Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Fever

I blame the cow.

Not me-the-cow; the other cow, the one we dressed up to look like me, who got squished by a piano. While it was aboard our ship, I kept as far away from it as I could; but when it was gone, I didn't bother avoiding the places it had been. And since I'm the one who got sick, and nopony else aboard did, it seems reasonable to conclude it's a bovine-specific disease; thus, the blame.

It was closer to a flu than a cold - in addition to the sneezing, sniffling, and coughing, along came GI trouble at both ends, aches, and fever. I was an unhappy cow, and, well, let's just say that if you think it's unpleasant being near a human that's sick, sick cows are even less fun to be near. I gave Captain Red our general directions - north, to the coast - and then kinda-sorta quarantined myself in my cargo-bay lab, well away from everypony else's sleeping area. Amethyst agreed that I should stop feeding the pups for a while; no need to risk a cross-species infection. Blanche was quite willing to bring me broth, and keep me company - from a safe distance.

On my third day of unhappiness, I came up with the grand idea of trying to adapt the cure-spells I'd used on Blanche to apply to a physical disease rather than a mental one. After a bit of checking with my notes on Latin, and some memory searching, I came up with a spell to strengthen my immune system, so that it could finish beating up whatever microbes were rampaging through my tissues. Given the results, I'd say that I actually managed to succeed at that.

Were you aware that most of the symptoms of ordinary diseases don't result from the infection itself, but rather from your immune system's fight against it? Sneezing, coughing, and GI expulsions help to simply physically remove particles of disease; joint aches are caused by inflammation, which is part of the immune response. Thus, the main effect of my little experiment was to take all those symptoms, and turn them up to 11.

Did you know that "cold-blooded" animals, such as reptiles, have genomes several times larger than those of "warm-blooded" animals, such as mammals? This is because proteins only fold into biologically-useful shapes at a very narrow range of conditions, such as temperature; and so, with body temperatures that can vary widely, a reptile may need half a dozen different proteins to all serve the same function, each one serving at a different temperature range. Mammals, on the other hoof, tend to have bodies that remain at a very constant temperature, and so have done away with most of that excess complexity. However, this comes at a price - we only have proteins that can function at, or near, our body temperature. Crank our internal thermostat up by even just five degrees, and several important pieces of biomolecular machinery start falling apart.

In case you're wondering about this digression - fever, too, is the result of the immune system's activities, as it changes the body's makeup to be less hospitable to any given set of microbes. And by cranking up my body's immune system the way I naively did - I came this close to getting myself killed, within mere hours. If the ship's pantry hadn't included a magical version of an ice chest, if my literally fevered imagination hadn't managed to pull up 'frigere' as the Latin command for 'be cold', and if we hadn't acquired three unicorns to keep charging the gems to cast that spell with - well, the whole Chess Game might have gone in a whole other direction.

---

I will say one thing about the super immune system spell - while it nearly killed me, it also really kicked the butt of the infection. After one full day of pushing my body's limits... it was all over, the infection gone, and with it, my symptoms went away - including my core body temperature finally going back to normal without external magical assistance.

When I woke up, I felt... kind of hollow, a bit light, a bit light-headed. I'd burned through a lot of my body's reserves, and hadn't really been able to hold down food long enough to get any calories from it. I had been, thankfully, cleaned up, and I made a mental note that whoever'd taken care of that deserved some bonus hazard pay. Looking around, I saw that I was being watched by Berry Blast, the unicorn guard. Wordlessly, he poured some ice-water from a jug into a cup, which I gratefully accepted.

After a few sips, I commented, "So... that happened."

"Uh-huh," he agreed.

"Remind me not to tell anyone which spell I used," I said, thoughtfully. "It would be all to easy to use as a method of nearly undetectable assassination... somepony gets sick, then they get very sick, then they die. Very unfortunate, but happens all the time, no need to look for murderers."

"I'd really prefer if you shared that information with the Royal Guard, so we can come up with better ways to defend against it."

"If you really want to know - then you can buy it from me. The cost will never be lower than the price of an insurance policy that could cover all the monetary damages that would result from knowledge of the spell escaping your custody. And would probably be rather higher, based on how secure I think your procedures actually are. Did anything exciting happen while I've been... you know?"

"Captain Pepper is ready to give you a full report, but mostly distant sightings of dragons, and two close-up encounters."

I reached with a hoof to grab my glasses from my mattress-side table - and blinked, as even before I put them on, I could see my limb shaking. "I think I need some food," I said.

The rule of thumb is that a cow needs to spend six hours a day eating (plus eight hours a day chewing cud) - and I'd missed at least a full day, plus had only had light food for a couple of days before that, plus my body had been burning up its fat reserves to crank up its temperature. So for the rest of that day, and much of the next, I was basically stuffing my face with grass and grass-based food products. About the only physical exertion I was up to was walking up to the deck to stretch out on a deck chair, and let my body absorb some sun to make some vitamin D; and to turn a book's pages. Red arranged so that at least one member of our merry band was within sight of me, just in case I had some sort of relapse. She had to put her hoof down to keep Micro from pestering me for samples and details on the spell. It turned out that Gallant Heart, while not a full-fledged doctor, was cross-trained as a field medic, and remembered most of the Guard's manuals on how to turn an invalid back into a functioning soldier; so I let him take Safe Guard's old place as my personal trainer, deciding which exercises I should try and when.

I wasn't sure how much info I'd spilled on Latin-gem magic to our new crew; and asking them what they knew about it would be rather counter-productive if I hadn't told them anything... but it was a safe bet that everypony aboard knew that I'd come up with some sort of cooling magic, so I didn't feel any need to work hard at hiding what I was doing while playing with 'frigere' to make ice cubes. But even thinking too much left me tired and sleepy, so I wasn't really up to trying to come up with creative applications for the latest piece of magic in our arsenal.

What I did end up spending some time on, between shoveling more greenery into my seemingly bottomless gullet, was jotting down some notes on what I remembered of some hex-map games from Earth - ones which simulated soldiers on a battlefield, or spaceships in orbit; plus a few World War One games, such as "Ace of Aces", about aerial combat and dogfighting; plus some notes on the stats we'd collected about the Mikoyan's performance, and the similar numbers for dragons, griffins, pegasi, other airships, and so on. I was hoping to put together something better than the classic 'model ships in a sandbox' approach to war games, so we could try figuring out how effective any given maneuver or tactic might be in any given situation, without having to put the whole ship at risk... but between eating, sudden naps, Gallant's exercises, and the distractions of simply watching the landscape roll by, it was slow going. I tried not to feel bad about that, since it would be at least as slow no matter what intellectual work I tried doing at the moment, and 'slow' was still better than 'nothing'... but I really wanted to push myself to work harder and faster; and I had to occasionally remind myself about all those cartoons with morals involving letting a convalescent take the time they actually needed to convalesce.

---

And then we hit the coastline, and I had to break out my drawings of my Element necklace's gem, to use as a rough map to work out our course with Red. From various historical reports I'd gathered, I had a strong suspicion that some of the ancient artifacts I was hoping to collect were in one of two places. One possibility was at the bottom of the ocean - which would require outfitting an entirely different sort of expedition to collect. But there were also reports along Equis's northern coast of strange ships arriving, raiding, and disappearing again; and since the gem on my necklace seemed to be an accurate globe, and since that globe included a landmass to Equis's northeast; I was willing to bet a significant amount of time and effort that that landmass was inhabited... and that the inhabitants would have enough information to let me pinpoint something I'd find worth our whiles. And if I was wrong, I could always see about giving Tranquil her heart's desire, and playing Jacques Cousteau for a bit; of course, the oceans which old Jacques swam in didn't have anyone living in them.

But for the moment - we simply turned east, generally following the coastline, so that we could replenish our supplies from the Griffin Dominion, before we started flying over the ocean.

---

Armina and Amethyst had gone inland a bit, to hunt for some critters to eat on the way; I didn't want to gamble their health on our untested oceanic fishing skills. I was feeling steady enough to head down to the ground myself, but I mostly just wanted to walk along the beach. Captain Pepper was letting everypony have a bit of shore leave, in shifts; down at the same time as me were Stoke Red, who was poking around at some drift wood, and Cloud Bouncer, who was stretching her wings by dive-bombing sea-gulls.

It was all very relaxed, even pastoral... and, as you might guess, the main reason I'm mentioning anything about it at all is that it was about to become much less so.

The first thing I noticed which gave any clue that something unusual was happening, was that Stoke wasn't noticeable anymore.

The next thing I noticed was the tangle of ropes, a net, dropping over my head.

The last thing I noticed was the smell of unwashed bodies - canine ones, given the odor's similarity to Amethyst's and the pups'.

"Here cow," said a voice. "Nice cow. Yummy cow."

There was the sound of a smack. "Don't be stupid. Cow not for eating. Cow for turning useless grass into cheese."

"But I don't like cheese..." There was another smack, and I sighed.

Comments

[Forevermore]

Again with the kidnapping! Welp, no time traveling shenanigans this time, how's she gonna escape?

Personally I predict crossover with one of the established anti-slavery fics (Marty, Griffin, Ivan) or the less likely second use of the Warden Whistle. Of course the possibility also exists that she's going to talk her way out of this by promising something to the Alpha, such as the location of the Great Battlefield with the promise that it contains untold treasures (which is true, but is going to get him killed, thus solving the problem).

[BlackWing]

Reports of ships appearing, raiding, and disappearing? Yeah.... Sorry Missy, my bad. I think?

[Forevermore]

1190866 Nope, there be vikings up in this shit!

[strangephantasm]

I wonder what the bovine disease was. A lot of those can be really nasty if not downright fatal. Mad cow, brucellosis, ect.

1190860
I predict that MIssy gets out of this one by jumping the General Lee over a ravine.

[ObsidianOrangutan]

You have reptiles twice in the bit about body heat. Not sure if the cooling would actually work that way but clever idea.

[Horatiojones]

Its a briar patch moment, Oh no, please don't make me feed your young, anything but that.

Also, when is this right now, I have an idea for rogue Dairy workers. Mainly because I want my piece to get a gun.
This would be around 2 or 3 weeks after the wedding.
This is totally your choice though, if you say no, I'll figure something else out.

[AppleTank]

Who knew having a super immune system would cause so much problems? That's whats skin is for, I guess.

[nemryn]

1192330
No no no, she's obviously going to save the day by combining all the pastry remnants into one super-cake.

[Chaos Waltz]

caught up on this story, then went back to write my own story, and realized I accidentally based one of my characters off of Missy.
A corrupted, very insane version of Missy, but still very much influenced by her.

[DataPacRat]

1192330
I just went with a generic cow flu. I figure if biology's weird enough that ponies can catch human-like diseases, there's probably some similar ones floating around for cows, as well.

1192790
I'll send you a note through the site's private messaging system.

1196114
I've been reading a lot of stories, so my apologies for not remembering the details of yours offhand; is it a character who's already appeared in your story?