Frankentown
up.
Another beating ∴ This time I’ll fight back ∴ ! ∴
It was time to stand up for himself.
As Frank stood defensively against the guard, instead of attacking, one of the guards just nodded at Frank.
Both soldiers then stepped back out of the room and Frank quickly followed.
They walked for what seemed like at least a mile.
      Still no real windows in sight.
Perhaps we are underground ∴ The moment they passed a great thick glass door,
the two soldiers disappeared, leaving Frank locked inside the chamber. The doors didn’t budge, though he tried.
      With only one way to go, he made way. Once he stepped past the front wall, he discovered an enormous door lit to a laboratory down the dark hallway.
Inside were large vertical tube-tanks holding strange misshapen bodies, like the squid back on campus. Only the bodies were not unlike the one he had on his kitchen counter, only much larger, taller and mostly wrinklier.
Desks with tubes, microscopes, shelves full of tube racks and a wall of laboratory mice in separated sample cages.
    A creak gave Weiss away has he leaned back in a chair from behind a microscope in the far end of the room.
    “Oh, you’re here?” He said, pretending to be surprised to see him.
    “Are these … ” Frank couldn’t quite find the words to finish the sentence, and it seemed a ridiculous thing to ask a grown man anyway.
    “Extraterrestrials, Cabella.
They’ve been in touch since the forties. They’re here.”
    “Yeah, so it says in the pamphlet.”
    “They gave you a pamphlet?
    What the hell is a pamphlet?”
Weiss obviously never got one.
Perhaps there was more to know that he never found out.
    “Here, check it out!” Frank said, tearing off the contract, which he stuffed it into his pocket and handed the rest of papers to Hector;
a brochure as half-assed as anything.
      “Take a read. I’ll look around.”
    While Weiss buried his face in the literature, Frank had to see this game changing new world for himself.
“So I had a chance to look at your friend.” Hector said.  
    “Which one?”
The question somehow wasn’t quite clear enough for Frank who was still fighting reality.
    “The one that looked like blue mash taters with a pizza box logo printed on the side … .”
    Frank gulped.
Hector wasn’t entirely sure what Frank could be thinking. Frank always thought of him as a brilliant scientist but a rotten judge of character.
“Ohh, yeahhh … ..THAT one.” He finally replied, mocking Hector and all the while realizing that Hector probably doesn’t know that much more than he does,
if he knows anything at all.
Why would he refer to the gray as friend?
    “It’s a young one. Its suit looks like it tore on the back. It kills them. They can’t withstand the low pressure on land without them.”
There really was no way for Frank to react correctly, so he failed to react at all.
    “Oh, you know," continued Hector,  
    "they’re used to high-pressure at the bottom of somewhere deep.”

    Like … the bottom of the ocean?
    It took Frank a good half minute before he dared to speak again. It was kind of a lot to process.

    How did Hector … .
    “They just put you in here?” Frank asked.
    “Well, the project recruited me," Hector said, unsuccessfully trying not to boast.
"Came down to the campus, to my office.
    I had to sign an secrecy agreement.”
    La-di-frankin’-dah ∴ He thought,
sporting a sour look on his face.
    “In case it wasn't clear: I took the ole’ fashioned way, through the meat grinder,
beating n’ all.” Frank said, pitying himself.
    Hector Weiss didn’t look a whole lot displeased hearing of his colleagues injuries.
Frank could swear he caught a look of joyful resentment in Weiss’ gleaming eyes.
    He's such a snake.
    The door burst open and in walked an older graying man wearing a general’s uniform.
The dark gray of his coat was decorated with many awards- what the general would refer to as prestigious. They were merits awarded for completing

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