The Messengers of Sanctuary

Epilogue 1 - Nina

Nina had assumed for the last couple of years that she had figured out everything she was ever going to about the zombie virus, its mutations, effects, and the possibilities it could achieve if changed exactly so. Mostly she was held back by one thing and one thing only.

Morality.

Back in World War II, the only good thing that came out of the holocaust was the research. The scientists hadn't cared for human life, and so they could easily discover the limits and solutions to so many near death experiences. They had figured out so many things, but they'd left behind their humanity. They'd created ways to help by harming.

Nina wasn't a doctor, she hadn't sworn oaths to never kill, but she still knew that humanity was a valuable thing, especially after the world ended. Suddenly she was the only one that anyone knew of with the expertise and capability to create a cure.

Others in her place would have easily gone into human experimentation. Ignoring their morals and sacrificing their own humanity for the good of the race. But Nina wasn't a monster, she knew that people could still live, could still dream, could still fight. Even after the fall of humanity.

She also knew that the world needed as much peace as possible. If their salvation was brought through death and pain then what kind of future could they possibly hope for? What kind of a cure was it if it was made with hatred and desperation?

The first day that Nina realized this, she decided that she would never use an unwilling subject, she would never use deceit to get people to help her, and she would NEVER help by harming.

Those morals were stretched the slightest bit after meeting Trinity and realizing that the nightstalker didn't plan on ever helping her. A part of Nina wanted to force the nightstalker to help them. Part of Nina deep down wanted to ask Daniel to capture her, even though the woman still had her mind.

But Nina refused to give up her humanity.

Eventually she did make a cure. A true cure. She made a vaccine, a sanity serum, and a controlex. She made so many discoveries after that too, with the help of so many great people.

And Nina had assumed that the virus had given up all of its secrets.

Early on, Nina had suspected there might be multiple strains, she'd considered the possibility based on data collected during other pandemics. And really it seemed more impossible that there was only one virus at play here, viruses mutated, that's what they did. As she'd learned more about this one though, realized just how stable it was, she'd discounted the possibility. It got less and less likely with every passing year, with every blood sample and DNA search. The virus was the same forever, its mutations almost always temporary.

Until it wasn't.

Now, Nina was once more the only person who could figure it out. It wasn't nearly as desperate, she reflected. The cure did work on tunnelers, it worked on hybrids too from what she could see.

But demons and heartfire refused to cooperate. They were similar, she reflected. Similar in temperament. Their shapes and patterns were different, the portions that had been taken from the zombie virus were stark, but they were also very unique to the virus they now were.

Side by side, Nina never would have called them related. At least...Not until she delved into yet another blood sample, this one from Yijun, and realized that her immune system didn't exist.

After that Nina was a bit frantic, she checked the other pyros blood samples, but all of them were perfectly normal for a zombie. Only Yijun didn't have an immune system.

Nina took a sample of a common flu virus, putting a drop onto Yijun's sample. The demon virus easily fought it back.

She did the same with each of the other blood samples, watching with wide eyes as they vigorously attacked it. The other samples didn't do it nearly as efficiently, but as expected, the flu virus was gone a moment later.

Had Nina neglected to check Yijun's blood till now for a reason? She'd mostly been working with one at a time because that was more simple, but mostly she'd been using Fen's blood.

Nina looked back at the odd sample out, injecting a sample of the zombie virus into it. She herself classified demons as zombies, but she reflected that she would have to change that as Yijun's virus immediately turned and fought off the interloper. If this had truly been a branch of the zombie virus, it would have simply integrated itself into the system and changed nothing.

Nina injected the zombie virus into each of the other blood samples, frowning as two of them failed to fight off the zombie virus. Ephriam and Vincent? After a time their systems seemed to...back down? And from there the two viruses cooperated with each other. Nina had a possibility in her mind that this could be how those 'lost ones' were created. She'd heard the pyros speak of them before, their friends who had lost their minds permanently.

After a moment of watching curiously, Nina turned back to Yijun's sample, taking a bit out and putting it into a clean human sample.

It easily took over, burning through the defenses, destroying most of the immune system and then proclaiming itself dominant.

Nina did the same with the other pyros samples, each of them did worse than the last until Vincent's sample simply failed to take hold and was destroyed by the human immune system.

Nina frowned and took out a vial of contagious heartfire, trying that in Yijun's sample, perhaps they would fight it out? Nina knew from a cautionary tale the Sanctuary traders had shared that if a zombie was given heartfire it would die since the trigger happy virus made its mission to destroy any and all traces of the interloper virus. Nina watched the sample, waiting patiently for them to start duking it out or something.

What she hadn't expected was for them to ignore each other.

Nina finally remembered the experiment she'd done a while back, tracing the heartfire's detection ability.

It had thought there was something similar to the south. A large gathering...which she might have misinterpreted because of distance, perhaps it had just been saying, 'there's something like me to the south. And there's a lot of it.'

Nina sat back in her chair, setting up that same experiment, feverishly putting it together as her drive to know bore into her soul.

Nina listened to the equipment for a long time. Trying to gauge where the other vibrations were coming from. Finally taking out a map and circling her location, the location of ironwind, and the location of Sanctuary. She wrote a couple of numbers, listening to the pulses and writing arrows for direction.

It could indeed detect Sanctuary if Nina was right. It got a bit confused because of the amount of demons in this area, but it could sense them. The five brightest nearby pulses would be Chicory and her messengers.

From there it got harder, Nina stayed in her impromptu lab for hours, pouring over the pulses, trying to figure out the locations of the furthest ones.

Finally, with a big red marker, Nina circled the general areas of China, Europe, and India. It was widespread across the middle east and northern Africa too, but it felt like severe overkill to just circle the entire continent, so she made a couple of dots in the lesser areas.

Then hesitantly, because of how faint it was.....

Nina circled Australia. 

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