Chiral Inversion Syndrome

In the chaotic aftermath of the Pale Hands Crisis and the presumptive death of The Garbage Man in the collapsed depths of the Glass-Block Fortress, few people took notice when the reports of a rare few former 125 Hands agents and other subjects of the terrorist mastermind's dimensional shift ability began to perish from mysterious maladies resembling starvation. Fewer still made the connection between these deaths and the symptoms of Distal wasting - even among those who had never once set foot in the Distal Tesseract, much less attempted to eat the plants and animals which resided there.

Causes

Cyrus Vinge was a garbage man and terrorist by trade - hence his nickname as The Garbage Man - not a mathematician, chemist, or navigator. As such, Cyrus was unaware of the changes in holonomy that could be introduced into a structure as a result of being forcibly moved through higher spatial dimensions without resort to the Manifold Sky's commissures and inflection layer. When forced to use his abilities under pressure, The Garbage Man would sometimes unwittingly tap into bends in the fabric of spacetime in just such a way that objects would come out mirrored - including, most importantly, in the chirality of any stereoisomers present in the object's structure. Unfortunately, when this was done to a living creature, it caused them to effectively become part of the Distal ecosphere, as all of their amino acids also changed chirality, rendering many foods from 'terrestrial' sources unable to be digested at best and outright toxic at worst.

Symptoms

Regardless of attempts to sustain them, victims of chiral inverison would waste away as though they were starving and, eventually, succumb to what appeared to be malnutrition. No obvious cause for malnutrition was present, however, as each victim ate just as heartily as they did before and, aside from new bouts of indigestion or the occasional new alergic reaction to previously healthful foods, seemed simply to become thinner and less vivacious as the syndrome progressed.
Many who studied these mysterious deaths assumed that they were caused by radiation from the Celestial Realms during transits along the hidden fourth and fifth spatial dimensions of the Manifold Sky. The usual cancers, lesions, and infections noted in people who explored particularly contaminated portions of the Northern and Southern Tesseract were not present, however, though immune supression was observed among some patients who did have a history of contact with the Distal Tesseract.

Treatment

With The Garbage Man dead, any potential for residents of the Manifold Sky to resolve chiral inversion syndrome in a victim became impossible. Presumably, denizens of the Celestial Realms might presumably have had the ability to tap into additional spatial dimensions and, therefore, perform the holonomy shifts required to resolve the syndrome, but no such entities ever came forward to do so or could even be proven to exist. Had the true cause of the syndrome been discovered, the victims could have traveled to the Distal Tesseract and attempted to eat plants and animals from there in an attempt to determine which would now have nutritive content for them.

Affected Groups

Only around 1% of all subjects of the The Garbage Man's abilities ever experienced chiral inversion syndrome. Many who would have eventually shown symptoms later perished as a result of actions taken by The Garbage Man, the 125 Hands under his command, or the various factions who opposed them.

Type

Physiological

Cycle

Chronic, Acquired

Rarity

Extremely Rare