Catalyst

Chapter 42: Wheels Within

Most of the time, Abathur considered explosions to be a bad thing. When experimenting on banelings, however, he was more than willing to make an exception to this rule. Of course, working with the living acid bombs ended with explosions more often than not, regardless of what he wanted. This was especially true at the moment, as he was attempting to add the primer fluid for dragon fire into them.

The first experiment had gone poorly. Abathur had taken a baneling, suspended it in the stasis ward, then jabbed a hole in it while filling the sac with the dragon's fluids. Unfortunately, it had turned out that the two reacted to each other, rather violently at that. This in and of itself might not have been a problem, if it hadn't turned out that the acid prevented the dragon fluid from igniting.

Abathur's next attempt had him adding oxygen-containing struts to the core proteins of the banelings acid. This let the dragon fluid combust easily, but the acid clumped too easily, making it more like putty than a liquid. Any baneling that he forced to produce the mixture seized up and died, without even exploding. Clearly, that idea was doomed to failure. Rather than continue along that path, Abathur decided to add a third substance, one with multiple purposes. First, it would inhibit the reaction between the acid and the dragon fire until the baneling added its own igniter fluid to its payload. Second, it would provide fuel for the fire once the explosion had actually taken place. In smaller scale experiments, the mixture proved quite successful. Of course, the full scale implementation had issues. They always did. Fortunately the problem was relatively minor in this case; the inhibitor had a small failure rate, and small scale reactions took place across the gland. This only had the effect of causing the baneling to shimmer orange, so Abathur determined that correcting the flaw was unnecessary. With the mixture at least workable, it was almost simple to add the same quality to the roach's acid. Abathur wasn't sure that it would be a permanent addition, but he could always purge the trait later.

His next project was adding the psionic resistance to the armor of the various strains. Between the troll, acromantula, dragon, and basilisk essence, it was easy to see exactly how the psionics were dampened. Modifying each strain he currently had access to to replicate that was more tedious than difficult. He tested it as well as he could with his own spell casting abilities, but it would likely need combat to provide adequate stressors. That was fine. If there was anything the Swarm could find, it was conflict. Abathur doubted he'd need to wait very long.

(Transition)

Thenabar never ceased to be surprised at how much credulence humans had regarding physical ailments. Give them any vague deadline or any stupid symptom, and they simply accepted it as fact, no questions asked. Can't cast spells? Physical ailment. Can't perform well in class? Physical ailment. At this point, the only conclusion Thenabar could draw was that humans were so frail and suffered from such a wide assortment of diseases that they just had to accept whatever the person in front of them said, if only because they didn't know enough to refute it. It would've almost been comical if it weren't so pathetic.

Of course, he still had to play the part. He kept his skin intentionally pale, made veins visible in his eyes, added a slight preference for his left leg, and a few other minor details that cemented his reputation as a sickly student who had just returned from the hospital. For the most part, it seemed to have worked extremely well. The teachers fawned over him or ignored him altogether. Even the new potions teacher, while equally incompetent, paid no attention to his predecessor's killer. The Slytherins had already solidified their hierarchy and collectively saw him as a non-entity, a role Thenabar was perfectly happy to fill. The other students ignored him all together. Even the Evolution Master's former camouflage hadn't attempted to approach him.

It was disturbing how easy it had been to pick up human mannerisms. Thenabar had even caught himself whistling as he walked. Well, it wasn't the worst habit he could have acquired. Occasionally, he decided to indulge in the hobby while going from class to class. It was in one of these whistling sessions while on his way to his dorm after classes had concluded that he stumbled across a distinctly distressed looking Luna.