Wrong Side of Town [End]

[Dark]

Mushrooms. Minh nodded pleasantly, any lingering iota of guilt she might have felt for crushing the potential of a bright future completely obliterated. The kid’s plans were boring; she was doing him a favor by making his life interesting. She hummed happily to herself and had another cookie.

If only he would drink the tea--she could strong-arm him into submission, but she didn’t want to use violence unless she absolutely had to; there was a time and a place for beating people bloody, and this wasn’t one of them. She could always use the syringe in her pocket--filled with a quick acting sedative that would knock a child of his stature out cold--if it came down to a pinch.

She sipped her tea, and decided not to comment when she saw her daughter’s hair snatch several more cookies to stash away for later. It was always good to have snacks, though Minh really had to wonder about crumbs.

[Kitty]

He was headed toward his tea when he noticed that Thalia's hair moved in a way that he didn't think hair really should, and paused just before his beak tip hit the surface of the liquid, olive eyes going wide for a moment. Her hair was .... alive? That was ... really cool actually. He then realized he was staring and coughed lightly, mumbled an apology and focused on the liquid under his nose.

Ah, tea ... a bunch of crushed up leaves adding their unique flavor to hot water ... simple, easy ... gross. However, he was a guest in this home and the other mother was out trying to find his... so he'd drink it. Mama had taught him the proper way to politely decline something, but he wasn't really fond of doing that ... which is why he ate that utterly awful blossom salad the Rat/Eagle fixed on occasion. Flower petals just weren't his idea of a meal ...

If he could eat that, he could drink some tea, besides.... an awkward silence had slipped over the three of them and it would help with that, maybe. He stuck part of his beak into the glass before lapping at the thoroughly unappealing liquid like the dog he .... partially was. His little ears started to swivel nervously for a bit ... until he started feel drowsy. Hum ... he had been running around the city after Raanan, maybe he really did just need a nap? But ... wasn't that rude as well?

Not if you fell to the floor unconscious and in an ungraceful, furry heap it wasn't.

[Bee]

Thalia watched Brokat hit the floor and felt a little thrill of glee. Finally, he had taken the tea!

And now the fun could begin. She latched onto their little subject with tentacles and Hair, and together with her mother, hauled the Lowlander up the many flights of stairs and ladders and odd passageways (ah, how she adored the confusing layout of the apartment complex; years of bizarre additions and remodeling had served it well) that lead to Mama's lab.

The first order of business was securing the little fellow. They deposited him on the table. They didn't need a panic attack when their friend finally woke up, because sometimes subjects got all tetchy about the fact that they were being experimented on, even though this was a perfectly controlled lab setting and nothing bad could possibly happen.

If one uses the Corvie definition of "bad," that is.

[Dark]

Minh hummed happily to herself as she strapped the little fellow down--wouldn’t want him flailing about unnecessarily, now would they--and promptly hooked him up to a drip with a cocktail of narcotics that would keep him nice and sleepy until it was time to wake him up again; patients waking up in the middle of things could be rather bothersome, and Minh had learned to plan ahead.

Oh, what fun they were going to have. She rubbed her hands together and cackled gleefully. It had been so long since she had a proper subject, and she couldn’t wait to get started.

“Thalia, be a dear and grab a couple petri dishes, will you?“ Minh rummaged through her supply drawer, looking for her extra needles and vials. They’d have to draw blood, of course, and take samples from both infected and uninfected areas; they’d also need to take fur and feather samples.

[Bee]

Thalia happily fetched the equipment and scurried back to her mama. She took the initiative to do a little light swabbing, on both the rot and regular flesh, and dab them into their proper dishes (agar plates, so they had a happy little growth medium to help whatever tiny organisms Lowlanders had on them thrive). She was a little dismayed over her lack of hands, which would have helped immensely, but she did have hair, which worked just about as well.

She supplied the needles and vials to Mama (she was quick at finding things, and then even quicker at taking them) and let her do the blood work while she plucked a couple of feathers. Oh, she wished they could look at his insides without potentially killing him! Though she had heard some noise about a machine used to look at bones back in Corvistowne...

But she was getting distracted. She took her samples to the proper storage place to let them culture.

[Dark]

(Haha. Ahahaa. Dark can has post. xD;)

Properly equipped now, thanks to her darling daughter, Minh went about drawing her blood samples; a half-dozen vials, several of which she drew directly from infected areas. She imaged that whatever caused the rot was throughout the blood, but it might be local infections; best to not rule anything out. Minh labeled the vials carefully, and put most of them in the ice-box; she set several aside for an initial examination.

Minh was immensely pleased to see Thalia take some initiative, and start swab samples; such a smart child. Now what were they forgetting?

"Ah! Can't forget to start a journal." Minh pulled a thin black book, unused, from a shelf and rooted around for her ink.

"What was his name, again?" She began to make the proper notes: specimen's name, age, species, region, physical characteristics, etc. "We'll need measurements."

[Bee]

"Brokat," Thalia supplied, dutifully. She wasn't sure if he had a surname or if it mattered; probably not, in either case. Very few people carried them (though she herself was one of them: Mom, for all that she hated children, insisted that the noble name of Eumeleia needed to be passed on; Minh just happened to have one too, and thus she became a hyphenated multisyllabic disaster--where was she again--?)

Oh yes. Brokat. No one cared about last names except the people who had them. Thalia wrote down some of his measurements. She looked at her mother curiously. "What are we going to do to him?" Mama liked adding things to people; she assumed she might want to give Thalia's new friend a few additions. Or! Maybe she had something new up her sleeve. Thalia was very eager to help and learn, in any event, though she had a few wild ideas of her own. She had always looked up to her mother's sketchy scientific credentials.

[Dark]

Brokat. Who named their child Brokat? What did that even mean? But she was being distracted.

Minh grinned at her daughter's obvious enthusiasm; it was rather nice to have one of her offspring so interested in her work. She had spent most of her scientific career working on her own, with the occasional guest scientist helping out with a project, but she was rather enjoying having such a darling little lab assistant.

"We're going to be researching Lowlander rot, and exploring the possible causes." Minh had been wanting to get her hands on a Lowlander for testing for quite some time. A region full of unchecked, unexplained rot was massively intriguing, and it always surprised her that more research hadn't been done on the subject. It was time to find out.

"Is there anything else you would be interested in doing while we have a viable test subject, dear?"

[Bee]

Thalia looked at her little Lowlander friend in an appraising manner--while she liked turning boys into girls, that was less an experiment and more a routine surgery from which she derived great and somewhat inexplicable delight. For a moment she regretted having such scattershot interests: deciding what to do for an experiment was always the most difficult step.

"Well," she said, at last, "he is a birdie." She looked at his clawed back legs and his beak. He really was a wonderfully mismatched little thing. She liked making friends with fellow freaks. And those little feathers on his back, like they wanted to badly to grow into a real flight apparatus but just couldn't. Curse biology, it was so strange and flawed sometimes. Well, that's what Nature made Corvies for; to correct its mistakes. "I think he should be able to fly. Maybe we can work wings into it...?"

[Dark]

Wings. They could do wings. That sounded rather fun, actually--he had such stumpy, pitiful wings right now; they could fix that--and it fell right under Minh's area of expertise, too. It would be an entertaining exercise that would offer mother-daughter bonding time, and be a pleasant relief from the rigors of their actual scientific research.

"That sounds like an excellent idea, dear." Minh smiled at her daughter, and quizzed: "Do you know how to isolate what controls the wings? and how to stimulate growth?" Minh was fairly certain Thalia had an idea, but it was good to quiz the girl about these kinds of things from time to time--kept the mind sharp, and memory fresh. Or something like that.

"We'll have to do our initial research first, of course, to avoid contaminating the results," Minh nodded, "Proper, functioning wings are good reward for playing test subject, don't you think?" Minh grinned, pleased with this though.