With my personal scolding on repeat in my head, I gingerly held a five-gallon gas can while going around the room, splashing it all over the walls.
Once that room was finished, I changed the can out for another and moved about the Clinic, systematically painting the walls, floor, and ceiling of the building one by one until I finally reached Harlow’s office.
Walking over to the desk, I took out three more cans of gas and started dumping it all over the place, coating every square inch of the office, including the ceiling, with gas without forgetting to splash some on the corpse as well.
WEEEE WOOOO WEEEE WOOO
WEEEE WOOOO WEEEE WOOO
By the time I finished up with the Clinic, and was ready to leave, I could hear the sounds of sirens whizzing by as they rushed to fight the growing fire over at SonnyBrook, completely unaware that another was about to be started here.
Wearing a smirk under my mask, I gave my body a full inspection. Once I was satisfied that not a single drop of gasoline had gotten on my clothes, I made my way back to the place where I had dropped off Vincent, hoisted him up, and tossed him out the open window like a sack of potatoes.
With Vincent safe out of harm’s reach, I took out the book of matches I had intended on using over at SonnyBrook, ripped off three matches, and tucked them between the fingers of my left hand; then, in a fluid motion, I struck them against the phosphorus strip on the book, igniting all three and looked at the door, where the trail of gas stopped.
"Let the past burn to ashes so that we may arise for the future," muttering some nonsense that felt right in the moment; I coated the matches with a thin layer of particles and tossed them toward the trail of gas.
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FWOOOOSHH
As expected, it instantly caught fire without fail, so with nothing further to do, I turned around and bounced out the window, coincidently landing right on the unconscious Vincent to pad my fall like a soft mattress.
Crackle crackle FWOOSHHH
’Hm, oh, that caught fast,’ sitting up and looking behind me into the Clinic, I could see that the room had fully ignited, allowing the fire to travel.
’Time to go,’ hopping off of Vincent, I grabbed him by the front of the robe and lifted his body just enough so that he was barely two inches off the ground and took off running at 50% of my maximum speed.
Upon reaching a safe enough distance from the chaos, I slowed down and observed the distant horizon. When I spotted the trail of smoke and glowing orange color from that direction, I nodded twice and took off, running west toward Manchester.
For the next twenty minutes, I was multitasking as I ran; for starters, I needed to find something in one of the Arkadia shops that would allow me to change Vincent’s physical appearance drastically.
When I was given the picture to make his driver’s license, I did some slight digital alterations at the library, but since the best tool I could get my hands on was Paint, the amount I could alter was drastically reduced when compared to what I could have done with photoshop.
All I ended up doing was aging him slightly in the picture, offsetting his features slightly, and raising his nose overall; the two looked different enough that no one would be able to put two and two together, especially since Vincent was on record as being ten years older than Harlow. Sunken cheeks, hollowed brown eyes, dark salt and pepper hair, and long sideburns, the present Vincent looked nothing like the picture I had made on the computer; I needed to help the man along to finish my little project.
Having killed off Harlow, now, it was just a matter of making those changes take effect on the unconscious man in my grasp, and Vincent would be officially born.
As the lights of Manchester came into sight, I veered off to the north, where I knew there was a warehouse district that I could use as a hiding place for the night. After around an hour of searching, long past the time when the sun had set, I deposited Vincent on the ground and took out two objects.
One looked like a TV remote, and the other a pair of goggles. Being objects generated by Arkadia, they, of course, ran on particles, so in anyone’s hands other than a Returner, they appeared like nothing more than their normal counterparts.
First, I raised Vincent’s head, placed the goggles over his eyes with a soft thwap sound, and then began pushing particles into the device.
Soon, a faint purple glow lit up Vincent’s face, and through the sunglass-tinted lenses, I could see the man’s eyes rolling around under his lids.
When the glow finally subsided, I removed the goggles, placed them back into my inventory, and pressed the remote device against his neck.
On the grey remote’s surface were a series of buttons, each one representing minor changes that could be made to a 1C being. Hair color, skin tone, skin tightness—basically, it was a tool that any beautician of the era would die for, and in my hands, it was the perfect disguising tool.
This little toy changed a person’s superficial genes on a molecular level. With a few button presses, I watched as all of Vincent’s features began changing. First, his hairline returned to that of a younger man, but then his hair changed to pitch black with flecks of gray here and there. Even his eyebrows changed.
Next, his beard and mustache, which I had explicitly told him to shave but he hadn’t yet, began receding into his face; meanwhile, his sideburns dropped, eventually settling on his jawline near his chin.
Over the better part of thirty minutes, I played around with Vincent as if he were a doll, changing his appearance here and there until he no longer looked like Harlow but instead what I had designed on the computer.
He now looked like a middle-aged Italian man, closer to Elvis than I’d like to admit, but that was mainly because of the sideburns.