; another with such a quick incubation time and yet is extremely fatal which makes one wonder how it's even able to spread itself in the first place when its carriers die so fast; another can attack the skin and hair, slowly turning them liquid until the victim's insides is purely exposed, if they manage to survive that long.
"And these are only a few of the ones I've explored in depth. It is extremely fascinating, extremely illogical, such an onslaught in variety. …"
He trails off, realizing he's gotten carried away again.
"And that's only one reason why it's so strange. Not only are they all so dangerous, but they outnumber the usual microorganisms necessary for life to thrive or even exist. Any ecological cycle or system has bacteria playing an important role. They are essential in the maintenance of the flow of energy and nutrients, but it's hard to imagine what kind of ecosystem would develop from the variety of microorganisms I found. The bacteria responsible for decomposition, for example, is at a number very much less than expected, and there are many predatory bacteria, some of them even cannibalistic.
"But, but yes. That's the basics of what I've found from the samples he sent me, if that made any sense to you."
Remembering the vial in his front pocket, Bubo speaks while he still senses the chance. "I am actually carrying one of the original samples Nicolo sent me. I—I was hoping I could lay it on his grave."
Irizati scratched his head under his hat for a moment, trying to catch up to what the man was saying. "Hmm... Hard to say, I've been stationed in a small settlement outside of Alkenstar city for years, but even so this is a bit... beyond my expertise." He took another drink... now just a sip and thought for a moment.
"Though of all the ghost stories I've heard about the wastes tiny invisible monsters you can't see that kill you with sickness is my new favorite." Irizati eyed bubo suspiciously.
After a few moments of thought he added, "To be fair... these microorganisms of yours sound easier to believe in than the typical tales of curses, demons and angry gods that I usually hear as explanation for sickness. I would be curious to take a look at anything you have published."
Ah yes, Taniriel nods, Well, we can always try to wake him ourselves if you're anxious to give it back. A friend of yours? Taniriel asks, motioning to Lyle.
Overhearing, the green-skinned tiefling lifts himself off his table and walks over to Taniriel and the rest. "Afraid I have never met the good fellow, excuse my coming over here but I could hear old Nicolo berating me from beyond the grave for sitting in the dark blathering on with my thoughts. Might I join you?"
"Thank you," Bubo says gratefully. "I appreciate the chance to pay my respects.
"And alchemy on the body, you say? That's actually one of the main areas of interest for me. You may be interested in one of the successes I am most proud of seeing as they involved me having to modify my own body intensely; they're called plague vials."
He turns to Irizati and chuckles. "I haven't actually published anything. I've been too busy sating my own curiosity to bother though I have sent copies of most of my own work to Sir Cosma." He tilts his head slightly. "I wonder what he did with them?
"And there shouldn't be much danger from the microorganisms themselves. Most microorganisms are actually quite harmless. It's rather a small percentage of them that are actively pathogenic. One of the main curiosities of their abundance in the samples. As I said before, they're quite strange. Most of them you'd have to be intentionally infected with and all of them seem to be conditionally pathogenic even if they shouldn't be. Actually getting them to cause the disease was one of the most tedious parts of my experiments." He shrugs. "That's only in the samples though, which can't seem to make up its mind. I'm sure there's much more variety out there, constantly changing. I'd like to visit where they were from sometime.
"But I don't think Sir Cosma knew exactly what the samples he sent me contained." He nods thoughtfully. "I was quite surprised myself. Pleasantly surprised."
Feel free. I'm Taniriel. Pleased to meet you. Taniriel reaches out, offering a hand to Lyle. It appears that this fine woman has something of yours.
"Though of all the ghost stories I've heard about the wastes tiny invisible monsters you can't see that kill you with sickness is my new favorite." ...
"Well said. If a sixth of the stories about the Wastes are true then I am amazed Alkenstar is still standing. It must be a strange place. Still I would like to see it someday."
Lyle takes it with a surprised smile. "My lord- the old fellow owed me money when he died, I thought he'd wrangle his way out of paying it now he'd passed into the beyond... I find myself strangely disappointed. Odd."
Turning, Lyle shakes Tanirel's hand and nods. "Lyle Rihannsu, at your service. A fellow acquaintance of Sir Nicolo, I take it?"
"Why are we worried about the other Hellknights finding out. Surely Sir Nico's last wishes are fully in line with the goals of his own Order?"
Malcolm raises an eyebrow at this whiff of treason.
Bubo doesn't say anything but listens, interested. He takes in the new arrivals to their little group, looking unabashedly as his eyes are hidden by his goggles.