Actually, *enough* sleep-dep by the professor, and being pushed hard enough by the Boskos in unhappy enough ways *might* be enough to crack the seal a little on weapons-grade Handwavium.
Projected timeline
- Prof gets captured, treated poorly, and not permitted to sleep.
- Prof proceeds to go mad in Bad Ways over a period of time. Boskos maintain control, more or less, through progressively uglier techniques.
- Prof manages, in a way that can't really be described as On Purpose *or* By Mistake (because he's really too far gone at this point for either concept to make much sense) to effectively drive a chunk of handwavium mad in Bad Ways.
- The resulting devices (and they're in Named and Numbered quantities, and there is no more handwavium left over - or if there is it decays over time into an inert, non-handwave state) are appropriately scary, to both targets and users. On the one side, they're horrible and effective and all. On the other, they don't so much Have Quirk as occasionally turn on their masters in brutal ways. If anyone actually got biomodded, they'd almost certainly have bad things happen to their minds, they'd pick up some really Awful quirks, and they'd shift into some terrible battleform that would make them Very Scary Indeed in combat, but utterly destroy any chance they might have had of having a semi-normal life. (think hideous poisonous spines instead of hands and an enormous jaw with fearsome teeth that can bite through almost anything but cannot be made to talk. stuff like that). really, you'd only want one to survive the process, though. With this stuff, some people who tried to go for biomods might just die outright.
- the devices (and possible biomod) do their scary, scary thing, and are captured, destroyed, and/or used up over the course of the last few climactic battles. A number of them probably fail catastrophically in strange new ways, taking their crews/users with them. In any case, by the end, all or almost all are dead and gone, and any that remain are in the hands of people who don't want to use them, and *really* don't want to let anyone else use them... at which point they're probably jettisoned into the sun or something. Keeping them under Mighty Seals or the like would be appropriately dramatic and all, but when you have access to the sun as a disposal point for such things, there's really no reason to leave it lying around.
so, basically it fits dramatically, it makes sense, and by the end of the cycle we've *almost* returned to status quo - except that there are a few people who know that it is *possible* for at least one form of weapons-grade handwavium to exist, and perhaps even a few that know one (possibly reproducible) technique for making it. (Capture the professor, keep him imprisoned for a few months, torture him physically and psychologically, don't let him sleep, force him to create for you, and live through the experience. Easy, right?)
...oh, and keeping the Prof awake that long is going to require a *lot* of caffeine over time - which gives a great way for whoever to eventually track them down. For that matter, at some point he's probably going to start *trying* to fall asleep - to thwart their evil plans - and that means that they're going to have to figure out how to continue to regularly introduce huge amounts of caffeine to his system without his consent.
Projected timeline
- Prof gets captured, treated poorly, and not permitted to sleep.
- Prof proceeds to go mad in Bad Ways over a period of time. Boskos maintain control, more or less, through progressively uglier techniques.
- Prof manages, in a way that can't really be described as On Purpose *or* By Mistake (because he's really too far gone at this point for either concept to make much sense) to effectively drive a chunk of handwavium mad in Bad Ways.
- The resulting devices (and they're in Named and Numbered quantities, and there is no more handwavium left over - or if there is it decays over time into an inert, non-handwave state) are appropriately scary, to both targets and users. On the one side, they're horrible and effective and all. On the other, they don't so much Have Quirk as occasionally turn on their masters in brutal ways. If anyone actually got biomodded, they'd almost certainly have bad things happen to their minds, they'd pick up some really Awful quirks, and they'd shift into some terrible battleform that would make them Very Scary Indeed in combat, but utterly destroy any chance they might have had of having a semi-normal life. (think hideous poisonous spines instead of hands and an enormous jaw with fearsome teeth that can bite through almost anything but cannot be made to talk. stuff like that). really, you'd only want one to survive the process, though. With this stuff, some people who tried to go for biomods might just die outright.
- the devices (and possible biomod) do their scary, scary thing, and are captured, destroyed, and/or used up over the course of the last few climactic battles. A number of them probably fail catastrophically in strange new ways, taking their crews/users with them. In any case, by the end, all or almost all are dead and gone, and any that remain are in the hands of people who don't want to use them, and *really* don't want to let anyone else use them... at which point they're probably jettisoned into the sun or something. Keeping them under Mighty Seals or the like would be appropriately dramatic and all, but when you have access to the sun as a disposal point for such things, there's really no reason to leave it lying around.
so, basically it fits dramatically, it makes sense, and by the end of the cycle we've *almost* returned to status quo - except that there are a few people who know that it is *possible* for at least one form of weapons-grade handwavium to exist, and perhaps even a few that know one (possibly reproducible) technique for making it. (Capture the professor, keep him imprisoned for a few months, torture him physically and psychologically, don't let him sleep, force him to create for you, and live through the experience. Easy, right?)
...oh, and keeping the Prof awake that long is going to require a *lot* of caffeine over time - which gives a great way for whoever to eventually track them down. For that matter, at some point he's probably going to start *trying* to fall asleep - to thwart their evil plans - and that means that they're going to have to figure out how to continue to regularly introduce huge amounts of caffeine to his system without his consent.