Zeke, Ugo, and AJ gathered at the lab. They all had their masks and gloves on. Ugo and AJ watched Zeke hover the end of the syringe’s needle over the small circular glass tray of the brass monocular microscope styled with buttons and dials with a sigil on each of them.

“Careful, Zeke,” AJ said.

Zeke pushed the plunger a bit and squirted a chunk of the goo out to splat on the tray. A thin layer of glass materialized over it, sealing the gooey specimen in an airtight slide tray. Zeke figured it wasn’t worth commenting or spending a second to stare at in awe, giving all the crazy stuff he has seen today alone. He analyzed the draw tube and agonized over the thought of catching some hellish version of conjunctivitis from pushing his eye onto the lens. He sucked in his teeth and cleaned the draw tube lense with his leathered thumb and then did it anyway; he closed one eye and pushed the other onto the eyepiece and peered through the optical tube.

The image was blurred. Zeke fingered the rough edges of the dial and turned it a little. The image came into focus and he saw the black blotch.

He spun the dial all the way, and the image became crisp and high in detail, like a photo taken with a state-of-the-art camera by a highly skilled professional. He could see small bubbles erupt in the goo, and even smaller white dots sprinkled across. The edges of the goo were stretching and moving slightly, like tiny slugs. A colony of otherworldly specimens commingled in a spill of goo trapped in a compact glass space, fighting its way out. But what about Naomi’s cells? What were they doing?

Zeke scrabbled the limb of the microscope and found another dial. He turned it, and the image zoomed and morphed into something new. “Cielos,” he exclaimed.

“What?” he heard a concerned Ugo ask.

Zeke didn’t answer and stayed focused on the new image. It was like staring at a galaxy cluster. Bodies flowed along the dark crimson red aether-like space — red ones that took shapes resembling stars and the top part of a pitchfork, black ones that took the shape of discs with two curved tips jutting off the top, and white ones that took the shape of spheres and of a feathered wing. One of the spherical white cells had a black multi-legged cell adhered to the back of it. The black cell looked like a balled up millipede. The burdened white cell opened a tiny cavity in its front and expelled tiny multi-legged black cells that grew alarmingly quick to full size and then transform into spherical white cells and carry on swimming in the space, blending in, undetected, unharmed, and ignored by the other cells. A twisted version of the viral lytic cycle, Zeke concluded.

He returned the dial to its initial state and moved away from the microscope.

“What did you see?” Ugo asked again.

Zeke shot a look at AJ. “You brought the demonology book with the creatures, right?”

AJ nodded, grabbed the book from a nearby countertop, and handed it over to Zeke. He took it and leafed through its pages.

Ugo legged to the microscope and looked through the eyepiece. He turned a dial and then gasped. “Oh, cool,” he said excitedly. AJ walked to Ugo and he let her have a look as Zeke continued to page through the book with haste.

When he finally reached the demonic microorganism section, he stopped and stared at the left page where he found, at the bottom, a sketch of the virus identical to the one he saw in the bloodstream. He tried to keep his peripheral vision from focusing on the myriad of other horrifying, shapeless, multi-legged, multi-mouthed, multi-eyed, multi-faced abominations. The header next to the virus was — BOGGAD INFECTIOUS METAMORPH.

Zeke looked over at Ugo and AJ as they stepped away from the microscope. “Did you guys see it?”

“I saw the bug attached to one of the white cells and using it to create more bugs that are then taking the appearance of other white cells.”

“It’s called a Boggad Virus,” Zeke said and then looked down on the book. “‘An entity originating from the Boggart Swamp region in the Underworld's Realm. Can mimic components of the bloodstream of any creature upon entry. The entity multiplies and spreads until full assimilation; becoming a competent hive mind with an unyielding will over its new Container.”

“So, her cells aren’t attacking because they think it’s one of them,” Ugo said. “The threat itself just looks like any other functioning cell and it's chilling in the blood system. Killing everything slowly, undetected.”

“Hm, you’d think that God would give His lackeys smarter cells,” AJ said mockingly.

“Usually at the end of the lytic cycle. The virus destroys the cell after reproducing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here,” Zeke said.

“This virus reproduces over and over using the same host cell,” Ugo added.

“So, why aren’t the cells attacking the ones that are obviously infected?” AJ asked.

Zeke took a moment to think and said, “The virus attached to its host cell is mimicking all of its genetic material in its entirety. The enzymes, the protein of the membrane shell, everything. The infected cells are being recognized as just one, normal cell.”

“Okay, so, does the book say anything about how to get rid of it?”

Zeke looked over to the right page and saw a spread of sketches of demonic symbols. He became perplexed and examined both pages. There was no immediate correlation, and then he noticed small uneven vestiges of paper lined down in the middle of the book. He let out a groan.

“They tore the next page off,” Zeke lamented, “it could’ve had the cure and more information on the virus.”

“Whaaaat? But everything had been working so conveniently for us so far,” Ugo whined. “We’ve literally found rooms filled with deus ex machinas.”

Zeke examined the bits of paper further and realized some pieces were overlapping each other — more than one page had been torn. Zeke slammed the book onto the table and caved forward. “Now what?”

“Let’s just ask the angel,” AJ suggested. “She must know something that can help.”

“She said that she doesn’t know anything about the bug. She said that she doesn’t know much about anything of the… Realms.”

“What? Why? Is she dumb?”

“No, I don’t think that,” Zeke said, “she’s probably a new angel or something. A rookie, a newbie.”

“Well, she looks pretty young, maybe I still have a chance.”

AJ gave him a disgusted look. “With an angel…?”

“Love knows no bounds, AJ.” Ugo paced back and forth in the center of the room. “Okay, let’s see if we can use any real world stuff to help. It’s time for brainstorming, people! How do you usually fix a blood infection?”

“Medicine? Antibiotics? There might be some in here or in the dispensary that we missed,” AJ said.

“The page that probably talked about anything related to killing it is gone,” Zeke said despondently. “If we try things out at random, we might end up causing it to mutate,” Zeke shivered, “I don’t even want to imagine what a mutated demonic virus looks like.”

“How about a blood transfusion?” Ugo suggested.

“You want one of us to transfer our blood into her? If her super-cells can’t eliminate the cause, then ours would have no effect.” Zeke paused. “How about… dialysis?”

“Even if by some miracle we found a dialysis machine. No one here knows how to do it and we don’t exactly have the time to go on a crash course, well, Ugo does...” AJ trailed off. “Or we could improvise one… cut her open from various places and let the infected blood ooze out.”

“And where will we dispose of the infected blood?” Zeke questioned. “I don’t even know where we are going to put the one in the syringe. That seems way too dangerous and unlikely to work anyway. The virus will take us all down by being out in the open.”

“We need to focus on getting the bugs killed,” Ugo said. “Making the cells attack the right ones. Going back to medicine, let’s go back to that angelology book and look for something to power up her cells.”

“You just said it yourself. The problem isn’t the strength of the cells, but them knowing who to attack in the first place.”

“What if we just destroy all the cells? Like what they use for cancer patients. We’ll fry her immune system!”

Zeke looked at Ugo and said, “Chemotherapy on an angel? How would we even achieve that? We need to come up with a way for the body to attack cells even if it thinks it’s healthy… like an autoimmune disease…” Zeke looked down on the floor for a moment and then snapped his fingers. “With the overpopulation of white blood cells, they eventually start attacking each other. She’s not human, so it may work differently. We can force an autoimmune response. As the cells attack each other, new ones are made and this goes on until the system regulates itself, and the body is cleared of the virus.”

Zeke felt a pang in his head. It felt like a scalpel cut its way into his brain. He hunched over and hissed.

“Zeke?” AJ said, as she whipped over to him.

Zeke’s face scrunched up, and he dropped his head to the side. The pain incised from his brain all the way to his inner ear. He felt a continuous line between the two sections with tiny, sharp knives stabbing everything in between. His vision clouded and hued with a viridescent, as if he were looking through a green foggy window. Zeke lost control of volume and groaned as loud as a bleating goat. His friends were huddled around him at this point. He couldn’t hear a word they were crying out. When he looked at their blurry faces, a glimmering light shone and a silhouette of a unicorn appeared in front of it. Zeke was confused for only a second. Then, the pain subsided and was replaced with divine warmth. He lowered his mask and a deranged smile danced on his lips as he reveled in the comfort of his epiphany.

As his vision cleared, he froze and became confused on why he wasn’t confused by the blackened image.

“Zeke!” Ugo shouted.

Zeke looked at him vacantly. Ugo and AJ held faces of worry and despair.

“Don’t tell me the virus infected you!” AJ screamed.

“No!” Zeke screamed back, spooking Ugo and AJ. He stammered, “I… I know what to do.” Zeke could see the right words float in his mind as clear as an elementary math problem. He mentally grasped them and hurled them out into the open. “There’s no machinery in existence that can fry an angel’s immune system outside of a high-level Black Magic spell,” he explained. “Liquefied unicorn horn. That’s what we’ll use. It has the magical aptitude to increase the white blood cell count of any creature, even angels.”

Ugo and AJ stared blankly.

“And you know this, how?” AJ inquired.

Zeke kept rambling. “Small doses are incredibly effective. One syringe filled with the stuff injected into her bone marrow, on her spine, would be enough to cause an overdrive.” As the words escaped Zeke’s mouth, he became even more perplexed at how he understood what he was saying. The words flowed out of him on their own, like someone else took over his brain’s controls. Maybe he contracted a virus of some kind.

Zeke raised his mask back to the bridge of his nose. “Mora, AJ, prep for operation. The procedure is under way.”