Part 2
After the death of the field worker, Barnaby was distraught. He recognized what needed to be done, and he learned what he could from the corpse of the worker. A request was made to the town, that those who had died be brought to the clinic so that the doctor could learn what he could from their corporeal forms, to better prepare himself to save the lives of those he shared the living space with. You’d be surprised, or perhaps you wouldn’t, that most people are not entirely agreeable to the idea of their not long deceased loved ones being cut up and examined. It was because of this that the only corpses that Barnaby received were, generally, those of vagrants who had been violently killed through any number of circumstances. Generally, they had no known family to speak of who could complain, both verbally or physically, about the perceived ill treatment of their leavings in this world.
Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be gleamed of the function of a machine based entirely on damaged parts. The same sort of logic applies when considering the bodies of the Children of Mann. Certain organs were familiar to the surgeon, he had seen them before in animals, but others were lost on him. It was of no help to examine a corpse to discover that the innards had been eviscerated by whatever had killed the poor specimen. Barnaby needed untainted cadavers, he needed the unanimated bodies of those who died purely of natural causes, violent death leaves little. Had the towns folk been okay with this, surely they would have provided the Good Doctor with those very corpses, but the idea of their loved ones being desecrated in such a fashion was too much for many of the simple folk.
Barnaby had to turn to less savoury methods. He began digging up graves, and stealing the corpses therein. He would do so in secret, in the darkest moments of the night. Upon delivering the specimen to his clinic, he would begin the dissection and would examine the insides of those who had not died violently, and as such had sustained minimal damage to their insides. He learned much, the young von Draculesti, to a point where he could map out the insides of a Child of Mann, or at least, how they were supposed to look. This would help him to determine just how badly damaged another was, and how best to go about repairing that damage. Eventually, a scarcity became apparent in the small town that just wouldn’t do for the furthering of his science. The town lacked a major resource, people. There simply weren’t enough living people within the town for Barnaby to reasonably expect a steady stream of deaths with which to experiment and learn from. He would need to go elsewhere, one of the larger settlements.
On his seventeenth naming day, Barnaby arrived in the perhaps ironically named settlement of Utopia, in the Kingdom of Arkadia. He was under the guise of a merchant, coming to sell his potions and poultices. He would set up a shop here, and after some time getting to know the populace and the location, he would begin once more gathering the specimens for his experiments.
It didn’t take long before the business of medication became lucrative. The idea that people could simply consume an extract from a herb and recover more quickly from wounds, or perform more…admirably in any number of activities was ambrosia to the people of Utopia. After a few months, Barnaby once again began his night time extracurricular activities, and started once again grave robbing. Most people, when hearing the term “grave robbing” would naturally assume that looters were stealing whatever valuables the dead had been buried with, presumably to ease their passing into whatever afterlife you believe in. Barnaby’s actions fulfilled the more literally meaning of the term, as he was in fact stealing the corpses themselves.
The problem with using the dead as a means of learning anatomy is that, generally, without the influence of some cosmic horror or God, the dead tell no tales. There comes a point where the inert flesh of the dead provides no new insight. This is how the organs should look in someone who is dead, but this information, whilst somewhat useful, didn’t lead the doctor to the enlightenment he so craved. He needed to see how the organs worked in a specimen who was alive!
Arkadia’s ruler is a tyrant, and civil unrest is rife throughout the kingdom. The majority of the citizens within the country slave away and pay more in taxes than they could reasonably be expected pay, given their insignificant earnings. A pretender to the throne had risen, claiming to liberate the common folk, a true champion of the people! His cause was of no particular interest to Barnaby, for our doctor was not actually a citizen of Arkadia, and matters of state were beyond him. However, the rumours of the imminent rebellion gave our good doctor an idea, and the decision was made for him to seek out this would-be usurper, and pledge himself to their cause.
This was of no specific agreement with said cause. His reasons were simple enough, for where better to acquire corpses, and indeed prisoners, than a civil war?
