Vinilla's Den

Early life and career

Cecil Rycroft was born to an upper middle class family, with two siblings. His parents, who were devout Christians, chose not to have him vaccinated against smallpox despite having the opportunity to do so, and the boy caught the disease when he was nine years old. He came to the brink of death, but his mother's diligent praying and the hard work of a local doctor brought him back to health after a long battle that many others did not survive. This experience sparked many a change within Rycroft; his prolonged confinement to his bedroom gave him a craving to see the world, and he was inspired to save other people in the same way that the doctor had done for him. His parents thus encouraged him to go into missionary work, as he could accomplish both of these dreams with career path, and even spread the Gospel to those he healed along the way.

As an adult, Rycroft applied to work with the London Missionary Society after finishing medical school, and through it helped bring western medicine and religion to China. He was in the country at the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising against Western and Christian influence. The experience disheartened him, and he was unsure whether he wanted to continue doing mission work there. A Royal Navy friend suggested he could become a surgeon for polar expeditions instead, and if it didn't work out he could return to China, where the tense political climate will have hopefully settled in the years that such an expedition would take. Rycroft agreed to the idea; he may have been rather devout but he had no objection to the scientific work that these expeditions would entail. Understanding God's world better was no crime, but attempting to outsmart His designs surely was.

Polar Adventures

For Rycroft's first Antarctic venture, he was paired with the younger, slightly off-kilter Domagoj Evans as his assistant. They worked together well, but that could be attributed to the fact that the expedition was rather uneventful and they didn't have much cause to talk with each other in-depth. Nevertheless, Rycroft enjoyed the experience and decided to sign on for the United Kingdom's next journey to the continent: the Enlightenment Expedition.

The Disease

About a month into the expedition, a few crew members, mostly seamen, came to the surgeons reporting troubling symptoms: lethargy, bruising easily, joint stiffness and pain, and below average body temperatures. Of course, these were some textbook symptoms for scurvy, and Rycroft and Evans agreed to treat these patients for the disease accordingly. However, the dog handler, Kyrre Mortensen, reported seeing similar symptoms in his dogs but claimed that dogs were unable to get scurvy, and therefore the disease they were seeing had to be something else that needed to be investigated further. Rycroft disagreed, feeling a bit insulted that a lowly manual laborer thought that he knew better than him.

Mortensen refused to drop the subject though, and so the issue was brought forward to Captain Theodore Hawthorne. Hawthorne deliberated for a while but sided with the surgeons. Mortensen reacted negatively, but was nevertheless allowed to do whatever he wanted to help his own dogs as long as he didn't interfere with the other crew's work, especially the surgeons. And so, Rycroft and Evans continued as they were, treating the illness their human patients were battling as though it were scurvy. Eventually though, they had to face the fact that their symptoms were not responding to treatment, and in fact were getting worse. Their joints began to lock up completely, with their body temperatures plummeting even lower. Rycroft conceded that they had stumbled upon something new, and decided to call the mystery illness "Austral hypothermia". He allowed Evans to take charge of documenting the illness while he concerned himself with providing comfort for the patients.

The First Autopsy

Rycroft was rather disheartened to learn of Mortensen's death. Due to the unusual circumstances, he and Evans were called upon to do an examination to find any possible clues as to the precise cause of death. The absolutely disastrous state that Mortensen's body was in made it difficult for any major conclusions to be reached, but they theorized that it couldn't have been possible for human hands to cause the injuries he sustained; it must have been some sort of animal with plenty of sharp teeth. Rycroft also saw to the injuries that Hawthorne sustained in the attack. He was surprised to see that they weren't as severe as the scene of the "crime" initially suggested, but thought nothing of it and quickly returned his focus back to Austral Hypothermia. Symptoms continued to worsen but it was as of yet unclear where the ceiling would be - just how bad things would get - and Rycroft wanted to be ready for it.

Rycroft was keen to keep tabs on the ongoing developments related to the mystery animal, as he wanted to be prepared for more patients to come to his surgery in case of another attack. He was a bit incredulous throughout Lawrence Brewer's presentation revealing that the snow griffin he and his party found was not Mortensen's killer, but knew better than to get vocal over it, unlike many of the younger crew members.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION :-)