A Bitter Pill To Swallow

Eva flushes, feels a little woozy as everything starts to come into sharper focus. She closes her eyes and holds a breath for a moment before opening them and asking another question.

"So... who is my mother? My sister? And where are they?"

'Trade a cure for a kid?" Dave huffed. "That's a devil's bargain no matter how you want to pretty it up." As if he needed any further incentive to burn Plaxo to the ground and everyone involved with it, he'd found another good reason. And it was one that'd allow him to enjoy every minute of doing so.
"Did Plaxo pay for your community-college moustache-twirling courses or did you set yourself on this path?" Dave regretted not bringing along the car battery and jumper cables to the party. He figured Melissa might not be used that level of things just yet...even if Floyd clearly deserved it. "You've already opened Pandora's Box, Floyd, so let's see what else you got in there. Spill everything you know and we'll set you free.

Lie to us and there's nowhere on earth we can't find you."

Augusta makes sure that Camilla Strom is in the numbers. It sounds German so she must be some kind of villain, but she doesn't say that to Eva. After confirming, she will indicate that to Eva with a nod.

Calmer now, perhaps overwhelmed by what she's hearing, Eva takes a moment before she speaks again. Her mother is out there. Her sister is out there. She has a name. She can find them. Sure as she can burn Wyvern fucking Lake and Plaxco to the ground.

"What else do you want to know?" she asks Augusta. Then, thinking of her own follow-up, she says, "Why don't Melissa and Augusta need the meds?"

Augusta shakes her head, her body undoing it's change to oni. "Thank you, Brian. I'm sorry that this was difficult for you. I won't say that you made it harder on yourself than it needed to be. I will say that we will go to any lengths to find the truth. If what you've told us is incomplete or false, remember that we are 'women scorn', okay?"

She leads Dave and Eva away, with a glance to where Melissa fled. With her back to Brian, she asks quietly so only the two can hear, "Are we really letting him go?" She hoped so, and also hoped not, indecision warring on her face.

Eventually, Melissa comes back inside and glares at Brian. Seeing the others off to the side she walks over to join them.

"What did I miss?"

Eva is still thinking about Floyd's response when Ang gathers them together, and when Melissa reappears. The woman will never be accused of being the sharpest tool in the shed, and it takes her a moment to really grok what the man was saying. When the penny does finally drop, the broad-shouldered blonde stalks back over to the bound man, her boots clomping.

"Okay. So tell me this. Belinda. Tanya. Who knows how many others at Wyvern Lake. They all need the treatment... why? Are they clones of my mother, grown in test tubes?"

"Letting him go is probably for the best. We agreed to it and even though Floyd is a lying weasel we don't have to be." Dave answered Augusta's (probably rhetorical) question. "He's a blown asset to Plaxo and Wyvern Lake now anyhow. What we got outta him is probably all we're gonna get from him. Anybody else they think we could nab and interrogate is sure to have extra security from here on out so any further information we need is gonna have to come from other sources." Dave smiled at Augusta and tried to mollify the Oni, "Just because we said we'd let him go doesn't mean he just gets to walk on this... I got a plan."

"Well, I don't really know what it means...but we could ask. Starting with Tanya and Belinda, I guess, and following up with the folks at Wyvern Lake." Dave shrugged. He didn't have all, or really any, of the answers to Eva's questions but at least they had a breadcrumb trail to some folks who did.

"Belinda? Clones?" As Melissa starts gathering snippets of the conversation she missed, the pitch of her voice rises with each question.

"Test tubes? What the fuck is going on?" Her eyes settle on Dave questioningly as she waits for some explanations.

Augusta takes Melissa's hands in hers. "At Wyvern Lake, Plaxo is experimenting on Eva's mother, and may have used them to create the drug that they dosed us with. We might be the side-effect free successes, while Eva's family have genetic problems to deal with."

"You're not side effect free Augusta." Some of this information Melissa either surmised or had heard already through Dave but the part about Eva's family and especially her mother, made her want to scream at Brian. Squeezing Augusta's hand she asked, as she glowered at Brian,

"So what was decided about Brian? Do we kill him, chain cinder blocks to his feet, and dump him in the ocean or what?"

"We'll let him go. Dave thinks he's burnt, but maybe he has a part to play and will assist us. Not sure he's still boyfriend material, but that's up to you." She says the last without bitterness, even though she still finds Brian unreasonably attractive.

"Are you serious? He's a jerk. A dangerous, selfish, asshole, jerk! Boyfriend material? I'd string him up and leave him."

Melissa huffs out a loud breath of consternation. Only when her bottom lip starts to hurt does she realize that she's biting it.