However many times Professor Utonium walked around the laboratory in his basement, musing over his science textbooks, looking for a way to cure the nightmare that was the crime and terror of Townsville, he could not shake the feeling that he had been here once before. That indescribable feeling of being watched, the unshakeable feeling that there was no higher power than himself to fix the terrors of the society he lived in now...
...that feeling that every man contained within himself the power to change the world, that only the self could change the surrounding.
He almost laughed as he thought of a word for the most current idea that rested within his head.
Alchemy. HAH! The idea itself was older than dirt. That the production of something with science, the production of a real, living, breathing creature with something other than the power of 'God'...
...But the items of the recipe were from a simple nursery rhyme.
He doubted that it would work normally, but all of his studies, the science that had led up to this point seemed to prove otherwise.
Even as he grabbed his car keys and made his way up the steps, he failed to notice the faint shadow of a lithe spirit pushing a bulb of inky black, dangerous, fatal chemicals closer to the work place in which he would complete the culmination of his research, the creation of all female perfection. For he was lonely, and he so badly wanted a wife, unable to find a fit amongst the terrible, criminal women of this filth-ridden town, and had set in his mind to create one for himself.
Mephistopheles was alone for so long.
For years, the spirit had wished for company, love, family...everything that had been lost over the years. She...she? No. He. that was what Faust had seen the spirit as, a male, and He would take that gender identity to the grave if that was what Faustus had seen Him as, had wanted Him to be, and so that would be fine if she...
...She could never get used to it. The feeling of ballet, of dance, of flowers and femininity and softness still flowed through her veins, even if she had been thrown from Heaven and no longer deserved the title of Angel of Ballet, it was still part of who she was, the completely feminine act of beauty and grace that permeated the creature...
...Lucifer had taken her in, for a time, after the fall. But even he tired of her nonsense, the talk of dance, of grace, that flitting butterfly call that her hands would make as she arched her arms high above her head, twirling about on toes as if there were nothing hanging between those thin, taut legs.
The dancing drove him to madness, having watched it reminded him of his own expulsion, and in a fit of rage he had seized the ballerina and cut open those ballet heels, stuffing the toes with blades and glass so every tiptoe would hurt, would bleed, would punish. He had sealed those heels permanently on those legs, made it impossible to get away from that pain...
...and the arms, those horribly graceful fingers, he could not stand that either, mostly those hands, the pride of heaven...Lucifer had confiscated those too, secretly keeping them to himself so he would be able to comfort himself with those memories while those hands of the greatest Mephistopheles, once the most beloved of Heaven, would be replaced with repulsive bloody claws, screwed straight into the wrist bone so every movement in the way of dance would twist the bladelike screws further and further into skin...
...Even that was not enough, for then she began to spread that beauty through song, spreading that hopeless, terrible HOPE throughout the flames, making it less torture than it really was, and so he had seized that mouth and set it aflame with the hottest coals, burning the inside of the throat and burning those lips to the deepest charred black, and for that time the music stopped, the voice stopped, as it was even painful to talk, taking years and years for even speech to become possible once again, and when it did, the beauty of that voice was gone, mutated to that of a true demon of Hell.
Of course that body, now burned red and sensitive from the flames of Hell, would adjust to the pain, but while Mephistopheles remained in Hell, the pain would last and last and never cease.