18 The mad scientist

Ying Yue had sent a car to pick Nakshatra. She should have gone to pick her up personally, but she had lost track of time in the lab, and had forgotten to check out the apartment that was meant to be Nakshatra's. So she had sent the female driver Uncle Yin had recommended with explicit instructions to deal with her. Ying Yue was currently in the apartment looking over everything.

She had a lot of high maintenance friends, but Nakshatra was on another level. Ying Yue was from one of the oldest families in China, but that was nothing compared to Nakshatra's bloodline. Nakshatra's ancestors were kings and queens. She still held the empty title of Princess for a small province in south India. But now a days it was just an honorary title. She grew up in a palace on a small hill, and the people still treated her as a princess.

She was an only daughter, her parents doted on her and encouraged her craziness. They were proud that their daughter was an eccentric mad scientist, which only increased her quirkiness. They were rich beyond imagination, whatever she wanted, she has gotten.

So she had a bad awakening when her heart was broken by a dumb kid when she was in college at a young age of eleven. She wanted to know if people would like her if she were not her parent's daughter, if she did not carry her title. So she asked her parents not to interfere in her life anymore and made the decision to continue her studies in the US. That was where Ying Yue and Nakshatra met. They were the youngest to enter the college medical program. And as if fate was on their side, they were assigned as roommates.

They were essentially spoiled little girls for whom everything who did not even know how to work the washing machine despite their off the charts IQ level. They were little, know it all foreigner kids with an accented english, so the odds were stacked against them. But they had gotten through it. Together. A bond like that was not something that could be broken easily. A bond like that was the reason Nakshatra was willing to shift to another continent temporarily to take care of the other person's family member.

Ying Yue wouldn't have called her from Antarctica where she was currently conducting her research if she did not know for sure that she could help her grandpa. Nakshatra has always been a little unhinged, but after the death of her mother, she was practically maniacal, trying to find the reason behind her death. Ying Yue remembered that Nakshatra's mother Sayura had a similar diagnosis but the treatments had only made her get worse, finally led to her death. Nakshatra and Ying Yue were in the second year of their residency when it had happened.

It had been a horrible time for Nakshatra, and the only two people who could handle her were her father and YingYue. She became obsessed with finding the cure for the disease that took her mother from her, It took her a full three years to even figure out that her mother had not actually died from the chronic blood cancer as she was diagnosed. It was far worse. The research she had done for the three years regarding the cure of blood cancer was taken over by her colleagues and she started trying to find out he real cause. She could not find a good sample though. The outdated test results of her mother were not enough. That was when by luck she found another patient with similar symptoms. The patient was one of her father's business associate.

Nakshatra then came across a few other patients who were completely healthy one day, then diagnosed with chronic cancer the next. She had figured that something was very wrong, as some of the test showed that the change in their health conditions were infact because of a virus and not a cancer causing cell. She has been researching the origin of the virus and a way to counteract it. Her research was top secret, as most of the affected victims were influential people in the global scale.

The latest known victim was a Russian scientist who was conducting some top secret research in Antarctica. Volenshika, the Russian scientist had contacted Nakshatra personally to let her know about her condition. But she was already too late. By the time she made her way to the research facility, Volenshika was already dead. But she had left of her blood samples and blood cultures for the past few months. She had to respect the cold and clear cut way she had documented her own illness.

One of the main reasons she had such hard time with her research was the volatile nature of the virus. The virus mutated differently in different conditions, and it becomes unstable once it has been taken out of the living host. The virus has become more sophisticated over the years, and she was having a hard time to continue her research.

One thing she knew for sure was that the virus was one of the most brilliant creation of a man, and he was orchestrating the world's biggest coup by attacking the most influential men of various countries.