The beefrogs are fed at six, and I make sure I’m the one to feed them, because the last time I delegated it a graduate-level idiot with a ma
Chum LTN.3: Dufay
"Okay!" she says. "Okay, okay. Hi. So."
Trent takes the cap off his pen.
"Look, look - if I had a gene bank or a sperm bank of every superpowered person in Philadelphia or the Eastern Seaboard or even just like a moderately large town, we'd be in business, but we don't. As of this moment, I have two prepared cell lines. Mr. Nothing, and Deathgirl. So we've got that and animal tissue. You following me?" she asks to no response except for Mr. Yellowjacket nodding silently. Darnell raises a single eyebrow.
"Lena won't get me any monkey cells or monkey chimera cells, I remember that last zoo heist, but she did let me tap the beefrogs - super cute - for their cultures and eggs. They're made to be bioreactors, so I figure they'd be perfect for this. Frogs are super advantageous," she continues, with me resisting the urge to interrupt her.
"So. Project Bullfrog, that's what we're calling it"
Mr. Yellowjacket raises a hand. I laser focus my eyes on him in a way that I hope telepathically communicates 'save it to the end'.
Mr. Antithesis writes.
Mr. Yellowjacket puts his hand down.
Effie continues. "I'm always thinking this: why three hours? Why three hours? For an oral pill? And Fly, the injectable, lasts forever? I could buy a week. Maybe even a month or two. Forever? And why does our Vysera keep that 3 hour time limit? Believe me, I've tried to get it indefinite. It just doesn't budge."
Keys writes something down.
"That one ended up being a red herring, haha. But! There's no biological material in Jump or Fly, only chemicals produced by presumably Rogue Wave's power stealer, right? They're anomalous chemicals, not anomalous biologics. Minerals. I mean, it's all chemistry! And that's all physics, which is math. Biology is just chemistry is physics is math. It's really simple," she rattles off.
Blue Velvet's head tips a quarter inch. She's following Effie, not the science.
"Why do people need to inject all of the Fly? Can't they split it with a buddy? Does it weaken if you don't inject all of it? Strengthen? Not work at all? And why do people reliably die if you give them two doses of Fly, or Fly and Hypeman?" Effie sort of runs a hand through her hair and adjusts her ponytail. She makes an expression that is not, for once, wild and carefree jubilance. "Surely there isn't - hahaha - surely there isn't some kind of cosmic adjudicator deciding how many powers you can have, and if you get too many, kaboom! That's too ridiculous for words."
Nobody laughs, except her, briefly, and one short exhale from ESP.
Overdose has a shape - it has a curve, a dose-response, survivors at the low end. This has no curve. This has a threshold and a cliff. Two doses of Fly in one body, and a human being reliably folds themselves in half. Very rarely, they walk away from it, usually if regeneration is involved, which reliably gives them turbo-cancer. Jump and Fly? That's fine, unless you stack powers that don't work well. Jump and Hypeman? Same deal. Fly and Fly, or Fly and Hypeman? Kaboom.
I don't believe in adjudicators. I believe in mechanisms I haven't found yet. So I stand there with my hand on the tarp and my dick in my hand and I let a woman I tolerate tell a joke I knew the answer to.
"But." Effie clicks the laser pointer at nothing, delighted, because this is her favorite part. She's been rehearsing it in the bathroom. "Friends of mine. Colleagues. I have all your answers."
She looks at me. That's my cue.
"His name is Dufay," she says. "And he is going to be doing some very important work for us."
I pull the tarp.
