The anticipation was incredible. For an older undead gentleman, the sensation of a racing pulse was a treasured rarity. It was only so often that anything could surprise him, much less excite him in such a manner. But such an occasion was most certainly out of the ordinary...and thankfully, even his staff understood that it was a time to remain quiet and wait.

Gradually, Babagaya's eye movement sped up beneath her eyelids, the larger number of candles in the reeducation chamber pushing her now warm body to wake. Groggy eyes blinked, and her head rolled around on the examination table she was strapped to. Beakers, tesla coils and distillation contraptions lined the walls, in addition to a formidable collection of surgical tools. Dr. Bunsenburger was there, waiting with his arms folded behind a fresh lab coat as Zulgha and a few skeleton knights flanked him. The door to the corridor outside was open, but all she could see were the shadows of other, creepier minions passing against the wall as they crossed an intersection inside the maze-like laboratory, and the angry yet resigned expression on her face signaled to the good doctor that she understood that the current room she found herself restrained in was probably the safest for her.

After a few futile attempts to pull free, Babagaya gave up and tried to put up a strong front. "I'll never talk!" she said defiantly, garnering a hearty chuckle from Dr. Bunsenburger and a strange bobbing movement from the skeletons as if they were mimicking the movement of his chest cavity when laughing.

"Nobody expects you to; this isn't a political game, or any sort of attempt to coerce you into submitting Alliance secrets," he explained calmly, almost politely, as he walked in front of her restraint table so they could see eye to eye. "Truth be told, I still retain professional contacts with former colleagues who fled to Stormwind; this is not a factional issue. This is a more...scholarly one."

"Spit it out, you rotting sack of maggots: what do you want?"

"I admire that fire; you'll need it. So here's what's going to happen...you're going to summon various demons on my command, and you're going to keep them summoned while we take them into the examination room."

"Or else?"

That fire led Babagaya to steel her scowl, and Bunsenburger could already sense a stonewall attempt drawing near. Not at all in the mood to negotiate, he motioned for Zulgha to approach as well. The orcess had been an acolyte of the Scourge and later the Cult of the Damned before growing disillusioned and joining the Forsaken; while she lacked directly damaging, offensive spells, her talents for spreading the Blight would prove quite useful here.

Once Bunsenburger stepped away, Zulgha rolled her sleeves up like when she and Babagaya had thrown down back at Ratchet. The gnome continued to glare at her, but Bunsenburger noticed Babagaya's rapid breathing.

"Your people are interesting, Shadowcleft," Zulgha said while conjuring corrupting death magic. "You're so small, yet so hardy; there are ailments and curses that would fell ogres but would only give a gnome a bit of a cough. And your resistance to corruption is quite impressive."

Without any flash or pomp, Zulgha pointed toward Babagaya's exposed, shoeless foot, and the undeath in her own living hands disappeared. Miniature, localized Blight materialized on the skin of Babagaya's foot, turning the skin a dark green color and covering it in boils as Babagaya began to transform into a leper gnome from the bottom up.

"Stop! Stop! I'll do it!" the gnomish warlock yelled, more angry than frightened. Zulgha backed off after the corruption reached ankle high, ceding the floor again to Bunsenburger. "Light damn you all to hell!"

"That was a done deal long ago, my friend," Bunsenburger said with a grim smile. "Now, she backed off; it's time for your end of the bargain."

"This isn't a bargain, this is extortion!"

At least possessing the common decency to allow Babagaya her righteous fury, Bunsenburger ignored her attitude and tried to maintain professional distance from her character. "If you could summon your felhunter, please, then we can get started; that's what we have the most experience with. We'll need it to cooperate while we perform our experiment as well."

"You bastard, you Light damned bastard," she grumbled as one of the skeletons unstrapped a single arm. Her casting time was doubled, but after a few moments of the demonic cube glowing in the floor, a real, live felhunter crawled out of it.

The eyeless creature glanced around the room at first, the spikes on its back bristling at the skeletons who'd captured its master. Backing up to the corner as if ready to pounce, the felhunter suddenly stopped and raised its snout as if sniffing the air. Grinning in amusement, Bunsenburger wondered just how laden the air in his laboratory was with magical residue as the felhunter shook its long head around in confusion, probably overwhelmed by the magic, magic everywhere. It even chased its own tail in a few circles and began wheezing nervous noises like a dog trying to catch a trapped squirrel.

Not wanting the humor of the display to distract from his experiment, Bunsenburger snapped his fingers at the skeletons. "Take it to Barghash and Runa in the examination room; we'll need to begin shortly. And it needs to be severely injured anyway for the apexis crystals to hold it in stasis, so no need to be gentle."

On cue, one of the skeletons stopped the felhunter's enraptured doggy dance by impaling its hindquarters on its sword. Demons were tough, and the creature didn't screech so much as it grunted in response to a foreign object bothering it. Before it could rear up and bite, another skeleton stabbed it through its snout from top to bottom jaw, leaving it impaled on both ends as the two undead soldiers carried it like a giant shish kebab skewer. The demon growled in protest but couldn't wriggle free, and was carried the next room over without incident.

Turning back toward one of his two captives, Bunsenburger smiled politely in the face of the little gnome's murderface. "I think this arrangement will work out quite nicely," he said as he followed the skeletons out. "Now, if you'll excuse me-"

"Wait, I need to use the toilet!"

Stopping himself at the doorway, Bunsenburger lightly smacked his own forehead. "Oh my...it seems I forgot about a significant detail. You two," he said while pointing at some of the skeletons, "accompany miss Shadowcleft; don't leave her alone for a second and strap her right back onto that table when she's done."

"But I have to take a dump! This isn't fair-"

"Oh shush!" Zulgha said, silencing the gnomish warlock in mid sentence.

"Thank you, Zulgha."

"No problem, doc; I'll spam spell lock on her, too."

After an approving nod, Bunsenburger strode down the hallway, fielding questions from a few minions, signing off on a delivery of frozen hearts and assigning an assistant ghoul to a visiting scholar from Andorhol in his library before he could even reach the examination room. Taking a deeper breath than his body needed, one of Brill's busiest people tried to clear his mind of everything else before he entered the examination room.

Inside, more tesla coils, distillation chambers and instruments both magical and surgical lined the walls, all of it surrounding another restraining table in the center. Pylons topped by apexis crystals formed a hexagonal grid, the restrained and badly beaten felhunter tied down in the middle of it all. Barghash and Runa stood in one corner behind a protective metal barrier (which Runa probably didn't need), and the skeletons were at the ready in case the demon needed to be softened up even more. All was in place.

Stepping behind a control panel containing enchanted scales and graphs to test magical readings as well as vital signs, Bunsenburger inspected the results granted by the electrodes which the skeletons had roughly stabbed into the restrained felhunter's flesh. The creature was one of fel corruption; even the arcane magic enchanted into the room's instruments and the death magic lingering in the air pretty much everywhere in Brill were converted into demonic magic by the felhunter's endocrine system. The mere presence of apexis crystals charged up by arcane magic and attuned to block lay lines leading to the Twisting Nether was already wearing on the felhunter's essence; a separate reading for essence, separate from a soul reading, indicated that it was already starting to fade out of the totality of existence, neither passing on to the Nether or any sort of an afterlife. Permadeath was the only result of demons killed in such a fashion, and there was limited time before the pylons had to be shut off.

But more than anything, Bunsenburger noticed that the injured felhunter bleeding fel Fire was still alive. As frightening as demonic corruption was to the living, demons were still living creatures themselves: biologically immortal but capable of permadeath thanks to strides made by the few draenei contacts who his pre-Third War colleagues had convinced to deal with him cordially.

Once Bunsenburger was comfortable with the readings, he motioned toward one of the skeletons and then the felhunter. "Just a little bit off the top," he instructed, and the skeleton promptly chopped off the felhunter's two back tentacles, most of its back spines and chunk of demonic meat. "Perfect; it's near death. That's quite enough. Now, let's increase the frequency of the pylons..."

Slowly, oh so slowly, Bunsenburger slid a lever upward, keeping an eye on the felhunter's readings as he did so. He needed the demon's vital signs and essence to decrease in tandem; if it died from its wounds too early, it would escape back to the Nether, and if its essence dissipated first, it would simply be erased from every single plane of existence, at least in their universe.

Ashes began to flake off of the felhunter's back, falling more quickly as it struggled under the restraints. The demon was in a precarious position: it was impossible for the skeletons to attack it any more without killing it, but the ashy flakes of fel fire were a signal not that it was burning, but that it was disintegrating down to its very soul. Steeling his nerve and trying not to let himself become excited, Bunsenburger reduced the pylon frequency, attempting to preemptively reduce the disintegration of the felhunter. The process had already started, however, and the demon's very being continued to burn up even as its life bled out of it. When it stopped struggling, Bunsenburger realized that it was now dying too fast and had to increase the frequency again. Such was the back and forth game be played for a few moments, his concentration on the control panel until Barghash cleared his throat.

Understanding that his colleague intended him to look forward at the experiment rather than backward to speak, Bunsenburger squinted his eyes and examined the felhunter again. The ashes had slowed down almost to a halt, and the profuse bleeding had mostly stopped.

Frozen in place, Bunsenburger's jaw dropped open as he wondered if what he was seeing was true. Eyes darting in between his scales and his specimen, he read and reread every single measurement he could. The ashes continued at their slow rate; the felhunter was going to disintegrate into nothingness no matter what he did, but that wasn't a problem at this point.

Removing his goggles and stepping toward the table, he poked the lifeless body before him. "Doctor Freidrich Bunsenburger, calling it at seven thirty eight in the evening, Tuesday, July fourteenth...the felhunter has died," he said out loud, almost numb from joy and shock.

"It's dissipating, though," Runa said, her voice laced with confusion.

Bunsenburger turned around with a sweeping motion, his hand still on the dead demon's neck to feel for signs of life. "It doesn't matter...we did it! It will disintegrate because the process already went too far, but don't you see? Oh, by the Shadow, it's been at least a minute and it hasn't fully disintegrated yet!"

The felhunter's entire hindquarters and flanks became detached and fell off, not from rot or physical damage, but from their particles pulling apart and disappearing. A fiery mess started in the floor, but even the flames themselves faded out of existence, leaving a charred husk of a frontal portion still strapped to the lab table. Squeezing the mangled snout just to ensure that it was still intact, Bunsenburger laughed evilly as he felt the solid mass of a piece of a dead demon that remained on their mortal plane for two minutes, then three minutes as Barghash and Runa continued to observe quietly.

At four minutes, the shoulders and chest cavity were remaining, and the ashes had stopped. The electrodes which had been stabbed into other parts of the felhunter's body had scattered on the floor without a solid anchor, and Bunsenburger picked them up and stabbed them into the remaining demon meat himself before rushing back to his control panel.

"Yes...yes! Turn the pylons off!" One of the skeletons pulled a switch on the wall, and the apexis crystals progressively stopped glowing. Once the area was safe (at least for Barghash, who was the only living person there), the necromancer and the val'kyr both stepped out to view the remaining husk more closely.

"It's dead...yet separated from the a Twisting Nether," Barghash marveled, inspecting every inch of the felhunter husk.

Runa appeared less than convinced. "It's just meat and bones, though...what can we do?"

"For starters, we need to put the remains into stasis; I want to attach this to a ghoul made from human remains tonight and see if we can perform regular flesh shaping with demon corpses the way we mix and match mortal corpses. But that isn't the point...oh no!" Bunsenburger cackled, clenching his gloved fist in victory. "We kept a demon alive and mostly intact for at least three minutes...the only issue was the exact frequencies, vital signs...the right conditions! That can easily be achieved through further practice. We need..."

Rushing over to his only stationary drawer in the examination room, he grabbed a sheet of graph paper and a pencil and started jotting ideas down. Barghash immediately understood and started assisting with listing.

"Warlocks swear a blood pact with each demon type, so they only have one of each; once they lose one type for good, it's forever, so Babagaya no longer has a felhunter to offer."

"Good! This is good stuff," Bunsenburger said as he traced lines for a list. "What does that leave us with?"

"Not her felhunter and not her voidwalker, since voidwalkers are technically spawn of the Void and not the Nether," Runa chimed in, and Bunsenburger had to quickly erase what he'd already been writing.

"Yes, I forgot, they aren't technically demons...hard to kill and reanimate a gaseous being anyway."

"Her succubus, felguard, terror fiend...infernal?" Barghash asked.

"I don't think so; it's more like an elemental or a conjured minion than a living thing. We need living specimens."

"What about her imps?" Runa asked. "Some warlocks spawn wild imps at random when casting."

"Hmm...no, no I'd rather not deal with that; there's too much flammable reagants here. A single imp she can control like the felhunter is fine. That leaves us with...four more demons we can extort from Babagaya."

Runa balked. "You're including her terror fiend?"

"You and Zulgha handled that thing pretty well, from what I heard."

"Uh...what? Oh, yeah!" Runa replied nervously. Bunsenburger suspected that the story was bogus, but the coping mechanisms of those under his employ were the least of his concerns. "The sk...we drew and quartered it and it didn't die; that might be enough damage to put it near death, plus it would be easier to prevent it from damaging the equipment if it was just a body and a head. The room might not be large enough otherwise."

"Alright, great stuff. So, from Babagaya, we can still squeeze...four more demons. Matero can provide five since he still has his felhunter, putting us at a total of nine demons. That means we only have nine more chances to do this until we have to either risk kidnapping people again, or we have to send the others to Outland to abduct an unbound demon again, and that was far too cost inefficient."

Both of his colleagues fell silent for a moment, staring at the low tally on the graph paper. Knowing that they were likely still expecting him to lead, he set the paper down and turned to face them both.

"This was only our second attempt on a live test subject, and we came so close this time...all I need to do is refine the technique. Once I can cut off a fully dead demon corpse from the Nether, you two will be able to begin your phase."

"And if we end with only one demon corpse, how will we approach its reanimation?" Barghash asked. "This has never been done before; we have no idea if even a demon corpse separated from the Twisting Nether can be reanimated in the same exact fashion as the corpses of mortals."

"We will approach phase two in the same way that we approach phase one: trial and error. We'll do this again, and again, and again, refining our technique every single time. No matter how many times we must repeat the process, we will succeed eventually, because this is for science!" Bunsenburger raised a clenched fist to the sky to emphasize his last point, striking a pose that would even make Runa envious. "And we will prevail!"