Special thanks to Charity for her invaluable assistance in researching this (admittedly short) 
story.

-EDG

--

Haagenti stepped through the ruin of a wooden door, letting his eyes adjust to the sudden 
gloom.  Although the gaslights down the corridor in front of him were supposed to be eternal, 
six and a half centuries of neglect had dimmed all but a few, and those sputtered, giving the 
entire corridor a spooky, otherworldly appearance.  The Prince shivered involuntarily - 
regardless of how many times they'd visited, there was nothing more disturbing to a Superior 
than an abandoned Principality - and made his way through the wreckage of the hallway's 
displays and decorations, toward the rear of the building.

It was almost frightening to Haagenti to turn his gaze into some of the crumbling doorways.  
His eyes focused against his will on the remains of demons whose very Forces had rotted from 
the inside, of souls that had once had human form but were now contorted beyond all 
recognition, of imps and snots and demonlings forced into bottles, their nutrient drips - no 
matter how tainted - now more than six hundred years dry.  He shivered again.  This, more than 
many other places in Hell, was not a happy place.

It is said that the Demon Princes are hundreds of years more advanced than the humans.  (The 
Archangels, as all demons know, are backwards, incompetent fools, but they are hundreds of 
years beyond the Princes all the same.) Still, the Princes had to rely on the same basic 
methods that humans did, and as a result, the rooms which Haagenti was passing, even had they 
been in perfect, working condition, would still have seemed hopelessly antiquated to any modern 
mortal.  Even physicians and psychiatrists might have been baffled by some of the instruments 
and tools that lay broken and rusted on the tables and floors.

Still, there was a grandeur about the place.  In isolated spots near the Essence-burning 
gaslights, the solid mahogany paneling still shone as though it had been recently polished.  In 
some rooms, the decay was halted, and steel-and-glass contraptions still warmed over hissing 
Bunsen burners.  There was a power about the place, as though the countless ideas that had 
grown in this building had permeated the walls and pulsed still, waiting for another mind to 
corrupt.

Haagenti's was not that mind.  He remembered the events which had led to the Grand Laboratory's 
master's destruction, and he wanted no part of such things. He did want one of that master's 
last inventions, though.  Like his successor, that Prince had not always realized the full 
detail of his inventions' powers, and had developed a bacteriophagic syrup that would consume 
any germs it came across and subsume their infectious abilities, resulting in a super-germ that 
could be kept in a bottle.  Its creator hadn't gotten all the way through testing, though; in 
fact, the syrup was a poison that was alkephagic, devouring Forces instead of bacteria.

Haagenti was glad that the elbow-length rubber gloves he'd found in one of the less-ruined 
rooms were actually more or less untouched, and still he winced as he uncorked the glass bottle 
that held the venomous syrup.  When he was certain that the fumes had cleared, he removed the 
black dagger from its sheath and slid it, tip-first, into the thick liquid.  Almost 
immediately, beads of syrup began flowing up the blade, toward the hilt of the dagger, but 
cleverly-worked grooves in the surface and interior of the blade kept the liquid from touching 
the ornamented grip.  Only a few moments passed as the venom worked its way into the dagger, 
and then Haagenti drew the blade out and re-stoppered the bottle.  Its contents frothed and 
sloshed a little, but the Prince paid that no mind as he stripped the rubber gloves from his 
arms and resheathed the black dagger.

On his way out, Haagenti noticed one of the remaining gaslights sputter and die.  He sighed, 
reached up and let flow a little Essence from his fingertip into the light, which immediately 
flared back into life.  The Prince smiled, sucking idly at the prick that the light's sharp, 
pointed casing had given him.  It was only right, he felt, to give something back to a place 
from whom he'd taken so much.

As he stepped again over the blasted door, he almost thought he could hear a tortured, ragged 
scream from deep within the facility, and he shivered once more.

There was a reason that the master of the Grand Laboratory was almost seven hundred years dead.