(McCabe) Back to the Lab Again (private)

Irina

Dr. Marcus used his swipe card to access the WestLife labs, his samples in a little container. It wasn't busy. It never was after business hours; sure, there were the occasional tech here and there, bustling around and doing work, but the day shift was when the vast majority of the non-emergency work got done.

One thing Ryan had learned by experience was, if you wanted it done at night, unless you were, say, a VP, you had to do it yourself. And since he wasn't a VP who liked to make people work overtime when they didn't have to (overtime being expensive and all), he sometimes just came in himself. If there was a medical mystery, he liked to solve it personally and not rely on others.

And this right here was a doozy. Was it a medical mystery? Was it a scientific inquiry? The blood, that was something he needed to look into, but the slime leading into the sewer... that bore all kinds of testing. He needed to find out what it was, and that was going to take some processes.

So he started with the blood, since that was easy. He prepared samples of the blood for DNA sequencing and a tox screen. As for the slime, he prepared a little sample to feed it into the mass spectrometer. Letting the mass spec do its job and tell him what the slime was would be a start. All of these were very normal lab tests; pushing item into machine, press start, see what happens. It would likely get more complicated from there.

Ryan plugs the various samples into the respective machines and hits 'go' to get some basic reports going to start.

  

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2012-08-22 16:08:51		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 12 to Science: Mass Spectrometer Use on the Slime (Int4+Sci3+Eq5) (10 Again)		4, 6, 10, 9, 7, 8, 8, 6, 2, 1, 5, 5, 6		4 successes
2012-08-22 16:08:16		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 12 to Science: DNA Sequencing on the Blood (Int4+Sci3+Eq5) (10 Again)		5, 10, 5, 4, 4, 1, 6, 4, 6, 4, 6, 3, 2		1 success
2012-08-22 16:07:45		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 12 to Science: Tox Screen on the Blood (Int4+Sci3+Eq5) (10 Again)		8, 3, 1, 9, 2, 9, 1, 10, 3, 4, 3, 7, 5		4 successes

The DNA sequencer does its work easily enough; but without a match to compare it to, it's impossible to tell whether it does actually belong to McCabe.

The tox screen comes back with a hit eventually. The blood contained iron oxide, titanium dioxide and fluoxetine Hydrochloride - in order words, the ingredients for Prozac. This isn't very unusual however, as the coroners report stated McCabe had been prescribed the drug.

The slime contained salt, water and the mucin protein. The slime was... literally slime. A whole trail of it.

The tox screen put the blood exactly where Doc Marcus thought it would be. As part of Chris McCabe, probably. Probably enoug h that he'd experiment on the basis; the blood was where the body had been found, on a smashed surface as if he had been struck against it or something, and had something in it that was both odd and prescribed to him.

Circumstantial? Sure. But he was experimenting to see what he could find, not proving blood ID for some cop for a trial on its merits or something like that.

The slime made him raise his eyebrow. Slime? A trail of it, from the glass to the ground to the sewer. For some reason, his mind imagined a slavering, slobbering creature. But that wasn't enough to go on. But it did suggest to him that it wasn't what he had experienced before. He'd never seen the bitch slime things. Could it be something else other than a vampire?

Doc Marcus sat back in the lab chair before his computer, tapping a pen against his cheek rapidly as he thought things over. He'd assumed a false premise and needed to search more broadly.

Two things needed to happen, he realized. First, he stood up and put a sample of the blood in the mass spectrometer to find anything odd in the composition of the blood. Did something get added to it by whatever had attacked him? Was something odd in there that wasn't tox-related?

Secondly he thought about what biological reactions would generate slime of this nature, and looked to see if any incidents were occurring around town that had slime appearing in strange places like on sidewalks. It was a long shot, but it would occupy the time before the mass spec had done its job.

After all, it wasn't like organic slime just randomly appeared everywhere.

  3 rolls relevant

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2012-08-24 15:39:23		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 5 to Internet Searches: Int4+Comp3+Eq3-5 to narrow it appropriately (10 Again)		10, 9, 5, 4, 2, 9		3 successes
2012-08-24 15:38:41		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 7 to Int+Science to think of biological reactions that might produce this sort of slime (10 Again)		10, 3, 10, 4, 3, 5, 10, 3, 5, 9		4 successes
2012-08-24 15:38:10		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 12 to Science: Mass Spectrometer the Blood (Int4+Sci3+Eq5) (10 Again)		4, 2, 9, 6, 8, 3, 8, 3, 4, 2, 10, 10, 2, 6		5 successes

The Mass Spec does not spit out anything unusual in relation to the blood - whatever the slime had come from, it had not infected McCabe with anything. That was probably a good thing... Who in Hell wanted to be infected with that crap?

As Doc Marcus casts his mind over what he knows of slime, he can thing of a number of things off the top of his head. Slugs, snails, frogs, toads, newts - in other words, slimy creepy crawlies, amphibians and reptiles of various sorts. His search of the Internet confirmed his initial thought process.

Dr. Marcus raised an eyebrow as he thought the situation over. Yuck.

Mass spectroscopy was not necessary the appropriate test for organic materials, though. It did tell you what compounds was inside, but not necessarily what sorts of properties things had; like, if there was a virus, or a disease, or any sort of infectious material, the mass spectrometer wouldn't be the best way to proceed.

So he had to get his medicine on. Preparing samples of both, he underwent a few tests. The first tests he did was to run medical diagnostics on the blood and the slime. Why not? Couldn't hurt. He wanted to know if either item was infectious.

"Second, he plucked a few hairs from his head and placed them on a slide. He did the same with a bit of blood, then introduced a bit of the slime to each sample and proceeded to watch the reactions in a microscope... if there were any."

He tried to reflect, to see if any of this sounded vaguely vampiric...

  for the medicine and the science, and the occult!

Date		Action		Roll		Result
2012-08-25 14:51:18		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 6 to Int+Occult (10 Again)		5, 1, 6, 3, 9, 2		1 success
2012-08-25 14:50:34		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 12 to For the Science on the Rat (Int4+Sci3+5 for Hospital Lab) (10 Again)		1, 3, 4, 10, 8, 2, 9, 7, 5, 1, 8, 8, 3		5 successes
2012-08-25 14:49:15		Dr. Ryan Marcus rolls 11 to Getting His Medical Tests On (Int+Med+3 for Hospital) (10 Again)		3, 8, 6, 4, 7, 4, 6, 5, 8, 9, 8		4 successes

As Doc Marcus wracked his occult knowledge of vampires, to try and figure out if there was some kind of lore on the undead and mucous he cannot think of anything relevant.

As he ran his tests, he is able to discover one very specific thing: The medical tests had carefully eliminated the possibility that the mucous itself was anything unusual. It was a by-product of whatever had attacked McCabe, but the fluid itself gave off no reaction.

Ryan's lips pressed into a flat line. There were plenty of reactions that could create slime. Most of them were biological. Slime, sludge, like from a mouth or a nose or --

The fact was, the mucus was mucus. And there was nothing more he was going to get out of it. But what he did get was the very serious possibility that he would've been walking into a very bad trap had he gone down into the sewer expecting a vampire. And he had expected one. Was there something other than fangs that drained blood? Or was this just a drooly vampire?

He didn't have a clue. And he needed to figure it out, needed to talk to someone or --

Ryan stepped into a nearby lab office and closed the door behind him to ensure privacy before pulling out his phone and calling up Doctorow . Maybe if he bounced the new information off the hacker, they could come to better conclusions. There was the camera, too, and if Doctorow was very, very good, maybe he could hack a DNA database so he could run this sample...

"Yes Doctor" The voice of the Mad Hacker comes through the phone.

Doc Marcus looked around for a second, then sat down, watching the door as he spoke. "I've got samples from the scene where McCabe went down. There was mucus running from next to where a person was struck into the bus stop's plexiglass running down into the sewer nearby. I collected samples and ran them; no pathogens, no strange properties that I can tell. It's just... weird. There was so much of it." He paused, organizing his thoughts as he spoke calmly, slowly, with the determination of a physician with a plan. "There are a few things I'm hoping you can help me look into, if you're willing?"

OOC

Irina, if I can ask, did it look to Ryan like the mucus would naturally run into the sewer - ie: the sidewalk being inclined toward it for runoff or whatever?

Irina

OOC

No, the mucus did not look like it was running naturally into the sewer; it was a long trail from point A to B.