Igor and Wolf Man

Igor was a mad scientist. One day at the lab he overheard some coworkers talk about how mad he was. They all came down with a nasty case of Tourettes a few weeks later. They learned not to mess with a reclusive geneticist.

He was certifiably nutz. He engineered a banana that doubled human strength and decided to distribute them to the local high school baseball team for fun. That night Timmy hit a 560 foot home run into a backyard swimming pool. Igor's hyena-like chuckle repulsed the proud mother who sat next to him.

His basement was rife with the glitter of blinking lights and monitors. It opened to a 12,000 square foot biotech cavern with petaflops of processing power on quantum machines he invented himself. The walls were encased with specimens of human organs, tissues, fetuses. A holographic human body hovered in the middle of the room.

Igor plugged an IV into his arm and began typing furiously in front of his twelve foot plasma monitor while chain smoking. In front of him rotated a giant double-helix, a strand of DNA. His complex series of applications displayed a graphic representation of genes being exchanged and re-coded as the hologram grew horns, then wings, then flippers. He turned to observe his creation and chuckled, then plugged one nostril to take a long snort off a mirror in front of him before shivering and convulsing violently. The cavern roared with the racket of his chair bouncing against the concrete floor in uncontrollable tremors.

A relaxed figure sat across the room, carefully typing into another giant monitor. He was casually grasping slices of pizza and lifting them to his canine snout before devouring them whole. He wiped his hybrid paw on his pants and while continuing to type with the other, coughing and throwing pieces of pepperoni at Igor while cursing the wafts of smoke circulating among the cavern.

"Can't you find some other hobby, I seriously can't handle the stench."

"Not one I can do while splicing genes, get back to work."

"Wolf Man" was a creation of Igor's. Half man, half golden retriever with synapses three-hundred times faster than the average human's. Igor didn't trust other humans, so when he needed help, he decided to genetically modify his fuzzy best friend. His unconventional gene therapy gradually introduced human characteristics: opposable thumbs, longevity, bipedal posture, and, with some crafty nanobots, superhuman/superdog intelligence. Wolf Man did most of the grunt work, and was half-done reverse engineering human metabolism.

Whenever Wolf Man finished an organ, Igor gave him an aggressive scratch behind the ear...which he loathed with uncontrollable tolerance. It was that god-awful laugh.