Elan Vital
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Chapter XVII: Élan Vital

 

I took another long look around the area. Zrimash had a decent supply of healers, and I was intensely curious to hear Charcharias’s theory. “Alright,” I said. “But as soon as this is done, you come back here and help people.”

“Of course!” she said. “It’s unfortunate timing, but I need to test this as soon as possible. Follow me, back to my lab.”

We were both speed walking all the way back, me having to break into a jog a few times to make up for her greater height. We arrived a couple of minutes later at Halflance’s lodge, stepping into the tightly-packed side building where Charcharias had staked her claim. To my surprise, Anna and Unity were there waiting for us. 

“Emma!” squealed Anna, running up to me and pulling me into a hug before Charcharias had even had a chance to lock the door. “You’re safe! What in the world happened to you?”

“There was a fire,” I said, “a big one. I went in to save as many people as I could. Halflance and Zaya and Burnardor are all safe now. And so am I, I guess, though that wasn’t really in question.”

“That explains it,” Anna said, glancing over my head. “Always playing the hero, aren’t you?”

“What can I say,” I said with a shrug, “I can’t resist a chance to put myself in danger.”

“Can we leave-leave now?” Unity said from behind Anna. “Or do you-you still need us?”

Charcharias quirked her head to one side. “Hmm? Oh, of course, I still need you. In fact, now that Emma is here, I can tell you what I wanted you here for.”

“What do they have to do with the source of my powers?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Charcharias. “They’re just here as a control group. I assume that the two of you don’t have the ability to miraculously heal from injuries.”

Anna glanced down at her bad leg. “Definitely not.”

“I don’t think so,” Unity said, scratching at the metal studs embedded in the flesh around her neck.

“That’s what I guessed. Okay, Emma, you stand right over there. Anna, you go there, and Unity, over there.” With a few more brief instructions and one or two instances of directly grabbing one of us by the shoulders, the good doctor arranged Anna, Unity, and me into a line, in that order. Then she slipped across the room, to where a familiar metal cylinder was sitting under a sheet on the table. 

I could have sworn I heard Anna mumbling something under her breath that rhymed with “spidiculous”.

“Emma, have you noticed how every time you walk into my lab, the vitometer explodes?” said Dr. Charcharias, throwing off the sheet. The vitometer looked almost exactly as it had before, except this time being set on a wooden Lazy Susan of sorts. 

“Because it’s a piece of junk that’s trying to detect something that doesn’t exist?”

“I’ve tested it extensively. It does work, and its results match several predictions about the properties of the élan vital. If only it didn’t keep breaking down,” she said sarcastically.

“Yeah, because that’s the worst thing wrong with it,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Dr. Charcharias ignored me, instead fiddling with the controls on the side of the vitometer. “I spent days struggling with this problem, until inspiration struck me last night. What I’ve done is made modifications to the primary sensing rod,” she gestured to a thin metal cone jutting out of the front of the vitometer, “to make it more directional and, most importantly, to reduce the sensitivity by a factor of ten thousand.”

Charcharias flipped a switch to activate the vitometer, and for once it did not explode, instead emitting a steady hum and a series of steady metallic clicks. “Alright, so first I aim it at Anna, a typical human test subject.” She rotated the vitometer around until the point was facing directly toward Anna. Nothing happened. “Normally it would be indicating the presence of her electromagnetic field,” Charcharias explained, “but I’ve set the sensitivity so low that it can’t detect anything.”

“Right, yes, that’s the only reason it isn’t detecting anything,” I said.

Charcharias continued to ignore me, instead turning the vitometer to face Unity. “Again, nothing. It isn’t detecting metal or anything like that, otherwise it would go off from her implants.”

“It’s not going to work, Amina! Can we please just get this over with so you can start doing something useful? I get that you have your own—“

The point of the vitometer’s sensing rod began to point in my direction, and all at once the machine emitted a high-pitched whine, and the clicks shifted from a steady beat to frantic bursts. Charcharias seized the machine in an instant, leaning over it and reading something from inside of it. “That’s impossible…”

Without warning, I jumped to one side. The exact instant that I moved out of the way of the vitometer, the whine stopped. I was frozen.

“Emma? Could you please go back in front of the machine so I can write this all down?”

I didn’t move, except to slowly stick out my hand, palm facing the vitometer. Just before I reached the zone where I figured it was aimed, I yanked my hand back. The vitometer hummed at the exact same tone as it always had. “Step away from it for a second,” I said.

Charcharias rolled her eyes, but stepped back from the vitometer, holding up her hands like I was a cop. I nodded, and stepped back to where I had been. Without an instant of delay, the machine hissed and whined, loud enough to make me wince. It was real, then. Or at least something unusual was going on. 

Dr. Charcharias rushed back to the vitometer, having grabbed a notepad in the meantime. “So my theory was correct, but I didn’t account for quite how correct it was. Do you know what the élan vital is, Emma?”

“Five minutes ago I would have said ‘archaic pseudoscience bullshit’, but now I’m honestly not sure.”

“It’s an electromagnetic field that coexists with all living things, which is both generated by organisms while also sustaining them in an intricate feedback loop,” Dr. Charcharias explained. “The élan vital guides the growth of a fetus into an adult human, and modulates the process by which wounded bodies return themselves to health. It directs cells, controls growth, and is the primordial scientific blueprint from which the immense complexity of biology arises.”

I rubbed at my right temple, letting out a very weary sigh. “Every fiber of my being wants to scream at you that that’s bullshit, but I was set on fire today, so I’m feeling very open minded. What does this have to do with me being able to regenerate?”

Dr. Charcharias’s chest rose and fell, and she looked at me with the conviction of a woman bearing very bad news. “Emma, your élan vital has a field strength 150 thousand times greater than the strongest élan vital ever measured.”

“What?” I said, shaking my head. “Are you sure? That sounds more like a technology error than an actual measurement…”

“I would assume so, except that…” She leaned back against the table, looking down at the floor. “When you’re this far out of the boundaries of what we have data for, it becomes increasingly difficult to make predictions or foresee unexpected outcomes. But what I’ve seen you do, and the other experiments I’ve been able to perform, all of that lines up with what you would expect from an outlier like this. One question for you: have you ever felt sick because of the presence of electrical devices or phenomena?”

The floor fell out from under me, and I felt very slightly faint. I had never told anyone about the way I felt during lightning storms, let alone her. Which meant that either this was an even greater coincidence than I’d expected, or that she was on to something. The more that she spoke, the more the evidence was starting to tilt in favor of the latter. It didn’t make any sense, of course; vitalism was an old and outdated theory, the kind of thing that sits next to phlogiston and the Oedipus complex in the great hall of scientific bullshit. And yet apparently it applied here, and not only did it apply, but it allowed for someone to have the power to regenerate from fatal bullet wounds in a matter of seconds. 

I nodded. “Every time there’s lightning, I feel like I’m going to throw up… And the first time I went to your office, someone was doing a demonstration of a plasma something-or-other and I actually did throw up.”

“That would make sense,” said Charcharias. “The vital field interacts with normal electromagnetism only weakly, too weakly for most people to really notice. But a field that powerful might actually be distorted by things like lightning, or machinery, and make you feel miserable.”

“So I have weird magic electricity powers?” I said, slipping my hands into my pockets. “Good to know, good to know…”

“Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s magic,” she said, annoyed.

“May we leave now?” Anna asked, bowing slightly.

Charcharias looked at them with total confusion, as if she’d forgotten that they were there. “Of course you can,” she finally said. 

Anna and Unity hurried out of the building, even though I was almost completely certain that they didn’t have anything better to be doing.

“Alright, now that I have a better idea of what’s causing this, we can do some more focused testing on your physiology. Normally I’d advocate for some minor exploratory surgeries, but I’m fairly sure your body heals too quickly for that to be practical. As it is, though, we can go for some more blood drawings, maybe a sample of spinal fluid, urine samples of course, possibly a bit of tissue sectioning…”

“Woah woah woah, slow down a bit…”

“There’s also a few more in-depth examinations we could do with the vitometer probe as well, some tests with metal colloids -- those ones will lay you out for a little while. I might need to try requisitioning materials to do a close examination of your healing process, with painkillers of course. I just need you to stay here for a few hours, maybe overnight, and then we can—”

“Amina! What the fuck are you talking about?!”

Dr. Charcharias shook her head. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. We can start with the blood and tissue samples and continue from there.”

“No! No. You can take my blood or whatever, but we are not doing any of that other shit, okay?” I said. “Just because I can regenerate doesn’t mean I’m going to become your lab rat.”

Dr. Charcharias’s mouth fell open, this blank wide-eyed look like I’d just taken something from her. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Nothing like you has ever been recorded before. The advancements we could make for medicine are… endless.”

I couldn’t bring myself to keep looking in her eyes. “Is there a way you can do that without jamming every instrument you can think of into every one of my orifices, maybe? Because I have better things to do than being a test subject.”

“Please think about this,” she said, folding her arms. “It won’t be comfortable, but the most important things never are.”

“I know that. I was on fire, like, half an hour ago.”

“Which would explain several things, but that’s besides the point,” she said. “Aren’t you the one who’s always wanting to help people? This is what will help people, hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise sicken and die. You have the potential to be the greatest medical breakthrough of the century!”

“At the cost of my autonomy, sure. There’ll be all sorts of benefits to other people as long as I become a curiosity. I have… other things I need to attend to here. People are dying, right here and right now, and I have the chance to save everyone if I move quickly.”

She crossed the room slowly, clumsily, until she was standing right in front of me, towering almost a full head over me.  “Emma, please. I’m begging you. Think of the possibilities here. Think of all the things I could learn from you, and all the things I could do with that learning.”

“Yeah,” I said, arms folded, looking right back up at her. “All the things that you could do with me. Take my blood, maybe give me a CAT scan or whatever, but I’m not going to spend the next month as your lab rat. We can discuss some kind of arrangement when we get back to Halflance manor.”

Charcharias’s expression soured. “Of course. Would you like to sit down, then? So I can draw more blood?”

I pulled myself up onto a countertop, and Amina, defeated, went to go grab a syringe. While she was doing that, Burnardor burst into the room. Or rather, a Durkahn burst into the room, carrying Burnardor to her chest like a child.

“Dr. Charcharias, you irresponsible aquatic bitch! Stop feeding on chum or whatever it is you do and heal me!”

Classic Burnardor, that.

Charcharias looked up from her syringe cabinet, scowling the moment she saw that face. “Of course, Lady Burnardor. I will be right with you,” she said, power walking across the room. She avoided looking at me as she set a syringe down on the counter next to me. “What appears to be the issue?”

“Some debris fell on my body while I was trying to escape the flames. I managed to get myself out in time,” she lied, “but I fear I may have sustained a serious injury to my wrist.”

Her left wrist was indeed hanging unnaturally limp, the arm held close to her side. Poor her. 

“Set her down on the table here,” Charcharias said, indicating the only empty surface in the room. 

The Durkahn did as she indicated, and immediately turned to leave. The expression on her face told me that she hadn’t exactly been enjoying that particular duty. Burnardor cried out, more out of surprise than out of pain, as she landed on the table, hard enough that she very nearly bounced. 

As she landed, one of the pockets of her suit-jacket ended up sideways, the opening angled downwards. That, combined with the jostling of her landing, caused the contents of that pocket to slip partially out into the open. It was a small object with jagged, sharp edges, and a white surface that shimmered and shone with nacreous light. A glinggatluk. The matching pair to the one I’d found cutting through the bonds on the chargerthing’s saddle.

Dr. Charcharias did end up drawing my blood, and quickly doing a few scans with the vitometer, scribbling down notes the entire time. This was after she confirmed that Burnardor’s injury was heat exhaustion and a mild sprain. Once she was done, I returned to my cabin. 

I had a lot of things to think about. For one thing, I quickly realized what had been feeling “off” since I had left the fire. While my skin and flesh could regenerate, my hair could not, and had burnt down to stubble. As soon as I realized that, all other concerns left my mind, and I spent at least ten minutes staring into a mirror. I had been growing my hair out, as a sort of experiment, and losing it felt… sad, somehow. I still looked good, in a sort of punk way, but the knowledge that it would take a couple of months before it grew out again stung. That I’d lost my eyebrows in the fire did not help.

I had to tear my eyes away from the mirror to start thinking about actually serious matters. Matters like Burnardor. She was the chaos agent, the Cassandran spy. It all made sense: she was acting like a total bitch, despite this being a diplomatic mission, because she didn’t want to succeed. The attacks had always been where the other delegates were because one of the delegates was the one behind them. She even had a motivation, besides just whatever money the Cassandrans were likely paying her: she wanted access to the Council of One, access that could only be obtained if there was no treaty. Which meant that Ironseed was likely in on the plan. 

The only open question, then, was the identity of the Musician. It wasn’t Burnardor, their voices were too different. Neither was it her only known co-conspirator, Ironseed, for the same reason. Nobody I’d ever met had had that same accent… except for the woman in the recording. The one who had been involved with bringing me to Selene, and the one who had been backing Nemesis. The Musician’s voice hadn’t set off the recognition the way that the recording had, but it was also slightly muffled by the reikverratr mask, and the connection of the identical accent was definitely there. As I sat on my bed, staring off into space, the next step became clear: I needed to figure out who the Musician was.

And the chase is on... next target? The Musician. And who knows how long it might take Emma to figure the solution to that one out... Of course, if you want to know the answers, you can do it right now, just by clicking the link down below and joining my Patreon, for as little as $3 a month. You'll be able to see the next three chapters, and join my exclusive Discord server. You can also, at higher tiers, unlock the two exclusive Selene prequel short stories, as well as voting rights on which short story I write next. Otherwise, I'll see you again in exactly 1 week for Chapter XVIII: Stories and Legends.

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