Though you've disappeared you know
She will get you through
She'll come to the rescue
Guster - Hercules to the Rescue
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Thursday Jim's resonance joins the twisting thoughtfulness of Luke's in a back area of the Verbena's clinic. The Disciple makes a sacrifice, he siphons off Sid's mental exhaustion, the hallucinations, and he gives a bit of himself back to her. Bolsters up her mind, gives her a little extra knowledge. He suffers for her so that she can work and she doesn't allow that sacrifice to go to waste. Sid begins working with the viral samples immediately.
And it helps. She works, she tweaks, she tests. There are still coughing fits, her body still protests, but her sharp mind puts together the pieces of this puzzle. Saturday evening, finally, she sits back. She's tested and she's tested and she's tested and everything tells her the same thing. It's done. It's fixed. It's cured. At least in the samples.
She injects this cure into herself first. It's dangerous, leaving Grace hanging another twelve hours, but this time Sid will be the early warning system. She will know if something has gone wrong, if the Hydra virus has fought back. She will be Grace's shield. Not that she needs to be, but let's face it, Sid is paranoid, and if somehow she's turned out wrong, if she's miscalculated something important, she doesn't want Grace to suffer for it.
When she's finished, she goes to Jim where he rests and wrestles with the visions he's chosen to take on for her. Sid places her hands, always so warm, to either side of his face, presses her forehead to his and says, "Enough. You can let go now." She's smiling with relief when she says it, she doesn't want him to suffer for her, either. The sooner he gives the burden back to her, the better. And besides, she needs them to know that it's working.
Sunday the hallucinations begin to recede. Monday the nosebleeds will stop and the headache will go away. For both of them, though Grace will feel this relief about twelve hours later. Sid's done it. She's neutralized and destroyed an unknown, manmade viral agent (an agent designed to kill her) in under two weeks.
Sunday evening when Sid is feeling a little more lucid under her own power again, she gets a phone number from Grace's phone.
"Callum," she says, her voice still thready and weak. "We need to talk." No introductions, and straight to the point. Perhaps they set up a meeting time and place then.
[for Wednesday maybe? =D]
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Grace suffers in those twelve hours. While in her lucid times, she's comforted by Sid's progress, she also remembers Lena healing herself, and how that went to hell.
During not-so-lucid times, Grace can be heard screaming in the back room that has become hers over these days of quarantine. They are short, breathless, gurgling things squeezed through a graveled throat. So perhaps they don't reach the kind of decibel levels that might distract Sid or Luke, but walking down the hallway perhaps, or trying to bring her food -- one of them will eventually notice.
Look how she writhes, lost in her own world, eyes staring at and tracking things that aren't there. Her arms are streaked with little sores where she has picked at the bugs under her skin, and in her times of madness she cannot take care of herself very well. Clothes and linens have to be changed regularly because of the spilled blood.
When Sid comes by to administer the cure, she has to wait. Grace is gone. Flailing. In her mind, she is being dissected layer by layer, peeled apart by a woman in a yellow dress whose eyes drip tears of blood into her opened body.
When she stops, it is because she is unconscious. It's for the best really. Sid doesn't need to hold her down at that point, and at least the waking nightmare has stopped. But her eyes flitting like mad under closed lids suggest that it's only slid into her dreams.
Thankfully, it will be the last of the truly horrible ones. In a matter of days, she died, in a matter of days she will be reborn.
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When she learns that Sid has contacted Callum, she frets over that a bit. She's got a theory as to Callum, and who he really is, and what that lab of his really is. It's just a theory, but she lets everyone know anyway.
They're former Technocrats. Perhaps the consors and biologists of some splinter group that now wants to brand themselves Transhumanists instead of the other T. Or, alternatively, they are still Technocrats, and are studying this virus for their own reasons. If Lena and Sera are at their lab in the mountains, it would be a reason why they can't be located -- ex Technocrats are usually firebombed by current Technocrats, as Grace understands it (from all the Virtual Adept propaganda she's managed to soak in). So they'd have need of subtlety and hidden fortresses. And a secret Technocratic lab would want to remain secret, yes?
In other words, play carefully with Callum. He might have abducted their friends. And who knows what he really wants with the Hydra?
It's Luke, not Sid, who injects Grace with the cure. Once Jim relinquishes Sid's symptoms back to her she's bedridden, writhing in her own agony, and there she stays until her mind starts to become hers again. Luke, who has gone far, far above and beyond the call of any friend or mentor or doctor in keeping Sid and Grace here, in keeping an eye on them, administering aid when it's needed. For Sid this has gone a long way in her trusting people a little more again.
Not completely, though, not at all. Because all people have in them the capacity to turn and to harm.
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Later, when they're both able to sit up a little again, Grace suggests that these are those Transhumanists someone ran into before. Sid offers her a weak smile. Grace must have missed that update to Ginger, and then other things - like creating this cure - took precedence for Sid.
She's not going to meet Callum with anything approaching blind trust. But Grace only got his phone number, not the location of his compound in the mountains, a place Sid suspects their friends are. A place that is surprisingly difficult for their more magically adept friends to find on their own. She'll take precautions before going to meet him wherever she meets him. Talk with Luke about things she might be able to do with her Life magic that will be to her advantage (other than the few rotes she's already learned and been practicing on her own).
And she makes other preparations, or will. When the time comes, Sid will be more than prepared.
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It turned out that the number Grace had been given was still good, though the man on the other end of the line took a long time to answer. (Perhaps he'd given up expecting this call.) When he did, it was a simple conversation.
Sid said they needed to talk. Callum asked her who he was speaking to (the voice was wrong for Grace,) and then agreed.
"Yes. We do."
He asked if she and Grace were alright, how the symptoms were progressing, and mentioned that he'd lost Grace when she left her apartment. Whatever Sid decided to tell him (whether she admitted to finding a cure or not) he would agree to a meeting at 8pm on Wednesday. The location he gave her was about an hour North of the city, in a rural area. Though if she preferred a different place, he would go to meet her instead.
[OOC: Basically, whatever Sid wants to do, within reason. He's going to be cooperative.]
He asks her name and he can hear the smile in her quiet voice when Sid says, "You have four guesses and the first three don't count." She hasn't spoken to Grace yet but Sid has a strong feeling this man knows where her friends are, and the number and the voice are wrong for Grace.
He asks after them and Sid says, "That's not why I'm calling. Wednesday?" She should be a bit better by then. He gives her a location and she says very simply, "No." Her counter offer is for a small business district in Aurora, not the same one where Luke's practice is but close. The time is fine. When all of it is settled, Sid says, "Okay," and hangs up on him, just before a coughing fit takes her.
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Grace's sanity returns to her, bit by bit, but the body still rebels (hey, every day it's a little bit better, gasping her way out of that drowning).
It keeps her at Luke's practice for a little longer. But she's restless. Just feeling better isn't enough. Sera's missing, Lena's unknown. This battle for survival has turned into a rescue mission.
It's too bad Razor never left her any contact information, never told her where to find Denver's secret laboratory. If that's even what they're looking for. The one thing that they have to go on is Callum's number, and that's honestly horrifying.
He doesn't think any of them are human.
It's one of the first things they tell you, when they want you to have no sympathy, no mercy for your enemy. They tell you your enemies aren't really people. They dehumanize, and alienate, and let tribalism and survival instinct take it from there. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
So she doesn't think that Sid's headed into exactly friendly territory here, even if Callum is telling the truth. Which means, Sid might be breaking into or out of a possibly highly technologically advanced lab here in the near future.
Sid's gonna need help.
With that in mind, she starts prepping her tools. She takes her apartment key fob (capable as it is of radio transmission) apart, rewiring some of the inputs to her laptop, and turning it into a programmable radio transmitter. All the better for hacking doors that might rely on the same sort of input device.
She's got software to ease the progress if she can make it into any of their computer systems, too, and she works on streamlining it for corporate infiltration and security system override.
She may not be the most powerful Mage in Denver, but damn it, she's got some skills. The thought of Lena and Sera dying while there's a cure out there? No. She'll do what she can, whatever she can to help.
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