MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World Part 60

[George Phillies]

This passage seemed to get lost.

“It’s my gift to humanity,” Morgana said, “on which all of the pieces 
are well known so I will claim no credit for doing it. The publications 
will report exactly what each person did as part of the effort. We’re 
curing sickle-cell anemia. Not a bone marrow transplant scheme, the full 
genetic alteration scheme so that neither the sufferers nor their 
descendants will be in any danger. But all the parts are entirely 
well-established; only the/full cure/ is new. And don’t worry about 
keeping it a secret. The group all knew that we had this as a general 
project. They just didn’t realize it was happening now, not in ten 
years. Even if I told them not to talk, the research group would leak 
like a sieve given what we’re doing.”

“Won’t the League of Terran Justice complain?” Krystal asked. “They have 
this idea about inherited genes being sacred.”

“Anyone who cures a genetic disease, except that your kids still inherit 
it, is a moral pervert,” Morgana answered. “The sort of person I will 
happily feed to a Star Demon. Slowly. Contemplate what happened when 
Atlanticea sank.Atlanticeans had genetic cures, assumed that kids could 
always be cured the same way as their parents so they didn’t need to 
adjust the germ lines, and when the continent went under…well, there 
were a lot of young people, generation after generation thereafter, who 
died in ghastly ways, notably collagen failure shortly after having 
children.”

“The League sometimes gets rough,” Krystal noted, “like their campaign 
against private schools.”

“The League’s lead assassin got taken out by a tenth-grader in 
Washington,” Morgana said.“She had a decent force field, and a 
willingness to fly into a wall. Hard. Why he was sent to assassinate 
student automobiles is beyond me. But I did have a big boss of theirs in 
my office.He came to threaten me. That was the first time, in a very 
long time, that I did a manifestation here on campus. I promised him 
exactly what I would do to his organization if they bothered me. I also 
showed him memories from post-Atlanticea.I assured him they had come 
from someone else. He saw my point.”

“Should I ask how your cure works?”

“I would bore you with details, even though you are surely up to 
understanding all of them, so perhaps we should grab three or four 
scones and some large mugs of coffee and advance to my office. Whatever 
you want to talk about, the office is totally secure against spying.”

* * * * *

Professor Lafayette’s office was the traditional 15’ by 20’ that the 
Rogers Institution assigned to its more junior faculty. Lafayette had 
decorated her office entirely in white, from gleaming white vinyl tile 
flooring to shelves and curtains and white computer server box.The one 
concession to color was a circular carpet woven in an intricate scarlet, 
white, and black pattern. Krystal North carefully stepped around the 
carpet.It might be harmless, she thought, but it looked remarkably like 
a high-power third-order schema. She hadn’t spotted them, but surely 
Morgana had arranged defenses in depth to protect this room.

“It’s always a delight to see you again,” Morgana said.

“More so when it’s not a surprise,” Krystal agreed. “I confess that I 
very much did not expect to see you when the garage door opened. Miss 
Wells is anything but a political innocent.”

“Janie is a very nice person,” Morgana said.“And it can hardly be a 
secret that she has a few gifts, since she plays matches while behind a 
double Overton cage, guaranteeing she is not using mentalics to spy on 
people, not to mention that she was almost kidnapped by the Perversion 
Circle two years ago. Fortunately, her dad knows me, so she proposed 
‘Professor Lafayette’ as her second. However, I am reasonably certain 
she does not know who all else I am. Assuredly.none of the Wells family 
recognized my necklace.”

“She has some idea who you are?” Krystal asked.“My main concern is that 
I have put overwatches on each member of the Wells family, in case Baron 
Kamensky and his friends decide that Janie should be relocated to the 
hands of the Okhrana, no matter what the Tsar said. I don’t want them to 
get in the way of anything you might do, or tell the Wells family things 
that they should not know.”

“The Wells family knows what is an open secret, namely that I am the 
persona Sunssword,” Morgana continued. “I have installed several 
security precautions that should not get in the way of yours, both to 
protect each member of the Wells family and also to protect their home. 
I hope you warned Kamensky about how dangerous I am, this being 
international politics level?” Krystal nodded. “As it is tactically 
relevant, your people should realize that the two younger Wells children 
are not harmless. Brian is at least as dangerous as any member of Stars 
Over Boston, other than myself. Fortunately he has an extremely placid 
approach to life. If anything, he will not do something violent until it 
is a bit late.You should emphatically warn your intervention team, 
should they be needed, that they should not get between Janie and her 
targets, unless they are absolutely sure that she knows they are going 
to be there and has time to react.”

“Why not?” Krystal asked.

“She will feel very guilty about all of your people that she 
accidentally kills,” Morgana answered. “Even if I assure her she has 
bettered the species. She is extremely gift-true, but she is very 
definitely not harmless in a combat situation.”

“Our people do all have mentalic defenses,” Krystal said.

“The effect will be a little less dramatic than what you did to The Mad 
Mind,” Morgana said. “She won’t put enough power into someone’s mentalic 
shields to heat their body to incandescent plasma. However, if someone 
teleports into her line of fire, they will likely become deceased very 
quickly, screens or no. She certainly has not had enough combat training 
to pull a blow under combat conditions.”

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