Chapter Text
Despite what some Goodreads comments might suggest, Carol Sturka was a meticulous researcher.
Helen used to say that it was her most frustrating quality as a writer. She would get some idea in her mind for a subplot, a motif, a character arc, and it would just sit in her brain like the most annoying of earworms. She could not be satiated until she’d analyzed every book, article, literature review, and YouTube how-to video.
Case in point: When she was first drafting Bloodsong, she wanted Raban to be dead and gone forever. Make the book a meditation on grief and loss, allow Lucasia to struggle and fail to cope, and eventually find the strength within herself to carry on as the captain. Helen had shut that down immediately, so they decided on a compromise: Raban gets to be dead for no more than half the book. She’d need to find a way for Lucasia to find him again.
She struggled with that plot for quite some time, but one evening, an idea hit her like lightning.
A plague.
It would be a perfect way to up the physical and emotional stakes for Lucasia and her crew, and give her a reason to find the healer as soon as possible, who would already have an amnesic Raban in her little cave/hovel/spot. The whole book was meant to be a treatise on heartbreak and grief, and what better way to highlight one’s lack of control than to force them to watch as their crewmates suffered and died from a mysterious illness. Pair that with Lucasia’s failure to cope and her actions devolving into a mess of drinking and meaningless sex, and you’ve got a recipe for a beautifully broken protagonist!
She might’ve been buzzed when she came up with that one. Her memories of that night were hazy. All she could recall was abruptly standing up from the dinner table, glass still in hand, and stalking over to the whiteboard so that she could write everything down before it escaped her mind. She talked as she wrote, so that Helen would understand her logic. At the end of her spiel, she turned around, half out of breath, to see her leaning against the nearest wall and taking a slow sip of her water.
“What kind of plague?”
Carol didn’t have an answer. She hadn’t thought that far ahead yet, just that it would be painful and deadly.
Helen was willing to entertain the idea, but argued that a plague story would need to be handled deftly, especially since it could easily become a horror movie scene, or remind the readers too much of their own experiences with COVID.
“So, are we thinking viral, bacterial, fungal? Or just—” Helen waved a hand for effect. “—Some bullshit magic plague?”
Carol cringed, and even a year later would think back on those words with disdain. She’d worked damn hard on the books’ bullshit magic system.
They traded barbs for a few minutes, trying to argue in favour of certain types of plagues, symptoms, timelines, means of transmission. This was a game that they often played when Carol was dealing with a writer’s block, and it was something that she loved about Helen. She pushed her to be better, more nuanced in her writing.
Eventually, they went back to dinner. Carol poured herself a new glass of vodka, and Helen whispered something under her breath that she could not hear.
Carol would spend the next two weeks learning enough about plagues to cover an infectious disease degree. She went down a rabbit hole when she got to viruses, and before she knew it had come up with a structure, mode of transmission, and symptom progression timeline for her own. She marked it down as Virus X on her whiteboard, given that the society in Wycaro was not nearly scientifically advanced enough to come up with naming conventions. The primary transmission methods were by aerosols, fomites, and sexual contact. No known vaccines, but the Healer had a special cure.
The symptoms were listed in the following order:
The Sickness!!!
1. General cold and flu symptoms (cough, sore throat, fever, fatigue)
2. Muscle pains, blisters, and conjunctivitis?
3. Moonsburn** (defining symptom; large violet blisters extremely sensitive to moonlight, any part of the body left uncovered will burn and leave a scar)
4. Profound weakness and muscle pain, nightmares (most cases reach this point after about two weeks before self-resolving)
5. Insanity, death (10% of cases progress this far without treatment)
The R value would be a 3. Patient zero would be one of the pleasure women that O’Riordan brought onto the ship for the night.
*Consider a plot point where the crew finds out and targets the woman?? Lucasia has to save her???
It was rough, but it was something she could use. She still had plans to look into ingredients for an ointment to counteract the moonsburn. Maybe she could find some antiquated recipe for a steroid cream over the next few days.
It didn’t look like she’d done much research. But she’d used what she thought was necessary. The rest of her brain would have to sort through all of the trivia that she’d accumulated.
One bit that stuck with her was the fact that modern research was veering towards the idea that many, if not most, viruses had oncogenic properties.
***
Bitter Chrysalis wasn’t originally going to be a cancer book. That said, it was always meant to be a meditation on grief and isolation. Her original idea was that it would be the story of a happily married woman being forced into isolation in her hometown, following the funeral for her mother. The stress of the isolation and reckoning with her childhood memories would cause her to break down, force her to come to terms with the irredeemably toxic nature of her marriage, and make love to the woman who bullied her in highschool.
She came up with the idea a few weeks after her mother died from small cell lung cancer. She did not attend the funeral, much to the chagrin of her cousin Kate, who had become her primary caregiver after Carol abandoned the family. She still had a few angry texts left on read, something about the will and how her mother had said she’d have no right to any of it.
She didn’t give an iota of a shit about that. Mom had already spent Carol’s inheritance away paying those fucking quacks at Freedom Falls. Anything else was blood money as far as she was concerned.
Was the book a transparently narcissistic exercise that would allow her to finally vent to her readers about her fucked up relationship with her mother?
Yes. Yes it was.
Honestly, it was that or write a memoir. And Lord knew she was not ready to do that.
She struggled to get the ball rolling at first, largely because she just couldn’t figure out how to isolate her main character.
But after her little trip down the Bloodsong Virus rabbit hole, she found her way.
The yet-unnamed main character would be in partial remission at the beginning of the story, and find out while preparing for the funeral that her most recent CT was showing new mets. Carol made two notes to herself: non-chronological narrative? And Restarts chemo during the story?
It felt appropriate. During her oncology research (manic) episode, she discovered many interesting facts that would prove extremely relevant to her story:
-‘Hallmarks of a cancer cell’ (from Cell.com so LEGIT!! Make note for later!!)
-avoid immune destruction
-enable replicative immortality
-inflammation!!
-invasion/mets
-angiogenesis (==blood=road for mets)
-genomic instability/mutation
-resisting death
-deregulating cell energetics
-sustaining proliferative signalling
-evading growth suppressors
-Cancer is not evil. Cancer does not see itself as a destructive force (no shit), it just wants to survive
-A ‘cancer cell’ (kind of)=stem cell! ==Immortal cell!! Humanity searches for immortality but this cannot be done without sacrificing the body
-BUT cancer cells don’t do their fucking jobs!!! Which is why we DIE
-Parasitic relationship with body—don’t do their fucking jobs BUT steal shit from other cells! (Why you lose weight and feel shit)
-Tumour immunomodulation??? (Important, fucking cool research)
-Tumours use immune signalling to create protective barrier?? So body says ah nothing bad here move on, while inflammation and fuckery goes on inside and tumour grows! ==Placating body into accepting its own death!
-Invasion, metastases take path of least resistance! =Adjacent tissues, blood, lymph, seeding
-Viruses can induce oncogenesis (Jesus fuck we’re all gonna die)
-Body has immune cells that fuck up cancer!! (Usually!!)
-Natural Killer (NK)—>walk around with a machete and go up to cells to check for ID. Cancer has no ID? They fucking DIE.
**Also lmao laughter reduces stress and elevates NK activity. So I’m def gonna die of cancer one day woohoo!!
-Treatments:
-chemo=meds, stop cells from multiplying and functioning, weakening body in process
-radiation=pew pew fuck up cells, create fuck ton of scar tissue
-resection=chop chop maybe take a piece of organ too
She filled an entire wall with her notes in the end.
When Helen got home that day, she looked at the board, looked at Carol with an expression of shock, and asked “Babe...are you getting a fucking medical degree?”
She rode that high for weeks.
***
She took a sip of gin and stared at the newly covered section of the whiteboard. She’d stayed up until three am writing everything down.
Manousos walked in a moment later, obscuring her view. He appeared as dishevelled as always. Despite her insistence that water was freely available, and he didn’t owe anyone shit for it, he still insisted on conserving it as appropriate. At least he’d finally gotten some new clothes from the neighbours’ closet.
No, sorry, prestado. ‘Borrowed.’ Fuck. Whatever. No one was coming back for them anytime soon. And if they tried, they’d all be blown to the fucking moon and back.
“Carol?”
She stood impassively and continued to stare, lost in another hazy memory.
He paused, curiously, his gaze flitting between her and the complex medical vocabulary she’d scrawled all over the board.
He frowned at her and pointed at the board. “What is this?”
Carol pursed her lips and gave a short sigh. “Investigacion,” She said plainly, stepping forward to fold it up. “It was for my book. Nothing helpful.”