It isn't easy to be the only sane one in the asylum.

Sparky's on the books as Vapula's chief lab assistant: what he actually is the one that's supposed to keep the Prince of Technology on track. There's a bunch of stuff that needs to get done, whether or not it's interesting, and Vapula has this distressing habit of wandering off boring research projects. Sparky's the only one who's ever managed to both keep his Superior on track, AND stay alive in the process.

It's fairly well known in Hell that, if you really need it done, talk to Sparky first. Such notoriety isn't precisely welcome, since it also means that when say, Kronos or Baal gets annoyed, they also go and yell at Sparky first. He's grimly certain that they're probably going to do that very soon, with good reason.

After all, they've told him, time and time again, to keep Vapula away from genre fiction...

The Prince of Technology just loves genre fiction. Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Technothrillers, you name it, he'll want to read it. The weirder the idea, the more plausible he'll find it... and he's got an unlimited research budget. Well, this time Vapula's gotten at the hard stuff. Somehow, somebody slipped him some Lovecraft: when Sparky catches up to that idiot, Bad Things are going to happen. Sparky wants a trussed up demon to point to when Asmodeus comes in screaming...

But back to the problem at hand. Vapula got to reread "The Shadow over Innsmouth", and the gibbering could be heard all over Tartarus. Now, all the Prince thinks about is genetic engineering, gene splicing, invasive surgery, and whatever else would be necessary to create his very own Deep Ones... or worse, oooh, a Shoggoth. That'd be neat.

Sparky needs to stamp on this one, fast, which means that he needs to get the corporeal labs that would form the backbone of Vapula's research temporarily unavailable. 'Temporarily' is the key word here: he just needs them shut down long enough for somebody else to slip Vapula a mystery novel or better, a sitcom tape. Hope the PCs are up for a subtle job...

What, you're wondering why Hell doesn't just let Vapula go ahead and do this?

Are you INSANE? Don't you remember what happened when they let him read "The Stars My Destination"? They still haven't gotten that bunch of test subjects chipped out of the wall. And let's not even talk about that disastrous "Godzilla period": there are parts of Hades that still haven't been rebuilt, and the damn thing didn't even look right...