“Were you aware that your unit made the news today?” Dr Chen says, a bit waspishly. (It doesn’t explain everything, or even come close, but her top theory right now is that a bunch of med students are the ringleaders on a stupid prank and “Dr Harrison” wasn’t.)

“I - no - what does that—?” Dr Chadra had a whole script mentally lined up and it’s now throughly thrown off. “Why do you— ohhhh. Shit.” 

The journalist!!! He forgot about that!!! Dr Harrison brushed it off with a confident pronouncement that obviously no one would take a tabloid journalist seriously, but in hindsight obviously the specialist in Tennessee who they just dumped a bizarre and concerning and pretty fake-sounding case on would be inclined to get on Google. Awkward.

That…does, in fact, sound like the reaction of someone whose mind was entirely on something big and important and genuine and who was bemused at the concept that they would have had time to read the news today.

“So what did you call about, if it’s not to confess that this is an overly elaborate med student prank?”

…Back on the script. “Your expertise would be invaluable on this case but Dr Harrison isn’t comfortable saying more about the, er, biological cellular regeneration treatment over the phone. If you would consider flying here and signing an NDA, we can read you in on everything.”

“And I’ll be listed as a coauthor when you publish the case study later, huh? Is that what he’s thinking.” If this ISN’T a baffling prank then this would, in fact, be an excellent bribe for cancelled everything this week and getting on a plane to the west coast on zero notice.

That was not part of the script but Dr Chadra can react on his feet. "Probably? I assume so? I mean, like, that seems super reasonable, if you're consulting on it?" 

"...I need to think about it."

What she in fact needs is to find someone, anyone else who can confirm, as a third party, whether their puzzling and incredibly concerning radiation syndrome patient actually exists. If the patient is real, then - well, maybe she doesn't need to understand what the actual fuck is happening in Reno to know that they need her help. 

Well, she's in, what, Tennessee or something, she's not getting here until late tonight one way or another and by then either their patient will be dead or he'll be fixed or he'll be temporarily stabilized and they'll have until tomorrow morning to figure out what the fuck to do next. 

"Okay," Dr Chadra says.

“Keep emailing me updates,” Dr Chen says after a brief unsuccessful battle with temptation; she’s full of desperate morbid curiosity. “You’re setting up to do your secret treatment intervention again, yes? I’d consider getting the full set of labs immediately before and after, for the comparison.” 

...That's a good idea, actually, given that it's now looking like it could be another hour until they can use the Restoration and Leareth's labs are probably still getting worse - it's not imminently a life-threatening crisis but only because he's on all the life support - and it does seem valuable to know exactly how much the Restoration helps with all the myriad horrible problems. 

"Will do," Dr Chadra promises. "I'd better get back to it." 

Leareth is hanging on but, if Shavri's Sight is tracking the same things then his labs are definitely going to be getting worse. His cardiac output is deteriorating again, probably from a mix of counterproductive response to inflammation signals and the fact that his cells are getting less and less able to use all the oxygen being moved around in his blood. Oh and possibly the tiny arteries that feed blood to his actual heart muscle are having inflammation-related tiny blockages? ...It's not an emergency, they can go back up on the ECMO flow rate, just, it's pretty non-ideal, if Leareth's heart stops then that might make him non-targetable by Golarion magic again even if they're supporting his circulation. 

If Samora is not 100% definitely required for preparing the diamond dust then Shavri would kind of like her back in the room and on-call to cast Stabilize? 

Absolutely. She prepped the Restoration before Catherine got back so there's nothing else she in particular has to do. She can stand here casting Stabilize every six seconds if that's what makes their odds best, or she can stand here with one on the tip of her tongue waiting for Shavri to say Now.

She still has one Remove Disease, three Remove Sicknesses, and an open slot that can all be turned into Cures, plus three channels.

Wow Shavri is really tempted to demand that Dr Harrison authorize using both the Remove Disease and another Cure immediately! But it’s probably not worth it, they’re going to have an entire night to get through after this and the pneumonia continues to be very far down the list of Leareth’s worst problems, and it’s not clear how much a Cure will help right now, increasingly many of his problems look more like deteriorating Endurance than like injuries. Probably they should hold off unless he starts bleeding internally or something - he’s not, right now, he’ll just be in serious trouble if it does happen while his blood’s ability to clot is destroyed.

Casting Stabilize every six seconds seems great, though, if it’s not going to wear Samora out and result in her being exhausted later.

Marian continues to work as fast as she reasonably can, which is not that fast because it would be so stupid to fumble a container and drop a bunch of their desperately-collected diamond dust on the floor. 

Doooooes it at least seem like the final product, after three rounds of dilution and re-filtering with water and rubbing alcohol and then microwaving the paste in a clean ramekin inside a sideways biohazard bag, is a sprinkle-able powder? 

Marian's phone buzzes in her pocket to announce a reply to the text she sent her dad most of an hour ago. 

Hmmm. You might be able to evaporate away the solvents. I don’t think you could burn them away, since diamonds burn quite nicely. I’m not sure a centrifuge would work. There are recipes to make diamonds from methane.

There are WHAT NOW 

Marian immediately drops everything she's doing to google "recipe to make diamonds from methane".

It sounds like this is in fact just one of the industrial production methods, and requires a high pressure high temperature chamber (and a pre-existing diamond crystal to seed the carbon deposits). 

....In hindsight it's not actually surprising at all that there does not exist, like, a recipe to make diamonds out of methane IN YOUR KITCHEN, which is kiiiind of what her dad made it sound like, and you would need an actual chemistry lab or something. 

Marian passes on that diamonds are APPARENTLY FLAMMABLE and they should be careful about not microwaving them past the point that all the visible water has evaporated off in case the microwave can get them hot enough to CATCH FIRE. Maybe someone else already turned up this fact on Google - and it does feel vaguely not-totally-surprising, possibly it's something she learned in school once a really long time ago - but it had not been top of mind for Marian until now. 

She keeps going with the tedious process. 

(Diamonds being flammable doesn't come up very often, but when it does come up it's a big problem!)

Casting Stabilize every six seconds is no problem; Samora doesn't get sleepy and isn't going to get worn out just from making spell gestures.

Dilute. Filter. Scrape. Nuke. Dilute. Filter. Scrape. Nuke. This is boring but medieval alchemists would think they were the coolest motherfuckers. It does seem to be coming out pretty powdery but Catherine doesn't want to get it all over her gloves trying to sprinkle it. Sometimes it turns into a sort of crumbly cake in the microwave but it's easy enough to crush it back into powder with the edge of a spoon. Putting the microwave on half power makes the paste way less prone to blorping onto the inside of the baggie for only a little longer per nuke. As soon as they're done she's going to order a can of the dry grit from McMaster Carr with one-day shipping so they never need to do this again, and then she's going to give Dr. Harrison his credit card back.

They get to the point that Shavri thinks the occasional Stabilize is doing something, because Leareth keeps trying to slide from his horrible-but-surprisingly-functional heart rhythm into a more horrible and unsurprisingly-less-functional one, which would not in fact immediately kill him because the artifice at this point providing two-thirds of his circulation but Shavri isn't complaining that the spell considers this a targetable step-toward-dying that it can reset. 

...And then Leareth does start bleeding into his gut, which Shavri catches immediately because she's watching very closely for it, and that does justify a Cure even though Leareth would benefit from one a lot more after the Restoration, it doesn't seem like it can wait - and Leareth is not holding life-force very well but it does actually manage to get just enough of the accumulating injurylike damage to his heart that his electrical rhythm steadies out on the horrible-but-functional thing - 

Marian finishes filtering-and-nuking her most recent syringe of the three-times-rinsed diamond and delicately scrapes it into the central bowl of powder and de-cakes some of the crumbly bits with the edge of a spoon and then goes to schlorp up more and the container of diamond liquid is empty???

Are they. Done. Are they ready???? Is that definitely all of the diamond dust syringes, they weren't wasting a lot with the method but they don't have a ton of wiggle room, but if they're actually ready then she should maybe be gowning up to rush in there right now? ...Not rush. Make a careful and stateful trip in there. Possibly with the dry-diamond bowl inside a biohazard bag in the unlikely but horrible event that she manages to trip or something. But it sounds like if they're ready she should definitely not delay???? 

Shavri is skimming surface thoughts outside the room occasionally - the room feels like it should be shielded, what with all the positive pressure isolation, but of course nothing is shielded against Mindspeech here - and she's considering that enough reason to relay to the nurses that now is probably a good time to draw all those labs they urgently wanted. And poke Samora to let her know that her materials might be incoming soon?