[ avoidant as he is, john never assumes he's safe forever. he has not missed that unsettling anticipation while he's been in kenos. he looks up from his notes, but his expression is as unreadable as ever. ]

Ours are fine, for now. [ especially the areas and items he likes to keep private; he checks those regularly. ] I adapted a few for my experiment with Set, so I decided to start working through the others.

[ he idly plays with his pen without looking at it, needing an outlet for his discomfort. he liked the old dread better because at least he didn't have to talk to anyone. ]

I've been planning to test that, actually. Doesn't it make sense? You worked on the cure.

[ the experiments applying one energy or the other often had severe reactions. too much Meridian would cause rapid ageing or abnormal growths or cancers. multiplying organs. fascinating, but horrible. as one might expect, applications of pure Zenith had the opposite effect. those were not unfamiliar outcomes to john, very similar to the thanergy mutants he'd observed on "flipped" planets. it was only when they had figured out how to combine both Meridian and Zenith that things actually started looking like a cure. ]

You know what can happen when it's not right.