12 hours into her hospital stay and 13 hours into unconsciousness, it was decided that what Karyn had was an infection of some sort. Blood was taken and tests were run, all of which came up negative. The fever did not stop, nor did the sweating, to the point where they had to give her an IV of saline to keep Karyn from dehydrating. It was at 8 hours in that the sweat began to become more viscus and white, and after an hour of this Kayrn was covered in a semi translucent film about a centimeter thick, which clung to her skin like flypaper. It was at this point the doctors knew that they were dealing with something new, and they isolated Karyn and started running a new and bigger battery of tests.
She had a high white blood cell count in her blood, but very little of anything that could be considered a "novel" or new virus. Then again new things are hard to spot when you don't know what you are looking for. The amazing thing was her blood was not only perfect, it had also changed. One sample from when she first came in was AB+, then two hours later, after the film started forming, her blood type came back O-. In the second vile of blood her white blood cell count was completely normal, as if she had been on dialysis or her blood completely replaced with new blood.
It was at this point the more specific tests were run, this wasn't just something new, it was something unheard of, unlike anything ever seen in the history of medicine.
12 hours in the big discovery was made. The film that had encased Karyn, was in fact, a coating made of stem cells, salt, and water. Stem cells, for those that don't know are the type of cells that can become any other type of cell, they are universal, and if you were to add them to a liver, they would become liver tissue, if you were to add them to a brain, they would become neurons, inject them into an injured or blind eye, and they will patch that eye and sometimes even restore sight. It was these sorts of cells that were encasing Karyn's body.
It would be nearly a day before they would discover the next part of the puzzle. The film presented challenges to working out exactly what was going on. It was thick, the consistency of creamy peanut butter and just as sticky. It not only stuck to her skin, removing it, which was possible, only would require her body to produce more, which it would. The concern there being that she would dehydrate from having to keep producing this film. It was already estimated she had lost 9% of her bodyweight in sweat alone. (This wouldn't be noticed till later in other subjects but she had actually lost body mass, as in shrunk, while she had been laying in her bed, it wasn't just weight loss, her body was actually converting normal cells into stem cells to create this film around her body) Also IV's became a problem in that the stem cells would act heal the "wound" were the IV was much more quickly than should happen, which could cause infection and well it would be like putting a metal rod in you and then never taking it out as your body healed around it, if that sounds like a problem to you, you are correct.
It was at hour 23 that they found out that the film was actually flowing in and out of her, and slowly receding. The outside had begun to crust over from exposer to the air. By this point, one of the more clever doctors had begun calling this what he saw it was, not a disease, but a metamorphic phenomena. She was like a caterpillar in a cocoon, but without the cocoon. When a caterpillar makes a chrysalis, it then melts in that enclosure, and from that goop, reforms into something else, a butterfly or moth. Karyn seemed to be going through a similar process. and thus this was named, the butterfly flu.
Hour 24. The fever had broken, the film had receded so that all that was left was thick flakes of the detritus of the cocoon she had made. Her chest rose and fell in deep breaths. The doctors debated, what did their tests mean? This girl had fundimentally changed, her DNA was literally rewriting itself, this had never happened before. At 24 hours and 4 minutes. She woke up. She had never felt better.
