Scientists Squabble Over Tissue Sample
Ida:At a press conference last week, research biologist and amateur exorcist, Emile Portabello, announced he had succeeded in extracting a tissue sample from a demon he was in the proccess of excorsizing from a young Ida County girl. Portabello, a Research Fellow at Georg von Podebrad College, said that he cut off part of the demon's shoulder as it attempted to flee through the girl's mouth. When asked to name the demon, Portabello smilingly refused, explaining he was "already in enough trouble, as it is."
The sample was exhibited in a special containment jar surrounded by weird charms and arcane magical symbols. The sample consisted of a small piece of broken bone with brown and pink flesh clinging to it. It also seemed to undulate faintly under the glare of media lights.
Portabello believes that though the demon was changing back into its native form of pure malevolent energy when it fled the excorscism, it had created an analog of its own metabolic system in order to meld with its victim's body. It was this analog material which Portabello obtained. He believes an analysis of the tissue will provide him with some surprising revelations.
One of Portelbello's collegues doesn't agree with his theory.
"Hogwash! It looks like a baddly butchered hunk of porkchop to me," Dr. Thadeus Keltern, Professor of Zoology at Podebrad College retorted upon viewing a picture of Portabello's sample. "If you ask me, I don't think the girl was possessed by anything but bad table manners. Seems to me Emile saved her from choking to death on some hastily chewed dinner."
Asked about the movement of the specimen in question, Dr. Keltern smiled, "Are sure Emile wasn't rocking the table with his foot?"
According to Dr. Keltern, the press conference was one in "a long and tired string" of Portabello's stunts aimed at lobbying Podebrad's Science Faculty Chairs to consider his struggles with the Infernal One as serious research science. In one example, Keltern describes an experiment with a blueberry muffin.
"Dr. Portabello set up an experiment to prove that matter could be divided into its benign and malevolent components. He placed a blueberry muffin on dish, and then exposed it to what he called a beam of 'Gateway Plasma'. Afterwards, he let us all have a piece and it tasted good. 'Of course it's good,' he said. 'I have successfully purged it of its malevolent energy!' It turned out his 'beam' was just a stripped-down microwave."
In a recent statement from the office of Podebrad's President, Dr. Nickelous Klutie, the college has reconsidered its offer to extend Portabello's fellowship on the grounds that his biological research has failed to produce any signifcant results.
Currently, Portabello's present work is partly funded by the B. Lavatsky Museum.
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