therookery | crystal; rifter cultural exchange war table plot

FORM: Crystal
SENDER: Ness ( aberratic )
RECIPIENT: all y'all
NOTES: This is a long one, she's a yapper. Important points bolded for the tl;dr, not for ic emphasis.

[ she has learned her lesson in contacting jayce far too early in the day; today, when ness gets on the crystal, it's closer to midday than to the first rays of dawn. she wants to reach the largest possible crowd, after all, and can't reach people who are asleep.

so: it is midday, and the first thing heard over crystal is a stack of papers being tapped neatly on a desk. buckle up, riftwatch, this is gonna be a long one. ]

Hello, Riftwatch, Ennaris Tavane speaking. [ does it sound like she's reading off a pre-written script? maybe. look, she has a lot to get through and she doesn't want to miss anything. ] In looking into how I could best make use of myself here, I found that there's quite a lot of information on rifter technology and knowledge that might have a use in Thedas, but it all seems to be a little spread out, in various different offices and projects. My aim now, which I have received permission from Provost Niehaus to undertake, is to gather all this disparate information and compile it to make comprehensive files for each field. To that end, I have requests of our organization, both rifter and native Thedosian alike:

Rifters, I would like to hear from you on technologies available in your world that Thedosians may be able to reproduce. Some of these notes include reference to a Riftwach Cultural Exposition which took place last year, and I would especially welcome input from anyone who attended or presented at that Exposition. Much of the work on this end has already been done by the agents who worked on this endeavour before me, so my goal here is mainly to ensure that I understand exactly what it is I'm compiling, but I welcome new ideas to add to the compilation—and no innovation is too trivial to be included; at the Exposition, a rifter Jude Adjei met with great success in distributing his peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. If it can be achieved by the means and materials we have available to us in our new home, it's worth consideration, at the very least.

Native Thedosians, here I defer to your expertise in our home. The goal of compiling this information is to be able to facilitate a dialogue between ourselves and the rest of Thedas, to bring to bear the knowledge of worlds beyond to make life better across this continent, here and now. The question I put to you is, who would be most receptive to this dialogue? There are some names in these notes, a Monsieur Guillaume du Naigh, Signora Jacqueline Fioranati, and we have experienced no small success in engaging with the University of Orlais—but it has been some time since the Exposition. Have we made any new contacts? Which organizations are of the most open minds? Any names I receive will be listed and turned over to the Provost as contacts for next steps, once the information has been compiled.

Given no significant setbacks, I intend to have this information compiled and ready to set before the Provost within a month. While I welcome any and all contributions, it would be best they come sooner than later.

Thank you for your assistance, Riftwatch.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If you successfully recreate Jude's cookies, I will personally make up some sort of cross-division award to give you. [Not a joke; those cookies were amazing.]

And if you want to get some time on my schedule to talk about the stuff I can offer from my personal world, let me know. I've handed off "the merits of soap" and "germ theory" mostly to our head healer, [enjoy that, Stephen] but I've got a few other ideas that have been in the mix.

[ this is, without exaggeration, the best and quickest way to get ness to do literally anything. someone get her gold star stickers, she'll be happy for the rest of her life. ]

I'm sure the recipe must have been left with the rest of the Cultural Exposition items, it shouldn't be so hard. Most difficult will be acquiring chocolate, I think, but if a Division Head were to approve the expense...

[ help her earn that award, cosima!!! ]

I would definitely appreciate some time with you, especially regarding the microscopes—though that's more personal curiosity than needing further explanation, truthfully. I'm also very interested in Doctor Strange's idea for a "live blood transfusion", which sounds very exciting, but I'll talk to him about that.

I'll be sure to start brainstorming compelling scientific reasons we need the chocolate, sure.

[A joke. Unless...]

And always happy to talk microscopes. Honestly, I'm game for making them more widespread in Thedas; there's people besides us who could benefit. It's a shame we don't have the right kit for blood typing to go with transfusions, but blood cells are a reasonably interesting microscope demonstration, if you're already thinking about it with Strange. Synergy.

I do think microscopes and germ theory will be some of the easier ideas to propagate throughout Thedas—as soon as we have more places with microscopes, surely the germ theory should spread naturally, as more people see it in action.

[ bless her, she really thinks that people will believe in science once they see evidence of it. ]

Blood typing? I think I read about that in terms of the trans-fusion Strange had suggested–I think your note on the proposal was just "NO, STEPHEN." Why...?

So, okay. People have blood with different qualities. The way that, like, people have different colors and textures of hair, right? Natural variation, it's all still hair, but it can have really different properties. If you want, when we talk in person, I can explain a little bit about the ways blood groups different, but for now what's important is that there are four different categories.

In the worlds Stephen and I are from, we have pretty simple tests to tell which kind someone has. And it matters in blood transfusions, because not all the types are compatible. So trying to do the transfusion without being able to know what type of blood you're working with, you run the risk of those incompatible types. It can make the recipient sick, or even kill them in worst case scenarios. So here in Thedas, it would really only be appropriate for "they're going to die anyway so we might as well try" instances. Unless we figure out a means of blood typing, I guess.

[ ness is silent as she listens to cosima's explanation, and cosima might hear the scratching of a pen on ness' end of the crystal as she takes notes. ]

So, [ she says once cosima's finished, organizing her thoughts, ] in order to safely perform these trans-fusions, we'll need to find a way to determine which type of blood someone has. Do you have elves and dwarves and qunari where you're from, Provost? We may be dealing with more than four types here in Thedas, if not.

[ her pen keeps scratching away, quickly noting down questions to answer and tasks to complete in advance of performing a transfusion. ]

Is the micro-scope used in determining types of blood? I already thought those should be our primary focus going forward, they seem to be at the root of many of your worlds' advancements.

[ finally there is a pause in the scratching of a pen, and ness hesitates. ]

We must give some thought as to how to distinguish this trans-fusion from blood magic, to set Thedosians at ease.

Edited 2024-08-13 18:22 (UTC)

Yeah, there's always the blood magic thing. But this isn't at all magical. No mages needed. There has to be some way to verify that what we're doing isn't magic, assuming we ever get that far, but it'll still have a reputation problem.

And you're right, there could be more blood types in play here. Really hard to know. Some nonhuman species at home have blood pretty similar to humans, and some are really different. At home, it's mostly illegal to transfuse nonhuman blood into humans, for a variety of reasons, but we don't have other species that we can communicate with in a common language either.

The way we do blood typing at home, you don't need a microscope, though. It's. [A short pause.] To sum up a lot: you add a particular substance to a blood sample, and how the mixture reacts tells you what the blood type is. I'm not sure that Stephen and I have the knowledge or the resources to make the substances we'd need, though. Back home, it's something you can just buy.

I don't suppose you know what the mixture is made of off the top of your head? Or at least, what each type looks like when mixed? We might be able to work backward from there.

[ there's a deep sigh as ness looks over her notes, at all the many, many steps they still have to complete in the journey to get thedas aware and accepting of this science. the job is so vast, and she's just one person.

but it'll never get done if someone doesn't take responsibility for it, and letting herself be cowed by the amount of work in front of her only ensures that it takes longer than necessary. she shoves down the faint despair, and tries to think practically. ]

Even if not, knowing it's possible means that we can learn to do it here. There's so much to work on... We really must make inroads with the native academics. Building trust there, disseminating our corpus of knowledge and allowing them the freedom to pursue the advancements we know to be possible on their own... It might be the best we can do, with such a load of projects to work on ourselves.

I'll do my best with all this, and have something to put in front of you within the month, as agreed.

I know what it is, fundamentally, but not how to make it with the tools in Thedas. But the result is pretty obvious, at least with the kind of testing I'm talking about. The sample clumps in a way you can see if the antigen you're testing for is present.

But hey, look, we don't expect you to crack blood transfusions yourself. I don't expect to crack it. As you're saying, it's the kind of thing that's worth spreading to our allies so they can work on it. Huge public health benefits, down the road if not in the short term. Whatever native scientist works it out here can take credit [somewhere, the entire Diplomacy division may have just gotten a headache], as long as it saves lives. It's the exact right kind of thing for you to be looking at.

[ but she wants to crack blood transfusions so bad—though, this diplomacy member agrees with cosima: whichever native does crack it can have all the credit, so long as it gets cracked. for a lot of academics, the caché that comes with that kind of discovery would be reason enough to make the attempt, no money or favors required. ]

I fully agree, Messere Provost—the credit matters less than it getting done. Thank you, for the encouragement—

and I will be looking into those cookies. Prepare the award.

crystal; rifter cultural exchange war table plot

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