Yet again blackness enveloped his vision, closing from the peripheries towards the centre. He felt as though his brain was stuck in a wild, spinning side show ride with his mind a hapless and helpless observer. The echoing percussion of his skull hitting the concrete footpath didn't accompany any new pain. His last impression was of voices. He didn't understand what they were saying. He did however feel that they had a gentle tone. The last thought before complete unconsciousness took him, could have been that he was wrong about such things before.

The two figures bending over him cast shadows behind them on the pavement resembling a shared pair of wings. The diagonally situated street lights projecting a twin bodied angelic form that gave the scene a decidedly ethereal feel for any observer. There weren't any, at least none who counted.

They were clad in lab coats and both wore spectacles. The male was of middle age, tall and with what was probably never muscle, now definitely running to fat. He was pale but well kept. The woman was slim but not slender with blond hair styled in a longish and well cut, uneven bob. She appeared to be at least fifteen years younger than the male. They both wore expensive, conservative shoes. Hers from Rome and his from London. They looked more like affluent medical specialists rather than academics. Affluent academics seem to be a rarity.

Speaking first, in a voice that hinted at a sense of sardonic resignation the male said. 'This will be my late appointment, my very late appointment. Help me get him inside will you Steph? My back still hasn't recovered from this morning'
The woman answered in a Northern European accent. 'Certainly Doktor' Delivering the title with just a dusting of sarcasm. Adding, 'You should not exert yourself with such passion, at your age.'
Ignoring the comment, he became business like, in an attempt to escape her humour as much as a response to his evaluation of the condition of the man on his back in front of them. He instructed, 'We'll put him directly into the cubicle. There is no time for any preliminaries. He's contracted a significant level of Brane activity contamination.'
'Andrew, I know you want to use Ca3 serum with this client, do you think that it might be worthwhile setting up an additional camera? It is the first trial.'
'Sure, if we have time Steph.'

Ca3 represented the combined efforts of a linguistic professor, an anthropologist, a professor of Archeology as well as a sociologist, an abstract mathematician and Andrew. To say that they were a tight group was similar to calling the QE II a boat. True but so far short of the mark. They were all related by an obsession with the arcane as well as by blood. Ca3 was the latest flag along a path of discovery that had so far consumed the attention of Andrew Rougenaught and his five brothers for 25 years. They all blamed their mother, an historian and archeologist who was obsessed with the implications of the Templar Knights, their rise and rise and eventual collapse and the connection with the Swiss flag and banking. Conspiracy was a word commonly heard at their dinner table. Their father was considered an innocent. A mathematician who earned a decent living doing something or other for some government department. He had told them on several occasions about what exactly it was that he did. Unfortunately their interest was usually distracted onto more interesting topics before they ever got a solid understanding of his enterprise. It had not for a moment entered any of their heads that it was he who inspired their mother into a search that he could never have entered given his sensitive governmental responsibilities.

The recipe as Andrew called the formula for Ca3 had been carved on a stone found with an artifact that not only defied identification and categorisation. It also caused acute poisoning. The object, a disk of what appeared to be gold but was not, had three fine gold pins through it. Andrew had withdrawn one of the pins and encased it in resin to allow easier and safer handling.
His initial experiments were around the toxicity of the disc and the pins. He placed them in proximity to cages with white mice under various circumstances. Finally, when they showed no ill effects to the resin encased pin, he continued investigating until he found that the metal needed to touch the skin to have a contaminating effect. He started carrying the small block of resin in his pocket and feeling it every now and again. He did this for over a year, alert for any sign of poisoning. None occurred. What was most irritating to Andrew was that the metal defied identification, it failed to fit anywhere on the periodic table.

Since the discovery of the disc he had come in contact with a few other researchers, usually through some amazing coincidence or other, who each had some object that displayed similar poisonous properties. To confuse matters more, they possessed the further baffling property of being made of different, unidentifiable materials. This group had formed a not secret but rather unspoken sort of loose club around Andrew. Their natural, academic competitiveness was suspended due to the complete lack of knowledge about the origination of the objects as well as the absence of any logical matrix or method to informatively qualify their constituent materials. They each ran their own quiet research programms and shared the resultant information, without exception. Although, if asked they would have had to express differing motives for their exemplary co-operation and collaboration.

Andrew's gold disc had been discovered by his brother while on an expedition that had been undertaken after the reading one of his mothers journals. It detailed her trip to Central America and documented efforts to find evidence relating to a supposed ancient mine. It was guessed to be about one thousand four hundred years old. Her investigations were stymied by the incredible fact that there were no artifacts on offer at the sight. Not even any shards of tools nor traces of the mining methods used. It was a significant conundrum. It had remained so to the present day. No theory had proved valid, or even possible. Only the most outlandish of fantasies could give any explanation.

The disc had fallen from a hollow behind a carved piece of stone when, exhausted from climbing, Gregory Rougenaught had dislodged it's neighbors by sitting on them. After their return, they had sought to decipher and age the stone. Nissan Rougenaught had estimated the carving to be about fourteen hundred years old. It had finally yielded the secret of it's script after 20 years of the combined efforts of all six brothers and various other academics. The pictographs read like a simple recipe for cactus soup. Unfortunately, it used three different types of cactus. All of them rare. One was thought to be extinct until Cedric Rougenaught had bought some in a supposed drug deal with some small time, shady Mexican private business men. They had heard that he was interested in cactus and assumed it was for it's illicit medicinal properties. They charged an exorbitant fee but assured that if it was worthwhile they could procure tons. So much for extinction.