The rest of the day passes quickly. You say your goodbyes to Bruce and Mary, de-animate the critters in their home, and then follow Esme. The first stop is the previously mentioned boiler maker in a run down old shop off a side road. The cramped single room workspace is littered with raw materials and half finished boilers that gape like iron ribcages. It takes Esme a solid hour of negotiating to convince the man to plate Piecewise's bones with iron, but he eventually concedes and, getting the skeleton's measurements, you follow her off to a second hand store. You both comb the racks, pulling out thick winter jackets, puffy sweaters, overstuffed pillows and other raw materials for the disguise. Esme pays and you carry the heaping paper bags to the next destination.
The theatrical supply shop is a wonderland of props, make up, effects, and equipment, splayed up through four floors of a converted private home squished between two apartment buildings. You and Esme browse the clown-white and false mustaches for a while until you both come to the conclusion that a simple rubber mask is a better choice than a complex mix of makeup and appliances. Neither will fully hide Piecewise's skeletal appearance so simplicity is best. You find a mask of an old man, bald and wrinkled but not overtly so. Combined with a scarf and pair of sunglasses it should prove to be perfectly adequate for anything short of a close inspection. Even then nothing should immediately scream "HIdden Skeleton" and instead will appear to simply be a disguised human.
Finally, a military revolver is procured from the trunk of a car parked in the drive behind a line of brick homes. The area all looks very quaint and far from the troubles of the world, making the brown paper package -heavy with lethal intent- all the stranger as you fish it out of the hollow where a spare tire should be. Thus outfitted and prepared, loaded with bags, you return to the boiler maker to pick up your skeleton. The piecewise you find when you return is an odd thing; it almost resembles a comically thin knight in incomplete plate armor. For the most part the boiler maker did not plate the armor directly to the skeleton itself, presumably to preserve the structural integrity of the bones. Instead he seemed to make clam shell like structures or wrapped metal around the bone and secured it to itself. The skull is one of the few places that is bolted, albeit with thin bolts and sparing placement, in order to lay the carefully molded plates as close to the bone as possible. The skull is a geometric patchwork of plates laid out over the rough planes of the skeletal face and the chest is an equally complex mess of overlaying plates to allow piecewise to flex and move. It strikes you how much more efficient and effective armor can be when directly bolted to the body.
Pillow stuffing goes on next, held in place by long underwear. Like the armor, you and Esme take special care to leave the joints free and unrestricted. Then comes the clothing, thick pants and sweater followed by long winter jacket, gloves and boots. Finally the mask, carefully settled into a good position and then glued in place, and topped off with hat, scarf, and sunglasses. The end result is surprisingly good; you see the imperfections as its creator but Piecewise will definitely pass for human like this. He could walk down even a busy street and draw no attention; only a close look at him would indicate something was wrong and even then nothing specific other than his odd level of concealment and waxy looking "flesh". You give him the knife and the revolver and instruct them to hide the both. He stuffs the revolver into a jacket pocket and somehow makes the knife disappear up one long sleeve.
Esme stands back from the skeleton with her arms crossed, smiling a bit and looking him over. "That is both very effective and very creepy."
She looks out a window at the deep red of the approaching twilight and nods to herself. "Night's almost here. You ready to try this attack this evening or you do you need more time?"
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Topic: The Left-Hand Path (Read 116991 times)