My villain is slowly poisoning his step daughter, the queen. He needs to keep her sick enough that she can't get rid of him and his followers or marry and start a family, but he can't kill her until his daughter is old enough to inherit. Given the Queen is also the chief executive officer of the government, there are fitness rules that disallow minors. Plus his wife had just died, so another death would be a bit suspicious.
Given the story is set in the future with FTL travel and communications, settling other worlds, aliens, and such- How does he pull this off without getting caught. Why with this level of technology can't somebody figure out what's going on...
Some sort of genetically modified retrovirus slowly eating away at the nerve sheathes? But wouldn't they have cured MS or MD sometime in the next few centuries....I'd really like it to be something that a vegan or even low meat diet would make worse.
I'm going to charge ahead with a handful of symptoms and a lot of motive.
Ruth
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0 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 12 48
some kind of tiny radioactive seed, only visible if you know where it is and its there, not able to pick up on scanners.......it would take 2 decades to kill her and it will be very, very painful
1,169 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 15 24
Vegan or low meat diet, could mean she would be low on protein, maybe the villain could hide the poison/disease in 'protein shakes' and as Crazy_Skillz just said, something radioactive can go undetected for a long time.
33,000 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 16 06
I would go with something simple, like giving her a poison that stops absorption of something vital. Say you managed to find something the scientists don't know about, that stops people absorbing vitamin D. This can result in things like heart disease, some cancers and chronic fatigue; it even causes depression, which could mean she commits suicide later on - she wouldn't want to marry anyone if the depression is that bad, and nor would she want kids.
If you take the time to glance through the symptoms of some of these deficiencies, I'm sure you could come up with something.
Even if you didn't do that, there are still ways of getting around the doctors figuring it out. Maybe they know exactly what is going on - not the poisoning part, of course, but all the symptoms etc - and they assume it's nothing more than a disease. Imagine how frantic they would be when she shows all the symptoms of a disease they know, but they cannot cure her, because your villian is still feeding her the cause. Or you could have your villian make an alliance with an enemy race, and have the scientists of said race show him some sort of new, undiscovered-by-anyone-but-them chemical that causes fatal symptoms. That way, again, the doctors would see the symptoms, but wouldn't be able to conclude anything but that it's a new disease of some kind. They wouldn't be able to stop it until they knew more about what was causing it.
The only problem I can see with poisoning over a long time is the possibility of her gaining immunity. This is easy to get around, but I just wanted to make sure you knew that readers could expect it.
284 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 22 26
If you want an archaic feel, give her candles with arsenic in the wicks, so they release it as they burn, I don't think that it would be too quickly fatal, or even not at all if they are rationed to her
1,339 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 08 48
He has acquired something (X) that has been banned from the universe or completely used up or otherwise thought to be gone. If the thought of X even comes up to the doctors, they would be "It can't be X, because X doesnt exist any more"
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23,060 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 19 14
Yeah, good old arsenic would work. I rememeber a true story where a woman poisoned her husband with it by putting it in tea, but at low level, and it kept doctors stumped for a long time since he kept getting ill and seeming to recover in cycles. He lost fingernails, and his lips would turn blue, if I remember the symptoms correctly.
The only thing is, arsenic (or any other heavy metal) would show up in the right blood test. At present, I believe these kind of blood tests are considered quite exotic, and would be very rarely performed (basically only if heavy metal poisoning was suspected). In the future, though, you might expect that kind of test to be simpler.
15,003 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 23 40
You could go the high-tech way. A biotech-derived active protein specific to her DNA.
It would be highly specific with next to no chance of poisoning anyone else. It would also be almost undetectable as it would appear as one of her body's own proteins.
What it would do is more-or-less up to you. I'd consider blocking a hormonal pathway so the victim would slowly become more and more unbalanced, which would present both psychologically and physically.
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7,538 / 50,000
Nov 9, 2009 - 07 18
you could use something artificially engineered, a disease or toxin made just for this purpose
----------if you really wanna have fin with it you could have it as a new super secret government weapon that was designed to take out important targets with near impossibility to detect
Then you're trusted lieutenant bad guy does some sneaky stuff to get it off records and feeds it to the queen, he could even modify it further so that it will keep her sick in doses
or
use something mundane and have the doctors say "Future science isn't perfed"
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