Chapter 3: The Test

It had taken two months, but the day had finally come.

Lewis and Franny had spent countless hours in the basement, working tirelessly on what Fowler had dubbed "Project F" when he had granted them a million dollar budget. Franny had actually fainted when she had seen the numbers and realized InventCo was actually going to fund her idea.

They could have moved to the labs at InventCo if they had wanted to, but Lewis preferred the privacy of his own lab. And he didn't like the idea of an InventCo scientist finding Franny's frogs and thinking they were simply runaway specimens that needed to be dissected.

The nerve cluster, like Lewis had guessed, did in fact effect Frankie's vocal cords. But there were half a dozen such clusters that could change the vocal pathways, and the changes were so miniscule that even one nerve cluster could be altered a thousand different ways. Effectively, they had a little over six thousand different options and even more then that in combinations to try out, it was like the world's hardest password.

Lewis' Amphibian Vocal Alteration machine had been built within five days of the increased funding and they had set to work. The all but endless combinations had taken forever to comb through and they had all but given up hope.

Then Frankie had sang.

Well, he hadn't actually started singing, but he had made a more musical sounding...sound, then normal. They had immediately made corrections and tweaked the original design of Frankie's vocal cords and he had made two musical sounding notes.

This had repeated for the past two months until now they were confident that he would sing. Actually sing this time.

"Come on Frankie, make mommy proud!" Franny said, not even bothering to cover up her blushing cheeks as she made herself look like a fool. Lewis would tease her about it anyways, regardless of whether he actually saw her blush or not, so why bother? "Come on, sing!"

Frankie, sitting before the two young adults on a metal table in 'their' lab in Lewis' basement, croaked once, then bothered himself with hopping around a bit. Franny felt her shoulders sag, "I really thought..."

"Don't worry, Fran," Lewis said in a comforting tone. "We-"

"Forget it!" She shouted and headed for the door that Lewis and his dad had put in last month that allowed them to leave the basement and enter the backyard, if they ever had a need for that sort of thing, which apparently Franny did right now.

"Franny wait!" Lewis called after her and ran to catch up. In the process of this, he tripped over her box of frogs and crashed into the wall near the door, which caused a bolt in the wall to come undone and, in turn, caused a stack of old blueprints to fly down and send one of Lewis' arc welders, which was laying halfway off the table, into the air, where it crashed into the intercom on the other side of the room. Immediately Lewis' mother's jazz music from upstairs could be heard and every frog in the room turned to stare at intercom with varying levels of curiosity.

Lewis, however, didn't even notice this, as he was busy chasing Franny, who was trying to call her brother, Art. Lewis flew forward, tackling the former karate enthusiast to the ground, knocking her cell phone from her hand. "What in the world is the matter with you?" Lewis asked, noticing that she was crying.

"I'm such a failure! Just like daddy said!" She sobbed. "Every time I think it's going to actually work, it doesn't! I gave up Karate for this, I gave up everything! Dad and mom both think I'm crazy!" She continued on. "And now your going to probably lose your job because we can't give them anything to pay off all that money, and-"

Lewis grabbed Franny's shoulders and shook her rapidly. "Franny snap out of it!" He said, trying to break her out of whatever crazed state she had fallen into. "Your idea isn't crazy, and neither are you!" He snapped.

Franny, who had calmed down a bit, nodded softly as she sniffed and rubbed her tear streaked eyes quickly. "I-I'm sorry, i-it's just that I...I can't believe it didn't work..." She mumbled, suddenly all to aware just how close Lewis was to her and that he was actually holding her, if only to comfort her. He probably didn't even realize he was doing it.

"Don't worry about it," Lewis said as he helped her stand up, though he had yet to remove his arms from around her. "We'll just try again, until we finally get it right."

Franny nodded in agreement and the two headed back towards the lab. Upon entering the lab, however, they stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of Franny's frogs dancing in sync to the sound of Jazz music. But that wasn't what made their jaws drop.

Frankie was singing.

/

Reviews pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!