“How the bloody hell am I supposed to do that…”

Vincent Cain bit his lips as he sat large mahogany desk. Before him sat several scattered parchments filled with frantic scrawlings and blots of ink. His normally well kept hair was a tangled bird's nest of blonde. His deep sapphire eyes were clouded and bloodshot with dark sullen bags hanging under them. His skin was unusually pale, and his august robes were disheveled and messed up. Voices whispered a jumbled cacophony of a message in his mind's ear, leaving the scholar exhausted and with a killer migrane.

Yet he had finally figured out what the voices of Fate wanted of him, and it wasn’t a simple task.

Taking a deep breath the scholar leaned back and chewed on his lower lip as he contemplated the task before him. Curing the plaguelands of Raiaera would not be easy. Just as purging the Red Forest of Pode’s curse had taken countless heroes, Xem’zunds plague would prove increasingly more tenacious. It spread slowly across the land like a festering infection, being actively spread by the remaining forces of the proud necromancers cruel regime.

Vincent began to turn the problem at hand over in his mind. He would need samples of walking corpses, soil, bile, anything at all the could be carrying the plague. He would need a safe place to store everything without risking contamination of both the samples and the people dealing with them.

The last thing he needed was another outbreak.

Research aside, once he had a cure implementing it would be an entirely different animal. With such a large area to cover he would need a new way to disperse his solution. He would need soldiers armed to combat zombied during the implementation phase, each geared to prevent their own infection. In the end it boiled down to money he didn’t have, manpower he couldn’t dream of mustering, and resources he couldn’t afford.

How Fate intended to pull any of this off was a mystery, but the Cards seemed to feel particularly chatty. They murmured softly in his ear, clouding his thoughts and making it hard to think. Sighing, the scholar reached under his desk and pulled out a large bottle of cheap white wine. Uncorking it he began to raise it to his lips before there was a knock at his door. Scowling, the scholar stashed his drink away before answering.

“Come in.”