Kyan was in the middle of examining several samples beneath a microscope when he heard a familiar crash in the parlour. He'd assembled the scope with parts from sets of goggles he'd obtained from raiding a couple of nearby houses and a zombie specimen. Not that he was actively hunting them himself. He'd left that up to Sidney and Mabel Murphy the husband and wife couple he'd rescued on the day of the outbreak. It turned out Sidney was fairly squeamish, so it had been up to his wife to carry the corpse's head back after they had blugeoned it with poker and an axe.

With a sigh, he pushed away from his desk and was about to remove his protective gloves, before he heard; "It's alright! It just brought back another pigeon!"

"Dammit, pigeon for dinner again?" Sidney moaned as he placed down the book he had been reading down upon the table. Soft giggles followed his exclamation.

Kyan shook his head and decided to clear up any how. He'd been working on this for a while now and didn't really have any new answers. Creating a cure for the zombie epidemic was almost like attempting to cure the common cold, he wasn't having much luck with it. After he destroyed the samples and ensured he was clean, with assistance from Yin, there was a knock upon the door of his study.

"Master Lucian," Mr Forbes called out, still acting the role of the butler, even though Kyan had insisted he should stop. It was not as if Kyan could pay the man for his services now that money had ceased being useful. "I've brought you a fresh pot of tea."

"Come in, it is safe," Kyan responded. He could dwell on the coincidence of timing, but knew better. This sort of thing had been occurring a lot lately, as if an ancient part of his soul had awoken from its long slumber and he had resumed his role as the Living God.

He wasn't sure when the first time had occurred, it could have been that moment he had paused in the foyer of his home at the beginning of the outbreak. He had been thinking on how to fix various bugs in the kite and hadn't been particularly aware of where he was wandering to when he had stopped there. He maybe had stood there for a whole minute before he had heard the commotion outside the property and had opened the door to realise that the zombie tide had reached his street and there were two living people fleeing them. Letting them in was fate.

Sending them to a specific house some five doors down two weeks ago had also been fate. The couple had taken his lone gun, a poker, kitchen knives and the like and learned to fight zombies, otherwise, while they were trapped in the townhouse, they were no better than sitting ducks ready for slaughter. Who knew if the undead would ever one day be able to penetrate their safe haven and kill them?

That day, they had returned from the house that Kyan had asked them to look at, with a small amount of pitiful looking vegetables, that could barely be considered edible and two young children. The children's parents had been sick, just like Mr Forbes had been, but they had become strange, leaving their sick bed and attacking the maid! Their own maid had gathered the poor children and locked them in the basement of the house for their own safety. What had happened to the maid after that... the children had been left an urn of milk, left in the cooler temperature of the basement, bottles of wine and given a couple of rolls of bread each. The maid had said she would come back for them, but she never returned. Left even a day longer, the children would have died of thirst.

In the fight against the zombies hovering around the basement entrance, however, Sidney was caught and wounded by a scratch. By the time they had returned to the townhouse, he was showing similar symptoms to the sickness. Kyan had locked him in a room after testing his saliva and forced him to drink the medicinal soup. The poor man had poured three bowlfuls of the insidious stuff down his throat over the following twenty four hours. Kyan felt that it was too close a call, however, as at one point, his nails had blackened within their beds and his eyes had begun to yellow. At that point, Kyan was still uncertain to what was causing the mutations, but as the corpse dust had clearly been prominent in the man's saliva, Kyan simply used the potion that had cleared helped his now very healthy butler.

So Sidney had not succumbed to the corruption and become a zombie, which would have been a complete disaster. He and his wife were outsiders. Who knew what that corruption would have ultimately done to his soul?

The butler placed the tray with the tea pot and tea cup upon it and placed it before his master. "Sir," he lamented, "I regret to inform you that we are almost out of tea leaves."

"That's alright, Mr Forbes," Kyan reassured him. "I'll..." he stood suddenly to attention, before running out of his study and down the flight of stairs to the front door, a sudden need to be there, overwhelming him.

"What's going on?" Sidney asked, but Kyan did not answer him, swinging the front door open recklessly, his eyes falling upon the man standing at the bottom of the outside steps.

He was willowy, without much meat upon his bones, yet he stood proud and tall with katana in hand. His skin was clear, although his hair kept falling into his face, covering it and his warm eyes were wide as they fell upon him, gazing over his current form, just as he was looking over his husbands'. Kyan suddenly felt a little embarrassed. He had lost much of the weight from his body, especially in recent weeks where food was lacking, but he still imagined that he was a little thick around the middle and a little full of face.

The eyes of the man before him softened and filled with tenderness, sending his woes into the distance and he became overwhelmed with love. His husband, his lover for several lifetimes climbed the steps swiftly, sheathing his sword, before finally standing in front of him. "What took you so long?" Kyan's voice broke into a slight sob.

"Sorry, my love," came the reply and wrapped him in a firm embrace with a strength that belied his skinny appearance.

"Sorry to interrupt your reunion," came a voice in the street, "but can we have a little assistance here?"

The lovers turned to see several corpses pour hungrily out of a nearby house, one that Kyan had felt strongly that his own people should avoid. A swift kiss brushed against his lips and left him wanting.

"I'll be right back," his lover promised.

*****

A single pigeon was clearly not going to go far, especially when four of those partaking in the meal had not tasted any form of meat for a long while. Two pigeons were not much better, but Kyan could not take the risk of the kite hunting more. It currently lay in his study, it's golden body oozing steam and small sparks as it had overheated.

As if it were a natural thing, Hilton had completely taken over the role of the chef, much to the thanks of everyone within the abode, especially Mabel who was not much of a cook at all, but was the one that had been relied upon. Unfortunately, that meant the two pigeons sitting in an onion sauce, not only didn't do much for their hunger, everyone was left salivating for more.

Hilton had introduced Kyan to Sister Marie, Aston and Quentin, while Kyan introduced Mr Forbes, Sidney and Mabel as well as the two children Virgil, who was ten years old and Elsie who was eight. During the introductions, Mabel had exclaimed that she recalled Hilton, that he had fixed their steam car one time. Hilton had confessed that he did not recall that.

"Clean up memory wipe," Sister Marie had said, in blunt explanation, leaving Aston to offer more detail.

"Hilton got a little mixed up in one of our operations," he said, jovially. "Our organisation values secrecy so Hilton's memory was wiped. Spanner over did it a little though."

Kyan immediately felt concern, not elevated in any way when Yin called out to him;

*Yang says that this effected his host in more ways than just loss of memories.*

Hilton caught sight of Kyan's worries and offered him a slight smile of reassurance. This was all he could do at that moment. It wasn't as if he could reveal that his mind had been split into his individual lifetimes, each with their own personalities, thoughts and abilities developed within those lifetimes to everybody who had gathered. As it was Aidan was barely in control, holding everyone else back as they scrambled to view their lover through his eyes. When they were alone, later, they would explain. They had no intention of leaving his side now they had found him.

"So you are an engineer?" Aston asked him as he watched the two children play with a giant, mechanical rat. The thing spun about in circles and figure of eight shapes, but seemed to lack much other ability.

"I dabble," Kyan replied.

"Master Stoker is in fact the owner of several cloth factories," Mr Forbes advised, while pouring Kyan a cup of tea.

"I inherited them from my father," Kyan replied, attempting to downplay this fact. After all, his former business practices, before he had taken over this body, had been... unscrupulous at best. "Not that that has any meaning anymore. The factories are just bricks and mortar that is worth less than a good wall and the machines inside would be more useful as spare parts. I would not even be able to quibble about any cloth taken from them should survivors be able to claim them in the face of any zombies within their vicinities. Now I am reduced to dabbling in mechanics and medicines and little else."

"Medicines?" Quentin asked, curiously. There were currently no doctors on their base and they had heard that the main army had only secured two themselves. Their own base relied on a lone nurse and a midwife, who only knew how to help mothers bring their children into the world and nothing else.

"Hmm," Mabel answered him, while hugging her husband's arm as they were seated upon the couch. "Lucian made a medicine that stops an infected person turning into a zombie."

Aston sprayed his tea from his lips, while the room fell into silence. Hilton felt Adam's pride over his pharmacist husband's skills. "C-c-cure? You created a cure?" Aston stuttered out in shock.

"No, not a cure," Kyan shook his head sadly. "It would be more appropriate to label it a vaccine, I suppose. But I haven't tested whether it would prevent infection in a body that has already consumed the medicine. The zombie virus is insidious and can mutate within a zombie body. I can only stop it from taking root in a healthy body and even then, I believe it is not guaranteed. I barely saved Sidney's life when he was scratched."

"That soup was disgusting," Sidney shuddered in memory.

"Do you think that you can cure it?" Aston asked, his hopes raised, regardless.

"Do you think that you can cure the common cold?" Kyan sighed. "There are two things that generally create sickness in the world. Viruses and bacteria. The latter is unchanging, once a cure is found, it will always work. But viruses change quickly, a cure one day will not cure the next. Viruses use the cells of their host to reproduce, usually killing the cell in the process, it is this single thing about the zombie virus that allows a glimmer of hope at all, so long as it is caught before one becomes a zombie. The virus is symbiotically linked to corpse dust."

"Corpse dust?" Sister Marie queried.

"Isn't that what makes corpses explode?" Aston asked and Marie nodded in agreement.

"Corpse dust is a bacteria," Kyan said, carefully. "Bacteria is a single cell organism. The zombie virus uses this cell to reproduce. So long as a healthy person can eliminate corpse dust within their bodies, they should not mutate as the virus cannot reproduce and overwhelm the bodies natural defences. However, I believe a bite may scrap any chances of prevention. The virus is too concentrated in the saliva of a zombie and would infect a living being too rapidly, hence why my medicine cannot be considered a perfect solution in any form."

"But it's still a form of hope, a small miracle even," Sister Marie dismissed, offering perhaps the first smile that Aston and Quentin had ever seen her produce since they had become acquainted with her. That was a miracle in itself.