Peals of lightning split the village's sky, casting stuttered silhouettes twisted by the deluge. No one was awake at the late hour besides a pair of men in heavy cloaks, hatching plans under the glow of a solitary street lamp.
"Why are we doing this?" I had to yell to my partner to be heard about the drum of the rain, "People would volunteer for this, why do we have to kidnap someone?"
Dr. Gunther-Hagen opened his mouth to speak, but discovered that he didn't know the answer. By all accounts, the whole concept seemed pretty flawed.
"Because the boss said so, Batchelder"
I didn't really expect an answer anyway. I grit my teeth, then gave a slight nod. We picked a house near the edge of the village so the getaway would be easier, but every other aspect of the plan was so slapdash it may as well have been put together by a child. That seemed good enough, though.
Dr. GH picked the lock on the house while I stood guard just outside. The house was quiet, and didn't even give so much as a creak to alert the homeowners of the Doctor's presence. Spotting the child's room was easy too, with the door half-cracked and and the dim flare of a night light in the corner. The boy didn't manage to make any noises that couldn't be drowned out by the roar of the weather against the roof, an ether-soaked rag made sure of it.
Everything went off without a hitch, and within a few hours we were back at base with everyone else. The child we'd retrieved and dozens of others from the far corners of Remnant had been loaded into cells, and their video feeds were displayed on monitors all over the control room. Most had awoken, and were now crying underneath their small beds. A few had already moved on from that, and had begun attacking the doors with everything they had, verbally and physically. It was disturbing to see, but not surprising. From the beginning, it was all about a rich idiot with too much Lien who couldn't think of a way to get rid of it fast enough. There was no science involved, just a bunch of scientists to make it seem legit.
But even being constantly subjected to the torment of children was better than the first few weeks of the project. Everyone brought their concerns to management after the project briefing, every single person, and most were met with the same results:
"This is genetic experimentation, we need fetal test subjects or eggs, even babies are already too old for this to work", they ignored him.
"What's the point of this? Grimm don't have special powers or strengths to begin with, so what are we hoping to gain with these experiments?" They ignored him too.
"Wouldn't a Grimm hybrid's advantages, if any, be dwarfed by the disadvantages? Aura is our greatest weapon against the Grimm, why would we compromi"- That guy was dragged out of the office and fired.
"How are we supposed to do this anyway, when Grimm evaporate right after they die? There's no way to get any sort of sample", they gave him a raise, which was probably just luck of the draw- Monkeys with typewriters and all that. Management was bound to make a stupid decision at least in our favor eventually.
So as horrible as it was, we'd all been desensitized a long time ago. At first the pay was just too good to ignore even for a job that consisted of a madman's ravings. Now nothing remained of our past selves but a quiet mental itch that hadn't yet succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, our only hope of returning to our normal lives after we'd finished the job and retired.
But for now, we had to keep up the show, do our experiments, and file paperwork properly. The boss wouldn't have a clue, but after the experiments inevitably turned up nothing, he'd probably hire a separate bunch of people to double-check our work for him.
Day one; 4:46 AM- All Subjects have arrived. We're giving them a short time to become acclimatized before beginning experiments.
I stopped there. I wasn't usually a "bare minimum" kind of guy, but this was a bare minimum kind of job, and after the long night I just wanted to beat the rush for some food. I dropped the log file onto the server before going off to find some breakfast in the lab's cafeteria. I ordered a whole pepperoni pizza. It was in the middle of my third slice when I truly realized just how crazy this job was making me.