It's ALIVE ...

[Al'Magroth]

Al'Magroth was finding being a Dark Lord harder than he had originally expected. True, the resistance he had expected had been slow in coming, though now was drawing near. But equally slow had been those swearing themselves to his cause. And, of course, the matter of Ptia was taking longer for his man to clear up than he had expected. Oh, and losing one of his Archmages because he was foolish enough to go out without a forceshield was annoying. But most of all, it was the fact there wasn't an army knocking at his gate, or a civilian uprising. Something he could get his teeth into, really slaughter. Or decimate. Fun word, decimate. He would have to do find another region to do it to, now he'd done Toketi. Anyway, he knew that he couldn't go around decimating regions who were giving him military resources while they weren't actually resisting his rule. At least, not if he wanted regions giving him military resources that weren't actually resisting his rule tomorrow. It was dangerous, habit forming, and above all, lacked style.

So he turned to his one easily accessible release - a visit to Magroth Industries, and particularly to the basement level. And there, formed as a conglomerate of the twisted mind of Al'Magroth and the twisted minds of the geneticists he had run into at Biotopia when he first arrived, was The Project. It had earnt the capital letters. If people ever did manage to bring an army to his factory and invade, it was the sort of place they'd discover and half of them would have to go outside and vomit. Al'Magroth would have looked forward to that day, if it hadn't meant that he'd be half defeated already by the time they got to his factory.

As Al'Magroth entered in the access code and walked down the steps, he heard a tormented scream. He grinned. Now this was what being an evil Dark Lord was about. "How's it going, Greg?" he asked, as he passed a man in a white coat hovering over another man, strapped to a bench. Greg was slicing each of the man's fingers off, with medical precision. "Oh, great, great," Greg said, as the man screamed in pain as he bled profusely. "We've almost got this one sorted - just need to get faster clotting." As he turned back, the flow of blood stopped as the man's fingers grew back. "7.2 seconds," Greg said, as he made a note. "A new record."

As Al'Magroth walked on, he passed a man in a room with very thick glass; who angrily hurled a fireball at Al'Magroth, and cursed when it failed to do more than blur the glass. Another man sat singing softly to himself, as a plant beneath his feet grew bigger. A woman in a third room had three wooden blocks, which she appeared to be moving around with the power of her mind. Then, Al'Magroth reached another of his researches, Jim. "Any news, Jim?" Al'Magroth asked cheerfully.
"Oh, Al, I was wondering when you'd next visit," Jim said. "I've got a couple I think you'd like to see."

Jim led Al'Magroth down a corridor and stopped next to a large glass wall, which bordered on a room twice the size of the others. The tinting on the glass suggested it was a one way mirror. The strange void on the Astral Plane suggested the outside of the room was Nullified. Inside sat a young child. He was idly reading a comic book. As they watched, he blinked, and the comic book disappeared. Another blink, and a new one appeared in his hand.
"Natural teleporter," Jim said cheerfully. "We had to Nullify his room after his sister escaped and ran through five rooms before we caught her. And when I saw 'ran through', we're talking walls and all."
"Marvellous," Al'Magroth said. "Do we have any ready for the field?"
"I thought you might ask," Jim said, with a grin. "Ideally, we'd want to wait another generation or two - genetic splicing is so much harder on matured organisms - but since we haven't managed a growth accelerator yet, generations of humans will take too long. However, we're getting better at inserting powers, and we did a couple we'd ... 'pacified' earlier."
He led Al'Magroth to another room, where ten people sat inside. When Jim nodded at them, each teleported a small object to a different location in the room.
"Oh, I can think of several uses for these," Al'Magroth said, smiling. "And look at their Astral presence - almost non-existent."
"I thought you'd like that feature," Jim replied cheerfully. "But there's something even more exciting I'd like to show you."

He led Al'Magroth deeper into the labs under Magroth Industries, and finally, to a dark room. "We don't use the light. It aggravates them, and we don't want to risk losing them. We're still a couple generations off the final model, but these breed a lot faster. And there are so many around for them to interbreed with!"
Al'Magroth listened, and heard a splash. "So they're working as planned?"
"Oh yes," Jim said. "We've tested them on those new boys you brought in from the Khan's pimp. They carry the virus well."
"Imagine these babies swimming around the seas of Micras," Al'Magroth murmured.
"Soon," Jim assured him, "soon."
In the darkness, the faint glow of two eyes turned towards them. A fishy evil swam there, in the dark.