Starfish

Three

As the white foam liquor settled in his stomach, Ardus thought about how the end of that skirt had ridden up above her knee, the back of her thigh slightly paler than her calf. She had others, some kind of standard wear he'd seen on other humans as an option for trousers, but none seemed to cling, to hug the hips the way Doctor Ma'atanoa's skirts did. "Sea gods drown me," he muttered. "Those hips!"

Eventually he did make his way to bed, exhaustion from lack of sleep taking him. Before he truly drifted off, however, Ardus had a ridiculous thought. "Nina. Her name is Nina," he chuckled to himself. "She is named after a starfish." He giggled, sleepily drunk. The largest, most dangerous creature in all of Dreenai's waters, so huge it could only be found in parts of the world where the ocean was miles deep, living down in the dark beyond sunlight's reach. A ferocious, monstrous and thankfully rare animal, covered in pores like a Dreen but only glowing white, hence its colloquial Dreen name nina. The smallest were over a thousand feet long, the largest reported to have been two thousand and some many centuries ago. Doctor Nina Ma'atanoa, sharing a name with the most terrifyingly huge creature on Dreenai. And she was tiny! It was absolutely ridiculous. How could such a small woman upset him so much?

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"This is one of the red sea worms I've been working with." Meem, wearing a thick leather apron and gloves up to her elbows, reached into a tank containing over a dozen hideous-looking worm creatures that were just a shade darker than fresh blood. She stroked the creature, the length and thickness of a baseball bat with a searching, fringed mouth at one end and a vicious-looking black stinger at the other, and lifted it from the tank with both hands. As it hit the air the vile-looking animal's mouth opened and several more pencil-thin fronds extended like tongues, tasting the air. Meem held the end with the stinger tightly in one hand. "Stay away from that end. The mouth won't hurt you but their venom is probably instantly deadly to someone your size."

Nina made a face like she'd just bitten into a lemon. The worm reminded her of a lamprey crossed with a leech, and the way its mouth opened and closed like a toothless old man chewing poi turned her stomach, especially when a slippery clear goo dripped from those tentacle-like things. But, wearing a glove, she reached out and touched the top (maybe? It was hard to tell) of its head. Ew. The worm turned towards her finger and Nina cringed when one of those nasty things touched her fingertip. "So, this is what Doctor Ardus has been helping you with?"

Meem nodded. "These worms produce a powerful venom that contains a numbing agent five times more powerful than our current pain-killing drugs. In the wild when these worms are attacked by predators, their sting temporarily numbs the predator's body where stung which distracts it, then another chemical reaction causes intense burning pain for about ten minutes. I'm working on making an extract that can numb surface pain when applied directly to the skin, injected directly into the muscle or joints for those suffering from muscular diseases, or given by mouth for overall pain management. Isolating the numbing agents from the ones that cause pain is tricky, because chemically they're very similar."

Meem let the worm back into the tank, where it wriggled back down into a pile of other red worms. Despite how gross they were, Nina could appreciate the promise of such a drug. "This painkiller, could it be habit-forming?"

"Not at all," Meem explained. "At least, not in Dreen. We don't have the receptors in our brains for these particular chemicals to bind to. It's incredible, really, how the poison just shuts off pain receptors without producing side effects like euphoria or decreased response to stimuli. Patients can just forget they ever even had any pain and go about their lives with less intervention from their physicians. But that's where I keep running into trouble - too little venom extract, and the test subjects," she indicated a covered cage containing a dozen lizard-like creatures zipping around the enclosure, "just lick the carrier agent off. Too much, and my test subjects stop wanting to eat. If I can find the right concentration, and figure out how to dose it for oral, surface and intramuscular use, we can stop using synthetic painkillers altogether."