[Guilty Gear] Covalent Bonds VII
Title: Covalent Bonds, or The Absolutely Necessary GG College AU Fic with a Bad Title
Fandom: Guilty Gear
Part: 7 of ?
Pairing: mild Sol-Ky distillate
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: college-AU, humor/parody/crack
Summary: Sol is your not-so everyday mad science professor, and he hates the universe. That is, until he meets- Well, no. He's still going to hate the universe. He will, however, be forced into grudging coexistence with it.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII
Covalent Bonds
or The Absolutely Necessary GG College AU Fic with a Bad Title
Part VII
Coffee, it turned out, was the Spanish gold of the science lab - precious enough to barter ceasefires, able to buy passage to strange lands, and capable of enticing the supreme ruler of the jungle of pestilence and chaos, adversary of love, peace, and morning cheer, and natural enemy of sodium dodecyl sulfate into trade agreements he couldn't back out of.
Ky, newly appointed master of the treasury, swept through the decades-old box of coffee supplies like a spring-scented tornado, tossing out decaf, instant coffee, malt, and the dreadful powder mixes promising the unforgettable experience of a hazelnut chocolate mocha that tasted strongly of chalk. He had appropriated part of the budget to buy a proper grinder and a steady supply of kona beans, as he'd deemed the acquisition of a water-powered jetpack to be rather low on the list of priorities in comparison to the precious beverage that would allow him to enter and exit the lab in a dignified manner.
Professor Badguy was a man of few words, but they could be teased out of him with an espresso con grappa, and Ky politely decided not to remark on the pleased hum that would emanate from behind the Great Wall whenever he pushed a cup past the barrier. Of course, there was still the fact that the door locks were changed twice a day, and that he had to check his seat very carefully before sitting down, and the professor kept misplacing all manner of important things in hard-to-reach and inappropriate places, but other than that, he really didn't see what the fuss was all about.
Never in his life had it occurred to him to feel lonely, but he had certainly developed a lot of empathy for the pygmy possums at the local zoo. Being short, fourteen, orphaned and in college tended to have that effect, and if Ky had been majoring in sociology and also a lot more cynical than his sunny countenance allowed, he'd have written a paper comparing the frequency of curious stares, commiserative awws, and grabby hands. By contrast, the lab was a wildlife preserve run by the most disinterested gamekeeper on Earth. The professor called a wrong idea a wrong idea instead of telling him what a brilliant wrong idea it was, and Ky could expect to go through a whole day without any hair-ruffling, concerned questions about whether he was getting on, or his roommates' well-meaning, discomfited attempts at inviting him to a night on the town out of pity.
Here, he wasn't required to be legal to get access to the back room (though he certainly was required to have a strong mind and stomach), and he didn't get in the way so long as he kept to his side of the room. He could stow his meticulously hand-picked box of tea in a secluded corner of the coffee cabinet without expecting to find somebody's weed stash in it, keep working late without the distraction of drunken dorm parties, or have his nose buried in a publication all day and feel, for the first time in his life, that he had found a place to belong. Thus, Ky became the first and only person on the planet to describe spending an extended period of time around Sol Badguy as 'pleasant' and 'really quite normal,' something that would have gotten his capacity for risk/benefit judgments ruled unsound in seven states and also upset the professor profoundly, so he decided to keep it to himself.
Meanwhile, the ruler of the realm of pestilence and chaos began to experience some revelations of his own, but by a chance conspiracy of his higher mental faculties - most notably reason, curiosity, and his pitifully atrophied sense of companionship - was successfully kept from noticing the extent of these changes. (The higher mental faculties were quite aware that their owner had the tendency to resist change with flamethrowers, ground-to-air missiles and the occasional mutant uprising, so they deemed it much safer to leave the noticing of change to the tiny blond thing, who could be expected to catalogue it, professionally assess it, and, in this particular case, finish the cycle of realization by smiling quietly into his Earl Grey.)
At first, the change mostly manifested in the professor's lack of cursing whenever he saw Ky. After a while, a lack of door-slamming could be added to the list of observations. Looking closer, it became apparent that little bits and pieces in the wall around the professor's work table were starting to disappear, until it had shrunk to - or so Ky supposed - its usual size, less like the Hadrian's wall and more like the wall of an eccentric English gentleman, who was neither very English nor very gentlemanly, and also didn't take very good care of his lawn.
Around the same time, the realm of pestilence and chaos began exhibiting strange new properties. For one, it began to develop an acute lack of ashtrays, though the term "ashtray" had to be liberally applied to anything from saucers to crumpled take-out boxes, and, once in a while, an obliging petri dish. Ky couldn't honestly say where or why the ashtrays went, but his lungs and red-raw eyes felt grateful all the same.
For another, the chaos began to ooze. Not like a building tidal wave, or a blob of penetrating oil that could simply get into everything, but more like an amoeba in the depths of a water sample, slowly and purposefully stretching towards a distant source of food. Steadily, foreign items were finding their way into the space Ky had claimed as his own - a book on physical chemistry, a stack of old student papers with the post-it "Don't be that guy" attached to it, the occasional print-out of the first draft of one of the professor's articles (gratuitous swearing included). All of them simply phased into existence when he wasn't looking, and he was trying very hard not to.
It only seemed right to make room for a box of candy between his files and allow the professor's need for a cheap sugar fix to take over, munching on a chocolate bar while performing most-definitely-not-a-check-up, and muttering most-definitely-not-advice into his coffee cup.
Of course, class garnered Ky more stares than ever, since he was not only the first person to clamber back out of the jaws of hell (he suspected that this was mainly because nobody had tried), but also the first person to willingly clamber back into them (he suspected that being shot in the face with a pie cannon was a first impression few people cared to amend). He probably could have mentioned that really, Professor Badguy was only feeling murderous on days ending in -y, and he seemed to like teaching quite a bit so long as he didn't think he was teaching, and no, the story of the chewed-up pizza boy in the biosample refrigerator wasn't true, he tested it, and it turned out to be just congealed pepperoni with extra tabasco, but at this point, it almost felt like a personal betrayal to do so.
It was better to accept that he and the world had different priorities; Ky was content to get to know the man who could spend the better part of a day designing a Freddie Mercury cursor sprite, and the world was content to swap stories of said man's truly phenomenal and absolutely unproven body count - to interfere with this would be to upset the balance of the universe, and so it was much better to answer nosy questions with an enigmatic smile and accept that people were starting to call him St. George.
-------
There were a lot of reasons to become a teacher of literature, and a lot of reasons to stay one. Granted, most of them weren't very good reasons, generally some combination of idealism, mistaken hopes for fame and visions of the countless red sports cars that could be found tearing through the college campuses of early nineties movies. Once they started their career, one could observe a progressive souring of the young idealists' expressions, until they could be seen haunting the hallways with the mildly homicidal face of a person who had to see Shakespeare make an appearance on a list of modernist writers one time too many.
Most of them began to compensate by developing strange habits, such as directing independent films on the meaninglessness and impermanence of words, or self-publishing gloomy eighteenth-century-flavored verse only attractive to the kind of buyer who felt as bitter and slighted by life as the poet. (Then again, Testament had never been the particularly cheery sort, and all those free bra samples couldn't have helped.)
I-no's reason for staying was the shock value. Technically, a person of her persuasions seemed like she should have felt more at home running an S&M club - more money in that business, plus less of a fire hazard - but I-no felt that S&M had stopped being shocking with her mother's generation (or, to be precise, her mother's parents). These days, it needed a lot more than a bit of latex and a pair of handcuffs to make people turn the color of gently boiling lobster, and women's studies had proved to be fertile ground for any number of splendidly outrageous things that could be passed off as education and empowerment. Nothing quite like an erotic poetry reading with mandatory attendance, or a graphically aided lecture on the many representations of male castration in writing, and that wasn't even getting into all the wonderful things that could be passed off as "performance art" which would normally get a person arrested in the street.
I-no simply lived for making rows of prim, bespectacled and graying eminences squirm in their seats. Her students had turned out to be entirely too receptive to her teaching methods to make good victims, but she didn't necessarily see this as a loss. Nurturing the next generation was part of her job description, after all, and luckily, the university boasted a sufficiently broad selection of staff whose lives could use a healthy dose of pure, undistilled misery on any given day. She was keeping a time-table for just this purpose, as there was absolutely no sense in doing it like the science boar, who was only interested in scaring people into leaving him alone. No reason to go breaking her toys so barbarously; they all needed time to recuperate and believe themselves safe, sound and well over their crying fits before she would strike again.
Speaking of crying fits...
She paused in marking an appointment with the dean in her calendar - the university absolutely needed to host an exhibition on the erotic furniture of Catherine the Great, surely he would agree, he didn't seem to be averse to some rather unusual practices himself - and spent a few minutes contemplatively staring at her office phone.
The beautiful thing about phones was that they would never become superfluous. Say what you would about the accomplishments of the information age, none of them came close to replicating the circumstances of a caller screaming his fury and outrage into a receiver in the vain hope that the power of his voice would race through the landline and punch the recipient in the face. Modern technology also couldn't replicate slamming the receiver back down so hard that the phone cracked, or the fact that the caller's rage could be burned into someone's voicemail until the unsuspecting victim was around to go down in a barrage of words.
What most people didn't realize was that phone repairs could be kept track of, and messages could be preserved indefinitely for all kinds of wonderful purposes. To I-no, the helpless, incoherent vocalizations of a person in torment were what Händel's Hallelujah was to a music lover. She relished getting them, and relished reminding People in Certain Elevated Positions that she had them on tape, but most of all, she relished keeping them for herself, to be played while relaxing in a hot tub at the end of a stressful workday.
During the past few weeks, however, she'd felt like something was missing. That it had taken her this long to notice was a rather grave oversight on her part, but sabotaging a theological conference had taken up most of her afternoons. With that out of the way, however, she was left to realize that Freddie dearest really was overdue for a call.
If her messages had been a stamp collection, Freddie would have been the Blue Mauritius of voicemails. Much sought after, rarely heard, but, when provoked far enough, a truly masterful symphony of creative insults that were only sweetened by the knowledge that something she had done had driven him to communicate his fury instead of merely trying to exact his science-powered revenge.
As much as I-no liked to think of herself as an expert in blackmail and torture, it was extremely difficult to gauge what would drive Freddie to the point where his rage overpowered his desire not to come in contact with the outside world. Truth be told, she had only gotten him to scream at her over the phone once in all those years, a feat that had mostly been aided by very specific circumstances which regretfully hadn't been her doing, and this had been a good ten years ago. She'd invested a lot of time into crafting a situation of the same magnitude, and had believed the trigger to lie in the combination of the two things Freddie hated most of all - forced social interaction and prolonged exposure to a maximum amount of stupidity.
Now she had to face the fact that all her hard labor hadn't paid off quite like she'd thought it would. Sure, it had irritated Freddie considerably, but not enough for him to become inventive. In fact, the last time she'd had to deal with any spontaneous fires had been a good two weeks ago, which, though quite lucrative for manufacturers of faux leopard fur car seat covers, had grown rather dull in itself, and that alone was a cause for concern. Freddie cared about the creativity of his vengeance as much as she cared about her creativity when provoking it. That he should have grown beyond holding petty little grudges was a thing of impossibility.
She'd have heard it if he'd managed to knock himself out snorting his own spores; the on-campus celebrations alone would have been deafening. He also couldn't have surpassed himself and developed an immunity to stupidity. That was the wonderful thing about dealing with a genius - his brain was his own worst enemy, as there was scarcely a person in the world smart enough not to drive him up the wall.
The only other possibility was that Freddie had rolled over and admitted defeat, and that would have just been the damnest shame. She'd never be able to forgive herself if she'd broken him without getting a good scream out of him first. (Alright, that was a lie, but she'd feel very disappointed that he would succumb to a bit of exposure to real life so easily.) In any case, I-no decided, Freddie dearest losing his groove like that simply wouldn't do. She'd have to go and stoke the fires of his rage back to their usual neutron star temperatures, the sort of favor only bitter enemies could do for one another, though it certainly was a thankless job.
With a devious smile on her lips, I-no canceled her appointment, and went to investigate.
-------
They say a woman's purse is a place of deep, dark secrets... and stray hairclips, lipstick caps and scattered small change, ruining the air of mystery. "They" had never met I-no's purse, which was all about digging up the deep, dark secrets of other people, while also putting the secret-keeping capabilities of other purses to shame. I-no was quite fond of the red leather Vuitton, which could conceal a small-sized bear trap in its frame, and still had enough room to discreetly accommodate her all-purpose lockpicking kit. She'd had to significantly expand her arsenal of tools for Freddie's door, including a pen-sized welding torch and a compact powder box that doubled as an explosive detector, since Freddie could be awfully inventive when it came to keeping people out of his lab and in the hospital.
She'd already managed to disable the electroshock trap without incident, and was prodding around for the inevitable bomb when there was a quiet click, and a melodiously high-pitched voice announced, "Sentry mode activated."
"Coming!" another voice called. "Don't open the door! Just a moment, please."
The shout was followed by the sound of moving chairs, and I-no took a step back to ascertain that she hadn't somehow ended up stepping through a dimensional portal or picking the wrong lock since Freddie never said "please." Freddie never said anything, period, instead preferring to communicate in flying furniture. Freddie also didn't sound like a member of the Vienna boys' choir.
Some more clanging, followed by a childishly drawn-out cry of protest, and then the door swung open to reveal the strangest sight I-no had ever seen coming out of Freddie's lab (including, but not limited to, black-coffee-on-bacon sandwich, miniature velociraptors, a perpetual people-kicking machine, and a musical condom waterbomb, rigged to blow its load all over the unlucky passersby to a warbly rendition of "Good Old Fashioned Loverboy").
In the doorway stood the shortest, blondest, most adorably breakable-looking thing outside of a nativity play, wearing a custom-hemmed labcoat and a pair of goggles on his head.
For a moment, I-no found herself earnestly contemplating a strategic retreat, because the short, blond, adorably breakable-looking thing simply couldn't be real. Freddie was exploiting her secret weakness with the most horribly devious trap in the history of time, and if she didn't throw herself out of the way right this second, it would transform into a death ray and obliterate the portion of the corridor she was standing in.
Then, all her years of experience and observation kicked in to inform her that for one, Freddie just couldn't be arsed to remember anything about people, and for another, Freddie was not an aestheticist and thus wholly incapable of producing anything that didn't have six legs, three heads, and the vocabulary of a drunk, truck-driving sailor. In fact, the object in the blond jailbait's arms was looking much more like Freddie's usual kind of subterfuge - lasers, spider legs, stupid pop culture references and all. In the background, a few more creations of the same type had been stuffed upside down into cardboard boxes, rotating their thin metal legs and chittering furiously in the voices of homicidal school children.
"I'm very sorry," the jailbait was saying breathlessly, still preoccupied with wrestling his catch into submission. "He keeps building these things and they keep wandering off and I thought I found the last one but apparently not and it's really very much not safe here and GET AWAY FROM MY CULTURES."
I-no blinked when he whirled around to face the addressee, and his catch, apparently resenting the rapid movement, followed up with a sudden burst of gunfire. On the other side of the room, another one of the creatures fell off the chair it had been trying to climb, its egg-shaped shell riddled with bullet holes.
"I thought we agreed on this one, sir!" The boy slammed a hand on the thing in his possession, causing it to shut down with a shrill wail of protest. "No. live. bullets!"
When there was no response, he turned back to I-no, shaking his head and smoothing out his tie. "I'm so sorry about this mess..." He coughed when he realized who his visitor was, and straightened just that extra bit, like a regency shoujo manga page boy sprung to life. All that was missing, really, were some ruffles and criminally short shorts. "Um, ma'am. The professor doesn't seem to be in at the moment. Is there anything I can do for you?"
I-no raised her eyebrows, partly because she had never pictured Freddie hiding such a truly delectable secret, and partly because nobody had ever said, "Is there anything I can do for you," and looked her in the eye the entire time. Oh, this could prove to be fun.
"Well, that depends," she purred, leaning forward. "What can you do for me?"
Instead of turning the shade all teenage boys turn when faced with a cleavage of such generous proportions, this little specimen merely tilted his head in earnest contemplation. "Well... if the professor's borrowed anything he wasn't supposed to borrow, you can give me a description of the item and when and where you last saw it. I'm still sorting through storage, so locating it might take a while... unless he's used it for something, in which case, you might be better off demanding compensation. If you'd like to register a complaint, um, I'm afraid he's set the complaint box on fire again, but I can definitely take dictation. The overdue book fees will be paid by the end of the week, I'm pretty sure what happened to the music department was an accident this time, and if you're here to ask about the robopocalypse, I've been told to tell you that he didn't do it, and 'would this face lie to you'."
He took a moment to stuff the turret into an empty box and shoved it out of sight with one foot, a motion as discreet as it was practiced. "But you're not here for that, are you, ma'am?"
"Such a clever little boy. Whoever thought it would be right to abandon you here?"
The boy's lips pursed in displeasure. "My name is Ky Kiske, ma'am, and the professor has kindly agreed to watch over my progress."
"Oh, has he now," I-no said, eyeing him speculatively. Freddie liked students just slightly less than he liked live alligator wrestling, and even if she factored in the possibility that the cute little jailbait was simply lying for the sake of politeness, that still didn't explain how he'd ended up here or why he seemed perfectly at ease in an environment that would have sent most people into a terror-induced meltdown. Just imagining the kind of blackmail it had to have taken for Freddie to endure sharing his lab space with another human being... ooh, the things she would do to get her hands on this information.
On second thought, judging by the boy's face, she might not have to do very much at all. She knew the type, after all - guileless, willing and naive, the kind who trusted instantly and whose helpfulness knew no bounds, particularly when they were feeling out of their depth.
She smiled sweetly. "I'm having such a hard time imagining that; you see, Freddie is a terribly antisocial type. You must be something really special."
"...Freddie?" The jailbait blinked. "Are you an acquaintance of the professor's, ma'am?"
"You could say that. We go way back, in fact, though I don't suppose he's ever mentioned that."
The jailbait cocked his head to the other side, as if trying to picture Freddie having acquaintances and failing.
"Don't worry if you can't imagine it. Nobody can, what with Freddie dearest's issues and all."
"...Pardon?"
I-no waved her hand. "It's such an old story, really. He's quite the handful, isn't he?"
"Um."
"No need to be shy. I've seen and heard it all before." Shaking her head, she pushed past him, figuring that if Freddie really was either pressured or enamored enough to keep the boy around, the number of outright death traps would dwindle significantly once she stepped beyond the door frame. "Will you look at that, he's really turned this place around. Unless..."
The jailbait shrugged in the manner of someone who had been asked this question many, many times before, and also had to confirm that he was not a robot, a vat-grown life form, or whatever Freddie's version of a boy slave was. "The professor needs a bit of help with some of the day-to-day things."
"Indeed he does. Oh, is that coffee?"
"Um..."
Ignoring the jailbait's attempt to warn her of her imminent murder, she grabbed Freddie's favorite mug (formerly his second-favorite, but it had received a promotion upon the incineration of the actual favorite after her last visit). "I'm sure he won't mind if I help myself to a cup while I wait."
"Actually, ma'am, for your own safety-"
I-no tut-tutted. "Oh, he won't kill me. They'd take away his science toys if he did, for one. I'm really much more worried what his presence must have done to such a bright young mind. You simply have to tell me how you ended up here..."
And with a decisive heel, she nudged the door shut.
-------
Sol Badguy hated the world. That in itself was nothing new to anyone by now, save for the bunch of neighborhood kids who had decided that ignoring all the "murderous space crayfish breeding ground" signs around Mr. Badguy's backyard was a good idea, and whose misadventures in same-said location would rack up triple-page therapy bills for years to come. Everybody else had been reminded of that fact often enough (usually with science-to-the-face), but what they didn't know was that the reasons for his violent antipathy had changed considerably over the past two weeks.
Whereas he had formerly hated the world because it was aggressively incompetent and full of marvellous idiots, he now hated it because the world had suddenly gotten a whole lot smarter, brighter, and was serving him excellent coffee. It could all be blamed on the thing, of course, which seemed to have dedicated its life to ruining his curve, something he had spent so many years calculating and refining that it might as well be its own mathematical theorem by now. The curve existed solely to compare Sol's ideas of how the world should work with how the world was actually working, and to help him continuously adjust his expectations to the lowest possible point.
The world being what it was, this was necessary quite frequently, and though it was certainly disheartening to behold for researchers, educators, and passing alien probes, to Sol it merely meant that he didn't need to waste a lot of effort on becoming a functional human being. But now, the thing was here, with its stupid suits and its stupid enthusiasm and its stupid appetite for knowledge (not to mention its really stupid coffee-making skills), and it was throwing years upon years of carefully lowered expectations into disarray.
He'd simply had to get out for a while. Staying in a pocket of the universe filled with nothing but logic, curiosity and intelligence was having a catastrophic effect on his judgment - his daily word count had doubled in the past week alone, he'd noticed his hands developing a nervous twitch that made them put waste in its proper containers, and he was feeling, all in all, that getting to work at eight on a Monday morning was really quite a pleasant thing to do, and that was just about the singularly most horrifying revelation of his life.
Clearly the thing was emitting some heretofore unknown and dangerous waves that, given enough time, would turn the parts of his brain responsible for his steadfast hatred of humanity into silly putty. The best way to medicate was to go out, buy some truly terrible vending machine coffee, sit down in a cell phone-infested space and start correcting the midterm exams.
Just half an hour of this treatment was enough to get his blood pressure back to the active volcano stage, and as he came stomping down the corridor to his lab, anything could have set him off. So when he caught sight of the scarlet lacquer miniskirt trying to disappear into his lab, one could have expected him to erupt like the Krakatoa.
He didn't.
He didn't, because the overtaxed anger management center in his brain was immediately doused with the ice-cold realization that the thing would not have the good sense to save itself - the thing was hanging out with him, that was proof enough that its danger responses were broken, and of course its naive politeness would demand that it invite the mantis queen for tea and crumpets.
He would have to do something before she could shred the thing's clothes and leave it a devirginized, gibbering and possibly disemboweled mess. It would require the combined powers of mathematics, physics, exact memory of his lab's layout, and a decent amount of raw violence, but Sol was positive he could do it.
He elbowed the door open.
The undignified squawk told him he'd been right on the mark - well, almost right on the mark. The door hadn't left her splayed against the wall plaster, but it had made her dodge, and the dodge had sent her a good four feet away from the thing's belt buckle.
"Sir!" the thing exclaimed, predictably, stupidly in the process of doing exactly as its overly fastidious nature demanded, and pouring a cup.
"We really have to work on your sense of self-preservation. Put the coffee down and back away slowly."
"...Sir?"
"If she gets her hands on you, no one will ever see you again. Just a lone shoe in the hallway. I saw her get a sophomore this way."
"But sir, that's-"
"Professor Cougar. Of Cougar Studies. Today's lesson will be on hemlines. We'll be focusing on the difference between slutty and whorish."
"Oh my, what's wrong?" I-no cooed. "Did the cave troll not get his morning feeding?"
Sol narrowed his eyes, and thought it wisest to plant himself between the thing's bewildered innocence and its natural predator. "And what are you doing here? Exhausted your supply of prepubescent virgin flesh already?"
"Just their tears." I-no smirked. "Thought I'd swing by and see if you had any, you're so good at making the helpless little ones cry. Is that raw talent, or do you just get off on it?"
"Look who's talking. I'm not the one who prefers her victims without balls."
"Now, now, who's been keeping cute little boys around to do his dirty work? Tell me, how does it feel to finally have the chance to put that equipment to use?"
Scowling dangerously, Sol reached for a beaker. "Out."
"My, my, looks like I hit a nerve."
"OUT!"
"Oh, no need to get brutal. I can tell when I'm not welcome." With a pout that was fooling exactly no one, she turned, and made her way to the door with an exaggerated sashay. With her hand on the knob, she cast a glance back at the thing, which was still staring between them in wide-eyed, stunned confusion. "Just let me know whenever you're tired of him getting his science all over you. My door's always open."
And with a wink, she was gone, leaving the beaker to shatter ineffectually against the door.
Taking a deep breath, Sol closed his eyes, reminding himself why improvising a rocket launcher and splattering her all over the walls would be a bad thing. It would be refreshing, to be sure, and probably grant peace to hundreds of suffering university staff, but if he left to build it now, she'd just come back, and the thing would still be too clueless to protect its honor. With the sizable rage demon in the back of his mind howling in dissatisfaction, he straightened and turned to face the thing, which was only just now remembering that it could blink.
"...Sir? What's going on?"
"Listen," Sol said, trying very hard not to sound like he was speaking through clenched teeth, "That. Is not a woman. That. Is a black widow in human form. If you like your life - and your balls - you'll run the other way when you see her."
"She said she knew you..."
"Don't see how that's any of your business," he said brusquely, and, ignoring the faint look of hurt on the thing's face, started rummaging through his pockets for the key to the storage.
"Where are you going, sir?"
"To dip her car in liquid nitrogen."
A little over a week ago, the thing would have been appalled at the idea. Now, fully aware that nothing could possibly get between Sol and a mission, and that it was in fact easier to just deal with the results, it merely gave him a doubtful look. "That... isn't going to do much good, sir."
"Well. It will give me something to do with the excess nitrogen."
-----
A little ways down the corridor and safely out of the range of any surprise death lasers, I-no lingered, a cheshire grin playing across her lips.
Who would have thought that after years upon years of surly hiding in his cave and spitting flames at anyone who foolishly ventured forth to approach him, the science dragon was actually forming attachments. Wholly against his will, of course, and in denial every step of the way, but that was to be expected. Provided she didn't interfere, there was a chance he would even turn into something resembling an honest-to-god human being, but where would be the fun in that.
She flipped open her cell phone.
If Freddie wasn't going to appreciate what he had, she knew someone else who would.
-TBC-
-----
A/N: Next up: What demonic machinations lie in the future for our unwilling heroes? Who could possibly appreciate Ky more than Sol? What soul-shattering secret is hidden in Sol's past? And most importantly... will I-no ever get her voicemail?! Tune in next time to The Adventures of the Quasiamicable Pair which hopefully won't take a year to happen.
- Yep, the Portal guns. C'mon, like he wouldn't.
- While Cougar may be her main subject, I-no also minored in MILF.
- Ky owns forty-seven kinds of tea (high-quality, of course). Then he ran out of room.
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Fandom: Guilty Gear
Part: 7 of ?
Pairing: mild Sol-Ky distillate
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: college-AU, humor/parody/crack
Summary: Sol is your not-so everyday mad science professor, and he hates the universe. That is, until he meets- Well, no. He's still going to hate the universe. He will, however, be forced into grudging coexistence with it.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII
Covalent Bonds
or The Absolutely Necessary GG College AU Fic with a Bad Title
Part VII
Coffee, it turned out, was the Spanish gold of the science lab - precious enough to barter ceasefires, able to buy passage to strange lands, and capable of enticing the supreme ruler of the jungle of pestilence and chaos, adversary of love, peace, and morning cheer, and natural enemy of sodium dodecyl sulfate into trade agreements he couldn't back out of.
Ky, newly appointed master of the treasury, swept through the decades-old box of coffee supplies like a spring-scented tornado, tossing out decaf, instant coffee, malt, and the dreadful powder mixes promising the unforgettable experience of a hazelnut chocolate mocha that tasted strongly of chalk. He had appropriated part of the budget to buy a proper grinder and a steady supply of kona beans, as he'd deemed the acquisition of a water-powered jetpack to be rather low on the list of priorities in comparison to the precious beverage that would allow him to enter and exit the lab in a dignified manner.
Professor Badguy was a man of few words, but they could be teased out of him with an espresso con grappa, and Ky politely decided not to remark on the pleased hum that would emanate from behind the Great Wall whenever he pushed a cup past the barrier. Of course, there was still the fact that the door locks were changed twice a day, and that he had to check his seat very carefully before sitting down, and the professor kept misplacing all manner of important things in hard-to-reach and inappropriate places, but other than that, he really didn't see what the fuss was all about.
Never in his life had it occurred to him to feel lonely, but he had certainly developed a lot of empathy for the pygmy possums at the local zoo. Being short, fourteen, orphaned and in college tended to have that effect, and if Ky had been majoring in sociology and also a lot more cynical than his sunny countenance allowed, he'd have written a paper comparing the frequency of curious stares, commiserative awws, and grabby hands. By contrast, the lab was a wildlife preserve run by the most disinterested gamekeeper on Earth. The professor called a wrong idea a wrong idea instead of telling him what a brilliant wrong idea it was, and Ky could expect to go through a whole day without any hair-ruffling, concerned questions about whether he was getting on, or his roommates' well-meaning, discomfited attempts at inviting him to a night on the town out of pity.
Here, he wasn't required to be legal to get access to the back room (though he certainly was required to have a strong mind and stomach), and he didn't get in the way so long as he kept to his side of the room. He could stow his meticulously hand-picked box of tea in a secluded corner of the coffee cabinet without expecting to find somebody's weed stash in it, keep working late without the distraction of drunken dorm parties, or have his nose buried in a publication all day and feel, for the first time in his life, that he had found a place to belong. Thus, Ky became the first and only person on the planet to describe spending an extended period of time around Sol Badguy as 'pleasant' and 'really quite normal,' something that would have gotten his capacity for risk/benefit judgments ruled unsound in seven states and also upset the professor profoundly, so he decided to keep it to himself.
Meanwhile, the ruler of the realm of pestilence and chaos began to experience some revelations of his own, but by a chance conspiracy of his higher mental faculties - most notably reason, curiosity, and his pitifully atrophied sense of companionship - was successfully kept from noticing the extent of these changes. (The higher mental faculties were quite aware that their owner had the tendency to resist change with flamethrowers, ground-to-air missiles and the occasional mutant uprising, so they deemed it much safer to leave the noticing of change to the tiny blond thing, who could be expected to catalogue it, professionally assess it, and, in this particular case, finish the cycle of realization by smiling quietly into his Earl Grey.)
At first, the change mostly manifested in the professor's lack of cursing whenever he saw Ky. After a while, a lack of door-slamming could be added to the list of observations. Looking closer, it became apparent that little bits and pieces in the wall around the professor's work table were starting to disappear, until it had shrunk to - or so Ky supposed - its usual size, less like the Hadrian's wall and more like the wall of an eccentric English gentleman, who was neither very English nor very gentlemanly, and also didn't take very good care of his lawn.
Around the same time, the realm of pestilence and chaos began exhibiting strange new properties. For one, it began to develop an acute lack of ashtrays, though the term "ashtray" had to be liberally applied to anything from saucers to crumpled take-out boxes, and, once in a while, an obliging petri dish. Ky couldn't honestly say where or why the ashtrays went, but his lungs and red-raw eyes felt grateful all the same.
For another, the chaos began to ooze. Not like a building tidal wave, or a blob of penetrating oil that could simply get into everything, but more like an amoeba in the depths of a water sample, slowly and purposefully stretching towards a distant source of food. Steadily, foreign items were finding their way into the space Ky had claimed as his own - a book on physical chemistry, a stack of old student papers with the post-it "Don't be that guy" attached to it, the occasional print-out of the first draft of one of the professor's articles (gratuitous swearing included). All of them simply phased into existence when he wasn't looking, and he was trying very hard not to.
It only seemed right to make room for a box of candy between his files and allow the professor's need for a cheap sugar fix to take over, munching on a chocolate bar while performing most-definitely-not-a-check-up, and muttering most-definitely-not-advice into his coffee cup.
Of course, class garnered Ky more stares than ever, since he was not only the first person to clamber back out of the jaws of hell (he suspected that this was mainly because nobody had tried), but also the first person to willingly clamber back into them (he suspected that being shot in the face with a pie cannon was a first impression few people cared to amend). He probably could have mentioned that really, Professor Badguy was only feeling murderous on days ending in -y, and he seemed to like teaching quite a bit so long as he didn't think he was teaching, and no, the story of the chewed-up pizza boy in the biosample refrigerator wasn't true, he tested it, and it turned out to be just congealed pepperoni with extra tabasco, but at this point, it almost felt like a personal betrayal to do so.
It was better to accept that he and the world had different priorities; Ky was content to get to know the man who could spend the better part of a day designing a Freddie Mercury cursor sprite, and the world was content to swap stories of said man's truly phenomenal and absolutely unproven body count - to interfere with this would be to upset the balance of the universe, and so it was much better to answer nosy questions with an enigmatic smile and accept that people were starting to call him St. George.
-------
There were a lot of reasons to become a teacher of literature, and a lot of reasons to stay one. Granted, most of them weren't very good reasons, generally some combination of idealism, mistaken hopes for fame and visions of the countless red sports cars that could be found tearing through the college campuses of early nineties movies. Once they started their career, one could observe a progressive souring of the young idealists' expressions, until they could be seen haunting the hallways with the mildly homicidal face of a person who had to see Shakespeare make an appearance on a list of modernist writers one time too many.
Most of them began to compensate by developing strange habits, such as directing independent films on the meaninglessness and impermanence of words, or self-publishing gloomy eighteenth-century-flavored verse only attractive to the kind of buyer who felt as bitter and slighted by life as the poet. (Then again, Testament had never been the particularly cheery sort, and all those free bra samples couldn't have helped.)
I-no's reason for staying was the shock value. Technically, a person of her persuasions seemed like she should have felt more at home running an S&M club - more money in that business, plus less of a fire hazard - but I-no felt that S&M had stopped being shocking with her mother's generation (or, to be precise, her mother's parents). These days, it needed a lot more than a bit of latex and a pair of handcuffs to make people turn the color of gently boiling lobster, and women's studies had proved to be fertile ground for any number of splendidly outrageous things that could be passed off as education and empowerment. Nothing quite like an erotic poetry reading with mandatory attendance, or a graphically aided lecture on the many representations of male castration in writing, and that wasn't even getting into all the wonderful things that could be passed off as "performance art" which would normally get a person arrested in the street.
I-no simply lived for making rows of prim, bespectacled and graying eminences squirm in their seats. Her students had turned out to be entirely too receptive to her teaching methods to make good victims, but she didn't necessarily see this as a loss. Nurturing the next generation was part of her job description, after all, and luckily, the university boasted a sufficiently broad selection of staff whose lives could use a healthy dose of pure, undistilled misery on any given day. She was keeping a time-table for just this purpose, as there was absolutely no sense in doing it like the science boar, who was only interested in scaring people into leaving him alone. No reason to go breaking her toys so barbarously; they all needed time to recuperate and believe themselves safe, sound and well over their crying fits before she would strike again.
Speaking of crying fits...
She paused in marking an appointment with the dean in her calendar - the university absolutely needed to host an exhibition on the erotic furniture of Catherine the Great, surely he would agree, he didn't seem to be averse to some rather unusual practices himself - and spent a few minutes contemplatively staring at her office phone.
The beautiful thing about phones was that they would never become superfluous. Say what you would about the accomplishments of the information age, none of them came close to replicating the circumstances of a caller screaming his fury and outrage into a receiver in the vain hope that the power of his voice would race through the landline and punch the recipient in the face. Modern technology also couldn't replicate slamming the receiver back down so hard that the phone cracked, or the fact that the caller's rage could be burned into someone's voicemail until the unsuspecting victim was around to go down in a barrage of words.
What most people didn't realize was that phone repairs could be kept track of, and messages could be preserved indefinitely for all kinds of wonderful purposes. To I-no, the helpless, incoherent vocalizations of a person in torment were what Händel's Hallelujah was to a music lover. She relished getting them, and relished reminding People in Certain Elevated Positions that she had them on tape, but most of all, she relished keeping them for herself, to be played while relaxing in a hot tub at the end of a stressful workday.
During the past few weeks, however, she'd felt like something was missing. That it had taken her this long to notice was a rather grave oversight on her part, but sabotaging a theological conference had taken up most of her afternoons. With that out of the way, however, she was left to realize that Freddie dearest really was overdue for a call.
If her messages had been a stamp collection, Freddie would have been the Blue Mauritius of voicemails. Much sought after, rarely heard, but, when provoked far enough, a truly masterful symphony of creative insults that were only sweetened by the knowledge that something she had done had driven him to communicate his fury instead of merely trying to exact his science-powered revenge.
As much as I-no liked to think of herself as an expert in blackmail and torture, it was extremely difficult to gauge what would drive Freddie to the point where his rage overpowered his desire not to come in contact with the outside world. Truth be told, she had only gotten him to scream at her over the phone once in all those years, a feat that had mostly been aided by very specific circumstances which regretfully hadn't been her doing, and this had been a good ten years ago. She'd invested a lot of time into crafting a situation of the same magnitude, and had believed the trigger to lie in the combination of the two things Freddie hated most of all - forced social interaction and prolonged exposure to a maximum amount of stupidity.
Now she had to face the fact that all her hard labor hadn't paid off quite like she'd thought it would. Sure, it had irritated Freddie considerably, but not enough for him to become inventive. In fact, the last time she'd had to deal with any spontaneous fires had been a good two weeks ago, which, though quite lucrative for manufacturers of faux leopard fur car seat covers, had grown rather dull in itself, and that alone was a cause for concern. Freddie cared about the creativity of his vengeance as much as she cared about her creativity when provoking it. That he should have grown beyond holding petty little grudges was a thing of impossibility.
She'd have heard it if he'd managed to knock himself out snorting his own spores; the on-campus celebrations alone would have been deafening. He also couldn't have surpassed himself and developed an immunity to stupidity. That was the wonderful thing about dealing with a genius - his brain was his own worst enemy, as there was scarcely a person in the world smart enough not to drive him up the wall.
The only other possibility was that Freddie had rolled over and admitted defeat, and that would have just been the damnest shame. She'd never be able to forgive herself if she'd broken him without getting a good scream out of him first. (Alright, that was a lie, but she'd feel very disappointed that he would succumb to a bit of exposure to real life so easily.) In any case, I-no decided, Freddie dearest losing his groove like that simply wouldn't do. She'd have to go and stoke the fires of his rage back to their usual neutron star temperatures, the sort of favor only bitter enemies could do for one another, though it certainly was a thankless job.
With a devious smile on her lips, I-no canceled her appointment, and went to investigate.
-------
They say a woman's purse is a place of deep, dark secrets... and stray hairclips, lipstick caps and scattered small change, ruining the air of mystery. "They" had never met I-no's purse, which was all about digging up the deep, dark secrets of other people, while also putting the secret-keeping capabilities of other purses to shame. I-no was quite fond of the red leather Vuitton, which could conceal a small-sized bear trap in its frame, and still had enough room to discreetly accommodate her all-purpose lockpicking kit. She'd had to significantly expand her arsenal of tools for Freddie's door, including a pen-sized welding torch and a compact powder box that doubled as an explosive detector, since Freddie could be awfully inventive when it came to keeping people out of his lab and in the hospital.
She'd already managed to disable the electroshock trap without incident, and was prodding around for the inevitable bomb when there was a quiet click, and a melodiously high-pitched voice announced, "Sentry mode activated."
"Coming!" another voice called. "Don't open the door! Just a moment, please."
The shout was followed by the sound of moving chairs, and I-no took a step back to ascertain that she hadn't somehow ended up stepping through a dimensional portal or picking the wrong lock since Freddie never said "please." Freddie never said anything, period, instead preferring to communicate in flying furniture. Freddie also didn't sound like a member of the Vienna boys' choir.
Some more clanging, followed by a childishly drawn-out cry of protest, and then the door swung open to reveal the strangest sight I-no had ever seen coming out of Freddie's lab (including, but not limited to, black-coffee-on-bacon sandwich, miniature velociraptors, a perpetual people-kicking machine, and a musical condom waterbomb, rigged to blow its load all over the unlucky passersby to a warbly rendition of "Good Old Fashioned Loverboy").
In the doorway stood the shortest, blondest, most adorably breakable-looking thing outside of a nativity play, wearing a custom-hemmed labcoat and a pair of goggles on his head.
For a moment, I-no found herself earnestly contemplating a strategic retreat, because the short, blond, adorably breakable-looking thing simply couldn't be real. Freddie was exploiting her secret weakness with the most horribly devious trap in the history of time, and if she didn't throw herself out of the way right this second, it would transform into a death ray and obliterate the portion of the corridor she was standing in.
Then, all her years of experience and observation kicked in to inform her that for one, Freddie just couldn't be arsed to remember anything about people, and for another, Freddie was not an aestheticist and thus wholly incapable of producing anything that didn't have six legs, three heads, and the vocabulary of a drunk, truck-driving sailor. In fact, the object in the blond jailbait's arms was looking much more like Freddie's usual kind of subterfuge - lasers, spider legs, stupid pop culture references and all. In the background, a few more creations of the same type had been stuffed upside down into cardboard boxes, rotating their thin metal legs and chittering furiously in the voices of homicidal school children.
"I'm very sorry," the jailbait was saying breathlessly, still preoccupied with wrestling his catch into submission. "He keeps building these things and they keep wandering off and I thought I found the last one but apparently not and it's really very much not safe here and GET AWAY FROM MY CULTURES."
I-no blinked when he whirled around to face the addressee, and his catch, apparently resenting the rapid movement, followed up with a sudden burst of gunfire. On the other side of the room, another one of the creatures fell off the chair it had been trying to climb, its egg-shaped shell riddled with bullet holes.
"I thought we agreed on this one, sir!" The boy slammed a hand on the thing in his possession, causing it to shut down with a shrill wail of protest. "No. live. bullets!"
When there was no response, he turned back to I-no, shaking his head and smoothing out his tie. "I'm so sorry about this mess..." He coughed when he realized who his visitor was, and straightened just that extra bit, like a regency shoujo manga page boy sprung to life. All that was missing, really, were some ruffles and criminally short shorts. "Um, ma'am. The professor doesn't seem to be in at the moment. Is there anything I can do for you?"
I-no raised her eyebrows, partly because she had never pictured Freddie hiding such a truly delectable secret, and partly because nobody had ever said, "Is there anything I can do for you," and looked her in the eye the entire time. Oh, this could prove to be fun.
"Well, that depends," she purred, leaning forward. "What can you do for me?"
Instead of turning the shade all teenage boys turn when faced with a cleavage of such generous proportions, this little specimen merely tilted his head in earnest contemplation. "Well... if the professor's borrowed anything he wasn't supposed to borrow, you can give me a description of the item and when and where you last saw it. I'm still sorting through storage, so locating it might take a while... unless he's used it for something, in which case, you might be better off demanding compensation. If you'd like to register a complaint, um, I'm afraid he's set the complaint box on fire again, but I can definitely take dictation. The overdue book fees will be paid by the end of the week, I'm pretty sure what happened to the music department was an accident this time, and if you're here to ask about the robopocalypse, I've been told to tell you that he didn't do it, and 'would this face lie to you'."
He took a moment to stuff the turret into an empty box and shoved it out of sight with one foot, a motion as discreet as it was practiced. "But you're not here for that, are you, ma'am?"
"Such a clever little boy. Whoever thought it would be right to abandon you here?"
The boy's lips pursed in displeasure. "My name is Ky Kiske, ma'am, and the professor has kindly agreed to watch over my progress."
"Oh, has he now," I-no said, eyeing him speculatively. Freddie liked students just slightly less than he liked live alligator wrestling, and even if she factored in the possibility that the cute little jailbait was simply lying for the sake of politeness, that still didn't explain how he'd ended up here or why he seemed perfectly at ease in an environment that would have sent most people into a terror-induced meltdown. Just imagining the kind of blackmail it had to have taken for Freddie to endure sharing his lab space with another human being... ooh, the things she would do to get her hands on this information.
On second thought, judging by the boy's face, she might not have to do very much at all. She knew the type, after all - guileless, willing and naive, the kind who trusted instantly and whose helpfulness knew no bounds, particularly when they were feeling out of their depth.
She smiled sweetly. "I'm having such a hard time imagining that; you see, Freddie is a terribly antisocial type. You must be something really special."
"...Freddie?" The jailbait blinked. "Are you an acquaintance of the professor's, ma'am?"
"You could say that. We go way back, in fact, though I don't suppose he's ever mentioned that."
The jailbait cocked his head to the other side, as if trying to picture Freddie having acquaintances and failing.
"Don't worry if you can't imagine it. Nobody can, what with Freddie dearest's issues and all."
"...Pardon?"
I-no waved her hand. "It's such an old story, really. He's quite the handful, isn't he?"
"Um."
"No need to be shy. I've seen and heard it all before." Shaking her head, she pushed past him, figuring that if Freddie really was either pressured or enamored enough to keep the boy around, the number of outright death traps would dwindle significantly once she stepped beyond the door frame. "Will you look at that, he's really turned this place around. Unless..."
The jailbait shrugged in the manner of someone who had been asked this question many, many times before, and also had to confirm that he was not a robot, a vat-grown life form, or whatever Freddie's version of a boy slave was. "The professor needs a bit of help with some of the day-to-day things."
"Indeed he does. Oh, is that coffee?"
"Um..."
Ignoring the jailbait's attempt to warn her of her imminent murder, she grabbed Freddie's favorite mug (formerly his second-favorite, but it had received a promotion upon the incineration of the actual favorite after her last visit). "I'm sure he won't mind if I help myself to a cup while I wait."
"Actually, ma'am, for your own safety-"
I-no tut-tutted. "Oh, he won't kill me. They'd take away his science toys if he did, for one. I'm really much more worried what his presence must have done to such a bright young mind. You simply have to tell me how you ended up here..."
And with a decisive heel, she nudged the door shut.
-------
Sol Badguy hated the world. That in itself was nothing new to anyone by now, save for the bunch of neighborhood kids who had decided that ignoring all the "murderous space crayfish breeding ground" signs around Mr. Badguy's backyard was a good idea, and whose misadventures in same-said location would rack up triple-page therapy bills for years to come. Everybody else had been reminded of that fact often enough (usually with science-to-the-face), but what they didn't know was that the reasons for his violent antipathy had changed considerably over the past two weeks.
Whereas he had formerly hated the world because it was aggressively incompetent and full of marvellous idiots, he now hated it because the world had suddenly gotten a whole lot smarter, brighter, and was serving him excellent coffee. It could all be blamed on the thing, of course, which seemed to have dedicated its life to ruining his curve, something he had spent so many years calculating and refining that it might as well be its own mathematical theorem by now. The curve existed solely to compare Sol's ideas of how the world should work with how the world was actually working, and to help him continuously adjust his expectations to the lowest possible point.
The world being what it was, this was necessary quite frequently, and though it was certainly disheartening to behold for researchers, educators, and passing alien probes, to Sol it merely meant that he didn't need to waste a lot of effort on becoming a functional human being. But now, the thing was here, with its stupid suits and its stupid enthusiasm and its stupid appetite for knowledge (not to mention its really stupid coffee-making skills), and it was throwing years upon years of carefully lowered expectations into disarray.
He'd simply had to get out for a while. Staying in a pocket of the universe filled with nothing but logic, curiosity and intelligence was having a catastrophic effect on his judgment - his daily word count had doubled in the past week alone, he'd noticed his hands developing a nervous twitch that made them put waste in its proper containers, and he was feeling, all in all, that getting to work at eight on a Monday morning was really quite a pleasant thing to do, and that was just about the singularly most horrifying revelation of his life.
Clearly the thing was emitting some heretofore unknown and dangerous waves that, given enough time, would turn the parts of his brain responsible for his steadfast hatred of humanity into silly putty. The best way to medicate was to go out, buy some truly terrible vending machine coffee, sit down in a cell phone-infested space and start correcting the midterm exams.
Just half an hour of this treatment was enough to get his blood pressure back to the active volcano stage, and as he came stomping down the corridor to his lab, anything could have set him off. So when he caught sight of the scarlet lacquer miniskirt trying to disappear into his lab, one could have expected him to erupt like the Krakatoa.
He didn't.
He didn't, because the overtaxed anger management center in his brain was immediately doused with the ice-cold realization that the thing would not have the good sense to save itself - the thing was hanging out with him, that was proof enough that its danger responses were broken, and of course its naive politeness would demand that it invite the mantis queen for tea and crumpets.
He would have to do something before she could shred the thing's clothes and leave it a devirginized, gibbering and possibly disemboweled mess. It would require the combined powers of mathematics, physics, exact memory of his lab's layout, and a decent amount of raw violence, but Sol was positive he could do it.
He elbowed the door open.
The undignified squawk told him he'd been right on the mark - well, almost right on the mark. The door hadn't left her splayed against the wall plaster, but it had made her dodge, and the dodge had sent her a good four feet away from the thing's belt buckle.
"Sir!" the thing exclaimed, predictably, stupidly in the process of doing exactly as its overly fastidious nature demanded, and pouring a cup.
"We really have to work on your sense of self-preservation. Put the coffee down and back away slowly."
"...Sir?"
"If she gets her hands on you, no one will ever see you again. Just a lone shoe in the hallway. I saw her get a sophomore this way."
"But sir, that's-"
"Professor Cougar. Of Cougar Studies. Today's lesson will be on hemlines. We'll be focusing on the difference between slutty and whorish."
"Oh my, what's wrong?" I-no cooed. "Did the cave troll not get his morning feeding?"
Sol narrowed his eyes, and thought it wisest to plant himself between the thing's bewildered innocence and its natural predator. "And what are you doing here? Exhausted your supply of prepubescent virgin flesh already?"
"Just their tears." I-no smirked. "Thought I'd swing by and see if you had any, you're so good at making the helpless little ones cry. Is that raw talent, or do you just get off on it?"
"Look who's talking. I'm not the one who prefers her victims without balls."
"Now, now, who's been keeping cute little boys around to do his dirty work? Tell me, how does it feel to finally have the chance to put that equipment to use?"
Scowling dangerously, Sol reached for a beaker. "Out."
"My, my, looks like I hit a nerve."
"OUT!"
"Oh, no need to get brutal. I can tell when I'm not welcome." With a pout that was fooling exactly no one, she turned, and made her way to the door with an exaggerated sashay. With her hand on the knob, she cast a glance back at the thing, which was still staring between them in wide-eyed, stunned confusion. "Just let me know whenever you're tired of him getting his science all over you. My door's always open."
And with a wink, she was gone, leaving the beaker to shatter ineffectually against the door.
Taking a deep breath, Sol closed his eyes, reminding himself why improvising a rocket launcher and splattering her all over the walls would be a bad thing. It would be refreshing, to be sure, and probably grant peace to hundreds of suffering university staff, but if he left to build it now, she'd just come back, and the thing would still be too clueless to protect its honor. With the sizable rage demon in the back of his mind howling in dissatisfaction, he straightened and turned to face the thing, which was only just now remembering that it could blink.
"...Sir? What's going on?"
"Listen," Sol said, trying very hard not to sound like he was speaking through clenched teeth, "That. Is not a woman. That. Is a black widow in human form. If you like your life - and your balls - you'll run the other way when you see her."
"She said she knew you..."
"Don't see how that's any of your business," he said brusquely, and, ignoring the faint look of hurt on the thing's face, started rummaging through his pockets for the key to the storage.
"Where are you going, sir?"
"To dip her car in liquid nitrogen."
A little over a week ago, the thing would have been appalled at the idea. Now, fully aware that nothing could possibly get between Sol and a mission, and that it was in fact easier to just deal with the results, it merely gave him a doubtful look. "That... isn't going to do much good, sir."
"Well. It will give me something to do with the excess nitrogen."
-----
A little ways down the corridor and safely out of the range of any surprise death lasers, I-no lingered, a cheshire grin playing across her lips.
Who would have thought that after years upon years of surly hiding in his cave and spitting flames at anyone who foolishly ventured forth to approach him, the science dragon was actually forming attachments. Wholly against his will, of course, and in denial every step of the way, but that was to be expected. Provided she didn't interfere, there was a chance he would even turn into something resembling an honest-to-god human being, but where would be the fun in that.
She flipped open her cell phone.
If Freddie wasn't going to appreciate what he had, she knew someone else who would.
-TBC-
-----
A/N: Next up: What demonic machinations lie in the future for our unwilling heroes? Who could possibly appreciate Ky more than Sol? What soul-shattering secret is hidden in Sol's past? And most importantly... will I-no ever get her voicemail?! Tune in next time to The Adventures of the Quasiamicable Pair which hopefully won't take a year to happen.
- Yep, the Portal guns. C'mon, like he wouldn't.
- While Cougar may be her main subject, I-no also minored in MILF.
- Ky owns forty-seven kinds of tea (high-quality, of course). Then he ran out of room.
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