Here's the next (and probably-final for the forseeable future) installment of my sidestory:
Mr Frog stared at the Spawn tissue sample in the tray sullenly. He'd recently devised a way to toughen the Spawn's tissues and quadruple their resistance to piercing or cutting weapons with few negative drawbacks and was now in the process of figuring out how to discretely |add| a drawback. The constant surveillance in his lab meant Mr Frog had to at least be working on |something| at all times, though to Mr Frog's benefit the idiots in the security room probably couldn't visually discern the difference between engineering a bioweapon and baking a soufflé. Silena stood next to him watching, not doing anything particularly-helpful but at the very least ready and willing to spring into action the second Mr Frog needed her to hold something for a moment.
Silena, for her part, wasn't as thrilled with the prospect of assisting Mr Frog with his horrific project as she preferred to let on, but she was under orders to assist him, and so assist him she would. Admittedly, the only help Mr Frog would allow her to provide was holding onto things when he needed a free hand and cleaning up the occasional noxious spill, and even that had been a hard-earned priviledge only obtained after a 15-minute war with shouting, screaming, and at one point biting (Mr Frog was absurdly-secretive about the project, not allowing Silena to so much as look at anything remotely-important -- a fact which Silena noted with a healthy amount of suspicion), but that was as involved as Silena wished to become.
Something had occurred to Silena recently; Mr Frog was Ballpoint -- or, at least, ex-Ballpoint. In fact, ex-Ballpoint was even better; he had no reason to try to protect the company. Silena wasn't sure how much Mr Frog could be trusted, but she was reasonably-certain that any questions regarding Ballpoint would be answered truthfully, and there was something that she desperately needed to know. Perhaps Mr Frog would give her the answers she'd been searching for for fourteen years.
"Mr Frog, sir?" she began uncertainly. The little man turned his attention away from his work and craned his head around and up at her, irritation on his face. His attention was enough; Silena continued: "You were fairly high-up at Ballpoint, correct?"
Mr Frog's expression darkened. He looked at Silena suspiciously; her expression was uncharacteristically-serious. "Yes. What of it?" he said; "I've cut my ties with the company, if that's what you're concerned about," he continued tensely; "I want nothing more than to see it burn."
Silena shook her head; "No, that's not it," she said. There were other things about Mr Frog that made her suspicious.
"My father was an engineer for Ballpoint," said Silena; Mr Frog raised his eyebrows. Silena continued: "Fourteen years ago, he vanished without a trace. We tried everything -- police, private detectives -- but nobody could find even a single clue." Silena felt tears welling up; this was dredging up painful memories. "My mother suspected Ballpoint," continued Silena; "She didn't have any proof, but she felt it in her gut. Me too." Mr Frog straightened up and turned towards Silena, now paying full attention. "She tried to track him down on her own," continued Silena, her voice cracking, "sneaking into Ballpoint's facilities and looking for clues, but then she vanished, too." Silena paused and took a deep breath, composing herself; she looked Mr Frog straight in the eyes. "Do you know what happened to them? Either of them?"
Mr Frog furrowed his brow; this conversation was very telling. He supposed there wasn't any harm in humouring her. "I don't believe I've even heard of either of them, unfortunately," he said; "I recall a few of your species working at Ballpoint, but as far as I could tell they were all female, and if your mother had had a run-in with security I wouldn't have heard of it." He sucked on his lip; come to think of it, he strongly-doubted that Silena was actually related to any of the hominid species, despite superficial similarities. He added: "Unless... is your species not sexually-dimorphic? Perhaps even hermaphroditic? What did your father look like?" There was a distinct possibility that he had met her father and mistook him for a woman.
Silena's eyes widened for a moment, then she shook her head. "It's a lot more complicated than that," she said quickly; "My father was a dwarf. His name was Zuntir. He was a few inches shorter than you, stocky, and had black hair, blue eyes, and a really big nose with a bit of a hook to it. He usually had a pointed beard a bit like yours, but longer."
Mr Frog thought about this; interspecies couples weren't unheard-of. Silena could easily have been adopted, or her parents could have used a sperm donor. In any case, he didn't recall ever knowing anyone by that name; however, the date Silena had given for his disappearance raised another, highly-unsettling possibility. It was when Ballpoint's experimentation with the Spawn was hitting its peak; some of Ballpoint's dwarven staff had started to object very strongly, and said dwarves developed a disturbing tendancy to vanish.
Mr Frog frowned gravely. Silena's heart dropped into her stomach; she couldn't imagine what it took to upset a monster like Mr Frog.
"I don't recall ever meeting anyone by your father's description," began Mr Frog; Silena's hopes shattered. "However," he continued, his eyes suddenly hooded, "at the time your father disappeared, Ballpoint had hit the height of its Spawn research." Silena's eyes widened; she had a hunch where this was going, and she didn't like it. "The nature of the experiments caused a great deal of consternation among the dwarven staff, which many of them -- against their better judgment -- voiced, some of them threatening to go to the authorities," continued Mr Frog gravely; "Such dwarves typically vanished shortly afterwards." He focused his gaze at Silena; "Before he vanished, did your father express any sort of displeasure with Ballpoint?"
Silena shook her head. Tears were streaming down her face. "No," she said; "He... kept his work private. He never talked about his job in front of me and Mom. When he -- when he was with his family, his family was all that m-mattered." Silena was breaking down; she took several deep breaths and continued: "But what you're saying makes sense. So you think... you think Ballpoint killed him to keep him quiet?"
Mr Frog averted his gaze. "Do I think they killed him..?" he muttered darkly; "Yes, in a sense." Silena's insides froze; she didn't like Mr Frog's tone one little bit. "Ballpoint's management is very pragmatic about these things, you understand," said Mr Frog grimly; "If something doesn't work anymore, they repair it. If it can't be repaired, they repurpose it." He hesitantly looked Silena in the eye. "I believe that your father was used as a live test subject for Ballpoint's Spawn experiments," said Mr Frog; he had been in charge of the project, and had likely watched with detached interest as Zuntir turned into a Spawn, not even knowing his name. "I am deeply, deeply sorry," said Mr Frog. He looked at Silena with a sincerity in his eyes that shocked her, if only because of who it was coming from.
Silena's mind went reeling, and not just because Mr Frog actually seemed to be truly-remorseful about something. She felt light-headed, and placed her hand on a nearby desk to steady herself. Had that truly been her father's fate? She didn't want to believe it, but it made too much sense to dismiss. She waited a few moments for her head to stop spinning, then looked back at Mr Frog. "And my mother..?" she asked.
Mr Frog shook his head, his expression hardening back to its usual steady, dead-eyed leer. "I wouldn't know," he said; "However, if security caught her somewhere she wasn't supposed to be and upmanage suspected that she had something she would go to the authorities with, they would probably have either killed her or -- more-likely, based on what I've seen -- wiped her memories and dumped her in some primitive universe with no means of returning." He paused, then added: "Is that why you joined Eris, then? To take revenge on Ballpoint?"
Silena nodded, her expression darkening. "Yes," she said hotly; "I hate them. For what they did to my family, I want to watch every single bastard who ever worked there die." She raised her voice angrily; "If I could, I'd kill them all myself! After everything they've done, it's what they deserve!"
Mr Frog raised an eyebrow coolly. "Really? Every single bastard who ever worked there?" he asked pointedly; "I find that statement highly-alarming. I don't have much to work with here -- regulations, you see -- so if you were to try to break into my bedroom while I'm sleeping, I can't guarantee that your death would be as prompt as I would like."
Silena shook her head. She knew Mr Frog had been head of Ballpoint's bioengineering division, and had likely watched with his characteristic cold, mask-like sneer as her father turned. "No," she said darkly; "I think you should die for what you did -- I want to make you suffer like your test subjects had -- but you're on my side now." She glared at Mr Frog; "I can't forgive you, though, especially now that I know what might have happened to my father -- what you might have done to him."
Mr Frog raised his eyebrow again; seeing the usually-bubbly woman wish him dead to his face was oddly-amusing to him. It almost felt like a perverse sort of accomplishment. "Hate me if you like," he said coldly; "I'm not proud of what I did at Ballpoint. But I do recommend that you prioritize punishing those that are still actively attempting to cause harm." He shrugged; "Sometimes working to correct the negative consequence of one's wrongdoings is punishment enough. Something, perhaps, to contemplate while doing those silly stretches of yours every morning." Silena continued to glare at Mr Frog, unsure how to respond.
Mr Frog turned his attention back to the tissue sample. "In any case, I'm deeply-sorry about your parents, but I have work to attend to at the moment." It seemed to Mr Frog that he had finally seen Silena's true nature. He still had his doubts as to her intelligence, but there was clearly a very angry woman hidden beneath her cheerful, ditzy mask; there was a slight possibility that he could channel that anger to his advantage.
Now, if it's all the same to everyone else, I'd like to call it quits here. One thing that came to light during the previous argument was that I have completely and utterly failed to either build or communicate even the rudiments of a coherent setting (and made my guy a stealth God Mode Stu to boot), to the detriment of both my story and the canon as a whole. I'm not sure how to really fix any of it, but it seems better to just drop the plotline here rather than risk screwing things up for everyone further with my monkey-on-a-keyboard hackery.
I don't want to leave the story unfinished, but I don't think it's even worth finishing anymore, so I'm just going to call this project a failure and move on to something else that hopefully won't involve writing.
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Topic: [34.11] Spearbreakers - It shudders and begins to move (Read 2281636 times)