He watched Madison's tender touch and sweetened lies as she tried to comfort the hulking brute. Lye shook his head. Her hands cupped the prisoner's face and a puff of blue sprayed against his dampened face. The promised reprieve did not come without its own cost as the brute toppled over and gasped for air. His fingers clawed at his face until the appendages themselves snapped backward and dangled like sausages.

"A knife to the skull would have been quicker," Lye commented as he caught the keys she tossed to him. "But who am I to lecture?"

As predicted, the brute finally came to rest. Its lifeless corpse fell under Lye's disinterested gaze. He shook his head in disappointment before following the crazed scientist back to her lab. When they arrived, the assassin flopped into one of the open chairs Madison had around her facility. His fingers tended to the bridge of his nose as he tried to calm the prickled nerves of her grasp over him.

"So," he began. "What'd you gather from looking at them? To me, it looks like a little of you and a little of me in one potentially contagious package."

Lye gently shook his head as his hand fell from his face. The prospect of something being created of the two churned his stomach on a foul level. Even uttering the idea of their combined creation seemed an abomination in itself.

"And where would you like me to start helping?" he gestured to her expansive lab.

Madison already had motioned to a nearby few. While the question held genuine intention, Lye didn't expect the briarheart to take the offer. In fact, the odds of him being the center of one of her "experiments" lingered at the back of his mind. He loathed the idea, but compared to her joint efforts with Aurelianus, it would be a regular preventative checkup by comparison.

"Or will you be cutting me open instead?"