"Excuse me? Doctor Tofu? Could you please let me in? My back is killing me, I could do with one of your pressure point massages... Oh hello young lady! Could you please open the door, some fool seems to have locked me out!"
Akane fell against the window in frustration. The old man obviously couldn't hear her, and his eyesight was too poor to read the note pinned to the window. She had to get rid of him, but how? Before she could formulate a plan, however, a large van sped down the street opposite the clinic, and crash landed into the wall opposite. It took everything she had to resist running out there to help them. Luckily, a number of figures emerged apparently unscathed, wearing hazmat suits. One of them approached the old man, and Akane strained her ears to listen.
"... They won't let me in! How cruel of them, eh sonny?"
"Listen, you really don't want to go in there. Trust me on this. You'd be taking your life into your hands."
The old man's face turned pale. "You don't mean that... that... Kasumi is in there! Is she?"
"... Would it get you to leave if I said she was?"
And then, just like that, the old man was gone. Not bad for someone apparently suffering backache. The figure in the hazmat suit produced a pad of paper and a pen, wrote on it, and held it up to the window. "Don't panic. Everything will be alright."
Well now that was just inviting trouble. Telling someone not to panic when they're being quarantined was like telling them there might actually be a reason to panic. And if that happened, well, the mind got up to all sorts of strange and horrible things with that kind of ammunition. And worse yet, being told that everything will be alright actually meant that everything was not alright quite at the moment, thank you for the reminder.
"WAAAGH! What's wrong with my little girl? Let me see her, I have to know she's alright!" Oh good, her family had arrived. Nabiki was pretending not to know their father, and had shuffled off into the crowd that had started to gather around the clinic. While Kasumi was trying to calm father down, and not doing very well. Three men in hazmat suits were trying to hold him back, but she couldn't make out what any of them were saying.
"Hey, what's going on out there?" Ranma asked.
Akane shrugged. "I'm not sure, exactly. Our families have arrived, and those men in the hazmat suits seem to be building something around the door. It looks like a tunnel of some sort."
"Hey, isn't that your father trying to take that guy's suit?"
"I'm afraid so."
Thankfully, his efforts were unsuccessful. For once, Genma Saotome had seen fit to prevent someone else from performing a truly moronic act. He did this by rendering Soun unconscious, and carrying him off to the side. As this happened, a large ambulance rolled down the road. The now large crowd was forced to part, so that it could approach the clinic. It backed up to the end of the tunnel, and the door at the back of the ambulance was carefully attached to a hole, creating a sealed route between the front door and the protected vehicle. Unfortunately for Ranma, when the front door was forcefully opened by one of the workers, a table carrying a fish bowl was knocked over.
"Excuse me, girls. You'll have to come with us now."
Ranma picked the fish out of his hair. "This is gonna be one of those days, isn't it?"
"Ah, two weeks at the very least."
"Alright, this is quite enough. Isn't it about time you told us what's wrong with them?"
Nabiki was annoyed by this. All Doctor Tofu had been able to tell her was that it was something the government had been warning people about, but hadn't been able to tell her much more than the symptoms he'd been warned to look out for. Whenever they'd tried to find out what the hell was going on, they became evasive, but now that her sister was all settled in, there was nothing left to distract them with.
She looked at the middle aged women before her. She was obviously the one in charge. She had that wild eyed scientist look, and her unkept greying hair really didn't help the effect. Nor for that matter did her European accent. But now, at long last she finally had her attention. She didn't intend to waste it.
"As you vish, Miss Tendo. I am Doctor Hildegarde Lanstrom, and I fear zat zis situation, the fault is all mine. I vas hired by your government on ze basis of a paper of mine on positive viruses." She looked smug at the mention. "They vere a rather brilliant notion, if I do say so myself."
"But Doctor, just what is a positive virus? I've never heard of such a thing in any of the books I've borrowed from Doctor Tofu."
Yeah, Kasumi. Like she wasn't going to tell us.
"Vell, let me put it zis vay. Have you ever voken up in ze morning feeling refreshed and happy for no good reason?"
The sisters shared a look, and remembered an event from two years ago.
It was an early morning in the Tendo dojo, before the Saotome family had arrived. Kasumi had just delivered the finishing touches to this morning's breakfast, when she heard an unmistakable creak on the stairs. "Good morning Nabiki. Did you have a good night's sleep?"
Nabiki responded with an incoherent grumble. Kasumi smiled at her. She never had been a morning person.
"That's nice, dear. Would you please help me serve breakfast, since you're down?"
Another incoherent grumble.
"Yes, I do insist. You really don't do anything around the house and- Ah, good morning father. Did you sleep well?"
The Tendo patriarch beamed at his daughters, and spread his arms out wide. "Ah, what a beautiful day! The sun may not be shining, but that doesn't matter because for the plants, this downpour is a feast! Come now, I feel like dancing! I feel like singing. I gotta siiiiiiiiing!"
The sisters looked at each other in shock, and then back at their father. He'd started singing and dancing about the joys of life, and how thankful he was for the things that he had. Complete with backflips and somersaults in the garden. But just where did he get the top hat and cane?
Yet another incoherent mumble from Nabiki. Kasumi shook her head, and said "No dear, I'd best call him. He might not understand you this early in the morning." Nabiki gave Kasumi a pleading look after she said that. Kasumi sighed "Oh, fine. I'll get Akane to call Doctor Tofu while I attempt to calm father down."
Nabiki seemed satisfied with that. So she sat down to eat her breakfast, and enjoyed the show.
"Um, no," Soun said, attempting to recall such an experience. "I can't say I've ever felt that way."
"Such a shame, my dear sir. If you had experienced such a thing, it vould be because you had caught a positive virus. A negative virus is ze kind everybody knows of, ze flu, rabies, zat vun disease vat turns your bones into chocolate. But ze positive virus, zey are less known. Ve call ze vun zat causes feelings of happiness despite all reason ze reverse-flu strain."
"Hold on a moment," Nabiki interrupted. "Are you trying to tell us that you've put my sister and her fiance into quarantine together, because you don't want there to be an outbreak of general unacountable contentment? Excuse me if I don't hit the panic button, here."
"Eh? Zey are engaged? But zey are both girls! Ah no matter. A positive virus is still a virus, and do you know how zey reproduce? Zey hijack a cell, force it to make more like itself, zen kills the cell. Zis is not so good for the body after a time, regardless of what benefits ze virus might provide. Besides which, zer are other positive virus strains zan ze reverse flu. And frankly, I vould not vant an outbreak of any of zem, not at zis infectious level. Even ze reverse flu. But in any case, because of my paper, I vas offered a position by your government to determine the vay zese positve viruses vork. Vith their equipment, I quickly located the strains responsible for a number of interesting traits. Including reverse flu, good luck, charisma and, ahem, sexual magnetism."
Everybody in the room blinked simultaneously, even Kasumi.
"Yes, yes, sexual magnetism is a virus. Can ve please move on? Like children you are. Ze point is, once ze strains were identified and bred, ve started experimenting on zem. Zey became more infectious, and harder for ze immune system to eliminate. But for the sake of experimentation, ve also put markers in, so zat ve vould know which of our lab rats is infected vith vhat. Unfortunately, vun of zem escaped."
Everybody sat in silence for a few minutes, as the information was digested. Eventually, Kasumi spoke up with the obvious question. "So... um... which of the viruses is it?"
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(Posted Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:25)
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