Book 2 Extra 3: Contingency Plans (1/2)
It was around five in the afternoon when the young scientist, still wearing his multicolored collar-armor-cum-shoulder-guard over his usual white lab coat, stormed into the commons room of the hidden Research Society workshop. It was a small, yet surprisingly cozy room, with a well-lit interior, several comfortable-looking navy-blue beanbag chairs arranged around a simple wooden coffee table, a water cooler in the corner, an honest to goodness antique cuckoo-clock on the wall, and even a sizable aquarium with a fair number of colorful tropic fishes minding their own business inside.
Then the man slammed the door hard, scattering the fishes and making the old man reading a book on one of the beanbag chairs nearly jump to his feet in fright. Peabody glanced around in a mild panic, but once he noticed his nephew, he let out a small breath of relief and slowly retook his seat.
”Please, Friedrich… you're going to give me a heart attack one of these days.”
Labcoat Guy completely disregarded his complaints and instead he walked over and more or less fell into one of the seats with a small puffing sound upon his landing. The school nurse kept eyeing the younger man for a while, but at last, he closed his book, put it aside, and then subsequently he addressed his conspicuously silent nephew.
”O-ho-ho. I reckon things didn't go as planned?”
”It's the opposite,” Labcoat Guy answered with a long face, and for a moment the bags under his sunken eyes seemed even darker than usual. ”We set the stage, got them cornered, I said my lines, and then there was a fight… everything went as it should.”
”Then what's the problem?” Peabody inquired with understandable incomprehension.
”The problem,” Labcoat Guy stressed the word while he simultaneously tried to massage his temples, which was made more difficult than necessary by his bulky upper-chest armor. ”The problem is that they're taking everything we do in stride! There was no hesitation or surprise or anything! It's like… those kids are treating this as if it was a game!”
”O-ho-ho? Really?”
”Yes, really!” the younger man burst out in a fit of frustration. ”We're supposed to scare them, but they don't care at all! I even brought out one of the Gigants to give them a fright, without making it grow, of course, but do you know what the Abyssal girl said?” He waited for a beat, but since his uncle didn't speak up, he continued by exclaiming, ”She said it was cute! CUTE! What is wrong with these kids!?”
”O-ho-ho! Children today are adaptable for sure!”
”This goes way beyond mere adaptability!” Labcoat Guy countered, fuming, and so Peabody narrowed his eyes and thought about his words for a moment.
”They aren't common children, that's for sure. They met a Chimera and yet lived to tell the tale, didn't they? Surviving such an encounter… I would be more surprised if it didn't steel their nerves.”
”Again, this goes waaaaaay beyond that!” Labcoat Guy denied with a scowl, only to fall silent right afterward as his brows slowly knit together into a thoughtful frown.
”Uncle? Can I be honest with you for a moment?”
”O-ho-ho. Are you implying you are not honest with me otherwise?”
”Not now, uncle. I'm not in the mood for word-play,” he griped, then after a long sigh he quietly stated, ”I think we are being had.”
”You mean we are deceived? By the children?”
”No, of course not them!” Labcoat Guy exploded again. ”I'm talking about the Arch-Mage!” Peabody once again looked upon his nephew with a profound sense of incomprehension, so he let out a tired sigh and explained, ”I've felt that this deal was too good to be true from the beginning, but since you vouched for the Arch-mage's sincerity, I still signed it in good faith. After all, we were only supposed to scare a few kids! How hard could that be?”
”Oh-ho-ho! Harder than it seems!” the old man declared with a jovial smile, much to his nephew's chagrin.
”Stop messing around, I'm serious! I was suspicious about this deal from the very beginning! The Arch-mage gave us the funds and raw materials to keep our research running for years, and he only asks that in exchange? Does that make any sense to you?”
”Amadeus is a… smart man. A genius, even,” the nurse stated after some hesitation. ”This wouldn't be the first time I couldn't follow his thought processes. Like that one time, back in the academy, when we had to—”
”I've heard the story, uncle,” Peabody was interrupted by his huffing conversational partner. ”You had to make a focus apparatus for a decoder array, and he made you run a bunch of errands that didn't make sense at the time, but then he assembled a revolutionary new apparatus based on the Horten-Swarz effect. You tell me this same story every time I tell you the Arch-mage is up to something fishy!”
”Oh-ho-ho? Fishy, you say? Such as?” the portly nurse asked with a curiously raised brow.
”Do you want me to go by bullet points?” Labcoat Guy asked back with thinly veiled sarcasm, only to get momentarily stunned when the old man gave him a nod. Seeing that, he threw his hands into the air and exclaimed, ”Where should I even begin?! How about the part where he withheld crucial information about the kids? Like how one of the boys was an expert illusionist and the other one was an Abyssal? Or the way he's treating us as lackeys instead of business partners? Or how he's refusing to meet me as of late by citing 'security concerns'? Or how the kids are completely unfazed by the ambushes? No, I'll go even further! I'd bet my doctorate that they're no longer feel under pressure because they know when I would ambush them ahead of time! Just like today; they almost looked impatient, and the moment I pulled them into the Restricted Space, they immediately jumped at the Sprockets as if they were waiting for me!”
”That sounds unusual indeed. Are you sure?”
”Yes, I'm sure,” the man, who apparently had a real doctorate, stated with a metric ton of emphasis. ”They had to know that Galatea and I were coming; there's no other way to explain their behavior.”
”Are you implying that Amadeus told them when you were going to ambush them?” the old nurse asked a question that sounded entirely rhetorical.
”That's precisely what I'm implying,” Labcoat Guy stated quite authoritatively. ”He must have told them. It makes sense too; why else would he want us to tell him about our plans a full day ahead of time? He put that clause into the contract so that he could use it against us. He's playing both sides!”
”I still don't see why Amadeus would do something like that,” the nurse stated with his bushy eyebrows scrunched up so hard they were on the verge of forming a unibrow.
”Me neither, but it's the only thing that makes sense,” the man in the labcoat countered as he leaned forward in his seat. ”How else can you explain how they knew about our plans? It's just the three of us here, so no one could leak our information from the inside. That means it has to be him.”
”Oh-ho-ho. Aren't you forgetting about Pascal?”
”Please, uncle,” Labcoat Guy answered in a dismissive voice as he shook his head. ”We both know that he's the Arc-mage's personal lapdog. Do you think he would do anything the old man didn't personally approve?”
”You might be correct, but that doesn't mean someone we know had to leak information,” Peabody pressed on with his counter-argument. ”Maybe it's a spy who's doing it? Or a third party? For example, how about that one time someone sneaked into the workshop?”
Labcoat Guy's face instantly twisted in a grimace at the mere mention of the incident, and he really did look like he just bit into the world's sourest lemon.