The sting of sharp claws in his arm told him Gouto was presumably fine, albeit rattled, so he looked to Victor first. When the fountain subsided, Raidou removed his hand from shielding his face. Plenty of heat rolled off it Raidou had retreated so far that he almost had his back to the door, but he could still feel the room temperature go up by more than just a few degrees. It was bright orange, too bright to observe for long, and it burst from the beaker like a concentrated geyser. Raidou had never watched the brewing of an invisibility serum before, so he wasn’t sure if the eruption of a shimmering liquid was normal. Victor took the vial of powder from Raidou’s grip-seized it would be a more accurate description-and poured its contents into the first container, wielding a delicate sort of precision that Raidou found incongruous with everything else about him. There was a variety of scientific glassware bubbling away on Victor’s workbench, almost in height order, ranging from stubby beakers to triangular filtering flasks. They were evidently not the first summoners to enter that part of town with a similar request. They'd spent the better part of two days hunting down the powdered teeth of a lantern spirit-and, when it had proved difficult to justify extracting them from the mouth of one such peaceful demon, devoted an evening to bartering with it for its baby teeth. Victor sounded faintly annoyed, which rarely made for successful concoctions. Raidou directed a perfunctory frown to the top of Gouto’s head. “Patience! We shall see grim times indeed when people lose all appreciation for stagecraft.” “But the sooner you get on with the show, the sooner you’ll hear our rave reviews.” “I don’t doubt it,” Gouto replied, from the hammock he’d made of Raidou’s arms. What you are about to see will surely render you speechless.” “It is a crying shame,” Victor said, hands rapturously outstretched, “that you’re a man of few words by nature, Kuzunoha. He would perhaps place Victor’s claims of immortality into the last category-things that were either the ramblings of a lunatic or outright fiction-if he hadn’t seen proof of Victor’s durability himself. Raidou believed some of it (if Victor was nothing else, he was most certainly a Westerner), doubted quite a bit of it, and often silently deferred to Gouto’s crotchety mutterings about their resident quack being a compulsive liar. Victor alluded to cheating death as freely as he alluded to anything else in his past, dredging secrets from murky waters and displaying them as mere conversational pieces. It was because Victor did not seem to die-and Raidou, having been reliably informed that he would inevitably die young, couldn’t decide how he felt about Victor because of it. It was not because the doctor was once a mere man, nor because he had eccentricity down to a science, between fusion and forging and his other flights of fancy. For someone acquainted with every ghost and ghoul in the Capital, Raidou was hard-pressed to name one he found more peculiar than Victor.
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