It was time. After all the work that they had done, it was finally time to see if the Lost Unit design that they had finalized was viable. Since Howard was the one with the least time left, he had volunteered. Hayami was just praying that things would go well. As he watched the monitors for the processing-tank that held one of his last close friends, Hayami thought back to Danielle’s condition.

She had just started to complain of steadily worsening headaches, which all of them knew was the first stage of the anti-rebellion virus taking hold. Danielle was currently off making herself more noodles. Hayami had to chuckle at that: here they were, arguably some of the most brilliant geneticists in the world, and they were living on coffee, soda and instant ramen. Like a bunch of stereotypical geeks.

The sheer peculiarity of the situation was enough to make it funny.

When Danielle came back in, holding a cup of steaming ramen noodles with a fork sticking out of it, Hayami couldn’t help but start chuckling again.

"What’s so funny?" Danielle asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Nothing," Hayami said, shaking his head and turning back to the monitor.

"If you say so," Danielle said, shrugging. "How’s Howard doing?"

"He seems to be responding well to the retro-viruses," Hayami said, sobering. "But it really is too soon to tell right now."

"Yeah. I hope it goes well, for our sake as well as his," Danielle said.

Looking at the inert figure suspended in the processing-tank, Hayami added his own silent plea. For all their sakes, he hoped that this would be the time they overcame the odds. Turning back to the monitor, Hayami continued his silent vigil, accompanied only by the soft sound of Danielle eating. He knew why she didn’t take her meal in the mansion’s kitchen, as nice as it was: none of them wanted to be alone anymore.

Even if they couldn’t really do anything for Howard while he was being processed, even if they could only sit and watch the retro-viruses work – or not – the two of them were at least going to be there to lend Howard moral support. Even if he was completely unaware of them being there to do so.

Hayami remembered that he had once been an intensely private person. But that had been before Chronos, before he had been inducted into their ranks of processing techs. Professor Sumio Odagiri had been his mentor, and as time had gone on Hayami had found himself amassing a circle of close friends and casual acquaintances. It hadn’t taken much for Hayami to throw in his lot with Sumio and the others who wanted to fight against Chronos.

Hayami had long since come to the conclusion that, whatever their ultimate goals were, Chronos was evil and needed to be stopped. As his employment with them forced him to do more and more things that he personally found reprehensible, like the processing of unwary people into Sleeper Units, Hayami found himself more and more in accord with Prof. Odagiri and the people who had originally worked with the professor.

Working in Mt. Minakami, and then being transferred into Relics Point, had been both a godsend and a curse. On the one hand, he had been working much more closely with Prof. Odagiri and some of his closer friends, and on the other it had also meant that he’d had to work with the Sleeper Units in Takeshiro. That, however, had only made him more determined to bring Chronos down.

And now here he was, out of Chronos and trying to engineer himself and his remaining friends into Lost Number Zoanoids so that they would be able to escape from both the rule of the Zoalords and Chronos’ anti-rebellion virus. It was so strange how life could take such drastic right turns without even the slightest warning. Hayami sighed, turning back to the computer monitor still recording the progress of Howard’s processing.