And so we continue!

So, by the time this goes up, it will be reading week where I go to college. In addition to the large amount of studying I will be putting in, I will also be working on continuing to bulk up the backlog for the story. Right now, I'm barely keeping pace since the courses are more challenging now (I'm studying electrical engineering, though I have been told by a few people that I should try to write a book. I SCOFF AT YOU! Though I do sincerely thank you for the compliment. However, this is not what I consider to be book writing skill. Yet), So I have to devote more time to that.

BUT I SHALT NOT ADMIT DEFEAT!

Creativity: YEAH!

Author: You're late.

Creativity: Public transit.

Author: Fair enough.

Now, where was I? Oh yes! I am not going to miss a Sunday if I can help it. I am confident I can keep up this pace and have chapters ready for when exam season hits. There'll probably be a slowdown in completed chapters from March to the middle of April since that's the period of times between midterms and exams, but If everything goes according to plan, I'll have more than enough chapters to last us through that dry spell.

Alright, enough. Enjoy chapter 23!

P.S.

I know that that the number says 25, but that's because of the two-part Halloween special. Stop bugging me about that.

Grey was still grinning as they left the Vancouver Aquarium. It was the third day of his vacation with his friends and family and so far, it was going terrifically. Yesterday they had gone to a large suspension bridge that had a large network of platforms in between the trees. They spent the day exploring there before heading back into the city to find a good place for dinner. They ended up eating at a seafood restaurant before heading back to the hotel to watch a movie before heading to bed early.

Today's visit to the aquarium had also been great. They had spent hours looking at every exhibit and were now heading out to have lunch in the surrounding park. After that, they were going to head back to the hotel to spend the rest of the day at the beach.

The food they had brought along was pretty typical picnic food. Sandwiches, soda, a few assorted veggies and some dessert. After they finished eating, Grey and his friends lounged around, chatting and cracking a few jokes about how Grey should volunteer as a temporary exhibit at the aquarium at some point.

"Though seriously, if someone sincerely asks me to do that, I will clock them over the head and punt them out of the building." Grey stated before they got up and started packing up everything they had brought with them before heading back to the rental vans that Monarch had dropped off for them.

They drove back to the hotel and they spent a few hours swimming on the ocean. Grey stuck close the twins at all times. The beach wasn't too crowded and he spent most of his time in the water, giving him an opportunity to use his gills. They itched like crazy when he wasn't underwater, but that didn't stop him from coming up to keep up appearances.

He especially enjoyed body surfing when he wasn't keeping an eye on the twins. He even had a competition with Max, Tobi and Jessica to see who could make it the furthest on the same wave. Grey pulled a close second to Jessica, which led to pokes and prods about him throwing the competition so as not to appear as though he was showing off. He suspected he would be teased about that for a while.

He took an extra fifteen minutes to swim a bit deeper, checking out a few fish and other critters. He suspected for a moment that he saw a shark, but it was just a larger fish in the distance. After he was done with swimming, he went back up to the hotel with everyone else, keeping his gills covered with a towel. He would need to flush them out before turning back to normal, otherwise he would have an itch he couldn't scratch. After taking a shower to rinse the saltwater off his body and out of his gills, he returned to normal and met everyone in the deluxe room for dinner. They ordered food from the hotel restaurant through room service and settled in for another movie.

Grey felt great, being able to have this vacation without having an air of unrest surrounding him. Things were looking up.

Rothstein grunted in frustration as he fiddled with a few dials on his 'de-splicer'. Yorburg's polluted and tangled DNA was proving more difficult to unravel than he had initially anticipated. He had known that this was going to be an extremely difficult task, but it was proving to be more vexing than he had ever imagined. Still, he would persevere. He wanted what was in those vaults, even if it took him years, he would crack that damn vault.

It had been a couple of days since he had checked on the G-A's current batch, so he set the machine to standby mode and left to clear his mind and take a look at the project. Along the way, he bumped into doctor Misaki, who was on her way to another session with Rose. They had recently switched to a new set of exercises and lessons that were specifically designed to encourage her to speak. It was still only theoretical, but the doctor seemed very confident. Or perhaps desperate, since the Director wanted her to be able to function as a human being when they presented her to the other directors. They hadn't yet revealed Rose's existence to any other Director, sans the one that they had entrusted the other creature to, and it was undoubted that just as his current Director had eyes and ears in other facilities, so did other Directors have their own eyes in ears in this one. And they did not want the news to be broken before they were ready.

After bidding the doctor farewell and good luck, he continued on to the G-A lab. The subjects inside the pods looked to be just about ready. In fact, according to the machine, they would be ready for transportation in only a few hours! He sent word to his technicians to prepare holding pens for them. Perhaps make them a bit more… natural this time. He had been considering proposing that they add some foliage to Rose's own cell. Perhaps it would create an environment that would be more stimulating for her, perhaps encourage her to learn quicker.

Then it occurred to him. What exactly were they going to do about their new additions? Were they going to be like Rose was at the beginning? She had essentially been a newborn in an adolescent body, even taking her rapidly developing mind into account. Having to repeat that with six others who were created from a template based on her DNA was not encouraging. Working with them all together would be needlessly stressful and working with them one on one would take too long.

He supposed that, should push come to shove, they could always divide the class into pairs or sets of three. Plus, they would have data from Rose that they could use to create a more efficient teaching and training program.

That was another thing they hadn't addressed with any one the cross-species they had created, Rose included. They needed training for when they went on the offensive again. Or defensive. Now that the world knew that they existed, it would only be a matter of time before one of their installations was discovered. And when one of the was found, it would be foolish to bet against that damn Grey kid leading the charge. And now, according to reports, he had a few other cross-species to back him up. He had single handedly taken down over half their armed guards and basically killed Yorburg after the man went and pumped an untested, completely unstable mutagen into himself. Rothstein had just put him out of his misery.

Rothstein rubbed his temples as he started considering the problems that were piling up. Despite his ability to multitask, he was starting to miss important details and they were going to cost him and the rest of this base. Especially when those costs started to add up. He needed to start delegating some of this to others if he was to keep on top of things and succeed in pulling Yorburg's human DNA from the mess it was in now.

But who could he entrust these the progress and security of his projects to? Certainly no one on this base was intelligent, diligent and trustworthy enough to even consider contacting, and he certainly had no interest in hunting down old colleagues who owed him a favour or two for the sole purpose of easing he workload.

Perhaps though, he was overthinking it a tad. Maybe he should start fresh. Find someone who had no involvement in the upper reaches of this organization. He could always look for someone on the ground level who had decent management skills and enough scientific expertise to understand and record information about his projects for him.

Or he could find someone even more green. All he needed to do was peruse the latest reports they had on potential recruits, straight out of university and looking to begin their careers. If he could commandeer one of their external labs and get everything set up for the plant cross-species specifically, then he would just need to find one or two graduates with their shiny new doctorates to present with a once in a lifetime opportunity and he would have Rose and the others taken care of, while he could continue to experiment with the G-A machine.

Yes, that would do. Now he just had to make a few phone calls.

Two days later

Grey yawned as he looked up at the ceiling of his hotel room. Today was a low-key day for them. Yesterday, they had gone back to the suspension bridge and taken a tram up the mountain to go zip-lining. Luckily, no one had a fear of heights, which would have put a damper on thinks since a few of the lines went between mountains.

Once they had finished with that, they explored the rest of the tourist attraction before heading back down the mountain.

Since they had enjoyed a few more active days, they decided to take one to recharge and relax. The twins were currently watching TV, Jessica was still asleep, Max and Tobi were playing video games and his parents were down in the hotel lobby.

Grey looked up from his spot on the couch. The twins were splayed out on the couch, both looking like they were about to nod off. He got up and stretched before walking over to the door that divided the two rooms and pulled it open, walking over to see what Max and Tobi were playing. They were playing a fighting game that Tobi was absolutely destroying Max at. Seriously, it was almost a little painful to watch.

It was at this point that the door to Jessica's room creaked open and she peaked her head through. It was obvious that she had just hauled herself out of bed. Her hair was dishevelled, she was still in her PJ's and her eyes were still squinting due to the light. She immediately retreated back into her room while Grey sat down on the couch and grabbed a controller. They switched to a racing game and played a few rounds before Jessica came back out, having properly woken up and gone about her morning rituals… in the afternoon. They ordered some food through room service before Jessica took Grey's controller while he went to check on the twins. Sure enough, they had indeed nodded off. He came back to find the tables had turned and now Max was humiliating Tobi. Right up until the last corner of the last lap, when Jessica snatched victory right out from under Max's nose. Max and Grey said nothing for a few moments before Grey burst out laughing. And he kept laughing until his sides hurt. Tobi joined him not too long after he started and stopped shortly after. Grey watched a few more rounds before the food showed up. The selection of the hour was iced tea, nachos, extra cheese dip for said nachos, a small assortment of veggies with dip, and breadsticks. Grey still wasn't exactly sure why they had ordered breadsticks with nachos, but didn't question it.

Opting to not get food or grease on the controllers, they switched to watching TV while setting the food down on the coffee table. Grey immediately started attacking the nachos while the others started with the breadsticks.

"Seriously, what's with you and the nachos?" Jessica asked. Grey supposed it was a rather recent thing, him ordering nachos more often than not.

"Guess I just suddenly like nachos." Grey responded before devouring an extra cheesy nacho. He reclined as they watched a B-grade monster movie come on. To which Grey immediately became dead-pan silent and unresponsive to. There was a hurried rush to change the channel until they found a different movie. They didn't quite know what it was, but it wasn't something that Grey would likely take an offence or some other umbrage with. They watched that all the way through before the twins wandered into the room, rubbing their eyes. They switched back to video games and started playing an exploration game for an hour before Grey's parents came back to the room. By this point it was dinner time and everyone was still hungry, despite the rather sizable snack they had enjoyed not too long ago. They decided to order sushi today, though since the twins weren't very fond of sushi they ordered them a pizza. Once the food arrived, Grey immediately began attacking his order. His order consisted entirely of seafood based sushi, owing to the fact that sushi was one of his favourite seafood dishes.

After the meal, Grey lounged around in his room while and let the food settle before going for a walk by himself. His walk took him around the resort before stopping in front of the ocean to watch the sun set. He sat by himself for a while before heading back up to the room to watch it with everyone else on the balcony. It wasn't the end of the vacation, but this was probably the peak of it.

Rothstein walked through the three-story building that would be serving as his new outlet of study. The Hub, the central installation where the Prime Director kept a watchful eye over the whole organization had constructed this building some time ago, waiting for someone to submit an application for its use. Most people who were of the stature within the organization to apply were leery to do so, since being a surface location, it was much easier for someone to stumble upon it. Better to perform their more "risky" or "controversial" experiments in the safety of obscurity, be it within the ocean, deep underground, within mountains or near the Earth's two poles.

They kept them staffed and used covers for the installations, be it offices for businesses, external labs for large corporate entities, or other such misdirecting titles. This one was a lab internally and externally, but the experiments performed within were not the kind that everyone thought they were. The company in question, Neo-Gen, was a genetics company that specialized in plants, trying to breed plants capable of growing in much more inhospitable locations. That was the cover anyway, and that was the experimentation that went on in the outer shell. However, the building was designed with a massive "box" in the middle, which had security that made the D.O.D. look like chumps! Within this box was where they performed the real work, and it was within this box that Rothstein had arranged for large holding cells to be prepared, as well as a massive environment that connected to the pens, which was filled with all sorts of plants. Non-threatening of course, but there was a staggering diversity of green life within the central pen. In addition to this, there was a massive area set aside specifically for strengthening the cross-species bodies and minds. Doctors Trill and Misaki had already been transferred to continue their work, as well as a new team member. Doctor Lark was a biologist, specializing in plant life, who also had a doctorate in psychology. Needless to say, Rothstein was ecstatic to have her on the team. The initial invitation had been rejected since she was convinced that the cross-species would not last more than a week or two, but having been proven wrong had decided to reconsider.

Lastly, Rothstein wanted to get his new assistants. He more considered them to be apprentices or trainees, but assistants were the official title they would be getting.

Lastly, Rothstein had called in one special favour to acquire a new piece of technology that allowed him to adjust his physical appearance in a few small ways. Since he was now a wanted man, due to Monarch releasing an official list of all known members of the organization to the UN, he had to keep his presence as unnoticed as possible. For those purposes, he slipped the device on (Which looked like a headband) and adjusted his appearance. His skin took on a more tanned appearance, he now had a moustache and a few lines on his face vanished.

As for his name, he would now be known as Dr. Royston Parks, an accomplished geneticist and prestigious member of Neo-Gen. His fake credentials and 'history' had already been slipped into official records, so he wouldn't have to worry about anyone getting suspicious.

Rothstein opened a list of candidates he intended to interview for the positions he was making available. He wanted three assistants. He'd be working with them personally in rotation, while the two he wasn't working with would observe the projects he was working on.

His list was rather broad, but visiting the candidates would thin it out considerably. His criteria was a bit standard, but with one crucial 'make or break' stipulation. They needed to have the stomach for his work. If they didn't have the spine to do the sort of work they were doing, then they would be of no use to him.

He stood up and made sure his business suit was straight before picking up a briefcase and heading out to his car. Time for his first interviews.

So yeah, the plant cross-species are moving topside. Vacation's almost over for Grey and soon it will be back to work.

Creativity: Yeah, hopefully it'll get more interesting soon.

Author: That was borderline spoilers. Watch it.

Creativity: Watching it, sir!

Author: So, this one took a bit longer to finish than expected, but I feel it turned out well.

Next time, we'll catch up with Rothstein and his interviews. As well as other stuff that I WILL NOT MENTION HERE!

See ya next week!