> Sickness
>  by ShadowSpark22
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> And so it beggings 
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	Journal of research and investigation of the unknown illness affecting three towns of central region of Equestria, Shadow Spark Vol. 1:

This is an introduction to the research and investigation of a new sickness that started plaguing Equestria, there is little known to the moment but as head of the research team and the new born health department I Shadow Spark am on the proses of writing down everything that could be important to help to find a cure and or contain the spread of the disease. In this volume I should work explaining what we know at the current day, having never feel the need to keep time other than the pleasantries of knowing my date of birth and other things that are alike and of little importance there is no record of time and history seems to be just recording of mere memory, in order to understand the progress of our work I am beginning the very first record of time that is actually part of a serious attempt to record time in Equestria.

For my first date I am going one thousand years to the past which seems to be the date with most happenings in a long while, events recorded by Celestia’s memories are of the disappearance of the Crystal Empire, the Capture of Discort and Luna’s Banishment to the moon, then everything is normal for hundreds of years where there is nothing big except for appearing towns and cities, important leaders of small revolutions that ended in little blood before social understanding, abandonment of the Pony Sisters castle in the Everfree, then everything is minor until the embodiment of the Elements of Harmony, the death and re birth of the six ponies that represented the elements and that brings us to three month ago with the first case of the illness that we are now studying, I am inside a controlled zone so I can only communicate with the Princesses by mail and I haven’t really read all of them regarding history so I just put together this short and simple time line.

Case 1: after years of understanding pony kind and griffins have being in good manners towards each other, so a visit from one of them to the town of Ponyville was welcomed, like always, yet this time the griffin got sick two days before her visit was over and she went to the hospital in town, the sickness turned out to be something easy to tread with juts some vitamins and antibiotics the griffin was healthy and on her way back home, (from here on to what we know now is mainly guess work but with strong scientifically study… we just can’t tell if this is actually one hundred percent accurate) one of the doctors the treated the griffin started feeling bad but it was symptoms known to many illnesses, none of which were considered dangerous, vitamins and antibiotics and the doctor was sent home, next day the doctor (Dr. Good Will) managed to drag himself to the hospital and he was put in intensive care and he began the fight for his life.

Symptoms: the first symptoms are similar to many simple sicknesses like the Common Cold, redness in the eyes, nasal congestion, head ache and a mild fever, this are the symptoms that are visible in all cases from the first one on. Stage two would produce symptoms a bit more complicated to understand, like loss of the ability to do certain things; we assume that the sickness attacks the brain and damages something in there, regarding Dr. Good Will he lost the ability to filter what he was saying, some kind of newly gained advanced turrets syndrome impossible to control, he would say things that were very harmful without wanting, that lasted a day then everything went back to normal, the second day he started shaking and scratching, it was hard to hold him down but it was necessary because he was starting to scratch of fur and skin in some places, this was the moment to call for quarantine but no one knew what was happening so everyone was in the room trying to help poor Dr. Good Will, by next morning all organs began shutting down, his entire body was working in an intermittent manner, even the lungs, heart and to my surprise brain as well, he would die and come back to life minutes later screaming in pain as his body worked harder every time to push around semi coagulated blood thru his vines and arteries, he apparently knew when he was going under because he would grab whoever was close to him and tell him/her not to let him wake up again.

The third stage is by far the most disturbing, once the body is declared dead the victim wakes up one final time, this is the same to all victims, the eyes open and you can see nothing but horror, you can see the pain of a heart that is cold trying to start again, the brain which is supposed to be far from any ability of consciousness asks you to destroy it any possible way, the pony is completely dead but something makes the brain stay alive, you can see his eyes moving around and recognizing but nothing else moves, after thirty hours of eying around in a room the doctors decided to remove the head to see if such action would finally kill the dead pony, but the eyes didn’t stop for another day, studies showed that the brain was even after dead generating electricity somehow and that was what was keeping the pony alive.
Regarding the third stage some victims manage to move their body, but a cold stiff body would do nothing more than rapture all its muscles and as soon as those were gone the victim would fall limb on the ground with its eyes still pleading for death, some manage to talk for a little bit but only to desperately ask for death, so far all the infected die and there is little sign of immunity.

Regarding stage two almost all cases are different just watch out for anything that seems out of normality.
Contingency: the day after the hospital received Dr. Good Will all the medical personal that was helping him or walked into the room where he was at showed symptoms of mild sickness, they all stayed for testing and where positive for a cocktail of sicknesses that were impossible to have all at once, the conclusion was that a new illness was begging to spread and that it triggered almost all the tests that they had taken.

Quarantine of the entire Hospital was issued, but friends of Dr. Good Will that spent time with him the day before were also sick, they had walked around town all day looking for vitamins and such to treat the sickness and by the fourth day of that week twenty percent of Ponyville was showing symptoms of mild illness.

After four days of the first case the town was closed on Celestia’s orders and all towns that where in direct connection to the railroad with Ponyville was closed as well under the most massive quarantine project known to pony kind.
Water, and food was provided to the healthy as well as a thick walled shelter for all that was still free from the illness. A train leaves every day to screening stations away from the infected area and the clean ponies are free to leave and find a new life outside the infected zone.

Form of contagion: it is by now obvious that the illness is very contagious, body fluids, air, and just touching each other is a form of transmitting the disease.

In order to keep my sanity and record the work done I am going to write my own experience in the same journal, starting tomorrow I will be working with the rest of the team for the future of equestrian, today I am just seating in a room with the sharpest minds in medicine for our first meeting to figure out how things are going to work regarding our abilities, the speaker introduced me so that I could explain the calendar and dates for record keeping and we all agree to begging our tasks tomorrow as the official starting date of project New Start, name given because sadly some of the infected ponies where out of Ponyville before the quarantine was issued and now there are three towns considered infected zones and a huge wall confining the three towns to stop any one from leaving without being screened.

My team of research will be Star Dust, Dark Shine, Twilight Sparkle, and Dr. Green Cross leading the team, I am ok with it, it feels good no to have to burden of being leader this time around. Twi doesn’t seem good since last year out of the Hooves’ conflict and she was finally starting to act like her old self when the illness started to spread.
Shine and I are still friends but we have decided to give up some time apart also due to the Hooves’ conflict, Dust is still his old self, no big changes in his life, and well Dr. Green Cross apparently is a very smart fella from Appleloosa who apparently cures any kind of anger or pains by just smoking some kind of herbs, he also comes up with crazy ways to fight diseases that almost always work that is why he is leading us.

With nothing else to report from Day 0 of the medical convention to plan project New Start Shadow Spark with hope and optimism signing out. 

> Vol 1.1
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Vol 1.1
Day 1 Research: after working the managerial part of the entire medical community I get back to the post of third in command of my research team, Green Cross is working now with Twilight and I am ready to head out for the studies of one of the heads that have not being destroyed yet, we decided to keep one of the medical workers that were infected to study the evolution of the sickness over time.

Now there is a happening that have us all on edge, Rarity one of Twilight’s friends is showing symptoms of mild sickness and she was inside of the safe zone cleared as a potential risk, she is just now taking the sickness test and soon we will know if she will become our newest test subjects.

Twilight is breaking down so she is just working on relaxing and work simple task with Dr. Cross, Shine and me are working on fixing the first set of environmental suits to be able to walk outside of our sterile units, being the fact that most ponies out of here have no idea of the procedures taken to work here I will add some definition to this research portion (Sterile Unit: filtered environmental research and living quarters, provided by Celestia).

Day 1 Research portion 1: uncover the head of one of the infected medical workers of the original Dr. Will case, this individual was decapitated by accident before the second stage was determined over, meaning that he was thought to be dead he was actually having problems to react to the environmental stimuli there for he was just asleep when his head was removed. This case is actually an important one because his head was confused and put as a different pony that the one he actually was when he was truly alive, we don’t know his real name and his body was lost during the chaos of the situation.

Day 1 Research portion 2: establish communication. We know by now that the head alone have being showing the 
same signs of life as all the infected, he is the only head we haven’t destroyed and now we are going to try different methods to find way to communicate to the head knowing that he can’t talk but we don’t know if he can listen of communicate any other way.

Day 1 Research portion 3: working possible causes to SBEG (Spontaneous Brain Electricity Generation) to see what fuels the brain, why it occurs, and how to stop the life pulsating symptoms of stage 3.

Day 1 Research portion 4: collect samples of brain tissue to analyze.

Procedure 1 uncover head: walking into the morgue we can hear several dead ponies trying to ask for death, it is a disturbing experience as everyone in the room seems to try to get your attention, it does not help the fact that Shine and me in our suits are the only ones that haven’t a sticker without date of deaf; row after row of dead, some of which have already even started decomposition are moving their eyes, some are now even milkish of how long their heads have being deprived of life. The newer once sometimes moan and the older once just look around until their muscles gave to nothing else but ground meat.

Our destination come into view, it is a drawer with a sticker that reads “lost property” it was used to store things that workers around here lost during their jobs but now it hold the head of a mysterious pony who we are hoping to help to tell us who he once was.

Procedure 2 communications: we found the correct head, after getting used to the fact that his pleading eyes didn’t stop asking for mercy we manage the move the head to a work room, in this room we have the latest technology that is availed, it is first time for me to see a video camera which will be recording everything that we do, there are also recorders and other apparatus that are actually powered by electricity instead of magic. We have a set of element that can perceive and absorb electric pulsations in the environment, also microwaves and any form of vibrations; if the brain is still alive in there he will be able to let us know.

Frontal lobe, by inserting some proves into the brain we can see if there is activity in the brain, if there is any coherent activity we can translate it into speech. The procedure is to insert the proves, I am as I am writing this using my magic to accurately insert the proves into mapped areas that would allow us to measure any activity, if there is anything I can record it and we could establish communication.

Proves in place, and there is activity, the first set of reading are erratic yet the computer is registering as a response to the proves invasion, if it would have being translated into sound it would have being a loud scream.

NOTE: the usage of proves for brain analysis seems to cause pain to the dead pony that we are using for this portion of the research procedures.

Communication is possible, the computer started registering brain activity, and the pony can talk, his brain is functional after being separated from the body for more than four days. As for conversation we thing he may be death because there is no coherent response to any of the questions we ask unless when write it down for him to see.

RECinfo: First instance the subject screamed (pain we assume), Second instance the subject would do nothing else but swear without stop or asking to kill him, Third instance we showed words to try and communicate, we know now that his name was Pineapple Gjoe who was at the hospital to get removed a splinter, he got sick and then he died, that is all that he said before screaming and swearing again.

Procedure 3 reasons for SBEG: we did discover that the brain was generating its own fuel, that it was conscious and that it was in pain, but there is nothing within our technology that would indicate a definite reason for SBEG.

Procedure 4 sampling: removing brain tissue was easy and without complications, as soon as pieces of every lobe were removed, the subject quit responding and his brain finally died, he was finally gone and we had our samples, this four procedures toke most of the day, we have a meeting to share discoveries and then designated sleep time to start working optimally in the morning, today’s samples will be studied side by side with the samples of tomorrow’s subject that will be quiet fresh in comparison to the work we did today.

I sent my first report to Celestia today it reads:

Dear Cely, I am afraid that today was even longer of a day that I was expecting, Twilight’s head in not where it should be but I can understand why given the fact that now one of her friends is showing symptoms of mild sickness which is the first stage of the main thing, yet as if now we don’t know if she has it or not, her name is Rarity I am not sure if you know her well, hope this won’t make it worst for you.

Shine and I made quiet good progress, we know now that the ponies’ brains stay alive for four days even after it is removed from the body, they are also conscious and with aid of those computers we can hear them and talk to them.

There is little else to report at this time but be free to help with your ideas, we all are ok, there is tension and despair but I am still optimistic, working together we may just come out victorious. 

…

Still optimistic and small air of accomplishment Shadow Spark logging out