Back to the last event?
. 
Virus sits alone, looking at a chart which contains notes that he has written. Over the last few months, as Strychnine grows and the others adjust to their own dragons and lifestyles - and Virus' own experiments continue - Virus has also been in the mood to explore.
After all, you can't keep a man like him in one universe for long. Ihrinna holds the fort while he makes occasional forays with Henshuth to new worlds. Or in this case, to a 'genre'. As some of his children come back they share stories of people that travel to meet other 'versions' of themselves. He knows that he is unique, at least in this universe... What about others?
Could the circumstances behind Virus' birth be duplicated in other universes? What are the chances? Of course, if he were in that one universe where Woodstock and her friends patrol the stars on their ship Caledrus, they would know in a moment: their infinite improbability drive would take them there.
But he is on a dragon, not a starship. All Virus has is his imagination, a need, a desire. And a willing dragon.
***
This place is... filthy, Henshuth comments. The world where they have landed is covered in pollution and noise, the very ground is poison. Even more than Virus would have infected it. But the thing that he notices more than his dragon, the people are resoundingly healthy!
"How can this be?" Virus whispers to himself. "Feel that, Henshuth?"
The dragoness pauses, lifts her head and sniffs. With a wheeze, she snorts out a cough and folds her arms.
I feel that the air is worse than -
"No, the people, isn't it odd?"
After a moment, Henshuth sent, so many. There are so many people - yet none like you. Nothing like you, in fact. How can they live in such filth?
"That's what I would like to know," Virus says. "And perhaps do something about it. They're like... flies. Congesting this world. I have nothing against planets."
Virus urges Henshuth to find a place among the rooftops. There are weirdly mutated pigeons and rats the size of dogs, sparrows which dive and flit like winged darts. The human population seem to move around their deformed animal life and destroyed ecosystem with indifference, which bothers Virus for some reason he cannot place.
Breeding virii and bacteria is his specialty, what could be farther from the norm for someone like him? Perhaps it is that the humans here may be resistant to them? Then what?
He takes no joy in destroying a dog's life, why would he care? Only in disturbing humanity does Virus truly thrive in his decadence.
This society, he determines while walking among the thousands of people in this city, must die somehow. It is not dying from within, no bacteria grow in them that could be construed as deadly - nothing to check their population. Do they war? Do they simply breed like flies by the billion? Why has their world gone so horribly wrong?
Well, he'd have to correct it. If slowly. If perhaps merely to ... apologize to the world for this plague of humankind upon it? There is nothing left of the natural creatures. Only meat grown on the hoof for the human population to eat (deli after deli offering the 'finest vat-grown foods' or 'the real thing from veal farms') and pets or those animals like the pigeons that could adapt to humanity's conditions. Virus imagines that coyotes, peregrines and crows are found elsewhere, raccoons perhaps... But this is a sad state for any world to be in.
As he steps around yet another corner filled to the rim with people of all descriptions - loudly discussing the latest trend or sport, hardly bothering to apologize for running into someone else - Virus is inspired.
A woman with a stroller walks by, two whelps plump and fresh cooing at strangers from within. Another baby roosts within her womb though she may not yet realize it. Can this be 'prosperity'? Virus wonders.
Well if that is the only way to hurt them, this society will be harmed where they have their biggest pride. That of fertility. That which they have taken from the planet as though by force.
He will make something that will hurt them. Slowly, but surely.
***
Henshuth lifts her wings and they fly back into the pitch-filled sky. She can actually feel the soot entering her weird glowing lungs - and it is a good thing that she can regenerate from her wounds. She complains that a wound on her own tail began to fester almost immediately. Virus makes the decision to return here only once he's finished his work.
He follows a young man around, one who appears not to have a job nor a home. Typical of such a huge population there must be so many of these they could be uncountable. This world - values its 'productive' members and allows the reward of breeding to the point of oblivion - and neglects to remember that they've run out of space for those without the cash to survive.
With the offer of a place to stay and good food, in a quiet environment, Virus tempts the young man into coming with him to the roof. Henshuth's appearance almost does not faze the man - he's seen weirder things out here in the streets. Virus does not doubt that for a moment.
When they fly off, and return to the hospital grounds, with the wall being put up to the useless protests of the dragon-fanatics, the young man all but explodes from surprise.
"There's nothing here! Put me down!" He exclaims. His eyes squint, and Virus realizes only now that the endless sooty night that they'd experienced on that world - was day. All day, all night - no change. Perhaps a bit of brightness between the static clouds and the soot rising to them? No matter.
"Yes, it's quiet, as I said. Don't worry," Virus promises him. "You'll be inside soon enough. This place is very ... very far away from your home."
Virus senses the panic in the man's mind, the sky is something alien to him, the ground too clean - the air filling his lungs is pure, or at least not polluted so badly and he can smell things for the first time. There is no crowd to bump into, no press of people to keep him 'safe'. No buildings rising to all angles, blotting out what might have ever been seen of the skies.
Just a rolling hillside with trees, one low complex near a wide (if steaming slightly) lake. And dragons. Numerous ones. The young man passes out.
Fortunately for him. Virus merely wants to take some samples, see what makes him so much different than those people of this world. Stunned by his discoveries and spurred on after telling his family about this man's world, he formulates a truly insidious plan.
He would plant them, carefully, into the society. Such a flagrant and sexual lifestyle that so many people lead there! The man, Adrian, tells eventually of how one man was responsible for nearly forty children, in the neighborhood he was born in.
And he says so with a weird pride.
Privately, after the work has started and Virus can only wait for the cells to grow further on their own, he and Ihrinnah discuss this. "It's as though his world never grew out of agrarian family expectations, keeping so many children to 'work' on the farm. It's one thing to expect them to work because you need the hands, and can't pay others."
"Yes," Ihrinnah comments, "so if you've got a large family you can harvest better and more quickly. But ... this world grew out of that. If one or two children are born to a couple that's nice, and usually they call it a 'family'. When six or eight come..." she waves her hand in the air, "that's a litter."
"And why I've decided to do what I have started," Virus says. He explains what he's done, how it will work, to her.
And she agrees, it will do the job. Slowly, but they'll have time. All of Virus' children, no matter how created, are immortal if they so wish to be. These too will be. Among all other things, they will need it. They must spread their disease.
Making an imperfect world, perfect again? Perhaps in time... Perhaps...
*next - to the Barren Men* (unfinished)
Virus bonded Henshuth at the Ring of Fire Ihrinnah bonded Uteneth at Firestone
Cholera ... Variola ... Typhoid ... Candidiasis ... Escherichia ... Pylori
Digitalis ... Conium ... Zigadenus ... Atropa ... Calla ... Amanita ... Datura ... Disporum
Barren Men (unmade pages)