“Here you go, Kylan,” I said, handing out two Fire Eel grenades I had constructed over the past three days. “Remember – be careful with them.”
He eyed it nervously, first layering them with a good amount of padding, before securing each of them tightly to his belt. Good. I nodded.
“Now, Slime-bro, just like we practiced.”
I watched like a proud father, as Slime-bro extended a pair of tiny limbs that encircled a portion of Bang, before internalising it as an encapsulated vacuole-like structure. A moment later, he repeated the process with Boom, deliberately keeping both sacs far apart from one another. When the time finally came that we needed more, he could fashion new grenades quickly.
In our practice just before re-enacting Monty Python, Slime-bro had been able to expertly create new grenades by remodelling his membranes within himself, after I explained the prototype’s design. Luckily for us, I had plenty of extra Slime-bro membrane grown on culture dishes for him to replenish his lost bits of membrane in creating them. It was taxing and tiring for him to perform it repeatedly, since it required plenty of concentration and dextrous control, but it meant allowing us to restock on grenades when we needed them, slow though he may currently be at generating them.
In other words, Slime-bro had upgraded from cute little slime, to walking (well, bouncing-slash-slithering for the pedants) arms-factory. In time, I hoped his production rate would increase. Maybe I could sell them off to earn some extra money to channel into our lab’s funds as well.
“Here, Eric.” Aksal held out a stoppered vial of red liquid, and I knew at once what its contents were. “Healing potion, basic adventurer grade. It won’t work with severe injuries, but you shouldn’t be injured in the first place.”
He glared at me with a challenging look that brooked no argument.
“I know, I know,” I said, acquiescing. “No touching the sample until it’s actually dead.”
“It’s so creepy that you can just casually refer to a manticore as just a sample.” Kylan twirled the knives in his hands, inspecting them for a moment, before slotting them back into their holsters. “Thank the Five that Shinya is normal. I was starting to worry for the fate of your world.”
“That’s not true,” Shinya said while readying a horse generously supplied by the villagers, once more reverting to his usual diplomatic style. “I was just an average person back on Earth. Eric, on the other hand, was close to finishing his graduate studies.” He gave an embarrassed smile. “I think Vergence might have been better off with Eric as the Hero, in fact.”
I considered that thought for a moment, and then –
“Nope!”
“Absolutely not.”
“Slurrrp!”
Shinya startled at being met by overwhelming disagreement from myself, Kylan, and Slime-bro respectively. “But he’s already well on his way to curing Vergence of the Blighted Curse, and –“
“Oh, come on, him?” Kylan rolled his eyes, gesturing toward me. “If he were the Hero, he’d ruin Everach faster than the Demon Lord ever could! He’d turn us all into slimes or something just because he could!”
Heh. Once the hero worship that Kylan had for Shinya had worn off, the two hit off remarkably well. Considering the similarity in their ages – my assistant was sixteen, while Shinya was nineteen – I supposed that was to be expected.
“Fair point,” I agreed. “That does sound like an interesting idea…”
I leaned in toward Kylan, eyeing him speculatively.
“Wait… you can’t actually turn me into a slime, could you?”
I forced my expression to remain level, muttering utter nonsense under my breath. “Hmm… yes… that has potential… just transform the Gowallean framework, and splacolate the vital sphloon… yes, yes, that could work… maybe some dinglebob to go along with that, and by re-calamariing the cells, we should arrive at an escargoto matrix, and…”
“S- stay away from me!”
I waited until he hastily backed away to join Aksal in loading some supplies the villagers donated for our journey before grinning fiercely, falling into peals of laughter. The best part of being in a world where no one knew anything more than the basics of biology was that I could get away with utter rubbish, and people would think I was being intelligent so long as I did something suitably impressive every once in a while.
Hell, even some people from Earth might have believed it if I sounded convincing enough!
Off to the side, Alicia and Celeste were throwing me weird looks, uncertain as to whether I had been joking, even with my reaction. Shinya was just shaking his head, mildly amused, but otherwise focused on seeing to the last of his preparations.
Finn Deyland, though – now that was a kindred spirit. Though he didn’t comment, he gave a firm nod of approval, and I now suddenly sorely wanted to know what travelling with him had been like for Shinya, Alicia, and Celeste.
“I was just joking,” I said for their benefit, raising my voice so that Kylan could also hear. “I can’t splacolate the vital sphloon, that would be just silly – everyone knows you have to rapidash the ekans in order to pikachu the geodude!”
“STAY AWAY FROM ME!”
Shinya finally cracked, chuckling aloud. “You know, I always pictured scientists as being much more – proper – folk.”
“Scientists? Nah,” I scoffed. “At some point, all those hours in the lab would have permanently addled any aspiring scientist. Can’t survive otherwise.”
One day, Kylan and Slime-bro would be just the same as myself. Of that I had no doubt.
The plan was for us to continue along in our carriage, with Shinya’s group escorting us. We would inspect the site of the former goblin tribe, where Finn could then use his skills as a [Pathfinder] to hopefully track the beast.
I took stock of my own supplies. After the worthwhile expenditure of Bang and Boom for the purposes of education, and adding the amount I used to make the latest batch of grenades, I was now down to about half a tank of each. I had plenty of slime membranes, just in case I needed to make use of them as filters in experimental work or to allow regeneration of Slime-bro’s shed membranes. We still had our vaccines – now that Alicia was here, with the ice magic at the [Ice Knight’s] disposal, I was less worried about them thawing, but even her skills could not bring their temperature down low enough for long term cryopreservation.
All in all, it meant that we had less luggage along with us for the ride, which allowed us to exchange our carriage for a smaller but more mobile one that the villagers had. It was convenient, because if we were going to hunt down a manticore, our previous model would not have been ideal for traversing rough terrain if it came down to it.
Speaking of vaccines, however…
“Any chance that any of you want to be vaccinated?” I asked, gesturing to the containers kept chilled with copious amounts of ice. “Aksal and Kylan have already gotten their jabs, along with the people in Hawksmoor.”
Shinya’s party eyed me uneasily, looking to their leader for his opinion.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “Now?”
I fished out one of the vials that had been expanded from back in Hawksmoor. “Give me a moment to let them thaw.”
I did, of course, have an underlying motive. Some people might call me dense – I would freely admit that – but I could also be one manipulative bastard if the situation called for it.
Plenty of villagers had come to see their great hero off as he set out to slay a mighty manticore plaguing the lands around their homes, and I could not let this opportunity pass. In Hawksmoor, I’d been informed that the villagers had been willing to take up the vaccine because they were a close-knit community, and respected Aksal deeply. Outside of there, however, I suspected that few would be willing to allow some unknown [Biologist] or a coalition of [Alchemists] and their assistants inject dubious substances into them.
If the Hero of Prophecy was willing to take it up, however, it would lend me some credibility. I wasn’t too interested in distributing the vaccine, per se – that was Aksal’s job – but the success of his eradication programme would have a direct influence on my own reputation, and hence my funding and potential for collaborations.
I allowed myself a slight amount of satisfaction, as the villagers began to curiously watch as I withdrew a few vials from storage. Shinya’s party still hesitated, but I suspected that once the deed was done, they would follow his lead.
It took several minutes before it was finally ready to be administered, and in that time, Shinya had removed the light armour that he wore, rolling up the sleeves of his garment. “Ready?”
He nodded, and I gestured for him to sit. Normally, back on Earth, there’d be a whole segment on ensuring I had the right patient, getting them to confirm their name and date of birth, going over the procedure and checking their understanding to ensure I obtained informed consent, but… meh. I would let Aksal do all that once he got his program started.
“Relax, now,” I said. “Sharp scratch –“
Were we closer friends, I would have gone with ‘here’s a small prick’, but alas, I had no idea whether he would take offense to that just yet. Experiencing that embarrassment once on Earth was enough to make me consider my words every subsequent time I needed to draw blood since then.
In an instant, it was done. I handed him a piece of gauze, and he pressed it against the injection site. “I can’t remember the last time I had one of these,” he commented, looking at the site curiously.
“Hero Shinya.” One elderly villager stepped forward, speaking hesitantly. “What was it that Eric the [Warpriest] did to you? A blessing of power, perhaps, to grant you the divine strength of the Five in ridding Vergence of the demons, and avenge his fallen Tennallian comrades?”
… me, a [Warpriest]?
“A [Warpriest]?” A woman in the crowd glared accusingly at yet another villager. “Rello, you said that he was a [Sword Saint]!”
“B- but it’s true! I saw what he did to the accursed manticore’s spine! He used divine strength to carve it in two!”
Wait… hadn’t he been the one I had scared off while playing around with [Manipulate Protein]? What in the… what?
Shinya seemed just as clueless as I was, but I heard a sharp snort coming from behind me. All Kylan offered was an innocent look, however, and I knew I would be extracting no answers out of him.
Eh, it was probably unimportant anyway.
“It’s medicine,” Shinya explained. “Eric created it. By giving this dose to me, it protects me from the Blighted Curse in the future.”
The villager’s eyes widened. “[Warpriests] have such a skill?” he asked, shocked. “But of course… that must be how he cured Caleb of the goblin’s curse…”
…how was it that Shinya’s explanation was so readily accepted by everyone, while I stumbled on my own words while trying to describe what the vaccine did? If Grynasar offered courses on public speaking and communication, I sorely needed to attend one of those.
By then, Alicia had removed the pauldrons of her plate armour as well. The murmuring in the crowd grew – they must have recognised the princess for who she was, even though her armour did not bear her family’s emblem.
Excellent!
Variolation had truly taken off in England and Western Europe in the early 18th Century through the influence held by Lady Mary Montagu, who had witnessed the practice in the Ottoman Empire, and had her own children inoculated against smallpox. The practice had slowly spread among the aristocracy after news of her practice and its relative success was made known, paving the way for more widespread acceptance of the technique.
It was a piece of random historical trivia that unfortunately took up space for more valuable and deserving things, but hey – it had come in useful once in that pub quiz a while ago!
As crown princess, Alicia Everach’s influence would far outweigh that of Lady Montagu. Things were blazing off to an excellent start, and all it took was Shinya’s presence to convince everyone that vaccination worked, even though there were no results to prove it just yet!
“Eric,” she said curtly.
“Princess,” I replied in kind, already drawing up a second dose. Needles and syringes had to be changed, of course – I did not want to spread an epidemic of blood-borne infections. I would need Celeste to dispose of them all with a [Firebolt] once I was all done. “Sit down, please.”
I applied traction, and aligned the needle in place. “Sharp scratch… done.”
I handed her a piece of gauze. Next was Finn. His presence attracted less attention from the villagers, since he had no notable peerage of his own, but they were still scrutinising my actions carefully.
When it came to Celeste, however…
She drew up the sleeve of her robe, stepping into the chair that now served as my impromptu vaccination station. She was uneasy with the practice, probably doubting its efficacy, but after her friends had already gone with the procedure, she chose to follow suit.
Before she even had a chance to sit down, however, I made my objections known. I may not be a medical professional, but I had ethics to uphold!
“I’m not going to vaccinate an elf!” I protested. Then, because I knew Alicia would retort to that, I explained myself. “Even if you’re only part-elf, I don’t know anything at all about how that might affect your physiology. This attenuated virus might just be more virulent to you than the wild-type strains! I mean, I haven’t even had a chance to study your immune system; for all I know, you might not even be able to mount an adaptive response! Heck, I don’t even know whether you’ve got an immune system – I mean, you’ve got to, surely, though the question remains as to just how exactly that would be like –”
This time, cognisant of my own rambling, I shut up.
Off to the side, Slime-bro mimed a slow clap.
Celeste seemed perplexed for a moment, but then spoke wisely. “Huh?”
It was then that a thought struck my mind.
It was sneaky and underhanded, but if it meant that I could obtain some samples for my research…
“I just need to make sure that it’s perfectly safe for you,” I assured her, switching tones. “If I could draw a few vials of your blood, a bit of skin tissue, and maaaaybe a scrape from your cheek, if you just give me a bit of time, I might be able to figure out if this vaccine is alright with the specifics of your physiology, or whether I’ll need to tailor make a different version specifically for you.”
Hopefully, I didn’t sound too greedy there. Already, I was leaving out the urine and stool sample. Those could come at a later time and date.
She nodded firmly. “What do I need to do?”
Ah, victory.
A shame I had to go about such roundabout means to obtain what I so desired, but I highly doubted Alicia would appreciate me poking and prodding at Celeste in order to study the specifics of her biology – if there even was any difference from normal humans that came from her part-elven heritage. If it meant having to hoodwink a naïve innocent girl like Celeste, I was willing to bear the burden of shame so long as it meant that I could determine how her part-elven heritage manifested as a distinct phenotype, despite apparently having only a single elven-blooded ancestor generations ago.
My money was still on inbreeding.
It was the most likely answer, barring less common inheritance of traits such as mitochondrial transmission from mother to child. It would certainly be more convenient for my own understanding – I had pretty much slept my way through genetics lectures back in undergraduate classes.
The villagers were now hoping to get a dose of their own, following in their hero’s example. It was good that we had prepared plenty of stock in Hawksmoor – if we hadn’t, we would have needed to return after ramping up production in Grynasar.
For now, though, I didn’t have the time to attend to them – science demanded to be performed. Luckily for me, I had Aksal.
“Aksal,” I called out. “You take over.”
From the exasperated look he gave me, he clearly saw through my act, but made no comment on it.
“Now, then,” I said, smiling sweetly at Celeste. “If you could just rest your forearm over here, I’ll tie a tourniquet around your arm and draw some blood…”
-x-x-x-
“This is bull,” I sulked, letting my grievances be known to the one person willing to listen to my complaints. “Unfairness of the highest degree, and I say that knowing that you have a cheat-code on the back of your hand that gives you main character energy.”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
I could perform my various analyses perfectly fine. The trouble lay in the fact that Celeste was extraordinarily normal. Negative data, in other words.
The constituents of her blood were just as expected. Her cells looked morphologically the same. I had no means of genomic sequence alignment to compare her genetic material against a reference genome, but from what I could tell of her karyotype and with vague comparisons to my own, she was just as human as everyone else.
Heck, Kylan would probably say that she was more human than I was.
Why, then, did she have classical Tolkien-esque elven traits? Was she a token elf-like character just because all isekai works had one? Was this some mystical law of the multiverse that all parallel universes of the isekai genera had to obey?
Shinya shook his head, bemused. “Careful that Alicia doesn’t hear you,” he whispered, point at the princess in question, who was addressing the townsfolk. “She’s quite protective of Celeste.”
Ah. So Shinya knew that as well, then. How would that dynamic factor in once the romantic subplot kicked in between himself and the members of his party?
I didn’t know, but it would make some excellent material for my future novel. I could see the title of the novel reshaping: I Became a [Sword Saint] in a Fantasy World and Accidentally Set Up a Love Triangle with my Travelling Companions?!
Boy, that was a mouthful. Anything for the clicks, I guess.
“Well, it’s probably safe, I guess,” I said, admitting defeat as I turned my thoughts back toward the present time and place and addressed Celeste once more. “I’ll give you your dose.”
She had gingerly cut off a small portion of skin, grimacing as she did so, but had healed up the wound immediately afterwards. By inoculating an extremely small titre of the virus against it and visualising the course of infection with [Bio-analysis], it appeared that the viral activity was still grossly attenuated, adapted to a different host species as they were. Considering that her circulating immune cells were identical to my own, the vaccine would likely be just as effective.
“Great!”
“Sharp scratch,” I warned half-heartedly. “And done. You run along and play with your friends, now. Don’t trip.”
Shinya sighed. “We aren’t that far apart in age, Eric.”
“Ah, youth.” I shook my head whimsically. “I remember when I was a bright-eyed undergraduate believing that I could change the world… oh, how the years have taken their toll on me…”
He rolled his eyes at the theatrics. “Well, Aksal’s almost done on his end as well,” he said. “We should get going.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “Well, manticore’s waiting. Let’s go!”
I placed Celeste’s samples in the chilled container, just in case I wanted to re-inspect them at some point if they remained viable. Maybe get them fixed in formalin or something at some point. Did they even have formalin here?
That was a stray thought that actually did hold relevance, for once – if I wanted to study samples in Grynasar later, having access to proper tissue fixatives was going to be essential. Hopefully the alchemists had them in stock.
Without further ado, I boarded the carriage, where Kylan and Slime-bro were already waiting. Kylan would arrive and get us moving soon enough. “Had fun?”
“Don’t even start,” I warned. I needed an outlet for my frustration, and before me were two prime victims – ahem – students. “Alright! It’ll take some time before we reach the goblin tribe, so we’ll have a quick lesson on basic Mendelian genetics during the ride there!”
It spoke of how much Kylan now accepted his place in life that all he did was give a long sigh, before taking out a notebook that he now carried with him at all times.
Outside, I could hear the villagers clamouring as they said their final farewells. “Hero Shinya…”
Looks like it would take some time indeed. All the better for me!
“Right, listen up. This is pretty damned important to all biological disciplines, so I’ll take things slow.” I adopted what I was now starting to call my ‘lecture voice’, clearing my throat. “You may have noticed that children take after their parents, but why is that so? One prevailing theory in the past was the idea of blending inheritance, in which children took the average of values of their parents for any particular characteristic. But is that true?”
Kylan and Slime-bro were paying rapt attention. Good.
“Well, less than two hundred years ago, a monk, mathematician, and biologist by the name of Gregor Mendel asked that same question, and began studying traits among the pea plants in his garden. He was observant – and probably had way too much free time without the Internet; no, don’t ask – and he noticed that there seemed to be certain traits inherited independently of other traits: seed shape, flower colour, seed coat tint, pod shape, pod colour, flower location, and plant height. Before we talk about the science, however…”
I looked them both in the eye, ready to impart the words of wisdom I wished I had known before I chose to take on a PhD. This was knowledge not shared in schools, and knowledge that one discovered on the job.
“Listen up, both of you. If you take nothing else from this lecture, simply hearing what I tell you next will save you from a life of misery and frustration.”
Something about my seriousness must have gotten through to them, because they both sat up straighter in their seats. As much as a Slime could, anyway.
“From Mendel’s example, you can learn two things. The first: pay attention to everything. Sometimes, the grandest truths lie hidden in the simplest of things.”
I paused.
A few moments passed.
I looked at them expectantly.
“…and the second?”
“The second,” I said, hiding a victorious grin for successfully building up my audience’s anticipation, “is this: sometimes, the best scientists are the luckiest, and that’s the sad truth of life.”
Kylan waited, as though expecting to hear more, but no addition was forthcoming.
“Uh… what?”
“All the seven parameters he chose? Mostly monogenic inheritance, sited at loci on different chromosomes. But oh, hey, guess what? The damned pea plant only has seven pairs of chromosomes!” I spat out. It was petty and spiteful of me, and it was no doubt my jealousy doing the talking – there was no way I would have paid attention to such minutiae in his shoes – but I was for the most part just a failed graduate student playing as a scientist. “He didn’t have to contend with genetic linkage, or epistatic interactions between genes, or anything more complex than the barest basics of what makes a gene and how they’re inherited! Nice and clean data, without anything to throw a wrench into a convenient hypothesis!”
Alright. Rant done. I inhaled deeply, calming myself, and began to proceed with my lecture proper.
Hopefully, the sudden change in tone wouldn’t scare my students away from a life in science. It was frustrating, and it could be utter bullshit at times, but hells if it wasn’t the most rewarding career ever.
My friends who weren’t in the know often asked me what science was like, and my answer was always the same: imagine Dark Souls, but in real life, except you don’t actually die. A hundred failures in a row, but finally defeating the damned boss gives you a rush of endorphins like no other. Then you go on to the next boss, and see how the developers want to screw you over this time, except here both the bosses and the developers are none other than the grand mysteries of life itself, and they deliberately made the bosses imbalanced to all hell.
How’s that for an analogy? And here my literature teacher said I would never amount to much!
“What Mendel found over the course of the next ten years laid the foundation of the modern science of genetics. You see, by artificially crossing them between one another – that is to say, deciding which varieties were fertilised by which other varieties – and recording the results, he found the most basic pattern in which such traits were passed on. Today, the fruits of his painstaking journey of discovery are known as Mendelian inheritance, that was later built upon by the work of other biologists…”
-x-x-x-
“And that is why the mystery that is Celeste Grynas pisses the hell out of me,” I finished, irate. “She just does not make any bit of sense! Unless I inspect every single gene and protein at the individual level, possibly compare them to a wider cohort and her immediate family, there’s just no way I can figure out what makes her so special! It’s publication-worthy material of the holy trinity of Cell-Nature-Science just sitting there, except that all I have now is the equivalent of Part A of the first supplementary figure of the paper! And the damned Reviewer Three will still bash the hell out of it and demand for me to perform impossible experiments before deeming it acceptable for publication! You two understand, right?”
Ho, boy, did it feel good to finally let that frustration loose. If no one else had been able to understand why I was so perplexed, all I needed to do was make others see reason.
Luckily for me, the basic building blocks of genetics were pretty basic concepts to grasp, which meant that I could get Kylan and Slime-bro up to speed fairly quickly. I had dived into the lecture with gusto – covering the notion of genes and alleles, genetic loci and linkage, homologous recombination, and the basic patterns of dominant, recessive, and co-dominant inheritance of traits. Only then would it be possible for them to see why elves were utter bullshit, secondary only to manticores.
As of now, of course. The truest heights of bullshittery were likely still lying out there, waiting to prey upon any unsuspecting [Biologist].
I had teased more complex models for other characteristics that I would cover in the next lesson – first was polygenic traits, where multiple genes interacted additively to influence a phenotype. That should contrast nicely with epistasis, where the effect of one gene was dependent upon what was encoded at a separate gene, for example a pair of genes whereby a product encoded by one gene directly acted upon that encoded by another gene at a separate locus.
As things stood, however, I thought I had covered a decent amount of material, considering that this was only their first lecture.
“Well, that brings today’s lesson to a close. Revise your material dutifully; it’s pretty important, so I’ll be testing you two to make sure you know the concepts well. Any questions?”
Kylan’s face was slightly tinged with red. Huh. When had that even happened?
“Something wrong, Kylan?”
It was at that point that he doubled over, hands placed on his belly, and burst into laughter.
“Eric,” he forced out between gasps. “You know that everyone could hear you, right?”
Ah, right. This wasn’t the same carriage we had rode in, which had enabled Kylan to sneak on board and subject me to the terror of [Distract]. With thinner walls, and a more compact design, this carriage had no such insulation of sound.
Well, it wasn’t like I intended these lessons to be a secret. The more people who appreciated biology, the better! In Grynasar, I probably might need to give a couple lectures for the purposes of scientific outreach. Review committees loved that kind of stuff.
Ah.
Ahhhh…
Ah.
“Oh, hell.”
Why does this even keep happening?
Was this yet another natural law of the universe; an extension of the one that said ‘Verily, Tolkien-style elves shalt exist in any derivative work of the isekai genre’?
I sat up in my seat, opening the window, and peered outside. Sure enough, though they were pretending not to notice, it was clear that our escort party had heard every single unflattering word I said.
I sought out Celeste immediately. What did that expression even mean? Was she angry? Amused? Annoyed? Was that a promise of future retribution? Did I have to fear being set alight with a [Firebolt]? Was she going to block all my requests for funding? Stop me from collecting more samples? Bar my entry to Grynasar? Use her influence over the city’s top brass and engage in the nepotism that pervaded science? Reject my position in academia before it even truly began, and doom me to a life of – I shivered at even the mere thought of the horrifying word – industry?
Could she even do any of that?
“The people of your world sure made some interesting discoveries, didn’t they?” Finn commented mildly, glancing at Shinya. “I, for one, hadn’t expected to learn about these ‘genes’ or ‘alleles’ when we set off from Everach.”
“Well, that was refreshing,” Shinya said, a sly smile on his face. “You were a lot more enthusiastic in your lessons than my teachers back in school.”
I coughed, eager to turn their attention away from myself. “Let’s just get back on track.” Huh. That lesson had gone on for longer than I’d thought. “Are we anywhere near yet?”
“It’s just ahead,” Finn said, pointing. I craned my head past the open window, looking into the distance. “Thanks, by the way. It was an entertaining lesson.”
Well, I might as well try and reap what benefit I could here.
“You know, you could come join my lab,” I suggested. Finn’s skills in tracking would be a godsend if I ever needed samples of interest captured, and from what I had seen of his work with the manticore based on description alone, he was far better at anatomic sketches than myself. “I’ve still got plenty more topics to cover!”
He shook his head. “No, thanks.”
Shame. Guess it was still just my two assistants and myself.
I wisely kept quiet for the rest of the ride, now that I knew the hazards that could come with freely speaking my mind. Soon enough, we neared the ruined goblin village.
As I alighted from the carriage, I could see goblin corpses strewn about, thrown like rag-dolls against trees or the primitive huts they had constructed. Several had been ripped by what looked like claws or talons, more than a few had been entirely crushed in a vice-like grip, and a few had been flattened to bloody pulps.
“Hmm,” Finn spoke, inspecting them. “Talons, huh? And the hind-limb… hooves?”
He swept his gaze across the aged battlefield, taking in every detail. Then, he pointed upward. Squinting, I saw what looked like a spear impaled against a tree.
“They did some damage to it. Glancing strike, but it must have left a decent gash on its tail. Retaliated, but missed.” He pointed once more, toward a pattern of manticore spines. Two were pierced cleanly through cracked ribs – the venom coating it had already liquified the goblin’s flesh – but a volley of spines had missed their mark completely. “Probably hit its eye; took out some of its ability to aim. It… retreated; had to recover and lick its wounds. Would have gone on to chase the fleeing goblins otherwise, and been lured to the village in the process. Lucky us.”
… how was Finn even doing all this? Was this a skill specific to the [Pathfinder] class, or did he just possess incredible amounts of deductive ability?
Was he even correct, or merely spouting possibilities?
“Quite impressive, huh?” Shinya asked knowingly, as Finn kneeled against a tree, inspecting gouges carved into the trunk. “I couldn’t believe it myself, either.”
“Don’t suppose you know how it works?”
“Not in the slightest. Finn says something about how all tracks leave a slight echo of history behind, but the way he explains it makes it sound impossible to understand. I do know that it’s more effective if the tracks are recent, though.”
A walking Sherlock Holmes, then. Very handy.
“It made its way through this undergrowth, and left the remaining goblins behind.” Finn motioned with his hand, carefully wrapping a thick sheet of hide around his other arm before he probed in the tall grass. “And… here we go.”
In his hands he held a goblin arrow. The arrowhead was dented, and the shaft was bent, likely having been deflected where it hit the manticore. As Finn continued that explanation, however, my attention was drawn to something else.
There was blood upon the arrowhead – and at its very tip, a small chunk of flesh that hadn’t yet rotted away was still present.
With the manticore spines, I had been unable to extract any meaningful information about its genetic makeup, simply due to the fact that those spines were only a mass of organised fibrils and a yet-unidentified toxin.
Here, however, was an extraordinarily precious sample.
“Eric?”
“Oooh, gimme, gimme!” I pleaded eagerly, hands held out. “Me like shiny thing!”
“Uh…” Finn glanced at his companions, uncertain. Shinya gave a non-committal shrug. “Sure, I guess?”
Gingerly, he dropped it into my palm.
And without further ado, I used the skill that was now becoming one of my staple tools.
[Bio-Analysis].
“What flavour are you, I wonder…?”
Mana flared, my vision blurred for an instant, drawing into focus a short moment later.
And what I saw made absolutely zero sense.
The nuclear architecture threw aside the regular tenets of cell biology. Multiple nuclei within a cell was not exactly unheard of – polynucleated syncitia were features of regular physiology in certain cases, and in altered cell biology of cancer.
What the manticore possessed, however, were structures for which I knew no equivalents of. There were dozens of enveloped structures resembling nuclei containing what I assumed was genetic material, with a larger membranous envelope surrounding this collection of smaller membrane-bound structures. Within each of the smaller basic units were a full complement of chromosomes that made up an individual karyotype.
And in fact…
There. In one of the small substructures was 46XY. A quick and dirty comparison to the karyotype of one my own cells suggested that they were virtually identical. If I had a means to compare their bases, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shared sequence homology.
In short, the manticore possessed human genetic material. Somehow. Magically.
And there were dozens of these miniature organelles. Tens of dozens. All of them each containing the genetic material of a single different species, and these substructures in turn bound within a ‘supranuclear’ structure. Every individual cell of the sample of this putative manticore possessed a single unit of this megastructure, in the way that most cells tended to have a single nucleus.
This was some screwed up biology. On Earth, something like this would never have been feasible – introducing that much complexity gave too much room for error in division, never mind the fact that it was absolutely wasteful. Yet, the powers that be that invested themselves within Vergence had made it completely possible.
“Did you figure anything out?”
“Biology is broken, this world sucks, and the universe is a lie.”
There was a yelp of alarm from Slime-bro. I was only dimly aware that he wobbled toward me, looking up at me with uncertainty. My focus was fixed entirely on the sample embedded on the arrowhead, hoping that somehow I had come to the wrong conclusion.
It was then that I frowned.
In layman’s terminology, the manticore was a Frankenstein’s monster that had its genetic material haphazardly placed in bags, that were then placed in a larger bag, and the whole thing then shoved into a cell. Still, there was an order to it all. It wasn’t a complete mess; not like the lesions of chromosomal-instability high cancers. There, breakpoints, amplifications, large swathes of indels, inversions, and all sorts of other chromosomal aberrations were present, but for all its outlandishness every individual karyotype out of the dozens in the sample were clean.
I looked deeper, stretching my [Bio-Analysis] further.
There.
I was no geneticist, but this was still somewhat within the purview of my knowledge. Just barely.
Of the dozens of full sets of chromosomes of different ploidy number, all but one set were engulfed in repressive epigenetic marks. H3K9me3. H3K27me3. Across the entire lengths of chromosomes corresponding to the genetic material of dozens of species, transcription was completely repressed, sparing only a single set to manifest.
Within those mini-nuclei – err, sub-nuclei? Whatever the nomenclature was, every cell within that small piece of sample had all bar one of these mini-genomes compacted as heterochromatin. Normal chromosomal architecture was preserved only in one of these substructures, a diploid set of 39 pairs, thirty-three of them much smaller than the remaining six.
It sounded, funnily enough, like the genetic makeup of Gallus gallus. The common chicken.
All the cells in the small sample of flesh on the arrowhead had the same pattern of inactivation, leaving only one set with the normal chromosomal architecture I would expect. Gears were already turning in my head, and things were starting to make some sense.
In therian female mammals that possessed two copies of the X chromosome, if there was no mechanism in place to suppress the expression of one of them, females of the species would have twice the dosage of products encoded by genes of the sex chromosome compared to males. Left unchecked, it would result in a multitude of biological issues outweighing the benefits of having sex chromosomes in the first place.
To compensate for that, nature developed tricks of her own, guided by the hands of time. There existed X-inactivation: early in embryogenesis, each cell of the diploid female would inactivate a random copy of the X chromosome, and this inactivation would be maintained throughout the lifetime of the cell and all its descendants within the organism.
X-inactivation. First discovered by the geneticist Mary Lyon, and also given the name of Lyonisation, this process seemed uncannily similar to that, though applying across entire sets of chromosomes for the many species present within the sample of manticore flesh. It explained certain facets about the manticore – for instance, based on Finn’s rendition of the creature the night before, why it possessed local patches that corresponded to various creatures, in the same way that X-inactivation provided reason for tortoiseshell cats.
Still, it didn’t explain everything, and in all honesty it felt a bit of a tease.
For a simpler description, it appeared that the remains of the manticore before me held genetic material of dozens of different species, but based on the pattern of its genetic marks was only able to express that of the common chicken. Could it be that this were how manticores possessed different traits? Different locations expressing the genetic material of different species?
Some things didn’t add up still, but it sounded possible, though I didn’t know how it could happen naturally. Embryologists, for instance, had already done experiments decades ago grafting limb buds from the embryo of a chick to that of a quail. The characteristics of the developed limb followed those of the donor, implying that limb specificity was defined by species-intrinsic traits rather than extrinsic factors of the graft recipient, at least within the constraints of their experimental protocol. In complement to that, a scientist could even graft in an extra limb bud, that would then develop into an additional limb.
In that regard, it was fully possible for a manticore to have scales on one location and feathers on another, and have different numbers of limbs and all the other sorts of bizarreness that Finn had informed me of. It didn’t fit all the facts and data I had on hand, but it was a starting point.
When would this process occur? How did it occur? What regulated it, and how could it go wrong? Was this the norm, or was the sample before me a freak chance occurrence of a perfectly mundane creature gone wrong, giving rise to manticores as the world knew it?
Too many questions. No answers to be had. There was a single piece of the puzzle, but I didn’t even know the picture of what it was that I was supposed to be building. Here and now, it seemed that I was utterly in the dark about it all, until I got more information and studied more samples.
But if I could learn more about this… if I could see just what made it tick…
Could I, mayhap, discover just what a manticore even was? Could I use this facet of utterly implausible biology for other use? Could I be the [Biologist] whose name would be immortalised in the annals of history? Could I discover what made it tick, and have generations of unfortunate students of biology calling the process Ericisation?
I laughed.
“Eric?”
“Onward!” I cried out, eagerly looking around as though half-expecting a fresh manticore to pop up from around the ruins of the goblin village. “Biology demands samples! Our thirst shall not be sated!”
Ah, but perhaps I was getting ahead of myself. I cleared my throat, ready to explain what I had found –
“Oh, no…” Kylan moaned, wincing. “I know that look…”
Ignoring him, I began to speak in as regal a manner I could to a bemused audience. “Mary Lyon, born 15 May 1925, was an English geneticist who discovered perhaps one of the most fascinating phenomena in genetics with important implications across all biology…”
Despite the many more questions churning in my mind, this proved one thing: a manticore wasn’t completely foreign after all. Biology still held some truths.
It did not change my mind, however, that manticores were still utter bullshit.