Necromancer

A Royal Road Fan Fiction

By: Halosty

Chapter 98

Searching for a cure required Mortimer to spend less time in a lab than he expected. Not that it wasn’t a long process, but there wasn’t as much standing around in a labcoat looking into a vial of something. However, there was also a lot more human testing than he was expecting. Not on an actual person, of course. That would have been a recipe for disaster. Instead, he found himself in a familiar sort of space, one in which he had spent a lot of time. Virtual reality.

As Mortimer well knew, the human body was extremely complicated. Thus, it was hard to perfectly simulate how it worked. However, near-perfect simulations were relatively much easier. It was one of these that he was working with. In front of him was a simulation of someone with the same condition as Solara. Although Mortimer didn’t particularly care about being able to cure the disease in general, he couldn’t stand to experiment on a likeness of Solara. Even though the visuals could be changed, Mortimer would still know. In addition to that, it wasn’t likely that a real cure would be significantly different from person to person. One version would be able to fix all of those who don’t end up with special complications.

Even if the cure was correct, of course, it would still take time to be useful. One of the perks of virtual reality was that time could be sped up. The human mind couldn’t handle much more than four times normal speed, but it didn’t have to. After all, the doctor didn’t need to experience all of the time, just observe what happens after certain amounts of time. It was set up so that time would stop advancing upon any significant changes in the condition of the “patient”.

As a starting point, Mortimer had administered the drugs used to treat any even vaguely similar condition. As could be expected, there were few positive effects, and many negative reactions. Otherwise, the condition would likely have been cured already. Mortimer tried various combinations of these as well. He could theoretically experiment on multiple “people” at once, but of course the processing power of the system would have to be split, so it wasn’t useful for his purposes as it wasn’t any faster. If he wanted to compare what happened side-by-side, there were always recordings of everything that happened, which were much easier to play back than calculate to begin with.

Overall, it was a very boring process. There weren’t any sudden bursts of inspiration, where he could just whip up something that would work. However, he got a few ideas that might eventually lead in the right direction. Mortimer thought back to his time in Royal Road, mixing poisons. It was much, much, easier to cause bad things to happen to people than to fix something. It wasn’t even that hard to cause fairly specific problems, because with poisons you didn’t care much about the side effects. After all, what was the harm if your deadly toxin also happened to cause loss of feeling in the lower body?

After one year, Mortimer had made very little progress. However, very little was not none. One formulation he’d come up with actually managed to briefly bring the patient to consciousness, for a few weeks. However, it couldn’t be called a cure at all, since they were barely functional, and quickly degraded back to how they were, before further advancing toward death. Mortimer was completely in awe of those who had come up with medicines before virtual reality. Having to experiment on humans would basically be fruitless, except in the case of a plague. It would still take quite a large amount of time to experiment on mice, and of course the tests weren’t going to be perfect.

The next year, Mortimer had various other times where the patients successfully regained consciousness, but they all had problems afterwards. With lesser doses, the side effects weren’t as bad, but the positive effects were almost nonexistent. Still, Mortimer wasn’t going to give up. He had a goal, and he was going to complete it. Plus, he had to admit that experimentation was sometimes a little bit fun. When it wasn’t boring or stressful.

After a few years, and what Mortimer experienced as about 10 more, he actually had something. It wasn’t a cure, exactly. However, with continuous use, the patient could function mostly normally. At least, they would be able to be conscious, and get up and walk around. They were still not healthy, though. Still, it was good enough that Mortimer was finally willing to use it on a scan of Solara. The effects… well, they were to be expected. No significant difference from the generic patient. Fortunately, that meant no unexpected side effects either.

Was it good enough? The answer was both yes and no. It was good enough to use. Mortimer would be able to see Solara up and moving again. She could at least start living life again. However, it still wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t a cure. Thus, Mortimer wasn’t going to stop where he was at. Still, he was proud of himself for finding a way to help Solara. Well, there were also those other people with the same condition, too, but that wasn’t important to Mortimer.

Upon thinking about it, Mortimer realized the yet unnamed disease might actually be names. According to tradition, it would be either names after the doctor who found a cure, or more likely, the most famous patient with it. Frankly, Mortimer didn’t like the sound of “Vail’s disease” and of course “Perrywinkle’s disease” was just stupid. Well, hopefully someone would come up with a better name.

Synthesizing the compound in the real world wasn’t a trivial process, but neither was it too difficult. After going through the approval process, it was finally starting to be produced. Next, it was administered to those who needed it, though of course Mortimer wasn’t specifically involved with any but Solara. First, small doses would be administered to make sure that there was no strange reaction in the real world that the simulation failed to reproduce. Then, after steady increases in dosages, Solara should awake.

Mortimer wanted to wait by her hospital bed for that, but unfortunately, he couldn’t. He still had other work to do. However, in his heart, he was sitting there, waiting for the moment she awoke. He still had things that he needed to say to her, after all.

//End Chapter 98

Author’s Note: I don’t want to draw this series out too long, but I also don’t want to abruptly cut it off. So, I’m still left with my approximation of 1+ chapters to go.