There was nothing particularly special about the town of Crosophe. It held no attractions of national interest, produced no noteworthy exports, and had not, as far as Lucius was aware, ever produced so much as an artist or musician skilled enough to grace the footnotes of the annals of history.

It was likely for this reason, the town's unimportance, that whoever was responsible for the outbreak of ghouls had chosen it for his work. The hulking ghoul who had nearly killed Lucius, so much stronger and nastier than his counterparts, even possessing a streak more of intelligence then nearly every other ghoul Lucius had ever encountered, had been special. That was the simplest way of putting it. That monster had seemed almost experimental.

The ur-vampire of old had created what the Memories referred to as the high vampires, and those high vampires had created from human stock the ordinary sort of vampires. Just so, those lesser creatures themselves were capable of turning humans into ghouls by injecting them with the serum they stored in little sacs in their gum lines. It was a chain of diminishing potency, of increasing bestiality.

Then, of course, there were the mutants. This term always seemed to Lucius a bit of a misnomer, seeing as how the transformation process into ghoul or vampire was mutation in and of itself, but he was not the one who invented the terminology. Among the Memories, “mutant” referred to those who were affected by the ghoul serum while already having developed tumors from the relic-induced cancer which was so often the downfall of Memories who relied on those relics in the field.

People like Lucius.

Where did those mutants fall in the scale of humanity and beasthood? It was a matter certainly beyond Lucius, the purview of scientists and academics.

Some years ago, there had been talk of a medicine which might prevent the development of the mutant transformation, and Lucius’ own master had undergone this treatment before his retirement. The treatment had never resulted in as much immediate success as for that poor man, so it had been shoved onto the lap of some unimportant doctors. Lucius hadn’t heard so much as a peep about in the years since. The general consensus seemed to be that the medicine’s one case of success had been due to the patient’s particular biology rather than the effectiveness of the drug itself.

Lucius felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of old Master Mikael. It had been years since Lucius had last visited. No, the man had not been pleased to see Lucius the one and only time his old apprentice had paid that Sun-forsaken lighthouse a visit, but the disgruntlement of old men was no excuse to neglect the man who had made Lucius the potent Memory he was today.

When this mission was completed, perhaps Lucius would return to that lighthouse again.

He said this to himself often. He never did it.

Lucius couldn't bear the thought of seeing his old master a withered old man, incapable of doing anything other than staving off mutation. Perhaps that wouldn't in fact be what he would find if he visited, but Lucius did not have the courage to find out. That was one of the many things for which he despised himself.

Lucius never liked to talk about the things for which he hated himself, not because of the pain which they brought up, but because they made him feel foolish. Self-loathing was for teenagers and tragic heroes in poetry, not for real, flesh-and-blood men who had to look at themselves in the mirror every morning before getting the day’s work done.

Lucius often felt as though he were the only one in the world who couldn't figure out exactly what he was supposed to be doing at his age—he thought he was fifty, or thereabouts. By this time, shouldn't he have settled down, had children, had grandchildren? Shouldn’t he have, knowing that he had done such great work in his youth, knowing that every day he spent in the field was shaved off his life as cancer inevitably approached, long ago found some more mundane profession and lived out the rest of his life in peace?

No, peace was never something Lucius had known very well. He simply braced his shoulders and marched even more doggedly into the life he had. No going back now.

Lucius walked down the filthy main avenue of Crosophe with his hands in the pockets of a different coat than he had worn on the night of the fire. It wasn't exactly a new coat. Lucius was not a believer in new things. New things made you stand out. He had paid three silver crowns for this coat, which had, until only a few hours ago, graced the back of a day laborer down by the train station. It had been well broken in, splattered with oil and rust and generally giving the appearance of a life lived every day in hard labor. It was exactly what Lucius needed.

As for the glasses? Those had been tougher. Proper eyeglasses were very difficult to come by outside of major cities. The scientists who studied the workings of the eye were an insular lot, and their work did not come cheap. It was not uncommon to see people of all stations of life walking around with cheap glasses whose lenses were simply cut sheets of glass from bottles, but these did nothing to correct vision and simply filtered out bright sunlight or the light of vapor lamps, those relic-powered fixtures which could be found, in small towns like these, only around official buildings. Of course, the common people didn’t understand the workings of the eye as well as a scientist. As Lucius understood it, the common people who wore these bottle glasses derived a sort of placebo effect from doing so and truly believed the devices improved their vision.

Lucius himself always traveled with several pairs of specially darkened lenses crafted for him by a doctor in Nodinium. The sensory components of the relics in his eyes were terribly sensitive to ultraviolet radiation, and the glasses not only protected these components from sunlight, but obscured the inhuman, metallic surfaces of his relics from the gaze of onlookers. All Lucius’ cultivated banality would go to waste if it were obvious that he walked around with silver orbs surrounded by scar tissue.

Lucius had not replaced any other articles of clothing beyond the coat and glasses, but these would be enough. Even if there had been a witness at the fire, aside from the man whose family Lucius had been unable to save, it was unlikely anyone would notice him in the crowded street.

And, indeed, Lucius was surrounded by a crowd. Men and a few women bustled about their business, noses stuck in newspapers, trying to avoid being pushed into the middle of the street where carriages clattered over poorly set cobblestones.

Red brick buildings rose on either side of the street, some paned with glass but others only with metal bars and oil paper to keep out the rain which was so common to this part of the country. The architecture of the town was a mix of buildings built within the past decade and those built almost a century ago. The difference in the architecture was striking, for, as a little sign on this or that corner proudly proclaimed, the town of Crosophe had been chosen by lottery a decade prior to receive an architectural grant by the crown. A prominent city planner had drawn up his building crew from the population of the Town itself and, without further ado, gotten to work tearing down the worst of Crosophe’s corpse-buildings and erecting useful edifices upon their graves.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

While the old buildings of Crosophe sagged and looked as though at any moment they might collapse into a heap of bricks and clay shingles, the more modern buildings, those paned with the purest glass which must have been carried by train all the way from the glassworks of Dominium itself, stood in a neat, blocky clusters with carefully drawn-up alleys between them and angular gutters which poured rain water away from passers-by instead of throwing it down in sheets upon them as the older buildings tended whenever it rained.

Unfortunately, Lucius turned off the road and stepped on uneven wooden stairs to the door of one of the town’s old generation of buildings. No modern comfort and safety for him today. This edifice, a small, one-story house, seemed to hunch its red brick shoulders under the towering height of the tenement buildings on either side of it.

A tiny brass plaque was drilled into the door frame. Dr. Teodor Gaster, Biologist & Physician.

Lucius rang the tiny bell above the plaque, and shortly the door opened to reveal Dr. Gaster himself. He was a short, fat, bald man in his seventies with a goatee and bushy eyebrows to make up for the lack of hair on his polished head.

Dr. Gaster leaned on his thick, knobbly walking cane, looked Lucius up and down, and said, “Come in.”

Lucius followed the doctor inside, closing the door behind him. It caught in its warped frame, and Lucius had to haul on it with all his weight to get it to finally slam into place.

Dr. Gaster had covered every wall of the small dwelling with shelving. Worn tools, cloudy specimen jars, and thick sheafs of paper filled every nook of these shelves like sardines in a barrel. Small tables were scattered around on a floor that had perhaps once been neatly carpeted, though by now the fabric of the carpeting was worn thin and the nails which must have kept it secured had torn free, allowing the fabric to wrinkle and pile in places.

Papers had fallen all around onto the floor, and open books rested face-down on the largest table of the room, one on top of the other.

Lucius passed one of these books and looked at the faded lettering on its cover. Insectoid Anatomy, it read. Volume Four. The author's name was obscured with age, and seemed moreover to be written in a script unfamiliar to Lucius.

There was no kitchen or heating of any kind in the small house, though the temperature was a little warmer than the cool fog which lurked outside. It was, all in all, not a place Lucius would have wanted to live, but it didn’t seem to bother its occupant much.

“Come on, lay yourself down,” said Dr. Gaster. He pointed with his cane to a threadbare couch which lay, unceremoniously, nearly in the center of the dwelling.

Lucius obediently lay upon it, wincing as the movement pulled as his scabbing wounds. He rested his head on the arm of the couch and turned to look at his host. “Reading up on bugs, are you?”

Dr. Gaster ran this way and that, muttering to himself as he snatched a tool or a vial from one shelf or another. The hunched man seemed to know every item’s precise location, despite the fact that everything he procured seemed to have been buried under a mountain of paper in upon A a shelf indistinguishable from the dozens of others in the room. “Yes,” he finally replied, “I'll tell you about that in a moment. It has to do with… erm, with the matter you asked me about last time.” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment before catching it again, then returned to sifting through his library of scientific implements.

Lucius had visited Dr. Gaster twice now. The first visit had occurred once upon his initial arrival at the town of Crosophe, at which time Lucius had bluntly stirred the doctor into action after the poor man had retired only a little less than a year earlier—so early, in fact, that he hadn’t yet bothered to have the plaque denoting his profession removed from his front door.

Dr. Gaster had once been a contact of the Memories, if not a proper member of their organization. He had reluctantly agreed to assist Lucius in his work in Crosophe, and though he had made quite a fuss about being an old man who simply wanted peace and quiet, it seemed to Lucius that Gaster was secretly happy to be putting his brain to work again. Old habits were hard to break, and retirement must be a difficult transition after decades of scientific work.

A nasty wound procured a few weeks after Lucius’ arrival in Crosophe had prompted his second visit to the doctor. After Lucius had treated himself to a late dinner of steak and ale pie in the dingiest tavern in town—a ritual he’d begun a decade earlier, though that was another story altogether—a couple of drunks had followed Lucius outside and waylaid him in an alley.

Even half-drunk, Lucius always had enough self-control not to murder poor fools who weren’t even armed. The common sort of brutes deserved a thorough beating, in his mind, but not outright murder.

As it turned out, one of the men had indeed been armed, and Lucius misjudged his foes. Upon closing in to deliver a savage blow to the side of his assailant’s head, Lucius had felt an icy line across his abdomen as the thug turned out to wield a little knife between his heavy fingers. The pain cleared Lucius’ head enough to prompt him to sweep a ray of heat across the brick and stone around them, terrifying his attackers enough to flee, leaving their victim holding his stomach and groaning more at his own stupidity than at the pain.

A few drops of clarified vampiric blood had set Lucius’ embarrassing wound to heal in only an hour. It wasn’t anywhere near the efficiency of a ghoul’s regeneration, let alone that of a vampire proper, but it was miraculous nonetheless.

Yet Lucius now noticed, laying on a dust-choked couch in the middle of a bewildering home library, that Dr. Gaster was not going about the preparation of blood which he had before.

“Glasses off, please,” said Dr. Gaster.

Lucius sighed and removed them, not looking forward to the dressing-down he was about to receive.

Dr. Gaster stopped short at the mask of blistered, peeling skin around Lucius’ eye sockets. He moved to the couch and squatted down so that his eyes were at level with the mechanical relics. “I’ve always hated the idea of these things,” he said. “The orbital socket in an inappropriate mounting location for relics. Far too close to the brain. You could do just as well if they were mounted anywhere else, even in a weapon. What happened to the ray casters I know your scientists were building years back?”

Lucius grunted. “The things connect to my optic nerve, so hey have to be in my eye sockets. That's what I was told. They told me the risks were greater than any other relic, but that implanting them there could give me my sight again.”

“Then the only other option was retirement,” said Dr. Gaster quietly.

Lucius nodded. “I didn't quite understand the cost back then, but I’d never go back if I were given another chance.”

“Cost?” Dr. Gaster gave a bitter laugh. “You mean risk? You haven't paid the cost yet, my friend, because you're still alive. Your brain still functions. The pain you feel isn't the cost of your decision, but of your continued recklessness.”

“So you say,” said Lucius. “Well, what can you do for me?”

“We can't risk applying any more vampire blood. Trials have shown that, while the blood doesn’t carry whatever active agents are present in a vampire's living body, the blood can still induce a ghoul transformation almost identical to that of ghoul serum itself.

“The risk increases exponentially as a patient receives greater volumes of it. As far as we can tell, these agents remain in the body permanently. It isn't, for example, a matter of waiting a few weeks until the last dose makes its way out of your system. Another dose could would get rid of—” He gestured to the mask of burns covering Lucius’ face. “...But it might also make you a mutant right here and now, and that's not a risk I'm willing to take, whatever risks you are happy to take upon yourself.”

Lucius didn't argue. Dr. Gaster was not exactly the most prestigious doctor in the world, but he was meticulous and had never steered Memories wrong but he had worked with them. “Well,” said Lucius, “what will we do, then?

“We do things the old-fashioned way,” said Dr. Gaster. “I'll check for foreign bodies in your wounds, then clean them up, then smear them with a nasty salve that will hopefully remind you not to put yourself in so much danger next time.”

“Nothing in the world that could do that.”

Dr. Gaster sighed and, after soaking a rag with strong alcohol, began wiping down Lucius’ wounds. “Well,” the doctor said after a pause, “was it a successful mission, at least?”

“I don't know,” said Lucius. “It's been a very long time since I've been able to figure out what I consider a success. I killed all the ghouls in the pod, at least.”

“Then you had civilian casualties?”

Lucius nodded. “I could have saved them. Can I call the mission a success when I sacrificed real, innocent people for the sake of hypothetical people in the future?”

“You wouldn't believe how many times I've asked myself that question,” the doctor muttered, and reached for a pair of well-worn forceps.