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THEY FOUND MAGGIE AT home, pacing back and forth in the living room. She had the look of death, not hers but someone else’s. Danny and Kevin knew that look and began to slowly back out of the house.
“Stop. I saw the news. I may have to kill that idiot. The trouble is he probably wouldn’t know he was dead. He would probably run around like a chicken does when its head gets cut off, and there’s no joy in that.” She continued to pace back and forth, clenching and unclenching her hands and muttering to herself. “Maybe I should booby-trap his classroom when he gets back. No, that’s no good. Last time I played a practical joke on him, it took him twenty minutes to realize I had substituted all his students with mannequins.”
“It’s all right, babe.” This came whooshing out of Danny, since he’d been holding his breath in fear realizing he wasn’t the target of her anger, he finally breathed. “He can’t have the super strong formula. It’s got to be all watered down. Sort of like the one we gave Lexi Corp.”
“I can’t believe I was so stupid. I had several trials, and I was tinkering with them at the university. I wanted to ask one of our biology professors some questions about the way the ingredients were interacting with each other and left the old trials in my desk. I had completely forgotten about them. Tranwrach must have found them and took them from my office. I don’t know why or how he would think to look in my office, but he did. A while ago he was even weirder around me than usual. In the past, he would just sort of jerk his head and grunt, but right before he left on his personal leave, he would dive into the nearest classroom whether it was occupied or not. He was feeling guilty about something. I bet it was because he took the trials. I just can’t believe he’s smart enough to have done that, and then shop them around. He can’t be that savvy.”
Maggie had several versions written up in separate folders and charted and graphed with different dates. She had forgotten she had left the older versions in her office, with the unwatered down, soon to be discovered by Maggie version in her secret hidey-hole which was known only to her and far from the university.
As with all secret formulas, Maggie knew that the key to this formula lay in the vial she had given to Danny, which had tossed into his mixture. Her recipe consisted of all-natural ingredients along with some other ingredients found in the natural world. She had no intention of putting toxic chemicals into something one puts on one’s body. The only un-natural product in the formula was nanotechnology, specifically a nanoemulsion that served as the delivery system to carry the product through the different layers of skin. She still wasn’t sure of the safeness or long-term effects of that nanoemulsion. Of course, the formula’s real key might not have anything to do with that nanoemulsion, but rather with some of her natural ingredients interacting with those in Danny and Kevin’s slapdash formula. This is why she wanted the formula to go through the washing machine, to find what, if anything, changed in any way, “Frankensteined,” so to speak.
She had tried several different types of natural ingredients before settling on the final version. The strange part was that when combined they produced an odor similar to a smelting factory and pig farm. She couldn’t understand it since most of the ingredients’ were things like fruits and honey. There were, however, those “other” ingredients, of which she’d used only minute doses since they seemed like something Macbeth’s trio of witches might be stirring in that cauldron of theirs. But if the result made one youthful, bring on the stink.
“So even if he took your trials they are the ones you discarded. They don’t have what we have, the super-formula” said Danny.
No, but we don’t know what the effects the other ones cause since they’ve never been tested. We can only hope they are crap,” replied Kevin.
“Yes, hopefully they are crap,” Maggie said, in a not so confident tone.