@knifedunwall wanted a starter
Daud realized, while they were making their way across tundra elevation, something he remembered, and something he had promised her samples of. The Bully Rat Plague, the weeping sickness, an epidemic of catastrophic proportion, had no identifying cause. He had promised her samples while they had poured over slides in a microscope, and she introduced him to a cosmos of microscopic entities. He now was ahead of his time in breadth of knowledge, understanding that viruses existed.
What he had suggested, as the days passed in their travels, was to visit one of the forerunners on epidemic research, Dr. Luigi Galvani, who happened to take up residence in the capital city of Tyvia, Dabokva. The snow faded as they journeyed, something she wasn't used to but didn't hate as much as she thought she would. Hunger was a problem, but her companion made it a priority to instruct her on every edible plant and thing along the way, and the insects, in particular, were extremely palatable when roasted and salted.
She added them to the Ladder, as they moved, collecting samples, infecting them, and keeping a small vial upon her of explicitly Tyvian, and his world's nascent wildlife. The only real differences in their structures were the amount of sensitive features the beasts had to electromagnetic changes. The fish had longer whiskers, the hairs on the bellies of worms were much more sensitive. There were more attuned river beasts that used electricity as a primary hunting mechanism. Her hypothesis was the core of the planet was more excitable, more energized in general.
They followed a river through a small village, where some of the imperial fashion had trickled downstream, and he'd let her run amok at a tailor to collect more appropriate field wear, but also something to be seen in an academic's forum. The cuts didn't differ very much from what she was used to wearing, though the fabrics were of better quality.
She picked a deep, royal blue, high collared vest out, and coiled a crimson scarf around the inside of it. The pants and vest were buttoned asymmetrically with brassy gold that matched the key earring upon her ear. She had her own makeup, and accentuated the look herself.
She looked, by all rights, very, and undeniably important. Her deep maroon shade of lipgloss wasn't even a possibility with the powders and lacquers available. She did her eyes in a strange way that was minimal and sharp, and above all, her traveling gear was not of this time or place.
And so, she was dolled up for the meeting that admitedly piqued her interest very much. From Daud's initial plans, they were simply to let him slink in to Galvani's estate, and take whatever samples the pathologist had lying around still. She disagreed. If they were an archaic pathologist, then they were no longer playing in his field of thievery when they didn't need to.
"He's a man," she had told him, "-a man who is not only an isolated one, but potentially a lonely one. We're going to let me meet him, first."
And then, perhaps, they would be saving time, and funding, to impose themselves on Galvani to stay the night. They could, certainly, take what they wanted to, but it always helped to have allies in moderately high places.
And so they were here, confounding his home security in a foyer displaying instruments of all kinds, some of which she recognized. There were paintings hung in most spaces of the room, somewhere between realism and nationalism for many of them. The subjects were mostly people, and the skill was there, sure, but there was no emotional aspect to any of the works.
She smelled chemicals from outside his front door, and what excited her most was the smell of menthol mixed with formaldehyde. Someone who deals with the dead.
"Hmmm.... I have six doses left. Six days. This guy's real lucky I'm not terribly infectious right now," she muttered to her stiff companion.
