2986 Steps

by Verlax

Chapter Nine - The Desperation

Twilight and Hansen entered the hospital. They were greeted by the sight of Dostoyevsky, who was apparently waiting for their return in front of the laboratory door. As Twilight approached him, she noticed that his expression was grim, as well as a little bit scared.The dark-blue pegasus raised his head and looked at them.

“Wooden Draft... he...” Dostoyevsky whispered.

“Wooden Draft?” Twilight asked, confused.

“One of the patients.” Hansen explained. “What’s a matter with him?”

Dostoyevsky gulped nervously.

“He couldn’t take this any longer. Wooden Draft hanged himself.” he finally said, hanging his head in defeat.

Silence filled the room as nopony knew what to say. Finally, Hansen spoke up, his voice devoid of emotion.

“I didn’t tell you this earlier Twilight, but some patients escape... this way.”

Twilight was shocked, just standing there motionless and staring at a point on the wall only she could see. Once the meaning of these words finally settled in, she almost completely lost contact with the outside world, her mind a jumble of incoherent thoughts and terrifying conclusions, overwhelming her and forcing her to realize a sad truth: somepony, a patient, died, and she didn’t even know about his existence until he took it from himself.

Dostoyevsky and Hansen stood silently, looking at the mare worriedly, yet none of them dared to interrupt her. Finally, as the blue-coated pegasus grew concerned with her behavior and decoded to try and snap her out of it, Twilight came back to reality, stomping her hoof angrily on the wooden floor.

“I’m sick of it!” she snapped.

Neither of them was expecting this kind of reaction.

“I’m sick of it and I swear to Celestia that you should too! We did nothing! Absolutely nothing!” Twilight was shouting, looking furiously at the two stallions. It might have been just their imagination, but they thought that it suddenly became a few degrees warmer in here.

“Ehm...” Hansen tried to interrupt her, clearly embarrased, but Twilight wouldn’t have any of that.

“Don’t even try!” she snapped at him. “You’re not even trying to cure this frickin’ disease!”

“Miss, we tried several medi...” Dostoyevsky tried this time, but he too was interrupted by the furious mare.

“Exactly! You tried several ways to cure this disease within months. You’re almost as effective as Manehattan bureaucracy! Not only you don’t have any drive to do it, you treat patients here like numbers, faceless incubators for this disease and what’s even worse, I almost adapted your way! How is it even possible that I don’t remember most of the patients’ faces!? How is it possible that all I did while meeting death here was slightly shiver and nothing else, when I should be with those ponies, trying to help ease their pain!? How is it possible that I regained my senses only once a patient I’ve never even met committed suicide!? And finally, how is it possible that during my entire stay here we’ve made exactly no progression in regards of creating a cure for lepra whatsoever!?”

The two stallions could only watch in silent awe as Twilight was getting more and more into her rant, fires of determination burning in her eyes.

“When you started treating patients like test subjects and not like living ponies, your zeal in fighting this disease became rotten. Just as the leprosy makes limbs rot, this pestilence made you insensitive.” Twilight continued, starting to pace around the two doctors.

Again, neither of the two had anything to say in their defense.

“Inside, both of you!” Twilight snapped at them, turning towards the laboratory and moving inside, angrily slamming the door shut behind her. As she vanished behind the door, the two stallions exchanged utterly confused glances, and after a moment of hesitation they followed her inside.

The laboratory was kept in a strict order. Every book, every flask and every device was in kept in clearly defined places. Hansen was spending more time here than in his own bedroom after all, so he needed the order. Besides a few chairs, microscopes and flasks and a laboratory table there was a blackboard hanging on the far wall. Twilight was standing next to it, holding a piece of chalk with her magic. She wrote ‘LEPROSY TREATMENT’ on it in capital letters.

“Take a seat.” Twilight ordered, annoyance still in her voice as she turned around to face the two stallions.

Not wanting to further aggravate the mare, Dostoyevsky and Hansen quickly sat down, looking at her with both apprehension and curiosity in their eyes. Twilight nodded to herself seeing the two doctors doing as she said, and after she took a deep, calming breath she began:

“Okay now; before we start brainstorming, let me make one thing clear” Twilight spoke in a much calmer voice. “I’m not a doctor, and my knowledge on the subject medicine is limited. Still, we have to find a cure. It’s not like there weren’t any ponies that didn’t try it earlier. I suspect however that they worked just like you - detached from their patients, treating them like objects and not ponies. And they were working too slow. What we need is ideas, a lot of ideas, and what’s more important, we need to introduce them as fast as possible. Yes, we don’t have a time limit, but I don’t care about it if the lives of ponies are on stake.”

Twilight raised the piece of chalk with her magic.

“Let me start.” she said as the piece of chalk began scribing words on the blackboard: “High Temperature”.

“I guess it’s worth a shot, mostly because high temperature can easily kill some bacteria.” Hansen nodded slowly. “If we would choose the temperature correctly, we could wipe out most of them while not damaging the patient’s body too severely...”

“But we have a problem.” Dostoyevsky raised his hoof, indicating he wanted to say something. “Even if it will kill most of the bacteria, they will begin reproducing themselves again and we would have a relapse of the leprosy at our hooves.”

“And it’s worth mentioning that even if it will be successful, in this weather and with our limited resources we can’t use this method on all the lepers.” Hansen added.

“Hmm... but what if we wouldn’t apply this to the body as a whole?” Twilight suggested, tapping her chin in thought.

“What do you mean?” Hansen asked confused.

“We can have a patient put one of their hooves in really hot water, while the second one would be left dry. We could observe the process more clearly that way and check what’s changing, and if the results would be good, we could expand on this idea.”

Hansen smiled at the prospect, nodding his approval.

“And we have one thing to test already. Perfect.” Twilight thought as she checked off ‘High Temperature’ on the blackboard.

“Well would you look at that Dostoyevsky. Not five minutes and she already did more than you in a month.” Hansen teased his pegasus friend, to which the stallion in question scowled.

“Damnant quod non intellegunt.” the old pegasus snapped back. “At this point we are both guilty. And besides, I am more a director and founder than a doctor.”

“I don’t want to interrupt you guys, but we have something more important to do.” Twilight reminded them where they were, tapping their hoof. “How about one of you comes up with an idea for a change?”

“Okay. Aloe-codeine mixture.” Dostoyevsky said and Twilight wrote his proposition on the blackboard.

“I can’t deny this medicine really is helping, but it’s impossible to converse. Aloe just can’t survive in our climate. We talked about this already Twilight, I don’t think we can use this treatment here in the north.” Hansen stated, shaking his head dejectedly.

“We could always go the other way.” Dostoyevsky suggested. “We can ask for some auxilium from other cities. Mainly researchers from the Canterlot Medicine University. We could write to Doctor Mouritz from Moloukai. It was him who discovered this mixture in the first place. Maybe he will be able to come up with a method to preserve it to work in our climate?”

“Actually, that’s a really good idea.” Twilight gave her support to the idea and wrote “Call Help” on the blackboard. She wasn’t sure when they would receive this upgraded mix, if at all, so for now she drew a large question mark near this proposition.

“Okay, any other ideas?”

“A one-percect arsenic mixture.” Hansen suggested, which brought an immediate reaction from Dostoyevsky.

“Objection! It’s even more toxic than mercury!.” the pegasus protested. “Yes, it will kill off most of the bacteria, but it will damage the patient’s body heavily at the same time. We cannot use this method, it’s unethical!.”

“At this point we got pretty desperate.” Hansen countered calmly. “All other ideas weren’t nearly as successful.”

Twilight wrote “Arsenic Mixture” and “Mercury Mixture” on the blackboard.

“I don’t know how either of these mixtures works.” Twilight said. “We have to remember however, that saving ponies’ lives is our main goal. I can agree with Hansen, we did became pretty desperate. However, we became desperate to save lives, not to search for a medicine at all costs. We have to find it, yes, but ponies can’t suffer from our research.”

After her small speech Twilight crossed out “Arsenic Mixture” and drew a question mark near “Mercury Mixture”.

“Antibiotics have almost no effect on leprosy bacteria, but maybe if we could upgrade the composition?” Hansen suggested.

Twilight added “Antibiotics Improvement” to their list.

“I guess it’s probably the best idea we wrote up until now. But I’m not sure if our laboratory has enough equipment to try this.” Dostoyevsky said worriedly. “You know, our budget is big, but not “that” big.”

“That’s... kind of strange then.” Twilight scratched her head in confusion. “Princess Celestia wrote to me about the leprosy and from my understanding she ordered the officials here in Flankfurt to give you all the funds they can spare for you to conduct your research.”

“Of course they gave us what they could. Problem is -Flankfurt is a really poor city, despite it’s size.” Hansen proceeded to explain. Living in this city for long enough, he knew the local situation better than his companions. “At the same time the government has to ensure that the city can survive this blizzard. Without traders from other cities, Flankfurt’s economy will simply collapse. And if the economy dies, the ponies here will also die, just not from leprosy, but from hunger.”

Once Hansen stopped speaking, silence filled the room. Twilight silently mulled over his words, and after a moment she nodded to herself, coming to a conclusion.

“Well in that case, this idea isn’t as good as it first seemed.” Twilight said as she drew a question mark near “Antibiotics Improvement”. “Any other ideas? Maybe...”

“Leper Messiah.”

The chalk broke.

Twilight slowly turned her head towards Dostoyevsky. The old pegasus looked like if he was surprised himself that he spoke those words out loud.

“What?” Twilight and Hansen asked in unison, both with shocked expressions on their faces.

“It’s just Faust dammit impossible!” Dostoyevsky exploded with frustration, his sudden ire taking both unicorns by surprise. “Ponykind has fought this disease for thousands of years and we didn’t make any progress at all! You are right Twilight! We did nothing! Because maybe it’s not medicine that is the key to the cure.”

“Dostoyevsky, we are desperate, but not that desperate.” Hansen said, shaking his head, though there was something forced in his voice, just as if he wasn’t so sure of his own words.. “Seriously, what do you want to do? Fight the ’ghost of the plague’? We have to stand firmly on the ground, not with our heads in the clouds. We have to attack the disease in every way possible. Expand leprosariums, train more doctors, call help from every freakin’ medicine university in this country...”

“I have to agree with Hansen here.” Twilight added. “We may be desperate, but fighting superstitions won’t help us. You saw the leprosy bacteria yourself, I saw the leprosy bacteria, we know exactly what we are fighting. It’s a germ, not a metaphysical manifestation of a disease. We know that certain types of medicine can hurt it. We just have to press it more... well, maybe that arsenic mixture wasn’t such a bad idea after all...”

Dostoyevsky fell silent, glaring at the floor without a word.

If they only knew what he did, if they saw what he saw...

“I guess that’s all for now.” Twilight said, stepping from the blackboard and looking at its content one more time. “We have plenty of ideas to test. I suggest you prepare the mercury mixture for tomorrow while I’ll prepare the high temperature method.” At that moment Twilight yawned tiredly, the events of the day catching up to her. “Gah, it’s really late. I guess I’ll go to sleep. Good night.” she bid the two stallions farewell, perfectly knowing that with the events of the day her slumber wouldn’t be a peaceful one. She just didn’t want to think about how many ponies would pass away during her sleep, just because they worked so slow up until now.

It didn’t take long for Hansen to follow in her hoofsteps, bidding his old friend a good night and retiring his room. Dostoyevsky however didn’t even acknowledged his exit, still looking at the ground.

---

He sat there, not knowing for how long himself. Was it a coupe of seconds? A few minutes? Hours maybe? Time wasn’t all that important right now, what mattered was only him and his thoughts.

The sound of the raging blizzard on the other side of the window went unnoticed by him. He was deep in thought, remembering all the times when he had encountered things, that all logical ponies would dub as impossible, as superstitions and myths. But he knew better, he encountered them, he talked to them, fought them on occasions. He wasn’t going to cross something out just because it was beyond the reasoning of other ponies.

Finally, Dostoyevsky rose from his chair and slowly approached the blackboard. He picked up the broken off piece of chalk and wrote two words on it.

“Leper Messiah”

Comments

[Verlax]

Prologue was completely re-written so please read this before the new chapters.