[Villainous] What's Under the Bag? (paperhat)

What's Under the Bag?

I haven't written anything since April, forgive me if this is absolute shit.

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The worst part about Flug's job, according to him, would be the ridiculous hours at which he had to work. Any sane person would agree if they knew just what they were, which essentially started whenever Black Hat gave him some asinine new prompt for an invention and ended whenever progress on said item terminated as well. It was torture to the scientist, but it wasn't like there was anything he could do about it, so he never complained about how hard he was worked. Plus, he had to admit, he didn't exactly hate it some of the time. Engineering was one of his favorite fields of science, just below aviation, and it wasn't like he just took up the job here for no reason. However, when it's four o'clock in the morning, you can't see a foot out your window, and your brain feels like someone sneezed on cotton and shoved it in your skull, the last thing you'd want to be doing is working on a machine that could potentially backfire kill you.

Flug, of course, did have his own special ways of beating the exhaustion. Sometimes during the day, he'd have 5.0.5. or Demencia keep watch while he took a 20-minute nap under his desk. Other times, if the bear noticed that Flug was up really late, he'd bring in a mug of coffee and a straw for the scientist to drink. Flug appreciated the kindness and wished the other two residents of the mansion were similar in manner, but unfortunately such behaviour would be hard to find in two full blooded villains. Not that anyone would expect any different, of course.

One particular night, Flug was toiling away at a very technologically advanced and very dangerous weapon Black Hat had assigned him to create a week ago. Basically, what his boss wanted it to do was to fire glass bullets filled with a highly acidic compound that would shatter on contact, dispersing the liquid to melt through the supersuit of any hero and thereby making it easier to defeat them. It was a genius idea, Flug had to admit, and he could name a few heroes he could see this being very effective on off the top of his head. Unfortunately, things tend to be much more simple to execute in theory than in practice, and that was certainly true in the case of building this gun. Flug had been working since the early hours of the morning to get a chemical ready that was, number one, safe for storage, and two, wouldn't explode the moment he finished mixing the reactants. On top of this, he had to make sure the weapon would be able to do it's fucking job in the first place, and these three factors on top of the scientist's sleep deprivation were making this task extremely difficult on him.

By this point, he'd already come close to burning his bag clean off his face twice. Chemistry is certainly a tricky subject, Flug mulled internally as he used a dropper to add a few milliliters of pink liquid to a tall glass beaker. The liquid inside of said beaker frothed and foamed for a moment, indicating that a chemical change had successfully taken place, and in a few moments it would likely be safe to add something else to the mix. It was getting hard for the scientist to tell which chemical was which, though, as sleep deprivation was causing his vision to periodically blur and make it hard to read the labels on the bottles. He almost couldn't tell the difference between formaldehyde and formic acid without carefully studying the containers, and that was a problem, but it wasn't like he could just stop working and go to sleep. Black Hat had a tendency to come in to check on his progress when Flug least expected it, and time be damned, he was not about to take any risks here.

The scientist didn't actually know what time it was, but seeing as the broken clock on the wall's hour hand had been stuck at '9' for quite some time and was beginning to near the '10', he figured it was well past 9:30. That meant he'd been slaving away at mixing chemicals for nearly twenty-four straight hours. He'd downed a few mugs of coffee earlier that day but it was beginning to wear off, and he was consequentially becoming exhausted fast. However, he knew there'd be no sleep until this project was done, so he pushed on and continued to mix chemicals.