Misha was sitting in the break room, drinking some tea after having finished delivering her rounds of medicine for the day, when Nel poked his head into the room. Despite being in charge of the whole operation, Nel had left them to do their work so that he could explore the city. He claimed, “I’ve told you how to make the medicine, so there’s nothing left for me to do.” Ostensibly his walks around the city were for surveying the state of the capital, but Ryne very curtly surmised it was because he hated dealing with government officials.
With the man actually in charge perpetually absent, dealing with the political leaders of Redford had fallen to Ryne, a burden that was starting to show in dark circles under the surgeon’s eyes. Misha found it hard to watch. She knew he wasn’t being saddled with unreasonably difficult tasks, but she also knew Ryne became frustrated with other people quickly. This kind of work was far more taxing on him than working for days on his own without rest.
“This is your specialty, isn’t it?” Ryne finally threw up his hands, trying to force the job on Miranda, but she was still too angry about Ryne keeping in touch with Leyas in secret to even consider bailing him out.
“I’m afraid I must leave it to my superiors. A bit of hard work every once in a while will do you good,” she replied with a venomous smile, rebuffing all of Ryne’s calls for aid.
With no other work to keep him busy, Nel was frequently popping up around Misha. He never got in the way of her work, but he would show up the moment she took a break. The timing was so precise, she had to imagine someone must have been telling him when she was off work, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask about it.
It wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, nor did she much care if the People of the Forest were keeping her under observation. She was much more interested in hearing Nel’s stories about Ryne and her mother.
She learned a lot about them. On one hand, there was Ryne, always coming up with outlandish and unprecedented ideas to experiment, and on the other, there was Leyas, who had slowly but surely built her knowledge and experience bit by bit. At first glance, they seemed to be the exact opposite of each other, and despite their numerous failures during their youth, they had both delivered results that caught the attention of the adults around them. Their dynamic was right out of a fairy tale. To Misha, it sounded like there was nothing the two of them couldn’t accomplish as they devoted themselves to their own fields of study.
I guess mom was always doing experiments back in the forest too. She was always making medicine in slightly different ways, trying to find out which process made the best one... I guess there’s no shortcut to success, huh?
On top of that, being an elder of the People of the Forest, Nel knew a great deal about the cultivation of herbs. The advice he gave her was always eye-opening. It became a great opportunity for Misha to step away from work, considering how hard she usually pushed herself. Plus, that it was Nel encouraging her to rest meant that Ryne’s demands that the old man get back to work were less effective. So, Nel started spending more and more time around her, no one quite sure whether this was overall a good or bad thing.
“Grandpa Nel, I have a question...”
When Misha tentatively spoke up as she was drinking her tea, Nel figured it was time for their usual question and answer session. Nel loved ambitious and aspirational children; every once in a while, they came up with an idea adults never would have considered.
“It’s about the Red Eye plague that this parasite causes. The parasite enters through the mouth, then starts to reproduce inside the host’s body. It travels through the blood to spread throughout, finally resulting in colonies in the lungs.”
“Indeed. After spreading throughout the smaller blood vessels, the patient starts showing signs of red lines across their skin and bleeding in the eyes. Is this just a review?” Nel frowned, not expecting her to have brought up the Red Eye plague.
“Yes, I’d like to go over it again. So, for those who are in the later stages of the disease, you need to both remove the parasites scattered across their entire body and get rid of the colonies in the lungs. But we don’t have any medicines that are effective on the lungs yet,” Misha said, her expression serious.
Seeing that familiar sparkle in her eyes, Nel sat up straight. “True. As I showed you earlier, the colonies in the lungs have a special barrier protecting them, making our current medicine ineffective. That is why our best method so far has been to repeatedly exterminate the adult parasites. So? Did you come up with something?”
“I once had a friend who got sick because of the fumes from a poison placed in her fireplace. Couldn’t we use a similar method to deliver medicine directly to a patient’s lungs?”
Nel’s breath caught. When a person took medicine orally, the body absorbed most of it before it reached the lungs, making it significantly weaker. Misha’s suggestion would make that medicine much more potent.
“But that would require a drastic alteration in the composition of the medicine. Do we have enough to experiment with?” Nel asked.