Ten Thousand Ways That Won't Work

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

The Bullet Time transitioned from the gas-and-dust cloud of the Kelsier system to the clouds of the Kelsieri atmosphere proper, almost without a noticeable difference. From there, Mara descended into snowy fog. A Kelsieri patrol cutter sniffed around, but they'd long ago stopped asking too closely about the ships that visited Fort Elsa.

Not that Rave Merrill's old home and research base was all that impressive, visually. A couple of structures protruded from the snowscape, one of them a hangar that opened as she approached. Snow swirled into the bay as she steered the miniature blockade runner into the cavernous bay. A half-circle of tall, hulking, inhuman figures waited by the door. As she powered down, they moved toward the ship.

"Easy, folks," Mara said, glancing back at Styr and Kolatta. "It's just the qo'saarai tuk'ata."

"I have faced tuk'ata before," said Kolatta, toying with an arrow-fletching in her belt quiver, "but rarely were they standing."

"My aunt uplifted them. Improved their ability to stay bipedal, gave them opposable thumbs, tweaked them here and there with alchemy and surgery that somehow breeds true. This is where she did it."

"Uplift." Styr shivered. The massive half-Valkyri didn't do that often. "Such a concept."

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

Mara descended the ramp alone. The ring of qo'saarai tuk'ata converged. She recognized a pattern of scars on the one she'd met the last time she came here. The one who'd told her that she wasn't ready to shoulder her aunt's legacy or heritage. That qo'saarai - maybe male, maybe female - nodded its huge gray-black muzzle and gestured back toward the door. Wordless, the formation shifted, allowing Mara to proceed. She glanced back at the ramp and saw Styr there, knuckles white on the hilt of his sheathed sword. Mara shrugged and tossed him a wave, then made for the door, flanked by the qo'saarai.

Walking with them unsettled her, even though her empathic senses picked up nothing but benign wariness. Their talons clicked with every step on the metal floor, and rasped against door controls. Their tails brushed and hissed against corners in the halls. Their teeth, huge fangs, grated when they spoke. And each of the uplifted tuk'ata outweighed her by a factor of four. Gigantic, robed figures, a bit like anthropomorphized canids -- no, that was very close to what they really were, wasn't it. Carnivores. Sithspawn.

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

Sensors picked up the Bullet Time at a reasonable distance and after automatically cross-referencing and tipped off Sarova who had been working on a spare project of hers. Sometimes a woman needed to get her mind off the usual guns of fear and agony, and instead do some little soul-searching… literally so when it involved chrysalide soul traps.

“Mara.” The greeting came once the girl surrounded by Qo’saarai Tuk’ata came into view around the corner.

“It’s been a while.”

There was some mild curiosity in those green eyes, but she seemed a little bit distant.

Almost as if her mind was still working on her project while being here.

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

She'd purchased twenty-four unbonded orbalisks from Galindas Exports, the Tenloss-affiliated pawn shop. Yes, someone had pawned orbalisks, and a heck of a story went with it. Apparently some Twi'lek girl had decided that orbalisks were a growth industry, so she'd gone to Dxun with bug spray, butterfly nets, and sample jars. She'd actually succeeded, too. When an orbalisk had bitten her and tried to latch on, she'd literally milked an orbalisk into a high-end Iron Crown antidote maker, then numbed the area and ripped off the one stuck to her skin. The girl still almost died -- the antidote had been far from perfect -- but the precedent was interesting.

Mara shook herself back to the moment and focused on [member="Cerita Sarova"]. The qo'saarai left, each muttering some kind of Kissai benediction.

"Hello, Cerita. I've come to use my aunt's gear, and I wouldn't mind your help if you can make the time. How much do you know about antivenins?"

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

Her mind went to Valik and his rampant paranoia.

“A fair bit. What are you after exactly?”

Most of her knowledge surrounding venoms came from specifically synthesising them in the most efficient way, but Valik had made sure that she could also formulate antivenoms when she needed to.

You will never know when someone manages to poison you.

Which was a fair point, she supposed.

With the Tuk’ata leaving the room it suddenly felt less… dark. They weren’t evil by any stretch of the imagination, but the Darkside was still strong in them. It infused them and there was still that background noise radiating around.

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

"As the executor of my aunt's estate, I've been trying to tie up loose ends, projects that she never brought to completion, things she always meant to do, amends she always meant to make. I have some of her files, and she discusses a project that she didn't get around to finishing. She wanted to make cures for Sith Poison, and all the poisons that different kinds of sithspawn produce." Mara hefted her bag, which held a bulky stasis box. "I've got twenty-four comatose orbalisks in here, one of which got dosed with a marginally successful antivenin, and I'm going to make the genuine article. See, if orbalisks bond to you, you can't remove them without getting a lethal dose of venom. Rave believed, and I believe, that there's a way to beat that. It's a pretty solid test case for being able to counter the nastier kinds of sithspawn poison, and that's got all kinds of implications for working with the leftover alchemy victims in the One Sith territories. The Seelie, Unseelie, all of that. It's the same reason she made the Trees of Ankarres, same goal.

"I don't know my aunt's machines as well as I could, but I figured this place was probably my best shot at pulling this together. Alchemy database, all kinds of genetic and biochemical and surgical apparatus, every kind of sample you could name. I'm still steering clear of the Dark Side, of course -- I'm not here to learn alchemy -- but I think this can be done without the Dark Side, if I'm careful."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

Ah, right.

Sometimes it was easy to forget that Rave had her change of heart in the last years of her life. Trying to turn over a new leaf, healing instead of damaging, trying to guide nature instead of warping it for her own purposes - it was difficult for Sarova to reconcile the Rave of her youth with the one that had reappeared after her first disappearance.

“If this is what Rave wanted,” A shrug came next. Even now she would respect her former master’s wishes, well most of them.

“Come, I will show you to the equipment. We had to move it around a bit, to accommodate new additions.”

Her mind wandered while they walked, though.

Already trying to ponder on possible ways to counter the venom released by the orbalisks.

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

Mara shrugged and went along, mildly uncomfortable as she eyed the windowed and windowless doors that lined the antiseptic halls. Claw-marks scored the deck and the door controls. Some of the windows looked in on surgical suites and medical labs of various kinds. Others looked in on the stygium mining operation. "Like I said, any help you could offer would be ideal. I have a general idea of how to get from point A to point B, and I have a skifter up my sleeve."

Shifting the stasis box's bag to her left hand, she reached down the neck of her shirt and pulled out a gemstone on a chain. It gleamed blue, vibrant even in the facility's flat light. "This is the Ankarres Sapphire. Pound for pound, it's the best healing artifact there is. Burns Dark Side influence on contact, heals just about anything. In terms of brute force, I think I can use it to dose myself with venom and constantly heal myself while my body produces resistance. Maybe. In a subtler sense, I can probably use it to alter the venom itself, on contact. Maybe. And it's guaranteed that if anything goes wrong, this sucker's my best bet for a do-over."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

The heat of the sapphire already stroked her back and made her look over her shoulder.

Blue, big, shiny, round, truly the pebble of all pebbles. But Sarova wasn’t really interested in it… it was too light, she felt like if she would try to hold it in her hands it would just burn her.

“Looks shiny.”

Before her attention slipped away again and went back to the orbalisks. Maybe if she wasn’t so attuned towards working with the Darkside it would have been different, she wasn’t a Sith, but most of her work and research in alchemy made her at least brush with that destructive Force.

So maybe not completely immersed, but definitely tainted in ways.

“Probably not my kind of thing. Almost there.”

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

Mara tucked the crystal back into her neckline and switched the bag to her good hand. "Don't worry," she said, voice dry, "I won't let the sapphire touch you. It only burns on contact, but it doesn't have to be in contact to heal, not if you know what you're doing -- and I know the sapphire as well as anyone. So it's a viable do-over for you as well, if something goes wrong. Not that you're pure Dark Side or-" She cut herself off and shrugged. "You are what you are. I don't judge. Don't mind me."

The hallways continued to pass by. The facility was extensive -- it housed hundreds of qo'saarai, after all, in every stage of uplift. Multiple levels, each deeper in the Kelsieri tundra than the next, supported a self-contained community. "You know," said Mara, "I didn't think I'd be this comfortable using myself as a lab rat. I wasn't about to try and test it on someone else, though, and orbalisk venom is so unusual that anything other than humanoid trials is probably worthless."

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

The suggestion to use some humanoid test subjects was neatly packed away again when Mara mentioned she wasn’t about to use and test this out on anyone else.

An honorable sentiment, she supposed, but perhaps that was why scientific experimentation and alchemy was never really counted with the honorable occupations one could choose these days.

“Using me as a test case is probably not what you want anyway,” The woman replied after a moment of thought. “I might look humanoid, but my genetic makeup is farther away from a human than say… a banana is.”

Or was it an orange?

“So the results would be less than useful.”

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Cerita Sarova"]

"Oh? Well, never mind about that, then. Oh, you're vinithi? I thought you were Falleen or something -- sorry."

Rave's facility certainly had a broad variety of surgical and alchemical and biotechnological and chemical labs, all staffed by qo'saarai going about the business of uplift. Perpetuating the subspecies, really.

"Hope we won't get in their way," she murmured. "I hadn't realized this place would be so busy, but it all makes sense. This is where they turn normal tuk'ata -- their friends and family -- into qo'saarai like them, isn't it. Lab coats..."

Shaking her head at herself -- why wouldn't qo'saarai go into the sciences, after all? -- Mara followed along. The stasis box was getting heavy in her bag. Twenty-four orbalisks didn't weigh a whole lot, but the medical-grade stasis machinery itself certainly did.

"One of these orbalisks was already in contact with a half-successful antidote, and probably still has it in its system. My first thought was to extract that antidote and go from there, but I'm betting that orbalisk needs more attention because it's now resistant to that antidote. It's the strong one, so it's probably the one to focus on."

She hefted the bag and set it on a stainless durasteel table, then opened it and removed the stasis gear: one large pod containing twenty-three orbalisks, and a smaller pod containing just one. The stasis boxes had transparent sides, revealing the flat, palm-sized beetle-like symbionts.

 

[Jairus Starvald]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

“It’s a condition I am trying to improve on.” She replied absentmindedly.

Years ago she had hated the fact that she was a Vinithi, it was too close towards the baseline of her progenitor. Savan had been a menace to society, the Galaxy and any sane woman’s self-respect. But that was a while ago, it no longer filled her with fury, just a steady determination to determine her own path.

Figuring out a reliable way to produce a new body was that path.

But that was a long way off if her records had anything to say about it. The amount of people being able to accomplish a feat like that… countable on a single hand.

“I wonder if it wouldn’t be more beneficial to try and prevent the orbalisks from being able to attach themselves in the first place.” The thought came once they got the lab.

“True, it won’t help those already afflicted, but prevention might be a more viable solution in the long run.”

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

Removing the orbalisks from their stasis chamber required heavy gloves, cloth and plastic and chain mail, the kind presumably used for handling alchemical critters. Mara deactivated the stasis boxes and dumped their contents into containment units. The unfrozen orbalisks scuttled about.

"They're sort of cute," she said, somewhat to her surprise. She got out a big pair of tongs and grabbed the lone antidoted orbalisk, then stuck it in an adaptive harness rack labeled 'milking station.' The harnesses tightened around one orbalisk at a time. Tiny automated units grabbed the orbalisk's venom injectors. A thin black fluid began to trickle into transparisteel tubes.

"Interesting possibility. The chance of running into orbalisks is very low, though. Still, it'd be a bit like the alchemical treatment that Rave noted in Ashin Varanin and Spencer Jacobs -- any time they run into pheromones, an alchemical bacterial symbiont metabolizes those pheromones. But that was a whole organism created just for that, or tweaked or whatever. Like I said, I don't want to get into alchemy. Still, I suppose if we were to find some kind of thing that naturally metabolized-" She tapped the nearest half-full tube. "-this stuff..."