A/N: *Reward to myself for having written the first of three exams.*
Well… guesses, guesses, and guesses. I make a lot of guesses in this chapter. ^_^' For those who like anecdotes and their possible applications to AnE, this will be a nice read.
There has been some misunderstandings in the past, so I'll just leave a note of it: whenever you encounter verse in this fic, it's original creations by me. I'm not quoting anything, I just write in a way that will make it sound like something taken from Faust. Whenever I quote Nietzsche or Sun Tzu or others, I leave a little note of it at the bottom.
2018-04-11:
Sorry för panikattacken... x'D Hans är en av mina lärare och har hotat med att gå och läsa min fanfiction - ett tomt hot, har jag alltid tänkt, tills statistiken visade att en svensk höll på att tugga sig igenom Inferno. Då fick jag en panikreaktion... x'D Det är inte ofta svenskar läser mig, så det måste ju vara en konspiration. Såvida det inte är Psykosfilosof - då är du bara snabb på att läsa. =P
I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
Shiro finished climbing the stairs with stumble-bruised shins a snarled promise that Mephisto would pay dearly for this.
"Lighter. Now. Man, I need a smoke…!"
"Look at you, all flushed and short of breath: perfect." Oh yes, bloody perfect; Shiro had half a mind to wipe his forehead with Mephisto's silk tie. "You can have the lighter, as promised." He felt the cool weight of the lighter reappear in his trouser pocket. "But I'm afraid smoking is out of the question."
"You think so? 'cause I think you knew that well beforehand, asshole", Shiro grumbled.
"Your assumption is quite correct, although your language is not."
Shiro was not in the best of moods, but he would admit that the room was not a suitable place for open flame. The top of the tower held a laboratory: the kind of which you could imagine in horror stories. But everything was new. Brand new. No lingering crust of dried blood, no rust-eaten scalpels littering smeared examination tables: everything was neat and tidy and… old. It was centuries since instruments like those had been in use, and yet they looked like they had been manufactured yesterday. It was a weird clash of impressions.
There were wooden racks from floor to ceiling containing empty vials, and other racks of full vials with freshly scribbled labels. Beakers and metal utensils were kept neatly organised in cupboards with stainless glass doors, and bright sunlight glinted off steel armature and polished stone floor.
"You were faster than I had expected", Mephisto said over his shoulder: he stood at a workbench with at least a dozen vials and instruments gyrating in the air around him, each busy with its own part of some experiment. "Be good and strip while I add the finishing touches."
"What?" No, he must've heard that wrong…
"Strip. Undress. Remove articles of clothing from your person." Mephisto swaggered across the room with one hand on his hip and a smug trademark smirk. "Purely for scientific reasons, of course~" He ran Shiro's tie between his fingers in a manner not even remotely scientific.
"Of course it is. And in purely scientific interest", he yanked his tie out of the demon's grasp, "I wanna know why. You're asking me to strip-"
"That would be convenient, yes."
"-and we're in seventeenth century Poland-"
"Quite correct."
"-and how the fuck does that have anything to do with my imprint?"
"Heated your temper along with your body, did it~? Why, we are here to determine what is happening to your body, of course; and the examination will yield more reliable readings if it has just recently been active." He gestured at the tower room the stood in. "This laboratory is better equipped than any modern-day facility I have access to for performing an examination of that kind. By the way…" Mephisto tilted Shiro's head up with a finger under his chin and looked closely at him. "You are out of breath, but you aren't fatigued – am I correct? Your legs and arms still feel fresh and strong?"
After a moment's thinking, Shiro nodded.
"I may already have an idea… But I want to be absolutely certain." Mephisto whipped around and returned to the workbench and the… stuff… that he was assembling. "Take a seat once you have removed shirt and trousers, the preparations are almost complete. I will also require a blood sample, so do make use of your Doctor training while you're at it."
Seat? The only seat in the room was the large examination table in the middle. It came with some highly suspicious leather straps for securing, well, say, a human body.
"Purely scientific…" Shiro huffed, leaned his crutches against the table and started undoing his shirt buttons. "What is this place anyway? How can this", he threw a glance around the laboratory, "be better equipped than a modern-day hospital?"
"Recall that question I gave you earlier, to ponder while climbing?"
"No answers, only more questions: isn't that just typically you?" Shiro tossed his shirt and tie over a wooden armature for rigging up vials in junction, and picked among the metal instruments on a tray for one that could substitute a syringe. "You can rewind time, but not for the dead", he said, settling for an early version of a scalpel. "Have you got any antiseptics?"
Watching Mephisto at work was entertainment in its own right: all his materials hovered obediently around him, like a swarm of glittering hummingbirds.
"I never pictured him doing anything but paperwork…" And with the practiced ease of a concert pianist, gloved fingers picked vials and tubes out of the air without ever forcing his eyes to stray from his work. It was like being smack in the middle of a fairy ta-
Shiro was called back to the present - or past? - by a bottle that nudged his arm. The label was tastefully unintelligible, but there was no mistaking the sharp smell of surgical alcohol.
"Thanks. …how come you can do that when you can't even bake cupcakes?"
"And who are you to talk? You never even tried my cupcakes." Mephisto added another drop of something purple into something pale blue.
"I'd rather try that", Shiro said flatly, and nodded at the test tube whose contents now gave off a sharp, agitated hiss accompanied by fizzy bubbles.
"Philistine." Something soft, but with high velocity, smacked Shiro in the back of his head: a small roll of linen cloth. "No sense of manners, no taste in clothes, no taste in cuisine." The demon clicked his tongue dismissively against his teeth and snapped his fingers; across the room, the door of a heavy cupboard swung open. "I have known Vikings better cultured than you, and their sense of culture was rather crude – not to mention unhygienic. I'm almost done; are you?"
A clean, empty beaker came gliding out of the cupboard to place itself neatly on the examination table. Imagine being able to do everything like that: never rummage around drawers to find what you were looking for, never take one magazine out of the bookshelf and have a dozen others fall out on the floor, just do everything you wanted with zero effort.
"It's simply not fair that demons have magic", he complained as he laid his scalpel by the small glass vessel and wet a strip of cloth with antiseptics. It had never bothered him before, that humans had to do everything by hand, but since he'd gotten to know Mephis-
Shiro's hands slowed to a still as his thoughts stumbled over an unexpected contradiction.
"Why… would he take an interest in alchemy, when he has magic…?"
"Neither is it fair that only humans get their own bodies", Mephisto pointed out. "Were you done answering the question…?"
The drawled lilt expected Shiro to add something more, to have thought one step ahead, but gave no hint as to what he should have thought of. Shiro went back to preparing the scalpel again.
"Sorry, I was too busy not falling down to think any further."
"I didn't intend for you to think further while walking up~" The guessing game was still on, huh? "One thread at a time the weft unfolds: this room itself is the other piece of the puzzle." Mephisto gestured around them while hovering the finished equipment and chemicals to a metal stand, of sorts, beside the table. "I can rewind time, but I can't bring back the dead: so…?"
Shiro cut a little deeper into the crook of his arm than he had intended, and blood welled up in generous amounts.
"You turned to alchemy." Red drops trickled into the beaker, and all the warmth in his body with it. "To find a way to do it." Oh, the pieces fit together alright. And the picture they formed made his skin crawl. "You experimented with resurrecting the dead." Experimented on humans; and that table he was sitting on had been...
"Why not use the proper name for things?" Mephisto led on. "Show you deserve the grades Maki-san gave you in history~"
Shiro deliberately focused on getting the blood into the beaker and not beside it when he spoke:
"Artificial life research."
"Good~" Mephisto confirmed in a tone that did nothing to ease the chill in Shiro's bones. "What is true power?" He pointed the question at him with his whole arm, as if it were a rapier. "Is it to have at beck and call the legions of Gehenna, that would swarm the land like locusts, striking down resistance with the force of a tidal wave and the unerring efficiency of plague? Is it to control the flow of information, to dam and release at will the precious drops of knowledge, and enslave the minds of the masses in shackles of ignorance and lies? Is it to be able to lay the world in ruin", he murmured in a voice like dark chocolate slowly melting, "with a mere snap of one's fingers?"
The snap of his middle finger sliding off his thumb sent ripples of chills over Shiro's skin.
"Demons are the agents of destruction; we warp Creation into crookedness, locate the seed of rot in every thing and make it fester. But true power", a vicious spark lit his eyes as he spread his arms wide for the announcement. "True power lies in creation: to seize from the realms of dream an Idea and weave from the thread of Thought itself the fabric to give it flesh and form! To weld the essence of the universe unto the winged breath of consciousness, and release into the flow of time a frail, fluttering instant with infinity locked within its confines: that", he said, pausing to address an audience unseen, "is power."
Silence fell heavy after the ecstatic outburst, the stone walls of the laboratory soaking up his words in reverent silence until he picked up anew; slower, once again measured and controlled.
"Though I can mould and shape nigh anything to my liking, even power like mine comes with limitations: human imagination", he leaned forward, intimately close, and poked a finger in Shiro's forehead, "does not. Find the right mind, give it the right means, and there is no limit that can't be transcended. Michał Sędziwój had the mind, but not the means; until I told him of the ley-lines that cross here in Wawel castle." He swept his arms out as if addressing the entire world at once. "The very lifeblood of Assiah itself, pulsing right underneath our feet. A forge for alchemy undreamt of, a place for miracles to be worked and limits obsolete to be scraped from the book of law; a place for life to be created, or restored."
"I should've known it was you. Only a demon would do something like that."
Shiro had read about it: what little there was. Artificial life research. Not only was it forbidden; it was a taboo so atrocious that the world had buried its memory in the ashes of purging fire, and left only a few lines in the books of exorcism history to testify that it had ever existed:
It is the science of giving life to that which is dead. It is a science that claims the power of God to perform the work of the Devil.
It calls shreds of the human soul back from death, and fuses them together with a demon so that the two, like a chimera, become one: but it is shreds only, and the creature they give life to is not a real human.
Artificial life and its research is the gravest, most unforgivable crime one can commit against God and against mankind.
Meanwhile Mephisto tugged off the white glove, one finger at a time; pricked his forefinger on the sharp thumbnail… and dabbed it at the cut in Shiro's arm.
"Hey, what are you-?" Before Shiro got any further, a tingling itch bit his arm as the cut… closed. There was still a tender pink line, as of fresh scar tissue, but no bleeding.
"Checking for response", Mephisto informed, and licked blood off his finger; his own cut had healed completely in less than a second. "Of which there is plenty." He took Shiro's arm by the elbow and prodded the skin gently with his thumb. "Instead of your immune system reacting against the foreign cells, it identifies them as the body's own." He let go of his arm. "It seems we've become compatible physically as well." He chose those words deliberately, bloody pervert, he definitely chose them deliberately. "Still, a few more tests are needed to further determine the nature of your condition."
Shiro's eyes followed the lithe, black form as it brought the blood sample over to the vials he had prepared. A demon. Not Mephisto, but a demon: a creature that would stake the lives of women and children in a gamble to achieve his ends, and infuse demons into their corpses to surpass limits that didn't agree with him.
"That's what human lives are to you? Puppets and playthings?" Bloodletting or the magnitude of a world tilting unsteadily: it was an unsettled Shiro that kicked off his shoes and reluctantly unbuttoned his trousers. "The more human they look, the less human they are: right as always, Midori-chan." His thoughts skipped like a scratched record. No, Mephisto wasn't human. Had never been human. Had never had human morals. "…aren't I the one in the wrong, expecting him to be human when he isn't?"
Mephisto looked human, more or less. He acted human – more or less. Because he had learnt to. His mimicry was close to perfection, but an act is ever only an act. Mephisto had the ways of human conduct memorised like lines of a play in a foreign language; a set of sounds that he could voice without understanding, verses that made perfect sense to a listener but held no meaning in his pointy ears.
No one knows the human heart like a demon: but no demon has ever understood the human heart.
"He knows all the buttons to push and all the strings to pull, but he doesn't understand…" Didn't understand the things about humans that can't be explained by logic; the things that are so fundamentally obvious to a human that they are beyond logic, because... they lie at the very core of human nature.
Shiro looked with fresh eyes at Mephisto's back while the demon mixed blood and chemicals: a visitor from another world, happily taking apart everything he came across to learn more about Assiah and its inhabitants.
"He's curious." There was a strange… innocence… to the thought. "Curious without any true understanding of human right and wrong. Like a kid." A kid centuries old that could bend time and space: innocent curiosity made infinitely lethal. "You really did it, then?" he asked, debating philosophical questions with himself that he really didn't feel he was up to. "Revived the dead?"
"Reanimated." Mephisto raised a cautioning finger to the difference. "God is in the detail, they say: and so is the devil – oh, the things you humans say at times, not understanding the weight of your words~" he snickered, as if sharing some private joke with himself. "One can bring life back to a body and reanimate it, that isn't hard: to bring the person back… ah, that Idea was smothered in its cradle."
And, while he magically attached a great number of copper wires to the cylinder of metal disks that he had built; as if it was the most natural thing in the world…
"'tis vain, they say, to wage pursuit of such endeavour;
to steal from dust of dust the spark of vestal breath
and con that lease laid down by Law that changeth never;
for high and low alike, the price of life is death"
It was a most peculiar one-man performance… but with a lead actor like him, there wasn't room for more than one on stage.
"'tis vain, I won't contest, but nonetheless entices
a certain type of mind from fancy to cabal;
whatever sway Law holds, for one so fond of vices,
doth fall to fault, as did the ilk of man in thrall"
Shiro knew nothing of theatre and performance, nor did he need to: Mephisto could hold any audience spellbound with that voice, and fill any stage with his presence no matter how large.
"A fickle lass, fair Chance a faithless mistress maketh,
that, charmed by chaster hymns 'cross tipping scales she trod,
the Ring of promise from the Fisherman then taketh
and jilt the Devil that would do the work of God"
"Huh…" He didn't really know what to say – plain words seemed to hide in embarrassment in the company of that monologue. He settled for sound. Sometimes sound better expresses what you mean.
It was like any examination by any doctor: a little uncomfortable, a little tense, a little-
Oh screw that; doctors didn't have claws. Doctors didn't attach wires to your skin with resin-like stuff that smelt strange – well, maybe some did – and they definitely didn't enjoy their work the way Mephisto did. Sure, he had more knowledge than anyone of the effects demonic presence could have on a human body, dead or living, but he had absolutely no sense of-
"You're very close", Shiro informed him dryly. Personal space was something unknown where Mephisto was concerned.
The demon's former professionalism was completely poofed away, and he took his merry time deciding whether to attach the wires there, or maybe there, or maybe on some other patch of skin he wanted and excuse to run his clawed fingers over. That was aggravating enough; but when he had worked his way up to Shiro's torso, he was so close the still long tress of purple fringe tickled his chin.
"You don't seem overly bothered." Heavy-lidded eyes came into view as the fringe was shifted out of the way. "On the contrary", one sharp nail traced a suggestive beeline down his chest, "your heart rate says you'd like me to be much closer than this~"
That was too close. Shiro's fingers wrapped around his hair curl and tugged. Hard.
"Ow! That hurt!" And did bring Shiro back his personal space, too. "Some way of thanking one who tries to help you!"
"One who tries to help himself to some rather unscientific research, you mean." He quirked an unimpressed eyebrow at the demon that clutched his head and curl protectively. "You can make it a rule of thumb that if your curl is so close I can grab it, I will. Nice crocodile tears, by the way. And what do I do now?" He wiggled his feet demonstratively, but was careful not to move anything that might disturb the examination.
"You do nothing, you monkey."
"Nothing? …I might fall asleep." It had become habit, when he studied day and night, to sneak any catnap he could get: now, it seemed to have developed into a remarkable skill of falling asleep anywhere.
"You may, if you wish", he said with a smile, and poofed himself a large, cushioned chair to lounge in while he took down cryptic notes from a metronome-thing on the tray beside the table.
"Wipe that dirty look off your face, I'm not falling asleep", Shiro huffed, but it wasn't without a smile at the corners of his mouth. "There's things in here with more bite than permanent marker for you to play with if I do." And he was one pair of boxers away from being buck-naked: no falling asleep under those conditions. "You already had an idea of what this could be", he picked up a bit more seriously. "How bad is it, you think?"
"If any of the blood samples turn black, we have reason to worry." The quill twirled pirouettes between Mephisto's fingers. "It's unlikely that you would have survived this long with autogenous miasma poisoning, however, so odds are that what we find will only be a minor inconvenience."
"Minor inconvenience", he repeated flatly. "That sounds like fancy-talk for rather shitty stuff."
"I believe the word you seek is 'euphemism'. There are degrees of severity, of course, but none so fatal that I can't make a potion to counter the deterioration."
"Deterioration." Shiro grimaced. This was only getting worse. "Did it ever strike you that picking pretty words to hide nasty stuff might be more unsettling than actually saying out loud that things will go to hell?"
Mephisto cocked his head to the side with the sweetest smile a couple of fangs will allow.
"Really now; why do you think demons value the art of wordsmithing so highly?" He dipped the tip of the quill onto Shiro's arm, tracing a trail of goose bumps over his skin. "The word is mightier than the sword because it pierces the heart through any armour." The airy touch of the feather slid languidly up to nip at his neck. "It's the hammer that bends the unyielding steel, and the delicate tap that traces fine embossing into its surface." Eerie. Eerie in a way that made something deeply human in Shiro instinctively recoil from danger. "It can be forged into the key for any lock, or chains that no key can loosen." Shiro turned his head away on reflex when the quill crawled up under his chin. "In the mouth of a master smith, it becomes a chisel that can shape souls."
There was a pause, and a dark glimmer deep in the green eyes that posed questions Shiro didn't want to ask: Am I a master smith? Am I shaping you this very moment, for some distant purpose in a future only I can see?
"I must be insane." He could understand people's worries. You don't make friends with a demon for the same reason you don't keep a tiger as a house cat. "…then again, isn't life more valuable the closer you are to losing it?" The world was full of lunatics parachuting off buildings and walking to the North pole: same need for kicks, different ways of getting them. "Does demon-wordsmithing include speaking in verse?" Thrills strummed his intestines, licked his nerves with adrenaline, but outwardly he remained calm. Parachuter ready to jump. "Just wondering. You're the only one I've heard do that."
"Hmm, no, it isn't something demons generally do", he said, and noted down a reading on the parchment. "I think it was a habit I adopted in Assiah."
"I guess that makes you weird among both demons and humans… You're good at it, though. How come?"
"How come?" That tone. That twitch of the hair curl. There was no mistaking it: Shiro had stepped on another of those landmine-buttons that caused Mephisto to take offense for his ignorance. "How come I am good at verse and rhyme?" he snorted and marked the next reading with more force and flourish than the previous. "Was I not known to the Norsemen as Loke, the spirit of wile and wit; famed far and wide for speech sharper than tempered steel and sweeter than a lover's kiss? Was I not Hermes to the Greek; patron of poets and literature, with the winged words of wisdom leaping off my tongue?"
"Okay, okay, point taken: you're good with words." And had a tendency to never stop using them, if you didn't shut him up before the monologue gained momentum.
"Not to mention good-looking~" the demon reminded, and made another of those one-eighty turnabouts in mood.
"You're never gonna let that go, are you?" Maybe it hadn't been such a bright idea to say that about his suit...
"Neither am I going to cease being good-looking – and adorable." And happy as a kid about it. "I will have to revise my opinion of you, Shiro: you have both tongue and taste, on the rare occasion they are out of the closet."
If Shiro had had any hand free and mobile, he would have smacked it over his own face.
"Spirit of wit and wile…" he groaned.
"My, how interesting…"
None of the blood samples had turned black, which was a relief; but with the examination completed, "interesting" was not the word Shiro wanted to hear.
"Last time you said that, I was told I could host Satan." Shiro shot a meaningful look at the demon that went over the readings once more. "Don't you dare drop something like that on me again."
His statement earned an amused chuckle from Mephisto.
"How about 'you now possess superhuman strength'?"
"For real?"
"Fufufufu look at that face!" The demon laughed with his whole, spindly body. "Have you decided on name and costume yet, Tetsuwan Atom?"
Shiro wiped expectation off his features and replaced it with a shamefaced glare. All men are boys on the inside, and all boys dream of having superpowers: likewise, all men would rather headbutt a bullet than admit that.
"You can put those ambitions to rest right away, Shiro: you won't be using that strength."
"You mean I actually have superhuman strength?" He had assumed it was just a joke when Mephisto laughed like that.
"Yes – as improbable and impractical as that is; yes, you do." Both quill and parchment disappeared with a poof. "Quite unique, your degree of assimilation. I dismissed it as a passing afterglow when you sparred with me, but it seems permanent – a rather delightful way of being wrong, I do say. In the simplest way of putting it", he said when he finally noticed the look of get-on-with-it painted on Shiro's features, "your body is halfway between human and demon."
The words replayed in Shiro's mind. Very slowly. No, they still said the same thing: halfway between human and demon.
"What does that mean, exactly?" he asked, feeling as though his body had gone someplace else for a while to digest the information.
"Who knows?" he said in that disgustingly flippant manner that made Shiro itch to yank his curl again. "This is the first case of its kind, as far as my knowledge stretches: very much can be assumed and very little said for sure." Mephisto slipped his gloves back on. "A body changes in many ways when a demon takes up residence in it, and changes back when it leaves. You weren't possessed in the traditional sense, but it would seem your body changed as if you were; without fully changing back."
"Details." Shiro began detaching the wires from himself, and scrubbed off the stinking paste with linen cloth as he did. "The devil's in the details: in what way has it changed?"
"That would require insight in biochemical processes that I don't think you-"
"What you think doesn't really do me any good unless it comes out of your mouth: details", Shiro demanded, and realised his mistake the moment he had. He knew that look: it meant manners, and it wasn't going away unless complied with. "Tell me; please."
"That's more like it~ The human body is a peculiar contraption, able to exercise much greater physical strength than it is built for – why, had you used any more force on that tengu, the strain would have torn the muscles from your bones."
He said it as casually as if he were talking about some anime he had watched, but Shiro could feel the imagined pain – tearing muscle from bone? – rip through his tissues.
"To prevent such messy things, your nervous system is equipped with a set of safety circuits - tendon organs, so called - which serve to inhibit the strength of your muscles. When a body is possessed by a demon, these safety circuits are switched off to enable it to channel our strength without, so to speak, blowing a fuse. This places the body under great strain, but since we constantly regenerate damage, one thing balances out the other." Mephisto's head tilted to the side as he ran an analytical glance over Shiro from toe to head. "Some percentage of your safeties remain inactive since Deep Keep, allowing you to perform remarkable feats of strength – at the humble price of having your muscles and tendons snap from overload. Fortunately, no such thing has happened. The damage done to your fingers is not all too grave, and will heal with no permanent ill-effects." His head tilted back straight on his neck when he met Shiro's eyes. "Detailed enough for you?"
"Yeah. Thanks." He curled and flexed his fingers, so very grateful that they would go back to normal. "So what now? I have to watch it so I don't overexert myself?"
"You mean we should leave you to your own devices…?"
"Something tells me you don't think that's a very good idea", Shiro deduced from the look of Utter Scepticism on the demon's face. "And I might be inclined to agree with you, depending on what your suggestion is."
"Spoken like a businessman~ A body can adapt, tendons can be strengthened: I will have Gokuro-san design a special training program for you, and if you follow it properly", Shiro didn't miss the special emphasis on that word, "you might be able to make use of that muscle force – to a certain extent. In either case, you need to acquaint yourself with your body anew or you will most definitely damage it."
"Sounds good enough to me." Maybe too soon to give up that superhero costume…? Completely insane, this was – but he wouldn't deny it was at the same time pretty cool. "Funny thing, that imprint… Wonder what other effects we'll see from it?" Shiro chuckled as he pulled the shirt on and retrieved his glasses. "Maybe I'll start speaking in verse?"
"Maybe you will learn to do a tie?" Mephisto suggested, without much hope to it, when he once again had to tie the garment for him.
"Maybe I'll be able to grow a beard?" Shiro pondered, having Mephisto's trademark goatee at eye level.
"A rather messy and unkempt one, judging by your hair."
"Pff, you probably comb that goatee smooth."
"Don't be ridiculous; it's natural."
"Oh I've seen your natural hair in the morning", Shiro grinned with one eyebrow cocked at the affronted look on Mephisto's features. "Very elegant."
"The same could be said of your way of getting out of bed in the morning", the demon countered effortlessly.
"That isn't half as embarrassing as sleeping with a unicorn plushie."
To his surprise, Mephisto chuckled – no, giggled. At first Shiro thought he had made a bow out of his tie, or done some other silly thing, but-
"No risk of you speaking in verse, with the little thought you put behind your words", he chuckled through a grin. "Anyone who heard you would get the impression you have observed my habits in bed quite often."
Shiro ran the conversation over in his head… and cracked up.
"Shit, that really does- pfwahahaha oh god it sounds so wrong!" He covered his eyes with his hand in embarrassment, but couldn't stop laughing. "Oh, now I see! It must be the imprint that turns everything I say into pervy hints!"
"The imprint augments what is already there~" Mephisto teased, and smoothed down the shirt collar over the tie. "Whether you acknowledge it or not."
"Yeah, yeah, keep on dreaming: I'm not into guys." Shiro pulled his trousers on, and carefully inched them up past the stitches without the fabric touching them.
"Not even exceptionally good-looking ones~?" he asked with a look that indicated he would print exceptionally good-looking on his business card without an ounce of shame.
"Especially not those: their heads tend to be too big for my palate. …no! Oh, don't you-! You know what I meant, you pervert! I'm not like that, it's the imprint! It's the imprint, I tell you…!"
But Mephisto had already collapsed over the examination table, with lung-bursting laughter peeling tears down his cheeks and drowning out Shiro's attempts to clarify what kind of head he really meant.
A/N:
Why Poland?
The laboratory Mephisto used was situated in 16th century Poland, yes? (…I actually tried to find a building that matched the looks of the one in the anime, but gave up.) And Neuhaus, who was apprenticed at such a laboratory, was from Poland. What's up with Poland?
New Ageists and Hindu gurus say that seven ley-lines, the energy flows (nadis) of the earth, intersect in Krakow to form one of the planet's strongest nodes (chakras) of power. "Energy" is pretty vague, but consider it Mother Earth's lifeblood. More precisely, these flows are said to intersect at Wawel hill, where lies Wawel castle: a powerhouse, quite literally, for one wanting to conduct experiments relating to life and resurrection.
Now, I tried to get this verified by the staff at Wawel Royal Castle National Art Collection, but they either thought I was joking or tossed the mail in the junk. |'-3 So be aware there's some sources contradicting this, but also some that say it's true: and if it turns out not to be true, I'll just claim the Vatican did a cover-up. ;) Anyways: one of the towers of Wawel castle, the one called the Hen's Foot, used to house the laboratory of a Michał Sędziwój (1566-1636), a pioneering alchemist and the first man to distil what was then called "the food of life": oxygen.
I don't think Mephisto could visit the present-day research facility from the anime: not without anyone noticing. But the cradle of the art? Yes, maybe. At safe distance from the Vatican's watchful eyes, too. Michał Sędziwój was something of a genius in alchemy at the time: sounds like someone whose aid Mephisto might have enlisted for his research?
Another funky detail in this is that Sędziwój was educated in, among other places, Wittenberg: same place as a certain Johann Faust (in legend). And speaking of the Faust found in legend: the constituents of his character are derived from many real life sources, one of which allegedly was Georg Sabellicus, a necromancer living in the 16th century (same as Sędziwój). And would you believe it? Sabellicus travelled to Poland to study – yep – magic (as chemistry and the natural sciences were called at the time). It would seem Poland was the place to go for advanced research at that time: so, in all, Kazue Kato picked her spot well.
Verses and wordplay
…because they might not be as obvious if you haven't spent three weeks poring over them, as I have. |-'3 I'm still using Goethe's way of writing, but I "levelled up" to hexameter since the pentameter made it darn cramped to fit in both words and flow.
'tis, vain, they say, to wage pursuit of such endeavour;
to steal from dust of dust the spark of vestal breath
and con that lease laid down by Law that changeth never;
for high and low alike, the price of life is death
"From dust to dust", the Christian burial rites say. From the life-infused dust we have been, to the "dead" dust we were created from. So somewhere in between these states of dust it would be possible to steal that divine spark that makes the difference between them, and bring life to that which is dead? Is it possible to cheat the eternal rule that life is merely something we borrow, at a price that cannot be negotiated?
'tis vain, I won't contest, but nonetheless entices
a certain type of mind from fancy to cabal;
whatever sway Law holds, for one so fond of vices,
doth fall to fault as did the ilk of man in thrall
Fall and fault are the two possible English translations of the Latin culpa: and Culpa is the word used to denote the Fall of Man, that made mankind slave to mortality, disease, sin, etc.
A fickle lass, fair Chance a faithless mistress maketh,
that, charmed by chaster hymns 'cross tipping scales she trod,
the Ring of promise from the Fisherman then taketh
and jilt the Devil that would do the work of God
Chance is a capricious gal. The Ring of the Fisherman is one of the official regalia worn by the Pope: it was the Vatican that forbade research into artificial life, remember? Could work as an engagement ring for the faithless mistress, once she left Mephisto out of luck and the Vatican discovered what he had been working on.
The word is mightier than the sword
You're used to hearing "The pen is mightier than the sword", no? This one is its predecessor by some 2000 years. Story of Ahiqar was found during archaeological diggings in present-day Egypt. It's a collection of tales, written in Aramaic, that is similar to the fables of Aesop and many stories featured in the Bible and the Quran.
Loke
…yes, I hope you can live with the Swedish spelling. ^_^' I prefer using "proper" spelling of my favourite childhood scoundrel-hero's name. Mentioned as one of Mephisto's earlier aliases in AnE ch 39, and the similarities are all there: trickster, schemer, shape hifter, sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent, not a god and yet accepted among the gods through oath, deity of wit and wordsmithing (most notably, smithing lies), and… quite the slut. ^_^' It's also said that Loke owns shoes that let him walk on water and air, to escape the many people that would want to wring his neck: a way of saying he can transport himself anywhere very swiftly? Poof…?
Hermes
Not as canon as Loke, but I believe Mephisto has been around long enough to cause trouble in all sorts of places. (I trust that if you think I'm way off track in my mad speculations, you'll let me know.) Some sources have it that the name Hermes itself is derived from a Greek word for "the power of speech", plus you find a bunch of modern-day words like hermeneutics (the study of interpretation of the written word) that more or less relate to the science of words. A trickster god, an intermediary between gods (well, "gods") and men, and able to move freely between the realm of the divine and the realm of mortals. He's the patron not only of poets and literature but also of orators and wit – and thieves. And he owns a pair of winged sandals; again, for swift transport?
Safety circuits and demonic strength
I invented a sort of anachronistic EMG examination (you might recognise a vague description of Alessandro Volta's cylinder battery), combined with testing blood samples to look for abnormalities. I imagine chemical balance and nerve function are the kind of things you'd have to check, if you dabbled in reanimating corpses using demonic possession.
There's a whole set of nerve bundles and things that moderate the tension and relaxation of muscles: there's no definite consensus on exactly which ones do what, and how they work. But if you "switched the safeties off" you would be able to do badass cool stuff. And then your body would break. |-3 There is training that aims to accomplish that (by overriding the reflex response from the spine), I learnt, but it's only done by body-builders and weight lifters and people that have no healthy relationship to their bodies. But imagine if you could balance that tendon-tearing strength potential with a demon's regenerative abilities…? Well, theoretically, it would work. And I'm a stickler for pseudoscience. =P
Why bother?
I'm not trying to give Shiro superpowers… =_=' There is a gap in canon that I need to fill, sooner or later. Humans in AnE are delightfully human, without insane strength or speed; unless we look at Shura and Angel. Yes, their high rank allows for superhuman badassery, but the most notable difference between them and other exorcists is that they wield demon swords. Angel sacrifices hair, Shura sacrifices blood, and in return they get more attack power: so I'm brazenly hypothesizing that they both enjoy that augmentation of strength and speed as a part of their contracts with their respective weapons.
That's the standard for how powerful a Paladin ought to be, then. Problem is we never actually get to see Shiro fight, so I don't know how powerful he was - or if he had some demon sword or demon gun (are there such things?) that augmented his own strength. What I noted is that in that first volume of the manga, Shiro is quite capable of diverting a charging demon's attack without breaking a sweat, and in the anime he jumps across rooftops like it's nothing at age 51 (while Rin misses his leap). In the Kyoto Arc flashbacks the monks are astounded that he was even able to stand with the injuries he had sustained: ergo, it looks like there's some kind of boost to his body, we're just never shown how it works.
The manga really doesn't give you much on Shiro. ^_^' Even if I squint 'til my eyes bleed, I can't see any indication that he used a demon sword, or any enchanted/possessed weapon that would enhance his physical capacity. Maybe future chapters will show that. As for now, I will pretend that his additional speed/strength came from a quite different "contract". At a price.
The billion-dollar question the anime never answered
…you thought I would write it here? No no no. "Postponing the excitement for later is simply for your own good." 0w~ (It's in the text anyway.)
I don't run with the anime, usually, but there is a most interesting question in it that was never answered: and when the subject was discreetly brought up anew in the manga, I decided I'd have a go at it. So remember this chapter, and you will get both question and a guess at the answer… in chapter 91.