A Very (very) Small Problem

[Faith Augustin]

26th Ymiden, 718

Faith was frustrated and she had a problem which she simply could not solve. It was not a big problem, in fact in very many ways it was a very small problem indeed. However, it was a significant one and she had done everything she could to try and solve it. Here, at home and also in the Order of the Adunih and the university. The people in each place had been helpful, given what support and access to equipment they could provide - and yet she still was no further forward. So, she'd decided that the best thing she could do was to ask Padraig. From the time they had first met, he had been the one who provided solutions to problems, after all. There had been a time, not so long ago, that she would have gone to find him at his office in the University, but instead she waited until he'd put Madison down for her afternoon nap. Faith was going through the same motions with Noah and she grinned at their son as she put him in his crib. "Nap time for Noah, yes it is. You're a good boy, and you're going to sleep beautiful sleep and dream wonderful dreams." Her hand stroked the bridge of his nose gently and his eyes began to close. Watching him as he lay there, arms stretched above his head as though to reach his sister, Faith breathed a slight sigh of relief. They were trying to get the two of them to sleep separately. It was fine now that they preferred, or rather insisted usually, sleeping together - but the bigger they got the more difficult it would be to get them sleeping alone.

Yet, Noah seemed quite content and then, Faith realised why as Starr, the Velduris wolf pup literally appeared in there with Noah and she looked down and then shook her head. She was never going to be the disciplinarian of the two of them, if the wolf acted as a comfort for him and meant that Noah could sleep, that was just fine with her. Her babies having happy, comfortable lives was more important than anything and so she said and did nothing to stop the wolf from sharing Noah's crib, his hands reaching out to where Madison's were. When they had managed to get both children, clean, fed and worn out as they were, down for a nap, the pair of them exited the nursery and Faith looked up at Padraig as he draped his arm over her shoulders.

"I was wondering," she whispered as they walked away, her arm slipping comfortably around his waist and her body falling into a natural rhythm with his, their steps synchronising as they left the children sleeping. "I have an issue in work, and I hoped you might help me?" It was about Nalin, she explained, he was a patient of hers she'd told Padraig about ~ although he was very good at zoning out, she knew ~he had a disease called Ink Bloom. It was very rare, very specific to certain families, in certain places.

"But that isn't really the issue," she explained. Or, it was an issue, but she was dealing with that separately. No, the issue here was simply that Ink Bloom seemed to be a parasite. In his blood. "I think that, anyhow. It acts like a parasite and it does all the things that a parasite would do. It also reacts to certain treatments in ways which suggest that the parasite can be made dormant, rather than killed." But the issue? She couldn't see it. It was too small. So small that a magnifying glass of the strongest magnification couldn't do it and she needed to see. To make sure that she had cured him, not just sent his blood parasites into a temporary coma.

"They're smaller than anything alive I've come across. Although, I suppose that's to my knowledge since I can't see them. Maybe they're everywhere," Faith suddenly flapped her hand in front of first his face, then hers in the way she had in the Scaltoth Jungle, flapping away the bugs. "Ew. Anyhow. Can you help me see things so small I can't see them?" Slipping her arm back around his waist she grinned up at him. "While the children nap, if you don't mind."

[Padraig]

Padraig had been home much more of the time lately than he'd been at the university. Or anywhere else for that matter. To say he was enjoying the change of pace would be an understatement. He'd missed too much, while the twins grew, developed and changed too fast for him to have kept up with. He didn't want to end up being like many of his male colleagues and fellow professors who could hardly remember the date of their offsprings' birth-trials, not to mention how old they actually were.

But if Faith was waiting for him to step up as the disciplinarian between them, she'd be waiting a very long time. Madison in particular had a knack for getting past her father's defenses or any pretense of being stern. Maybe Cyrus would step into that role, though it didn't seem likely. The babe's pup was beside her, much like Noah's own companion. But each time Padraig thought her eyes were fluttering closed and would stay that way, they popped open again and he was treated to a trail of chatter that was as lively as it was nonsensical. So eventually he did what any good scientist would do. He bored her to sleep with physics talk. And it worked.

"You have to ask?" Padraig quipped as they carefully shut the nursery door behind them and as good as tiptoed away. Of course he'd help her. Faith hardly needed to ask. She was right though. When it came to certain aspects of medicine, the morbid aspects at least, without actively realizing, he had a way of sorting and blocking out the need to know, from the rest, which tended to include the rather not know(s). They could have gone anywhere in the house, but in this instance he steered their course towards his lab up the stairs. The location helped him focus on the topic and problem at hand.

So a parasite that was so small that she couldn't see it? "How do you know it's a parasite then? Is it eating away at something, or changing the biological structure of something?" he asked, and then winced as Faith flapped her hands in the air. Padraig frowned, then had to ask. "You think they might be airborne? Wouldn't it make more sense, if they're only in the blood, that exposure to air outside the body might kill them?" It was probably an outlandish suggestion and it was off the top of his head anyway. Padraig was a physicist. Medicine was Faith's field.

"While the children nap," he muttered with a crooked grin and snorted. "Sure, I think we could whip something up." It was a jest obviously, Immortals knew how long it might take to solve a problem like that. The solution could arrive in the blink of an eye, or take arcs to figure out. "Well," he said as he propped himself on the edge of his desk. "If a magnifying glass isn't powerful enough, a lens with the power of a telescope might be. But we're not trying to see stars are we?" Not to mention the impractical nature of trying to view actual substances up close and personal, with a telescope.

In chemistry, he told her, substances could be broken down, sometimes by heating them, other times by treating them with other substances. "Have you tried to break down the blood to look for the separation of foreign substances?" he asked. But again, this was medicine and not his field. It would be better if they could magnify a sample of blood anyway so see what was there. If for no other reason than simple curiosity. "It sounds like we'd need a lens or series of lenses and eyepieces not completely unlike a telescope...but there'd need be obvious differences."

One of those differences being scale, he told Faith. "There are telescopes that can break down and fit inside a hand carried case. The less powerful ones. Then there are those that are powerful beyond the imagination, and so large that they'd fill or overcrowd the dome atop the Lightening Cathedral in Rharne. You'd need something almost as powerful I think. But clearly a scope of that size isn't going to be practical in this case," he pointed out, though that much he figured was already obvious.

[Faith Augustin]

Looking at Padraig as he "physicsed" their daughter to sleep, Faith wondered if he realised why it worked. He probably thought he was boring the baby, or some other ridiculous notion, whereas in fact it was very straightforward. "They sleep when they're tired, warm, full and secure. Your voice makes her feel secure." Faith couldn't easily give words to how she felt since they'd decided to move to Rharne, to stop with all this work-work-work cycle which they had both built up. Padraig was home a lot more and so was she - that meant that she was doubly content, for they were spending more time with the children, and with each other. The tension Faith hadn't known she'd been feeling was dissipating and she promised Vri, in that moment, that she would not forget this.

"Well, no, I don't have to ask but good manners dictate that I should," she replied, earnestly. He knew her well enough to recognise the twinkle of mirth in her eyes at that point, though and she grinned at him as he steered them towards his lab. It was a wonderful place, this laboratory and Faith loved it here. It was like the quintessential nature of him. So very many different things, so much more than he seemed to be. "You really should do something with that blood, you know," she said. He had the blood of two Immortals, plus a mortalborn. He didn't like working with blood, she understood, but still that was an opportunity. Now that he was marked by Xiur, Faith wondered, would that mean that he could combine his blood with the Immortal blood, Faith wondered? What about Karems and Kuras? Or, come to that....

"Ahem. Eyes on the job, Faith." Focusing once more on why they were here, she listened to his questions and considered her answers, carefully. "Well, I don't know it's a parasite. I think it is, I believe it is because it is acting in the way that a parasite does. It feeds on the blood. Consider Treid's armpit," she said, the small frown on her forehead clearly indicating that she was thinking, working it through. "We saw the blood separate. That led me to the blood infusion, but it's led to other things, too." Being able to put blood in to another being had been an amazing discovery and it had taken her a long time and a lot of work. But she had learned a lot of things along the way. "All beings, all mortal beings with blood, we can separate their blood into a yellow liquid and a deep red liquid. Parasites seem to attack the red blood." What they did, she said, was to grow in number. Each one took up space and eventually took over the functions of the red blood. There were many, many questions they still didn't know the answers to but everything Nalin's blood did, every way it reacted and how the blood acted when mingled with other, non-infected blood of the same type suggested that it was a parasite, she said.

"Also, cold stops the disease, but then, when the blood heats back up, it goes back to normal. Suggesting that there's a dormancy brought about by cold. Parasites snuggling down for the winter." It was how she had cured it, she said. She'd discovered that extreme heat killed it, but unfortunately had the rather terminal side effect of killing the internal organs too. So, she'd induced hypothermia and sent the parasites into dormancy and then suddenly increased the heat of the blood. The resistance of the parasite was lower and she was able to cure.

Thus far.

"But I don't know for certain, Padraig. What if it's just really really dormant, or doing that makes it dormant for three arcs? Or what if it isn't a parasite at all?" No, Faith was quite certain, she said, she needed to be able to see better and that sounded like something that a physicist could do. But yes, she'd separated it out, and it might be that they had separated out the parasites, but she could tell because she couldn't see them. She'd rolled her eyes when he started talking about it being airborne though. "I was joking, Padraig. Just the thought of there being all these tiny teeny little termites in someones blood makes me a little... well it's an affront to Famula, for one. They have to go." That was absolutely the case, of course and her Champion was determined that she would increase the knowledge of blood as much as she could in her lifetime. "But there could be. Right in front of us. Other ones, floating around, just being breathed in." She grinned at the outrageous, to her eyes, suggestion that the world was filled with tiny little organisms. What a notion, she thought.

"So, lenses. How would we do it?" Faith asked, with a frown. "Do we start there? Ideally, I'd like the blood not to be as far away as a star for me to look at it, though. If I have a wish list, that is." And then she added, casually, "And rather than overcrowding the Lightning Cathedral - can we go for fitting on my desk?" Faith wondered the last with a smile.

[Padraig]

"Ah," Padraig responded quietly as they left the room, and with an amused grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. He couldn't quite suppress it. "Is that the reason some of my students," Particularly one or two in the back row over the past arc or so, "drift off during my lectures?" He couldn't help but snort in amusement. All this time, he might have been flattered.

As for help, and asking, his skills were hers to call on, much the same as must be true in regards to hers. It was understood. Went without saying, even when it was polite to ask nonetheless. As for the samples of blood on his shelves, Padraig smiled and considered it. "There isn't an alchemist alive that wouldn't like to get his hands on that collection." The vials, he meant. "And I should. All of them, even Xiur's eventually, have been freely given with the donor's blessing." Otherwise it would be too difficult. Samples taken without so much as a by your leave would have seemed tainted in his mind.

But because they were given freely and without him so much as asking, it seemed almost disrespectful not to use them. "I don't mind the blood after the fact," he explained. in a vial, a puddle on the floor, that kind of thing. It was the stuff actually spilling out in the first place that he didn't care for. But while they were in his office to address something related to blood, it had little do do with what was in those vials. "Ok, so Treid's armpit," Padraig agreed and sat back, braced against the edge of a workbench with arms crossed over his chest.

If Faith believed that what she was dealing with were parasites, then they probably were. He didn't know anyone smarter or more skilled than her when it came to medicine. Of course as a scientist it always paid to keep an open mind. But it was a place to start. "So they feed on the red, and as they feed, they propagate? How do you know?" he asked. "Does the sample increase in volume? Or instead of producing more of themselves, do they maybe change some of the blood maybe to something more like themselves?" Padraig was fairly convinced he wasn't expressing what he was thinking very well. Which was why she was the expert in medicine, and he was not.

"So it appears to be dormant after treatment, but you can't be sure that it will be a lasting condition. Or even sure that what you're dealing with is what you think you're dealing with," he said with a frown. Of course his expression shifted into a quick grin and a snort when she teased him about the stuff being airborne. But at the end of the trial? "Well then if there's any chance of them floating around in the air, free as birds, then all the better to try and get a look at them." And stop them, obviously.

Was she telling him she didn't have a list already, he asked, teasing her. Because of course she had a list. As he lived and breathed, Faith had a list. "The smaller the scope," he told Faith as he pulled out a sheet of paper to draw and write on. "The more powerful the lenses must be." But there were also considerations which were relative, he explained. How much power, so far as lens power and magnification, was required to see...something in a sample of blood that was perhaps inches away, compared to that required to get a good look at a heavenly body that might be leagues upon leagues...up leagues and more leagues away?

"Also, instead of a mirror, which you'd see in a telescope, you'd need some sort of internal illuminator," he explained as he sketched. "A mirror gathers light, which is what's required for viewing stars under a very dark sky. You could consider it to be indirect. It gathers light but doesn't produce it. In order to view something as close as what we're considering here," Padraig figured..."Internal illumination." And the other thing, he told her?

He knew how to use a telescope. He knew all the parts and how they functioned. If something went wrong he usually knew what it was and sometimes, he could even fix it. But it required an expert in their own field to create, to cut, grind and shape the lenses...and so on. They'd need one of those. An expert, that was.

[Faith Augustin]

His students drifted off during his lectures? Faith looked at him and shook her head. "I do not believe it. Unless they are the pretty female ones, just sitting there to hear your voice because they adore you so." With a smile to him she was quite clear that this was the only possible reason and she was sticking with that, thank you muchly. They had a brief conversation about the blood he kept in his lab and she made a note to remind him again when his mind wasn't distracted by her desire for seeing blood more closely. He'd wander off and forget, there was not a doubt in Faith's mind. She didn't find his forgetfulness frustrating or difficult - it was simply the case that his head was so filled with wonder and thoughts that he could not hold them all.

"Increase in volume, no," Faith said. What happened was that the blood remained the same in terms of volume, but the ability to fight disease, the response to illness, the clotting agent, all of it - it reduced until it seemed like there was nothing. "I can only conclude that they are feeding on the constituents of the blood. When there is no more for them to feed on, they die, but it is far, far too late by then." It was confounding, she said, and frustrating too, because although it acted like other parasites, she didn't know for absolutely sure.

But yes, that was basically the situation she was in, she replied. She wasn't completely sure that they were dead - or that they were alive and what she thought they were to begin with. She'd made them dormant with cold, she said, and they'd been dormant now a lot longer. But did that mean she'd won? Or might it be that in sixty trials it all started again? Of course, part of this was that they had made the decision to leave and, consequently, that put a time limit on how long she could observe Nalin for.

When he teased her about a list, though, Faith laughed and shook her head. "I do not, no." This was his fault, she said and stole a brief but intense kiss, her arms wrapping around him as she did. "You have become such a bad influence on me that I have lost my lists. What have you done to me, Professor?" Her eyes looked up at him and suddenly she cared not a jot about any of this. "Shoddy," she whispered to him and kissed him again. "That is what I am, or what I perceive myself as being. But by all the Immortals, I've missed this." But they had a job to do, a problem to solve and so she turned her attention there.

An internal illuminator? Most of the other stuff he'd said had gone straight over her head and might well be slowly sliding down the wall as he spoke, but that she understood. "Well, there's the lightsphere," she said, of the small sphere she had which gave off sunlight. But then, she said, there were other options. "You can make things glow, could we make something alchemical, using your blood to do that or, a glowstone? They glow. Or something phosphorescent?" She assumed not a candle, that being the case.

When he said that they needed an expert, though, Faith beamed in delight. "I know one. He and his team have made me not one, but two telescopes. He's in Egilrun, but he's the man that the University use to make their telescope. Professor Dashiell told me he was the best." With a slight smile and a brief stroke of his cheek she said no more because no more needed to be said. "We could go. I need to make a visit there before we leave, anyhow, to make sure that Isonomia has everything in place." Abolishing slavery on Scalvoris was something which had been an incredible achievement and Faith had worked tirelessly for it. Sometimes, though, she still didn't quite believe it. "We could go there, if you'd like?" With a sudden impish grin which made her look younger than her actual age, Faith added. "I can make a list."

[Padraig]

"I teach physics," Padraig reminded Faith with a grin, in case she needed to be reminded. "It's not exactly a subject that attracts women in droves, be they prospective scholars or simply adoring fans." Therefore the small rooms and larger chambers that he carried out his lectures in, weren't exactly overflowing with women. Or rather, he considered, there seemed to be plenty at letter level, for the first ten trials or so, until the subject matter managed to either overwhelm them, or bore them to tears. The latter was more often the case.

So, back to the parasites. "In effect then, they feed on the favored constituents in the blood, until there are none left to consume...Their numbers, or volume, rises as the constituent count drops and once the balance becomes more one sided than not, it's too late for your patient. Got it." Would she had described the process in that way? As someone who knew her medicine, certainly not. But medicine was not Padraig's field, so he moved on quickly enough, having at least got the gist of it.

"No lists?" he teased as she leaned in and kissed him, and he returned the gesture wholeheartedly. Thoughts of parasites were the farthest thing from his mind at that point, and he could have happily kept it that way. Except that Faith sat back again, and he smiled before whispering, "Shameful." He'd missed it. All of it, and when Faith said that she had as well, he responded that they should both agree, that there would be much more of this, from this moment further.

So, the scope they were envisioning would need an internal light source. There were all sorts of possibilities and Padraig considered each in turn before concluding, "I think that so long as it's bright enough and doesn't generate an inordinate about of heat in a confined space, then your lightsphere would be sufficient." Simplest, most straightforward solution, he added, also, presumably, less to go wrong.

So Faith knew someone who made lenses. It was the same man who had created the ones for Padraig's telescopes, and he came recommended by professor Dashiell. "Praise offered up by Esme is very, very hard to come by," he remarked with a grin, "I'd say that speaks volumes regarding his skills. Perfect then, we have a name, we know the place, it's a nice trial outdoors for an outing. No time like the present?" he said, and yes, obviously they'd be needing that list.

[Tristan Venora]

Faith:

Knowledge:
Caregiving: Stroke a baby on the bridge of their nose to help them sleep
Caregiving: Babies sleep better when they're with someone or something they love
Investigation: Logical conclusions
Investigation: Requires information
Singing: Gentle humming to keep an infant soothed.

Loot: N/A
Injuries: N/A
Renown: N/A
Magic XP: N/A

Points: 15

Padraig:

Knowledge:
Caregiving: The sound of a familiar, soothing voice can put a child to sleep.
Engineering: Consider both form and function
Engineering: Making a microscope smaller, means making a lens more powerful
Engineering: Safety and comfort of user must be considered.
Engineering: Consider existing solutions to problems in order to engineer a better one
Engineering: Consider factors such as heat when needing light
Engineering: Telescope construction
Engineering: Considering the size of a finished product

Loot: N/A
Injuries: N/A
Renown: N/A
Magic XP: N/A

Points: 15

- - -

Comments: This was a nice thread!

There is something about the way the two of you write that makes your threads very easy to read and very easy to follow.

Reading how Padraig “physicsed” his daughter to sleep amused me. I also enjoyed the scientific discourse.

Unlike little Madison, I wasn’t bored at all, and I certainly didn’t fall asleep!

I agree with Faith. Padraig should use that Immortal blood sometime! He could make some really powerful items with it …

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing this continue. Well done!

Enjoy your rewards!

Please edit your review request to include the button below so that the other reviewers know that it's been taken care of!

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