He watched the family grieve from a distance, occasionally looking down at the steel floor. It would be unwise to go so close to the procession - she wouldn't have wanted her family to know about them, and neither did he. It was far easier to simply blend with the crowd, watching as the family said their last goodbyes to their daughter. He risked a peek at her face himself, still from a distance, lost among the other folk. She looked almost as beautiful as she was in life.
Shinky Cobblepot.
He remembered when he first saw her - it had been close to a year, but it was as fresh in his memory as if it was yesterday. He had walked into her parents' apothecary shop, and saw her in a little red and white dress. She wore her brilliant pink and teal hair in a ponytail, and greeted him with the most amazing smile. Her very first words to him were ' How can I help you? '
It should have been a simple question, but somehow, he stumbled over his words. He tried to smooth his hair to make it seem as if he had more important issues to think about, such as the arc of his hair - it didn't work. She saw through his nervousness and she laughed.
When he left the store, he had his reagents, but at the same time he felt as if he had left something behind. That couldn't be, he thought - all this sort of flustered emotion was simply a theory to him, a study. He was a man of science, not of silly common desires. Yet all the signs pointed that he was, in fact, attracted to her.
He was interrupted in his recollections by the loud spoken words of the funeral director. Cremation was the common means of corpse disposal in Gnomeregan, as it also helped to power the local generator, and it was the director's job to inform the family of the process as well as to remind them of the safety distance.
Her mother, however, could not help interrupting him with one last word of goodbye. " Look at my little girl.. s-she still has that sweet, sweet smile.. "
She always had that smile, even when it was incredibly awkward. He remembered one time attempting to sway her with poetry which seemed to fill her with confusion. And that one other time, he had simply gone up to her and said, quietly - ' You, uh...have nice boobs! ' Again, confusion. Then the biggest smile he had ever seen and a round of laughter from both of them.
Oddly enough, it seemed to work. She soon asked him if he fancied her - he explained that she inspired a hormonal instinct to his system which subsequently led to his desire to pursue her. To his surprise, she understood. To even more surprise and shock, she claimed to feel the same way around him, and demonstrated this with a close proximity liplock.
That was a time of great confusion on his part, yet he felt compelled to continue this relationship. She specified that her parents were rather strict and opposed to the researchers of magic, considering it dangerous and unstable, and so they were to meet in secret. He recalled considering it extremely exciting.
Clunk. That was the sound of the heavy steel lever opening the gate of the incinerator. Shinky's transparent coffin was slowly led into it by a conveyor belt, surrounded by her bawling family until the director stopped them from going beyond the safety lines.
He looked at her face from his safe distance, and gave her a wan smile of his own. Goodbye, Shinky.
It was, of course, too good to be true.
It all began to fall apart when there started to be thieves stealing fel dust, which investigators claimed were being sold to illegal medicine men and as an odd and dangerous form of procreation. There was also the worry that this could cause deadly reactions or tarnish the name of the research effort. Guards were dispatched to the site, but too many were already preoccupied, and it was up to the facility to ensure their own security.
His own idea was simple. His studies with demonic runes had enabled him to draw up a series of invisible runes spanning the doorways to their resources - should invaders attempt to steal from it, the runes would activate, inflicting them with crippling curses. This worked for several of the thieves, but one night, the unexpected occured.
He was to meet up with Shinky that night, but his research ran into delays and he had to finish the night's work before he could leave. During this time, he heard a scream from the reagents room, and upon wrapping up the last of his day's project, went to investigate.
As he had expected, he saw a thief - a young man writhing in pain from the effects of the rune barrier. However, he also noticed someone else in the same room, covering her mouth in shock and horror.
" Shinky?? What - what are you doing here? "
She turned to face him, and in her eyes he could read her guilt. She turned her head once to look at the man on the floor, and it was clear as day. She was his accomplice. She looked to be in tears as she looked on at the suffering victim. She stopped for a moment, then ran up to the warlock, begging him to save the young man. He was simply struck with confusion and shock while she spoke, unsure what to do. The man and Shinky were both thieves, yet...
Yet, he could tell. She cared for that man more than just a colleague. She loved him. There was nothing else she could offer the warlock, now. No.. perhaps she had never truly loved him, had she? He looked down at her, and at her begging. He decided that he could not stand to see her begging.. so he tapped her on her head with a simple incantation. She fell to the ground, motionless.
The rest was easy to work out. He took her body and the man's to an often hidden area. He wrapped a rope around her neck to make it look as if someone strangled her to death, and pieces of the rope were placed in the man's grasp. To any queries, he was simply walking when he found the man strangling poor Shinky to death, possibly from having discovered some stolen goods. He tried to defend her with a curse on the murderer, but it was too late - she was dead.
Of course, most of that story would be untrue. Perhaps the most glaring lie of all was that she wasn't dead. The curse he put upon her simply reduced her to a state of irresponsive muscle activity. It allowed her to sustain a state where she neither breathed, ate or drank, but was paralysed completely. It still did allow her all of her senses - including the ability to see herself slowly being carried by the conveyer belt, to hear the flames as they roared inside the incinerator, and to feel every inch of the heat as it consumed her hungrily, unable to scream.
Her family didn't seem to notice, but he believed he saw her eye twitch one last time to look at him before the coffin was led into the incineration chamber. He smiled one last time, then walked away. It was better if nobody noticed he was here, after all.
