Chapter 47: Chapter 47: Missing and presumed dead

Norman did hit up the President’s tailor for a new set of clothes after leaving the building. He didn’t get anything fancy though. Just a set of loose jeans and a black shirt that were stain-resistant according to the tailor.

He loathed giving up his flip-flops but he upgraded to a pair of comfortable hiking shoes. With the intention to travel by foot in the future, the flip-flops just weren’t going to cut it anymore. He would still pack his favorite flip-flops in his bag though. There was no sense in leaving his favorite footwear behind.

His work that day went by much the same as it always did, and when he got home, he spent every waking moment trying to figure out the spell he was working towards. It was imperative that he figured it out before he decided to leave.

It wasn’t until the day after Norman ran his tests on the old gron that things changed.

He had just finished up with the bodies in his room when a new set came in. He had unblocked the doors today to help him stock up. It sounded weird to think about storing bodies as stocking up, but that’s what Norman was doing.

Norman immediately recognized one of the corpses on the table. It was the youngest of the three gron he ran his experiment on. He walked over with a sigh. “Well, shit, that’s not good.” He was about to begin his normal routine of prepping the body when it jerked upright, scaring the shit out of him. “Gaaah!”

“Was that really necessary?” Norman asked the laughing gron.

“Yes. You should have seen your face.” The man slapped his knee and hopped up off the table, still in the same loose gown he had been wearing when Norman last saw him.

The former president did a few stretches and moved way more than a man his age should move. “Gods if this isn’t something. I was skeptical about your claims, even seeing your friend. But all my aches and pains are gone. I feel like a young man again.”

“Well, don’t get too ahead of yourself. This state isn’t permanent. You need to maintain the body with magical elixirs and healing potions, or it will begin to rot.”

“Still, it beats being locked up in a room until my mind rotted away from boredom and my bones turned to dust. I owe ya, kid, even if just for that.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Any idea what happened to the other two?”

The man wandered over to another corpse and began comparing sizes. Then he began to remove the dead gron’s clothing before replying. “The old fart died about an hour after you left. I assume by the fact that you haven’t seen him or heard from the President, he is probably dead, dead. Lucky bloke if ya ask me.”

“Hmm, something must have gone wrong. The President was supposed to route the body to me to examine. What about the last one?”

“Not sure. He was still kicking when my lights went out. When I woke up again I was already in the body storage area. He may show up later, who can say?”

“Alright.” Norman paused to think. He had a list of questions to ask this man, but he really needed more than one data point to ensure the process worked as intended and wasn’t a fluke.

“Can you explain how the process felt?”

The gron man shrugged, “sure, just let me get changed and I’ll tell you all about it.”

After a few minutes, the gron managed to change into a new set of clothes and lose the medical gown. “It hurt. I suppose dying will generally tend to cause that sensation. But it felt like my insides were being torn apart. It was probably due to that poison. That is some right nasty stuff, whoever created is a sick and twisted individual.”

Norman had to agree with that sentiment.

“Then when you gave me that healing potion, it felt like someone lit my entire being on fire. I could feel the two forces contending with each other in my body. The cold creeping pain of the poison and the burning flash of the potion. In their wake, I just felt numb until I passed out from the pain or the damage to my body, hard to say. When I woke up, everything just felt a bit numb. Even now, It doesn’t quite feel right.”

“Huh, interesting. Toby said a similar thing, that pain was muted.”

“Does that help?”

“I believe so, thank you…”

“You can call me Grobert.”

“Thank you, Grobert. It looks like you are planning to leave?”

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Grobert nodded, heading for the door.

“Before you go, please keep in touch with me. I may have some further tests I need to run if that’s ok.”

“Sure thing, kiddo. So long as you don’t try to lock me up.”

Norman chuckled uncomfortably. “No, nothing like that. Oh, also can you keep your presence a secret? I don’t want my friend to learn about my success.”

“Trouble in paradise?”

“More like we are only temporary allies with a common cause.”

Grobert grunted, “fair enough. I need to get my head around all the changes in the last few hundred years anyway.”

“Oh, one last thing before I forget.” Norman pulled out one of his potions and handed it to Grobert. “That’ll keep your body going. You only need a sip every day or so unless you injure yourself. I can’t provide the recipe, but if you need more give me a call. I think any magical healing potion should work, but be cautious. Test them first before drinking them. I don’t know if there could be side effects.”

“Thanks, a bunch, I’ll be seeing you around.” And with that, Grobert slipped from the room while whistling a jaunty tune.

An hour later the next dead president arrived. This time they were dead, dead. With no outward signs of what caused the failure, Norman stored the body until the end of his shift. He would need to examine it to find out why the process failed.

The last body never showed up during his shift and that concerned Norman enough to message the President about it. Not because the body never arrived, but because Norman had gotten an empty table during one of the resupply periods. That had never happened to him before, and he thought maybe the President could be wandering around confused in the body storage area that Grobert had told him about.

When the President responded, the news wasn’t good. There were apparently no cameras in that area because nobody had ever considered it a priority to monitor corpses. He did send Norman a code and a map of how to get to the storage room. That meant Norman would have to go looking for himself. It was a bit of an annoyance, but it needed to be done.

He would check it out after he examined the body he had stored.

Norman was glad the end of his shift had finally come, despite the missing president. It was like waiting for Christmas morning to unwrap a gift. Not that Norman remembered what having a happy Christmas was like, seeing as his parents were shitty individuals. But it was the idea that mattered. Norman pushed those thoughts aside as he deposited the body on the table.

The reason he decided to wait until after work to examine the body was simple. There were fewer people around. And he knew it would be at least a few hours before the janitor got to his room. He could have just dissected the body at home but he didn’t have the tools at home that he had in his room plus there was the mess to consider. Norman cracked his knuckles, it was time to put those tools to work.

It took a bit for Norman to figure out how the tools functioned. They didn’t run on normal electricity, but some sort of magic battery. Norman had expected them to be batteries like what he was used to with wireless tools. But he couldn’t find where they plugged into the device. He eventually got one of the devices to open up, exposing an attachment point and what looked like one of those juice bags that kids liked to drink.

He pulled the bag out and dug through the cabinets until he found a replacement that wasn’t empty. Norman wasn’t sure if the bags were reusable so he just tossed the empty one on the floor for the janitor to figure out.

Before he cut into the corpse that he experimented on, Norman needed a baseline to compare it to. So he took another gron corpse from his stored supply and started cutting it open.

The gron weren’t that much different than humans. Same organs, same placement, as far as he recalled from seeing the dissected corpses in the morgue. The major difference seemed to be in the blood. Instead of red, it was a burnt orange color. Norman saved a sample of the blood for later experiments, surprised he hadn’t done so sooner. Norman didn’t notice any tell-tale sparkle in the blood that would indicate it was magical. That didn’t mean much though, considering Norman didn’t know when or how the gron man had died or if all gron had mana.

Seeing as he had a rough idea of what he was looking at, Norman cut open the dead President. It was pretty clear that some significant changes had taken place in the man’s body. Norman was glad the stasis field on the tables prevented smells from escaping, or he might have gagged from the putrified insides.

The lungs of the former gron president were blackened and looked like those you would see on a lifetime smoker, not someone who was kept alive through magical and technological means. The kidneys showed signs they were blackened as well, but only partially, the other portions of the organs had rotted away into a foul stew of liquids.

The heart was different, it was partially blackened, partially a healthy orange color. And when Norman cut open one of the veins, he could see the blood had started to thicken and blacken similar to how Toby’s looked.

Throughout the entire body, he could see these three states. Blackened, rotted, and healthy. It was clear something in the process had gone awry. What that was, he wasn’t quite sure yet.

The only change he had made during the experiments was the timing of when he administered his potion. But Norman would have expected to see a failure like this on the one he waited longer on, not the middle test subject. And what happened with the first man he treated? Now, he absolutely had to find the last President and examine him to figure out what occurred.

Norman pulled up the President’s text message and checked the map he was sent. Apparently, the room Norman was looking for was in the basement of this building. That made it quite convenient. He quickly cleaned up the mess he made from cutting open the bodies and stuffed them back into his storage for further tests.

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