Entity Lab 12

Time: shortly after Beside A Black Tarn
Place: Unknown

“I don't understand it.” Dr. Krantz shook his head. “The conditions were identical.”
 
“Run it again,” Dr. Stern snapped a hand at the vid. “We're missing something.”
 
Riveted to the recorded images, they watched again. The med tech reduced anesthetic drip. The fallen angel on the table showed definite signs of distress. He began to twist against his restraints and mutter to himself. He turned his head to address the empty air beside him. A heat shimmer wavered in the space he addressed.
 
Something began to take shape on the tray beside the fallen's head, something dark and twisted, but after a few moments of twisting, impossible limbs and the hint of feral eyes, a hideous shriek sounded and the half-formed entity vanished.
 
Krantz cut the feed before the fallen began screaming. "You don't suppose it's because this one has horns, do you? Is it possible there are differences between fallen on a chemical level?"
 
"Nonsense." Dr. Prince yanked a cloth from his pocket to wipe the lenses on his spectroscopy goggles. "All fallen are the same except in superficial, aesthetic ways. They were all angels once. Run the successful one again."
 
They had all seen it a hundred times, though not with the spectroscopy goggles. Dr. Krantz queued up the file in question and let it run. They had condensed the feed down to the specific points where the entity began to manifest—apparent at first only through the fallen's odd behavior where he stopped muttering to himself and appeared to speak to something beside him, then in more and more visible forms until the bright pink entity became a solid mass.
 
"He is much more handsome than the other fallen," Dr. Stern murmured.
 
"And he doesn't have horns like the other one," Dr. Krantz added in a whisper.
 
"Aesthetic differences," Dr. Prince snarled. "It means no more than eye color or the size of someone's feet."
 
"I do like a man with big feet."
 
"Oh, yes. Long feet with elegant toes—"
 
"Will you please focus, gentlemen?"
 
Dr. Prince's teeth were clamped together so, Dr. Krantz felt it best to shut up and concentrated on the extraordinarily pink entity, which had chosen to manifest as an unusually large hedgehog. There didn't appear to be anything unusual about his elemental makeup—the normal carbon sorts of things, oxygen, calcium, iron, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on. But where had the atoms come from to make the entity? Was it actually physical, or did it merely appear to be? Was this an anomalous creation of matter? And if that were true, and everything they knew was wrong, what was the point? And what were--
"Why wasn't the entity detained?" Dr. Prince wrenched his goggles off with a frustrated huff.
 
"Security believed it was a data glitch." Dr. Stern edged away carefully.
 
"A data glitch. A data glitch." Dr. Prince tapped his goggles in the counter in a swift, syncopated rhythm. "Gentlemen, we need another fallen. A fresh one. We'll begin again. Take another look at brainwave patterns. There must be a way to repeat the phenomenon."
 
Dr. Krantz sighed, not looking forward to dealing with the people who brought them subjects, but he supposed it had to be done as many times as it took to replicate the results. For science, he told himself, for science.