#research facility

Samuele Bandini

Senior Concept Artist

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The machines whirr and sputter. Electric currents sprint along copper wires, traveling through circuits and systems. Power surges through inorganic substrata and nestles within the fleshly body suspended in pale, inert fluid. These laboratories are halcyons of investigation, discovery, and new-age revolutionary sciences—where data regarding demons is collected, catalogued, and analyzed. Thousands of files containing crucial information about humanity’s greatest threat are stored here.

Ming Fan is a junior researcher with moderately high clearance under Dr. Shen, a miraculously gifted scholar renowned throughout the country for his meticulous work with demonic lifeforms. Originally an intern, he had worked tirelessly to earn the professor’s scarce favor and the coveted position at the Qing Jing Research Facility, part of Cang Qiong’s illustrious institution. Through discipline and caffeine-fueled weeks, the role was his. Such a development was, to him, the fruit of cultivation for mind, body, and soul—an opportunity that he’d regret passing up for the rest of his life. It was only natural that he accepted, overflowing with enthusiasm and tear-stained gratitude.

The work at Qing Jing is absolutely grueling. Last week, an enticing specimen arrived from the riverbank of the glacial Luo, and the entire faculty’s been up for the past forty-two hours wrangling documentation, technology blackouts, and entire system collapses. Ming Fan, whose job is primarily concerned with analyses, proofreading, and delegating, spent the better part of those forty-some hours in the eye of the storm.

The demon refuses to comply with any order. The demon requires constant, persistent surveillance due to the high security class Dr. Shen had attributed to him. The demon is Ming Fan’s responsibility to curtail at every turn. If a breach in containment were to occur, the consequences would be near-apocalyptic, so said Dr. Shen. If their new capture somehow escaped, particularly under Ming Fan’s watch, not only would the life he’d constructed be destroyed, but everyone else at Cang Qiong will surely die. And it would be his fault.

The assignment was brutal, but humans needed to resort to caging and studying demons. Otherwise they would all be eradicated.

Ming Fan chokes down another dust-dry caffeine pill. Jiang Qing, his junior colleague, collapses into the seat next to his, equally exhausted by the look of him: his hair lays in unbridled mats, grease and sweat crusting over his skin, and he has flurries of untamed emotions in his dark eyes. Ming Fan offers him the bottle, but he refuses, “That thing’s gonna kill me.”

“That can’t be true,” he lies in response.

“How do you know? For all I’ve gone through fighting creatures like him, it’s never been this—this…” Jiang Qing rifles his fingers through his scalp, hands clenching tight. “Difficult.”

“Let me handle it.”

Jiang Qing flips out, “No!” Then, cooler. “No. Ming-xiong didn’t see him from up close. He’d eat you alive. No way.”

“Should I just be content to sit back and watch my juniors do all the dirty work while I bark orders tucked away in a safe room? Luo Binghe is my responsibility. I’ll take care of him.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’d just let you do this. You haven’t even seen him yet outside of a shitty pixelated monitor. He’s not the same as he is on camera. He may be extremely photogenic, I don’t know, but he’s terrible in real life.”

“I’ll be cautious. If we submit him to sedative gas, I can administer something to—”

“You don’t get it!” Jiang Qing shouts. “He’s deranged, violent, and vindictive! If you do anything to him, he’ll remember your face and hold a grudge against you forever. Ming-xiong, please don’t consider meeting him! He absolutely cannot be allowed to know that you’re in charge of him! He’d fucking rip you to pieces!”

Ming Fan steels himself. “As the researcher in charge of Luo Binghe, I’ll decide what to do with him. Dr. Shen entrusted me with this, so I need you to trust me too.”

Jiang Qing’s head falls into his lap. “You’re making a stupid mistake. Why not sleep on it first? I’m taking it that you haven’t had so much as a wink.”

The dark crescents under Ming Fan’s eyes are deep as eyeshadow. He must look like a panda. He gathers a stack of files: reports on the subject’s initial appearance by a small village, an interview with a washerwoman who claimed to have a close encounter with the demon, and notes from field agents who observed and collected intel about him. His own notes in flawless penmanship are organized within, taken during surveillance observation. Each was up to his own exceptional professional standards.

-

Against Jiang Qing’s better judgment, Ming Fan makes friends with Luo Binghe.

-

They get along splendidly, for a time.

-

Ming Fan is proclaimed dead twelve months later after having been subjected to gradual doses of Luo Binghe’s blood. His body was recovered by a close colleague at 02:47 on a Thursday, or the remains, rather. The first person to be contacted during such a state of emergency was the Site Director, Dr. Shen. He had even volunteered to personally perform the autopsy in lieu of Qian Cao’s Dr. Mu.

His conclusions were mournful.

An experiment in demonic nature was always doomed to death. Humans must persist, demons be damned. Sacrifice is necessary. Sacrifice is just. If few should suffer so more may prosper, Dr. Shen was willing to foot the cost.

I feel sick, but everyone is clapping. And so must I.

“We can’t just leave him there!”

“The mechanisms are on the inside. If I can get close enough- I only need one minute. One minute of distraction…”

[REDACTED] won’t be fast enough. I checked.

Please don’t tell him. Please.

This will be my last entry. Take care.

Researcher: [REDACTED]

Finny’s backstory?

I think we will, since we only got glimpses of it earlier, and he’s just as important of a Phantomhive servant as Baldo and Mey-Rin.

So far, all we know about Finny is he was a test subject for drugs apparently meant to create a special group of warriors, kind of like berserkers, considering the sort of trance-like state he sometimes seems to enter when there is a threat. It’s not just his strength that’s increased; it’s also speed, endurance, and certain other abilities. We see just how powerful, fast, and durable he is during the witch arc. He’s carrying all that extra weight, but it doesn’t seem to slow him down, and when he makes that huge jump off a cliff, all he complains about is “tingling” in his legs. The enemies expected him to die upon impact with the ground far below, but nope. Not even close.

We have a hint that the research facility might have been in Germany, since Finny says he understands some German. We aren’t quite sure what his first language is, and it’s interesting that our earl and Sebastian seemed a bit surprised to learn about his German language skills. If the facility was in a German speaking country, then they shouldn’t be surprised if a test subject picks up a bit of their captor’s language. The only explanation I can think of for this surprise is that the facility wasn’t German, but German could have been Finny’s first language, and he’s recalling bits and pieces he managed to retain. I am really curious why our earl and Sebastian even crashed that facility; was it a German military base, kind of like the “witch’s village”? Was it our earl’s first real assignment as watchdog? When our earl and Sebastian first saw S-012, Sebastian was going to kill him, but our earl told him to stop. So, they were not there to scout out servants for the manor. Nor does the research facility seem to have anything to do with fulfilling the demon contract. So… why were they bothering to deal with the place?

Another thing we don’t know is how Finny became a test subject to begin with. I have my own theory about that… as I’ve posted a few times… that I have reason to think one of the researchers was his own father. The one sent to shoot all the test subjects — he shot the test subjects on either side of Finny/S-012, but he paused when it was Finny’s turn, and that gave Finny a chance to put his new abilities to use and then escape. Let’s not forget that Sieglinde’s own mother essentially donated her to the German military, and I think something similar might have happened with Finny, in fact all of those test subjects could have been the children of researchers at the facility where he was being kept. But, unlike Sieglinde’s mother, this guy isn’t going to kill off his own child so easily.

Besides, ch44 shows flashbacks of the three servants about to be offered jobs, and it shows Mey-Rin, then Bard, then Finny.

That’s not the order they were hired in, but it’s the order we are seeing their current assignments in, so I expect this order to continue for them giving their backstories. In an older post about this, I suggested that Finny might have given us all we will ever get back during the witch arc. However, we’ve literally only seen flashes of his story, while Yana-san has given us many entire chapters focused on Mey-Rin and then Baldo, so now I think Finny will get a chance to go over in more detail what actually happened at that facility. Maybe even something from before it all. I’d love to get a bunch of answers to my questions regarding him.

We didn’t get anything on Ran-Mao, and idk if we will get much on Lau. If not, then chances are slim we will ever get too much on Snake, despite the fact he’s a Phantomhive servant. At least not during these three assignments. The chances of backstory on Snake increase later, if he has to face the reality of what happened to the other first tier circus members. Kind of like how we see Joker’s POV leading up to his and Kelvin’s deaths.

SCPA LAB

For "undisciplined" children, who could not be placed, the Association for the Protection of Child Martyrs opened this peasant school in 1912, "Ferme école Jules Lejeune", so named in memory of its protector. The aim was to build a peasant school in these buildings for 40 boys and a domestic science school for the same number of girls, but due to the rapid increase in the number of children, the facilities soon proved to be insufficient.

In 1920 the domestic science school was transferred to a neighboring municipality. From then on, the farm school was used exclusively to help and educate orphaned or abandoned boys. The children received a horticultural and agricultural education, two subjects that were very well-known and extensively taught in this city. In 1957, the state bought the site to turn it into an agricultural physics and chemistry station.

The Station de Chimie et de Physique Agricole (SCPA) was part of the independent research institution known as the Faculté Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux. Since 2009, this institution has been directly dependent on the University of Liège. The research station itself consisted mainly of offices and chemical, microbiological and even nuclear laboratories. They were all intended for agricultural research and for studying the environmental factors that affect agriculture.