"I'm telling you, Bunsenburger, it's not possible!"

Zanien banged the blunt end of his wand on the conference table as if to punctuate his exasperation as the topic. The act nearly shook the coffin-shaped table and echoed throughout the chambers of the reserved room in the Mage Quarter, shocking the other members with the impropriety of it all. Though his fel green eyes flickered at Bunsenburger ever so spitefully, the slight wasn't likely to be noticed by anyone else, leaving the good doctor unable to call the seething Sindorei out on it. Zanien's colleague from Silvermoon, a much less acrimonious individual known as Talionia, deftly moved to diffuse ehat had degenerated into a cross debate.

"Slogans aren't going to help settle a proposal submitted to this ad hoc committee," the older, less fiery blood elf stated in as calm a voice as she could muster. "We know the various positions held; we still have yet to take action on Dr. Bunsenburger's proposal."

Martha, the most sympathetic member of the committee toward Bunsenburger's case, tried to move the discussion along as well, but to no avail.

"I don't think this necessarily needs to boil down into a vote, either; in theory, each member is free to decide whether or not they wish to contribute-"

"How are we even entertaining this?" Zanien said in a rapid tone, offending Martha into silence. "Every one of us works under the same budget constraints as the other class trainers. In Silvermoon, we're up to our necks in noobs accidentally setting themselves on felfire and I know ny colleagues here in Undercity are working under similar pressure. And now we have this layman-"

"Zanien, please," Talionia said a little more firmly.

Defiance took on the shade of fel as the morally outraged warlock continued. "No, it needs to be said! How is a room of professional demonologists taking seriously the request of a man of science, and one who never even audited the mage's core program at that!"

Zanien's negative appeal was accompanied with a jabbed finger in the direction of Bunsenburger, who remained silent in his seat at the far end of the table. Folding his hands on the table in front of him, the good doctor exploited his body's lessened physical sensations to pose like a statue, refusing to grant Zanien the reaction he wanted. Bunsenburger was confident to a fault, but he knew when he was in enemy territory: he was essentially asking the most important warlock educators on the continent to ignore one of their own in favor of an outsider.

When Bunsenburger's inside man noticed his lack of defense, he stirred, as the good doctor had expected. Never show up to a gun fight without a posse, as they both often said.

"If I may speak a word in defense of Dr. Bunsenburger," said Gunther Arcanus, the only necromancer in Tirisfal not directly under his employ, "he is not proposing his research based solely on appealing to himself. His operation includes one of my fellow necromancers, as well as acolytes both living and undead, and a val'kyr-"

"Lesser val'kyr," added Zanien in a petulant tone of voice.

"-assisting him. His track record is proven, and he has contracts with numerous local Forsaken authorities. Were it not for his operation's fusion of magic and science, New Southshore wouldn't have been revived as a Forsaken port."

Unable to bask in the praise for even a moment, Bunsenburger found himself increasingly irritated at the intense scrutiny from a single member of the committee. "Excuse me my dear Gunther, but that's a proven track record with your field; not ours." As if he couldn't speak without using his hands, Zanien tapped the warlock class insignia on the sash he'd taken to wearing around his shoulder. "Had Dr. Bunsenburger requested funding from the Royal Apothecary Society, I would have supported the idea wholeheartedly."

His fellow blood elf even appeared tired of his grandstanding, and Talionia sighed deeply without even attempting to conceal her own exasperation. "Whether the request is a fair one or not, it was submitted to the correct committee; this idea has nothing to do with the Apothecarium. Now," the main representative of the Sindorei said sharply with a wave of her hand in the air to silence her fellow countryman, "let's move on to the substantive portion of this meeting. Forty five minutes was far too long to spend on the abstract alone. Can we move on to the prepared questions?"

For a good few seconds, Zanien stared in Talionia's direction as if attempting to communicate a silent message. When she shut him down and continued looking at their other colleagues, he found himself without support in a room full of the undead and relented.

"Fine."

As if tired of the whole ordeal, one of the local warlock trainers cleared his dry throat and adjusted his reading glasses to examine an index card.

"Dr. Bunsenburger, Richard Kerwin of Undercity. Nice to meet you. Now...ah..." Straining his eyes, Kerwin's wrinkled features became even more prominent in the candlelight. Unlike many of their kind, his skin had remained mostly intact in undeath, but the tradeoff was that all the signs of his advanced age in life remained preserved forever. "What...is...lemons...oh wait, I remember," he chuckled while tossing his index card to the side along with Zanien's attention span. "Now, you wish to raise undead demons. But as we all know, demons return to the Twisting Nether upon death. How do you intend to retain a corpse long enough for it to be raised?"

All the ad hoc committee's members save the recalcitrant sitting directly across from Bunsenburger turned their eyes to the heretofore silent man of science, his lab coat exchanged for a Forsaken tabard that never seemed to lay evenly on his two shoulders. Working the pause like a professional stage actor, he unfurled his packet of field photography and began sliding it over toward Kerwin - and only Kerwin, forcing the other members to all rely on the asker of the question.

"I thank you for the relevant question, professor," Dr. Bunsenburger replied, earning a delighted grin from Kerwin and an openly unprofessional head shake from Zanien. "The answer is apexis crystals. Preliminary tests on the samples from pre-war Draenor indicate that apexis tuning columns are the only means of permanently killing demons - their bodies disintegrate forever without the ability to rematerialize in the Twisting Nether."

"Which means that they-"

"Zanien, quiet," Kerwin said in a voice that was almost brusque for the old man. His eyes were fixated on the photographs in front of him, and a few other members of the committee were switching between trying to sneak a peek and focus on Bunsenburger's answer.

A smug, victorious smirk pulled at the corner of Bunsenburger's lips, though he kept himself under control for the sake of appearances. "As I was saying, demons killed under lab conditions within apexis tuning columns disintegrate forever when the right frequency is tuned and either, A, their bodies are already so damaged that the wavelengths finish the job, or B, their bodies aren't damaged but we simply blast them with enough waves. There is, of course the unmentioned issue of losing the corpses when they rematerialize in the Nether, which nobody mentioned until now." Not even bothering to look up at Zanien silently motioning toward him as if to say 'is anybody else listening to this,' Bunsenburger pulled out a sheet of fel vital readings and strategically passed them on to Talionia and nobody else. "But I do believe we discovered something last month."

A few other committee members tried to steal glances at the sheets in Talionia's hands, almost jealous at what she'd been given. The way her green eyes widened at the numbers only increased the curiosity of those who couldn't see it. "Five witnesses...all of them sentient?" she asked almost rhetorically, and the lack of context to her question caused everyone to look back to the good doctor.

"Every last witness is prepared to stand before the committee if you'd like to hear their testimony personally; we were able to sustain a felhunter's corpse here on our mortal plane for nearly three minutes after death."

Murmurs erupted among the members, and a pandemonium of pencil necked scholars soon followed. In his excitement to spy on the sheets in Talionia's hands, Kerwin accidentally allowed the photographs to spill from the envelope he'd been holding. Bunsenburger couldn't have asked for better had he planned it himself: the photos were spread haphazardly all across the conference table, allowing the committee members to view some of the photos but not all of them at once, and at bad angles. They practically became sensationalized, every one of them holding a piece of the puzzle but unable to solve it without Bunsenburger's assistance. Talionia began flipping through the sheets of felhunter vital signs more quicky than was possible for her to skim it, as if her skepticism had been turned on its head when everything added up.

Every the haughty rat sphincter, Zanien began furiously pointing at various parts of the photographs. "This is poppycock...how can you know for sure that these vital signs signify death when we don't have any other cases of dead yet preserved demons to measure against? You'd need a minimum of three repeated results to establish a scientific consensus, yet as far as I'm concerned, you don't have any proof that the felhunter in these pictures wasn't simply under stun effects from extensive damage." Zanien's eyes lit up an even brighter shade of green, as if the fel light bulb was shining in his mind. "The simplest explanation is usually the most correct one: you knocked this felhunter out cold after beating it into submission; you measured its vital signs while it was unconscious, a condition under which it remained until it finally died of system shock. I've seen this in demons previously. They're resilient creatures, but they can still be pounded into pulp like murlocs."

Had Bunsenburger a heart remaining in his chest, it would have begun to thump with irritation at that moment. Sufficed by gritting his molar teeth but steeling his lips into a congenial smile, he forced himself to face the immaturity from an otherwise respectable scholar valiantly. "I'm aware of that, warlock Zanien; that's why I'm requesting assistance to run more tests of the hypothesis and attempt to reproduce the results. You did read the text of my proposal prior to attending the meeting...correct?"

"Don't patronize me, Bunsenburger! I read the text and I'm aware that you're requesting we provide you with a candidate willing to permanently sacrifice their ability to summon a specific species of minion!"

Over the following moments, the forced smile gradually faded from the good doctor's face as a disappointing realization dawned upon him. One by one, the members of the committee began to peel themselves away from the visual aids he'd handed out, returning their attention either to him or to Zanien. Eyes blinked and heads shook as a number of them appeared rather surprised at the plainly obvious fact. And then the truth hit Bunsenburger hard:

Zanien had read the entire proposal. The other members - the ones whose support he'd been counting on - had not.

"Well now, eh...let me see here," Kerwin stammered while adjusting his reading glasses again. Each member had their own hand written copy of the proposal, and they were likely examining the fine print for the first time, much to Bunsenburger's dismay. "Why, yes...of, I must have forgotten. The demons involved in the experiment will extinguish the blood pact of the volunteer warlock. Such that...laid warlock?"

"Oh just let me read it, grandpa!" Zanien huffed while pulling his own proposal out, ignoring the acrimonious expression from Talionia as he did so. "Said warlock would never again be able to summon beholders if, for example, they offered their beholder for this experiment; the inability would be permanent, end quote. Ergo, what we're being asked here is to permanently stunt our pupils - for that is most likely whom we'll draw volunteers from - all so a non-warlock, by the Light a complete non-magic user can run through a theoretically endless number of attempts trying to replicate a sort of stasis trapped, beaten, halfway dead state upon beings that, to the best of our knowledge, simply don't leave corpses behind!"

When Gunther raised his hand to speak, Bunsenburger knew he'd already lost. A deep, bitter hate built up in his throat, threatening to pour forth as his ally admitted defeat by acknowledging that their position requires a defense in the first place.

"Now let's slow down for a second. What we could potentially be looking at is one of the most significant developments in our history. If we can turn demons from their fiery life into an unholy undeath, we'd not only decimate the ranks of the Burning Legion but also add a huge upswell to the ranks of the Forsaken - an important ally of both the Sindorei and the Horde. This isn't only about us, but about Azeroth as a whole."

"Time, Talionia," murmured Luther Pickman, another local undead warlock whose only clear position was that the committee reach a decision in time for him to observe the bat races at the new Tirisfal track that evening.

Pressing her fingers against her temples, the previously moderate blood elf appeared to be feeling the pressure from the combined arguing of Zanien and Gunther as well as the impatience of her fellow committee members. When she opened her eyes, she took a deep breath and smiled as if to reassure everyone that they would reach an amicable solution. That did little to soothe Bunsenburger's anger, however; he already knew when he was beaten.

"Alright...alright. Look...I don't prefer this method, but if we hold a fair and anonymous vote, can we consider the issue settled? Majority rules?"

"Fine."

"Sounds fair."

"Alright."

"I think we've heard enough."

"Let's do this."

Disappointment at her own suggestion mixted into Talionia's features, along with a measure of exhaustion and an almost contrite glance in Bunsenburger's direction. For his part, the good doctor merely stared at the desk in front of his folded hands, in absolute shock that he'd misread the committee members so severely. Of all the contingencies he'd planned for, their shirking of their duties was not one of them, nor was the notion that Zanien would take his proposal seriously enough to actually formulate rebuttals. Realizing that he'd brought a knife to a gun fight, Bunsenburger allowed his anger to seethe deep down, pushing it into a private place to fester so he could at least preserve his dignity in front of his peers.

One by one, the truant committee members passed little slips of folded paper to Talionia, the chairwoman of the ad hoc committee on cooperation proposals from those outside the warlock community. Gunther, being a necromancer, had only been invited due to the lack of a separate guild for his class, and thus wasn't a voting member of the committee.

It mattered not, though; Bunsenburger already knew the result. And with each syllable that Talionia silently mouthed while tallying the votes, he could sense Zanien chuckling with a closed mouth, the blood elf's chest heaving slightly as a rather self-absorbed relaxation loosened up the man's posture. Every internal gut laugh was like salt tossed over the wound, grating on Bunsenburger's nerves even more as his perennial opponent refused to win magnanimously. As if to add his signature punctuation to his disgraceful victory, Zanien even turned toward Bunsenburger and smirked at him, holding the expression for the entire announcement even when the man of science refused to react.

Talionia continued to stare at the tallied votes for a moment, hesitating before she delivered the news. Only when everyone was leaning forward in anticipation did she lean back in her chair, shake her head and speak.

"Majority vote, by a tally of five to three, is...against accepting the proposal for partnership between Bunsenburger Labs and the Horde Warlocks' Guild of Lordaeron."

For a good few moments, Talionia continued staring at the votes, and most of the committee members followed suit. Only the flicker of the candles lighting the conference room could be heard, and the air hung heavy on everyone as even those who voted against the proposal ostensibly felt uncomfortable looking Bunsenburger in the eye.

His cold undead blood suddenly boiling - at the antagonism of Zanien, at the failure of his peers, of the tendency of single strong personalities to unfairly dominate meetings, at the simple lack of vision among those of lesser intellect - Bunsenburger had suffered enough insult for one day. Scooping his photographs and sheets up off the conference table and shoving them back into his briefcase, he turned and brusquely walked out of the conference room, his uncomfortable dress shoes echoing his footsteps off of the stone walls of the narrow corridor as he walked back toward the Mage Quarter proper. Not even one last childish taunt from Zanien was enough for him to turn back, his honor too besmirched to face the committee without saying things he'd regret later. His walk to the city bat handler was a swift one, peppered by thoughts of how he could rationalize his first clear cut, fair and square loss in his career.