Welcome to Gaia! ::

They arrived back on earth in a swirl of week-old snow, which was suitably dramatic for Mistral, who was holding a bag of someone else's vomit. "You okay there, Camlann?" she asked the knight beside her, and looked around for a suitable waste receptacle. She'd rather dispose of this quickly, and if he was going to spill his guts again, she'd prefer it not be all over her.

There was a trash can on the corner, and Mistral tossed the bag and resumed her civilian glamour. "There's a 24-hour pharmacy a block and a half that way," she said, "If you feel up to the walk."

The sidewalks had been shoveled. Mostly.

"Let's just rule out the mundane and obvious explanation and then we can move on to the more exciting stuff."

Like space diseases.

Thank you, Tallulah, your sacrifice was not in vain, she thought smugly.

"That's a pity," replied Anabel, smiling wryly despite the delicacy that the current situation seemed to demand. "You'd make a lovely cadaver." Disregarding his wishes, however, seemed like a lovely way to wind up with an ancient Saturnian curse placed on her, so she made a mental note - no postmortem dissections on Camlann. Got it.

"I've encountered one other case of a spaceborne illness," she explained, as they picked they way over the icy sidewalk. "Tallulah, Nick's wife? She had some kind of microbial wasting issue she picked up on her moon." Might still have it, actually - Anabel hadn't experimented on her. She put a pin in the idea to come back to it later and ask Tallulah for some blood samples.

"Here we are," she added unnecessarily, gesturing for him to follow her into the pharmacy. "I'll even pretend it's for me."

Which was some shade of ironic, she thought, although saying that out loud was definitely in poor taste.

"Do you have a favorite brand of ginger ale, by the way?" she asked.

Anabel nodded and led him on a quick circuit of the store, grabbing a bottle of Canada Dry, a package of saltine crackers, a pregnancy test, and a birthday card, just to test the idea that if you were ever buying something ridiculous and embarrassing, a birthday card would somehow normalize it.

It would seem there were some previously undisclosed exceptions to that rule.

"Bathroom's in the back of the store," the sales clerk said helpfully as she handed Anabel her change. "In case the anticipation is killing you."

"Thanks," said Anabel. "Aleksy? Some emotional support would be nice."

She didn't quite drag him to the bathroom, but only because they didn't really have the kind of friendship that made touching acceptable for any reason other than space travel.

She peered into the bathroom. "There's a stall. I'll wait by the sink. Hope you don't have a shy bladder. "

Handing him the box, she added, "For science."

Anabel didn't think that anywhere near that level of hostility was called for, but then, she wasn't the one who'd just been subjected to the ignominy of peeing on a stick. "Let's get out of here," she said, nodding to him. "It smells."

Really, she was buying time to formulate a hypothesis. Once they were out on the street, she passed him the bottle of ginger ale, and said, "So you said you haven't consumed anything at your wonder."

It was important to get the basic facts straight. "Your symptoms are... constant nausea. Anything else?"

Silently, she ticked the little box next to irritability on the Web MD page she was assembling in her mind.

Anabel frowned. "I'll call us an Uber."

That done, she looked Aleksy over with a scientist's eye. What he was describing sounded almost like withdrawal symptoms, but she hadn't known him to use any controlled substances at the time of his conversion. So unless he'd started in the time since, that wasn't the cause.

"Have you talked to Nick at all?" she asked. If it was a real medical issue, the actual doctor would be more suited to dealing with it. Mistral was just interested in the magical stuff - but what could be causing all these symptoms? He'd already said he'd never eaten or drunk anything at his wonder...

"When was the last time you actually went to your Wonder?" she asked, for the sake of data collection. Her phone buzzed - their ride was on its way.

"July," repeated Anabel softly. It was important data, although she was unsure of its exact significance. No one that she knew of had ever gotten sick from failing to visit their wonder, but Camlann was transcended and perhaps that changed the game.

"I need a larger sample size," she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

A black sedan with an Uber sticker in the window pulled up to the curb. "Looks like our ride's here."