typhoid marty (typhoids) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-12 23:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, anthony liu, claudia corbett, marty lin |
LOG.
WHO: Anthony Liu, Claudia Corbett, & Marty Lin.
WHAT: Anthony and Claudia fight for custody of Marty. Three buds puzzle over the mystery of the depowering serum, and Marty tries to keep the other two from fighting. This is easier than it sounds.
WHEN: Saturday, January 12th.
WHERE: Dorm common area.
Anthony's eyes went back and forth between Marty and Claudia, who were sitting with each other in the common area. He hesitated from walking in, even though he had something to talk about with the both of them; a few thoughts that had been nagging him ever since he had the journal conversation with Kier and Damien. With his family being around and the memorial afterwards, he hadn't been able to sort out his thoughts. But Claudia was there. He didn't mind talking to Marty, but he wasn't sure whether he wanted to deal with another episode of 'Anthony is an idiot, don't listen to him'. Admittedly, he knew that both of them would be able to give more input about the matter than he ever would. So, breathing out a little sigh, he went up to them. "Hey guys." "Anthony!" Claudia said, looking up at him with surprise. Was he done avoiding her now? They probably still needed to talk but it seemed unlikely that they'd have that conversation with Marty there, unless he wanted to be dragged in as mediator. Or maybe he just wanted to talk to Marty and expected her to leave so they could chat. "What's up?" she asked cautiously as she studied his face, trying to gauge how he was feeling, wishing she could temporarily borrow Allegra's power to better navigate this conversation. Marty had been sprawled on the sofa, legs up on the coffee table and a book cradled in his lap, but he now jerked to attention. He was looking back and forth between two of his best friends with no small degree of suspicion, eyes narrowed: were those two still fighting? By the looks of the tension that had sidled in between them and the wariness bristling in the air, presumably yes. He was suddenly aware of the fact that he was sitting between the seated Claudia and the standing Anthony, and that they were having to stare past him in order to look at each other. (Cautiously, like two wild animals coming across each other in the wood.) Marty fought the urge to retreat backwards into the couch and sink into the cushions out of sight, and instead settled for a drawn-out “Sooooooo...” It took a couple more seconds for Anthony to swallow his hesitation and sit down next to Marty before he started speaking again. “I talked to Kier and Damien a bit about what happened to them while they were kidnapped,” he looked at his friends thoughtfully. “Looks like whatever made them sick wasn’t in the food. They were given an injection. That’s why I wasn’t able to heal them, and why you couldn’t detect any diseases, Marty.” He crossed his arms, eyebrows furrowing as he tried to sort out his thoughts. “I guess I was just -- I don’t know -- don’t you wonder why whatever it was worked on Mette but not on the other three? Was it their own mistake?” This had been bugging him for days and while he knew he wouldn’t be able to get any immediate answer, he needed to talk about it. As a barrage of theories and ideas flooded into her mind she had to bite back the urge to respond with 'Worried that the cure won't work on you?' Some things were more important than their feud and Claudia appreciated that, despite everything, Anthony still felt like he could talk to her about this. "But if a normal virus was injected into someone you'd be able to heal it, right?" She addressed Anthony, "And you'd be able to diagnose it," she added to Marty. What was different about whatever was in this needle? "Is it like an immunisation?" She wondered out loud, curious as to how that worked on what she had always assumed had to do with genetics. And why had it affected the boys differently from Mette? Was it a gender thing (unlikely, she decided), something related to their powers (maybe different types of powers were encoded differently in the genes so a different cure would be needed for different powers) or did they have different substances in the needles in the different countries (maybe the slightest change made all the difference)? She tried to sort these thoughts to make more sense of them before she shared them with her friends. "I wish we could see what they were given and run our own tests on it," she settled on eventually, wanting to see what theories Marty came up with before proposing hers. She liked to think she was an expert on these things but she couldn't deny that human biology and medicine was much more Marty's field of expertise. “So evidently ‘normal virus’ is a bit of a misnomer in this, if it’s entirely manmade,” Marty said. “I’m not sure how well my ability works on manmade diseases, actually, since I haven’t had a chance to play around with synthetic polio.” Play around with. What a way to describe it. In a moment of self-consciousness, Martin realised that he was one of very, very few people on the planet who would talk about disease in that manner. He swallowed the sudden discomfort, glanced at his friends’ worried faces, then ploughed on. “But you’ve said it yourself, Claudia: successful medication takes years upon years of testing. And they were two different facilities, separated by oceans and thousands of miles, teleporter or no. Presumably different doctors. Running different tests. Splitting up the workload makes sense to me, actually. Being able to work with two different, um...” Another little falter, a stretch to find the right tactful term as Marty remembered, with a lurch of horror, that Anthony had been through it too and it might be in his best interests to control his language. “Control groups,” he finally added, lamely. “Getting to try different things. Europe presumably just cracked the code where the Americas didn’t. Maybe having the power negator helped them. We’ll never know, unless IVF managed to recover any data and aren’t telling. Which is likely, now that I mention it.” The boy really was like a talking textbook sometimes. He listened intently to Marty and Claudia as they exchanged their opinions. For someone who didn’t have much of a background in Science, it took a while for him to digest their words and figure out what they meant. Anthony pursed his lips as he thought of why he had been taken. Maybe they had wanted to take away his power, or to show the world that he was harmful like what they did to Erik and Alyosha. Or maybe he was supposed to be there to heal those they had tested the substance on. He would never find out nor did he want to, but that didn’t stop the cold feeling from having its grip on him. “What are the chances of IVF actually finding a man made virus for us to tinker around with?” he asked dryly. There was almost humour in his tone, but he wouldn’t be surprised if this would happen someday. “Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be a virus,” Anthony added, briefly glancing at Claudia, suspecting that she would have a lot to say about what he was going to say next. “Whatever it was could’ve behaved as a ‘cure’, or -- well, something to reset our powers; make our bodies normal? It’s like... a faulty vitamin of some sort.” “A faulty vitamin?” she repeated, fixing Anthony with a Look. “Three people were so sick that even you couldn’t heal them and Marty had no idea what was wrong with them and you’re calling it a faulty vitamin?” What was wrong with him? How did he not understand how dangerous it was? At least Marty had agreed with what she had said about medicine taking time to be tested. She never doubted she was right but it was nice to have it confirmed by Marty, whose opinion on medicine and related fields she trusted. She shook her head and decided it was best to just ignore what Anthony had been saying, as hard as it was to keep her opinions to herself. Anthony might not have meant vitamin in the strictest scientific meaning of the word but to her vitamins were organic compounds required by an organism and this artificially created “cure” was not something Claudia saw as a requirement. She didn’t like dragging other people into her fights though so she left it, deciding that instead she’d slip some vitamin fact sheets under his door for him to read later. “What’s weird,” Claudia said instead, even though this whole situation was weird, “is that they didn’t try the Europe one on more than one person.” Probably a good thing considering that it seemed to have worked, but Claudia had been taught to always try scientific experiments at least three times. “They’ve got this thing that it seems they want to use as a weapon to rid us of our powers but they can’t even be sure that it working wasn’t fluke.” Not that they really seemed to mind if it didn’t work and instead killed people, considering what had happened. “I just wish we knew how they made both of them and could compare them to see why the American one didn’t work or why the European one did. You’d think they’d at least be sharing research and have something very similar. It could only be the smallest thing that made all the difference.” If the IVF could get a copy of the injection she doubted they would let herself, Marty and Anthony “play around” with it, but considering Marty’s powers and both their interest in science it would likely be beneficial if they did. “Have you spoken much to the three boys?” It wasn’t a pointed look when Marty glanced over in Claudia’s direction; his voice was gentle. “I grilled them a bit when they first came back to the safehouse and Anthony and I first saw them. Their powers stopped working properly. It was agony to access them and they didn’t really work. So as far as the, erm, terrorists or what-have-you knew, possibly they thought the serum had worked as expected. And we’re missing quite a lot of details on what happened in there. Maybe they did try it on others. I don’t know when the Europe injection was, um. Administered.” And he wasn’t about to ask. Collating data from the teleporters during a necessary emergency was one thing; trampling on traumatised students just for the sake of scientific curiosity was quite another. It was a bleak prospect, this question of hypothesis and experimentation, when you applied it to vol-hating scientists. Marty was accustomed to seeing his diseases writhing in a Petri dish, stale and sterile. He couldn’t imagine it being living children on the other end of that microscope, pinned to the metaphorical tray. And didn’t want to. It took all of self restraint for Anthony not to roll his eyes when Claudia gave him that look which he recognised very well. “Well, it still could have still been intended as medicine or a cure of some sort, except, as we’re discussing right now, it only appeared to work once,” he drawled before the conversation progressed, not because he felt particularly strongly about it, no. He mostly wanted to keep on irritating Claudia, who seemed to think that he had no idea what he was talking about. “Maybe the IVF is just keeping the details to themselves to run more tests on it. Or maybe they know that it actually does work, but just don’t want to share it,” Anthony shrugged and continued almost apathetically. “Who would want to share something that important when you could make your own decisions on how to use it? They could administer it as an experiment, as a punishment, or even when there are people who make significant requests to remove their abilities.” “I haven’t spoken to any of them,” Claudia answered Marty. She wanted to but she did have some restraint and enough common sense to know that right now was not the best time to bombard them with a million questions about what they had been through, as much as she would like to. “Could be a good thing that they think the American injection worked,” she mused. At least then they wouldn’t think to try and come up with one that worked better and any future use would not result in permanent power loss, even if any vols they found would have to suffer from the same illness that the boys had. “If they intended it as a good thing they wouldn’t have kidnapped people to use it,” Claudia snapped at Anthony, this coming from the girl who had wanted to believe that the kidnappers were nice people trying to use their hostages for good. “They could have just said ‘hey, we have a cure! any volunteers?’ instead of going to all the trouble to take vols because obviously people like you would have jumped at the opportunity.” So she still thought that he would actually do such a thing. Anthony could feel anger flare up, though he realized then that he had no energy to yell and defend himself. It was too tiring; he was tired of reacting and clearly his opinions didn’t matter in this case. He leveled his gaze with hers, his tone steely as he spoke up again, “Then people like me wouldn’t even dare to take it, with people like you around ready to tell us what to do like you own us.” Even Marty was astonished when he suddenly shot to his feet without thinking, standing between them with one hand splayed out in each friends’ direction, the message clear: Stop. “Can you two please stop fighting over this?” he begged, his head swiveling to take in the stubbornness and seething irritation in their faces. “It’s understandable to want a... I’m not going to say ‘cure’, but I’ve been having trouble thinking of an alternate term. It’s, um, understandable to want a serum that can do what this seems to. I understand that more than anyone.” Oozing sores, blistered skin, lesions erupting on the man’s skin before he died. Marty still remembered. “But it’s a moot point because there isn’t a workable treatment yet. And I know you both care about each other, so can this stop coming between you already? Claudia’s right, you’re right, you’re both right. It’s not like there are medical centres popping up and offering safe processing -- this isn’t X-Men: The Last Stand -- and if that ever happens, then maybe Anthony and I have some serious thinking to do. And I know that he would put enough thought into it. But until then, it’s not worth fighting over hypotheticals.” Completely drained by this display of nerve, Marty shifted to sit on the edge of the coffee table. Largely so he could see them both at once, rather than having to lever his gaze back and forth like watching a particularly volatile tennis match. As Marty stood up Claudia could already feel the guilt creeping in. She hated getting in trouble and while Marty was no teacher or authority figure of any type the effect was still the same. “Sorry,” she mumbled, looking down to avoid eye contact with anyone. She was really only apologising to Marty for putting him in the middle of this, not feeling like she owed Anthony an apology when she was only trying to prevent him from making a terrible decision. Even as Marty said they were both right all Claudia heard was that she was right, there was no way to guarantee the safety of this drug and therefore it shouldn’t even be considered. “We should focus on working out what went wrong anyway,” she continued, silently adding ‘instead of talking about Anthony’s desire for a cure’. It wasn’t like she was against the idea altogether. If Marty had been the first one to tell her he wanted a cure, instead of Anthony, she likely wouldn’t have reacted that way, not because she didn’t care about Marty but because she trusted his ability to make (scientifically) well informed decision but Anthony, she’d decided, needed help with these things. “What symptoms did the three guys show? That might give us a clue as to what was in the injection to make their bodies react in that way.” Marty’s outburst certainly managed to restrain Anthony from saying anything else. If anything, he shot his friend a grateful glance. He was already more than slightly annoyed as Claudia apologized, even if he was aware that it was petty. But why did she relent so easily when their friend said something, but refused to listen to him? It didn’t seem fair. He didn’t even say exactly that he would take the serum-cure-thing. It all seemed to boil down over the fact that Claudia seemed to think that she was allowed to control his decisions, which was... ridiculous. “Fever, nausea,” he answered shortly. “We don’t really have anything to work with.” “Body aches,” Marty added with a shrug. “Jack Fuller described it as a cold/flu wrapped into one and cubed. Which, yeah, doesn’t give us a lot to work on. And which I guess makes this one mystery we’re unable to solve, apart from being grateful that they’re okay?” The entire affair had ended in a happy enough conclusion, but the dissatisfaction was clear on the boy’s face: Detective Marty didn’t like like being foiled. Not one bit. |