S5 Episode Ten: "Patron Saint of Monsters"

"What the hell were you thinking?!"

"I tried something… and it clearly did not have the desired result…" Dr. Mythos spoke in a quiet, controlled tone, though his expression betrayed agitation beneath the surface.

"You think?!" the man in the suit fumed. "Seems that you weren't thinking at all!"

Dr. Mythos adjusted his glasses, a habitual attempt to steady himself.

"While the outcome was… unanticipated… the implications…"

"Your implications are insignificant considering the grand plan."

"She was going to expose the entire operation!" he snapped.

The man went still.

"She had a drive with documents, reports… gene sequences. She was going to take it to the press."

He paused.

"I did what I had to do. The opportunity presented itself before I had fully reasoned through the implications. I was documenting a sample of the most recent iteration of the serum when I found her… and the syringe was the most immediate solution available to me."

He pressed two fingers against his temple, not from guilt but from the irritation of having to explain himself at all.

"After that, it became a matter of observation. Documentation. It took time to narrow down her location, but between civilian media posts and the surveillance feeds we gained access to, we found a way to track her."

The sponsor adjusted his golden watch as if studying its set diamonds as though they might offer clarity.

"Regardless, this was never meant to be used on human subjects," the man firmly noted. "You're fortunate this blunder won't set us back further."

"Why not? Wasn't the end goal for the ultimate bioweapon? A human-level intelligence behind a mythological level creature…"

"Is not controllable." 

The man relaxed, but the tension never left his voice. 

"This 'Basilisk', as the media is calling it, is likely going to be a liability in the long run unless she can either be contained… or eliminated."

“Or understood,” Mythos said, more quietly. 

The man did not turn. 

Mythos continued. 

“They call her a monster because they do not understand what she is.. Because they can’t. But something created her… guided her…” 

A beat. 

“History tends to assign names to figures like that.” 

The sponsor finally glanced back, just slightly. 

“I am not interested in this world’s mythology, Doctor.”

He turned away from Dr. Mythos and glanced over the readings on the lab display, typing in a few notes with the practiced efficiency of someone far more familiar with the console than Mythos would have preferred.

"We need to move on to the next phase of this project as soon as possible. Either deal with this problem or I will have someone else do it."

Dr. Mythos narrowed his eyes at the back of the broad figure's head, though he knew the man seemed to have an uncanny sense of the people around him.

"Dr. Basil is still an asset…" he said under his breath.

He reached out and tapped a command into the console. A new display bloomed to life.

"And the next phase is already in progress…"

The man took in the new information, then tilted his head just enough to acknowledge him.

"You continue to surprise me, Julius."

Dr. Mythos cringed slightly at the use of his first name, but said nothing.

"Despite recent events and setbacks due to the Vigilantes, and the other parties clearly bent on hindering my research, progress remains consistent," the doctor informed.

"Ah, I presume you mean the theft of that…. collectible from deep space…" the sponsor waved dismissively. 

"Irrelevant. All of it will be once we reach the final iterations of the Zeta project. 

His gaze sharpened.

I am curious how Alexandra Basil will still be usable, let alone relevant, considering her current… condition…"

Dr. Mythos exhaled slowly, choosing his words carefully in the process.

"I believe there is still some use for that iteration of the serum in relation to Zeta, but I cannot fully study its effects without having her here in the facility."

The man turned back to the display and cycled it back to the readings on Basilisk and the formulae that had created her.

"I may know someone who can assist in the matter of reacquiring her… but you cannot let studying her overtake your primary responsibilities."

"Understood."

The man was quiet, his broad frame silhouetted against the scrolling data of the displays. The silence stretched… then…

"Julius… what we are building here is not merely a weapon.”

The tone shifted: less reprimand, more doctrine.

 “It is a transformation." 

He clasped his hands behind his back, a posture better suited to a podium than a laboratory. 

"Every civilization that has ever endured — that has ever risen above the noise of its age — did so because it possessed something its rivals could not comprehend. Something that made the opposition not merely inferior, but obsolete."

Dr. Mythos remained silent.

"The Zeta project was never about the creatures themselves. They are instruments. Symbols, even. What they represent, what they demonstrate, is a new order of capability. One that will make those who oppose us reconsider the wisdom of their opposition." 

He paused, letting the word settle. 

"Permanently."

"And the final prototypes?" Dr. Mythos asked carefully.

"Will be unveiled publicly." 

The man turned from the display to face him fully for the first time since the conversation had turned. The diamonds in his watch caught the blue light of the monitors. 

"The people of this city need to understand that the world they know is already obsolete. That there are forces at work that their institutions cannot protect them from." 

A faint trace of something that might have been satisfaction crossed his expression. 

"It is, in its own way, a gift.” 

Mythos studied him more carefully now. 

“I don’t anoint monsters, Julius,” the man added evenly. “I author inevitabilities.”

The clinical part of Dr. Mythos's mind registered the language with cold clarity. Vision. Transformation. The people. He had heard words like those before, in a different context entirely. Words and cadence that frequented a podium on stage, not in a secret laboratory beneath the city.

He filed it away.

"A public deployment carries significant risk of exposure," Dr. Mythos said. "For both of us."

"Risk," the man said evenly, adjusting his cuffs, "is what separates the architects of history from its footnotes." 

He moved toward the exit with the same unhurried confidence he applied to everything. 

"Have the final prototypes ready. I will send word of the where and when through the usual channels."

And then he was gone. The hum of the laboratory exhaled in his absence, filling the silence he left behind like water rushing into a vacated space.

Dr. Mythos stood motionless for a moment. 

Then he turned slowly back to the displays — the cascading formulae, the Basilisk readings, the half-completed architecture of the Zeta project's final phase — and looked at all of it with new eyes.

Public. 

He had always known that his sponsor's ambitions extended beyond the laboratory. He had simply chosen, until now, not to examine them too closely. It was easier to focus on the science — on the elegant, extraordinary problem of rewriting biology at its most fundamental level — than to concern himself with the machinery of whoever held the purse strings.

But public deployment was not science. It was a statement. And statements, once made, could not be recalled.

He reached out and pulled up the Basilisk tracking data, watching the small red indicator pulse steadily somewhere in the city above him. She had been brilliant once. One of the finest minds he had ever worked alongside. 

Now she was something else. Something the world would hunt.

"They’ll call you a monster," he murmured.

A pause.

"They always do."

His fingers hovered over the console—not to terminate, but to refine. To follow.

"Which means someone decides what you’re allowed to become."

His gaze hardened slightly behind the glass.

"You don’t discard a beginning."

The red pulse continued, steady and alive.

For the briefest moment, something almost resembling amusement crossed his face: thin, clinical, distant.

"Patron saint…" he murmured, testing the shape of it.

Not reverent. Not proud.Just… precise.

He adjusted his glasses.

He had work to do.