Desolation [manxman] DRAFT

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

"You are back! Did you bring me something?" Ker excitedly clapped her hands together on screen, bouncing up and down and shrieked like an angry harpy, making me flinch as her voice assaulted my ears.

"No." I stated briefly.

"Why?" She pouted and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"I had more important things to do." I answered truthfully.

After taking a shower I had nothing better to do than going back to my room, grabbing my laptop and calling her. She had sent me a million messages demanding I'd get back to her as soon as possible. I wondered what would be of this much importance that she went out of her way to bother me. It couldn't be her wanting a present from me. She was desperate for attention but not that desperate.

"What could be more important than your favorite sister?" She exclaimed, seemingly indignant.

"Everything." I said, making her scowl. "What is it that you wanted to show me?"

"While you and your little team were doing whatever in the mortal realm, I went and actually did some real investigating. The problem is dragon pox, it's infecting the humans now. It must have slipped thorugh the sphere border controls and infected a lot of people very fast."

Yes, must have slipped through. Or someone who knew they weren't being controlled at those borders gently helped it across. Someone who was sure they weren't going to get infected. Someone who could just hop in and out. Someone like me. Or Ker. Or a couple other gods and goddesses in this pantheon, many more in others.

"Good job." I tried to sound somewhat friendly towards her.

Why hadn't I come up with that? Or better yet why didn't we notice such a potentially harmful disease, infecting thousands of thousands? Oh yeah, I was busy being a depressed piece of shit, whining about how much my life sucked and not getting done the slightest thing. It made sense, though. If you got infected with dragon pox you sure weren't going to die a peaceful death, putting me in charge of it. No, you suffered and once you were done begging for your death then maybe Ker was nice enough to grant you your wish. Either way it was a very long and painful death.

"Have you talked to Dad?" She asked, seemingly innocent.

I rolled my eyes and just ended the call, staring at my background and setting it to a slideshow of kittens. Apparently I was in that mood. At least there was progress. Progress was good. I needed to pay every single member of my family a visit and get my hands on two samples of dragon pox. The regular one and the one that was infecting humans. It must have somehow mutated to be able to leap to them. Or maybe someone had helped it.

"I want to get started on dinner soon. What do you want to eat." Alexios let me know as I came back to the living room.

"No time." I disregarded his efforts. "I have something to do."

"Oh okay. Can I come with you? Whereever you are going, that is." He raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, I need you to teleport me." I yelled over my shoulder, leaving again to walk to the steps that lead downstairs. "Outside the nearest hospital with a quarantine laboratory."

He seemed to remember the time I had a hard time coping with people being in my lab and thankfully stayed upstairs and out of my way and my lab. I pulled out every drawer and emptied them out on the laboratory bench to get an overview of the items I still had in stock. I placed an order for everything I was taking with me and that I was still missing. In the end my backpack was loaded with disposable pipette tips for each of the pipettes that meassured certain volumes, the pipettes, gloves, safety glasses and several hundred Eppendorf tubes. You can never have enough Eppendorf tubes. I grabbed a second backpack with different chemicals I had lying around and hoped they had the missing ones in stock.