Some Notes on Norn Biochemistry

The mechanism of disease

Records from the first two plagues in ancient Albia, especially observations of the norn Molly during the Antigen Three plague in Ritual Codex Two, suggest a general course of infection and recovery in the normal norn: immediately after the initial appearance of the antigen, antigen level begins to decline and antibody level rises. After an interval, antigen level suddenly rises sharply, and then begins to decline again; antibodies continue their gradual increase. This continues for some time, with antigen level falling gradually and then rising sharply in a regular "sawtooth" pattern, and antibody level steadily increasing. At some point, the upswings in antigen level cease, antigens drop gradually to zero, and the norn is healthy again.

The continual rise in antibody level and decline in antigen is easy to explain: every normal norn has a gene that causes an antibody reaction in the bloodstream. The norn immune system expends glucose to destroy antigens and produce the corresponding antibody (this reduction in glucose is what causes life force to decrease in seriously ill norns). This leaves unexplained the periodic upswings in antigen level: why they occur at all, and why (in non-fatal cases) they eventually stop.

The best current hypothesis is that the upswings in antigen represent the normal reproductive pattern of the infectious agent; when antigens are present in a norn, they periodically reproduce themselves (at a rate much faster of course than the norn reproductive cycle), and levels rise. That is, every few seconds the antigens have lots of kids, and there's an antigen population explosion.

Why does antigen reproduction eventually stop? The most promising theory gives credit to the norn antibodies. As various researchers have pointed out, antibodies do not figure on the left hand side of any normal norn biochemical reactions; why, then, produce antibodies at all? It seems reasonable to guess that antibodies somehow inhibit the reproduction of antigens: when the antibody level is high enough, antigens can no longer reproduce.

The first and simplest hypothesis was that antigen reproduction ceases as soon as the antibody level is equal to or greater than the antigen level. More recent records however, especially from the norn Christine during an encounter with antigen Six (click here for an image), suggest that the situation is more complex: antigen reproduction in the case of Christine continued until the antibody level was considerably higher than the antigen level (somewhere between 150 and 200% of the antigen level). This suggests either that there is some more complex function that determines how much antibody is needed to terminate antigen reproduction, or that not all the curves in the biochemistry section of the Science Kit are drawn to the same Y-axis.

Clearly, further investigation of all this stuff is necessary.