Mystic Waters: Out of the blue

Chapter 16

Meranda said a prayer and promised to work non-stop until she found a way to help her friend before she could fall asleep.

The next day, just as Meranda predicted, Roselyn was glued to her side. The walk down to the lab was silent; both were lost in their own thoughts. When they got in the lab, Roselyn went to the couch and curled up. She looked traumatized by her mother's violent actions the night before. Meranda didn't blame her it was a horrifying thing to witness.

Meranda felt the weight and urgency to find a way to reverse the toxic changes that were polluting her friend's cells. She didn't know for sure if that what was happening, but she had a good idea.

Meranda had skipped breakfast in her haste to get started. She was curious to see if any of the test slides she had set up the night before showed any results. She wasn't sure what she was looking for or if exposing the slides to different temperatures and compounds made a difference, but it was a place to start.

She checked the slides that were refrigerated and nothing looked different. She then checked the slides in the incubator and again nothing. In her head she went over her old lectures from biology and chemistry classes, including an essay she had done on blood and temperatures during the hypothermia process. She had only had researched key points for the paper on the medical aspects; she was a biologist not a doctor.

When she looked up, Roselyn was watching her with a worried look on her face, "Rosie honey, don't worry. I always go round and round, up and down, frontward and backwards. It is how I process things. Would you rather go back to the room?"

"No, actually I was wondering what you think of all of this...of us?" Roselyn's sat with her arms around her knees and was looking at Meranda, her large brown eyes taking up most of her face above her knees.

"It was a little hard at first to wrap my mind around it all, but it would be naïve of me to think that humans were the only species in the universe." Meranda smiled reassuringly at her.

"Do you miss it? I mean--miss your pod and land?" Rosie shifted to a laying position with her hands under her chin.

"Well, I haven't had too much time to think about it. I guess I do and I don't. My mother passed when I was seven and my brother ran away with the circus. I lost my father recently in an accident in the mines--so there's just my best friend Jena. I don't have anyone else." Meranda never thought of her life summed up in a few sentences.

"The circus...what is a circus?" Roselyn perked up.

"It is a show that has animals that do tricks, and people that dangle from ropes high off the ground and people pay money to see the show." Meranda couldn't think of any nice way to explain it; she personally hated the circus and the treatment of those wild animals.

"Your brother ran away with them? What is money?" Roselyn thought that was a strange thing to say about her brother.

"I don't really know if he really ran away with them, I just say that because it is easier than saying what really happened." Meranda didn't want to get in to it, but had a feeling Roselyn was not going to let it go. "And money is what people work for so they can—um, pay for things."

"What really happened?" Rosie sat up; she was ready for the real scoop.

"Well, when my brother was a teenager, he and my dad got into a fight over my brother not going to school and getting into trouble...anyways they got into this fight and my brother left. I haven't seen or heard from him in many years." Meranda instantly noticed a change in Roselyn. She wasn't sure if it was a good shift or a bad shift. Either way it got her up off the couch, as she pulled a stool next to where Meranda was working. She could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.