Despite their best efforts, the Vanguard failed to find any trace of Pack Rat after his escape from their attack on his lair. None of his associates were willing to say much about him, aside from praising his skill and his kindness in taking in the rejects of society. The “Professor” was the most willing to talk, at least with Artemis, but even then it was only to try and make her understand that Pack Rat was not really a bad guy.
The most useful information she was able to extract had to do with the origins of the strange creature. As she’d suspected from her own investigations and the information Chuck, Jonny and Seth had turned up, he was indeed connected to the disaster a year ago at a Helix Labs facility in Sea Haven. The powerful company had managed to keep the incident relatively low-key, despite the deaths of five animal rights activists, but with this new information it wasn’t hard to piece together.
It seemed that the lab had been doing serious (and seriously illegal) testing on “uplifting” various animals, apparently for military purposes. Artemis suspected they’d been using some variation of the banned Ascendance process to not only bootstrap the animals to higher levels of sapience, but also chimerization… the adaptation of species-specific traits from one species to another.
The research had apparently enjoyed some significant success, producing a number of animal hybrids with human-level intelligence, as well as numerous impressive chimeras that displayed cross-sections of melded animal, reptilian, and even insectoid biologies. Which proved unfortunate for the local PETA activists who invaded the lab last January.
Apparently these college kids thought they were merely vandalizing another in a long line of pharmaceutical concerns guilty of torturing animals in the name of science – only to have their error made fatally clear when they accidentally released the specimens from their cages. While his fellow test-subjects were tearing the PETA activists apart, Subject XCV-112815, who would become Pack Rat, made for the waste cycling system, the sewers, and freedom. He never looked back.
Fearful and confused, the creature nonetheless had an intellect superior to most humans, and soon began to educate himself through poorly-secured libraries and bookstores. The “Professor” was the first of the humans to join him when he came to the old man’s aid as he was being beaten by a rowdy street gang. From there the “Rat Pack” grew, eventually moving into Astoria, where the tech pickings were better.
Helix Labs, meanwhile, managed to cover up their illegal activities, claiming the dead activists had accidentally ingested an experimental toxin that drove them into a killing frenzy that turned them against one another. Despite PETA’s continued claims otherwise, the story held together well enough, and the matter soon faded from the public mind. But Artemis had little doubt that facts were very much closer to what she’d just learned… and that Helix Labs might bear further investigation.
By the time her investigation into Pack Rat’s origins was complete, Seth returned from his trip abroad, and Artemis hosted a welcome home dinner for him at the Chinese restaurant across the street from Jane Valentine’s office, on 20 November. His lecture at the University of Ingolstadt had gone well, and he’d been well received in Bavaria by both scientists and historians anxious to meet him – and pick his brain. Germany on the whole had been welcoming and he only wished he’d had more time to explore more of his “father’s” old haunts there and in Switzerland. He certainly had enough offers from various academics, historians and scientists to make a dozen return trips, and he planned to take advantage of that as time allowed.
In fact, the only down side to his trip had been as he was preparing to fly out of Zurich, when a small group of protesters had made a scene outside his hotel. Apparently they were part of some fringe “Humans First” group, and were enraged at his “artificial” origin and were demanding that he be ejected from the country (and if some of the signs were to be taken literally, from life itself) immediately. He’d been more bemused than upset by the affair, especially after learning the group was claiming success in having “driven the monster from our land.” He’d wondered why they hadn’t made an appearance earlier in his visit, and he now rather suspected he understood their reasoning… such as it was.
Thanksgiving was just a few days later, and the Vanguard and associated friends and lovers gathered for the annual feast at the largest homeless shelter in the city, where they spent the afternoon and evening serving the less fortunate. As they sat down to their own meal, once the crowds were gone, JJ announced that he would be hosting a Christmas brunch for everyone at his place on Christmas morning. Glasses were raised in a cheer, and then they began the round of listing what each person was thankful for in the past year…