Disclaimer: The characters are property of Karin Entertainment and Hirameki International.

Foreword: The story might start off a little slowly, but please be patient and you’ll get lots of smut! Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy it even if you aren’t too familiar with the game! (Who knows, it might actually be a refreshing experience without too much background information!) The game, in case you did not get it yet, is Animamundi: Dark Alchemist, and you can easily look it up on the Internet for a synopsis etc. But I guess all that matters is that it contains severe hints of yaoi, thus creating a sturdy basis for this fic! Mwahahaha!

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A Nocturnal Perturbation

In the dead of night, only the flicker of a single candle and the quiet ticking of the pendulum clock were keeping Georik Zaberisk company as he stayed awake, cooped up in his father’s secret study, his head drooping over a dusty pile of medical books and research files. Running his gloved, bloodstained fingers over endless lines of Wolfgang’s beautiful but illegible handwriting, the raven-haired royal physician sighed as he tried to decipher the results of his father’s past experiments that only existed on tattered and moth-eaten pages now. The foul stench of rotting bodies and toxic chemicals was something he should have been accustomed to after years of medical practice, yet now it only seemed to intensify the splitting headache he had been struggling with ever since the blood transfusion in the morning. How pathetic, he thought, that he, a sturdy man roughly six feet tall, should feel so faint after such a routine procedure. Even if his body did manifest its dissatisfaction in such a disgraceful way, at least the man should have showed some perseverance for the sake of his beloved sister, Lillith, whose nightmarish screams of agony still echoed inside Georik’s head as he feverishly studied the texts and illustrations laid before him, muttering to himself as his shaking hand grasped a glass nearby.

Empty. Seeing that there was not a single drop left of the brandy he had been swigging hastily throughout the night, Georik groaned in disappointment and pushed the glass aside. The bottle where the drink had originated from had long since been emptied as well, only to be washed and refilled with an amber-coloured liquid called Aqua Vita. Strangely enough, that was precisely the elixir that could make him feel better, an alchemic folk remedy that had been of so much help to his sister. Toying with the thought of taking a sip, Georik laughed dryly and shook his head, returning to his texts after laying a pensive look on his scalpels and needles that lay on a board covered with old newspapers, completely sterilized and waiting for the next operation. How many times had he attempted the surgery on Lillith now?

His telltale answer littered the floor lifeless, in the form of a dozen bodies with their heads cut off. It was a disgusting sight, a repugnant testimony to his failure and all the sins he had committed starting from that fateful night of the witch trial in Geutrink. Yet Georik knew there was no stopping him from these hideous acts, not until he could find a suitable body for Lillith to make her complete again. Frustrated by how Wolfgang’s researches did not explain why Lillith’s decapitated head would reject every single body attached to it, the young physician slammed shut the book, coughing from the dust that emerged from the pages. “Father, please forgive me for my deeds and show me the way”, Georik whispered to the quietude, though neither clutching a rosary nor directing his words to the Almighty, rather hoping to be forgiven by his own father in flesh and blood who had once dedicated himself to helping the ill and lame… and who would probably curse his own son, were he to watch his misdeeds from up there.

A small clank emerged from behind the new, vividly coloured velvet curtains that Georik’s dear friend, Count St. Germant, had recently hung there after disposing of the old, raggedy ones. Shooting a quick glance to the direction of the pendulum clock, Georik recalled how late it was, and peered through the curtains to see what on earth was happening under his window at such an unearthly hour. He had a good idea of who might have caused such an outrageous disturbance, and to both his relief and annoyance, a second look confirmed the correctness of his guess. “You again”, he groaned wearily, rather to himself than to the nightly intruder, who appeared to be a tall man skulking in the shadow of the garden fence, adeptly fiddling with a couple of pebbles as evidence of what had caused the noise. Precisely on time, though always succeeding in surprising me as always, Georik thought as his tired, bloodshot eyes entered into contact with a pair of narrow, sinisterly glinting eyes of the exact colour of Aqua Vita. It was truly ridiculous how only one angry look seemed to entirely light up the man’s handsome, slightly angular face, framed by a tousled mass of crimson tendrils and a surprisingly well tended goatee. He sent Georik a mischievous grin, cocking his head and shrugging as to feign innocence until the raven-haired man gave him a reluctant nod of approval through the dusty glass.

After shooting a final glance to every direction to make sure no one would see them, Georik quietly sneaked out of the study, clutching a heavy set of keys in one hand and a candlestick in the other as he climbed down the stairs and arrived at the entrance of his mansion. Hoping that both his servant Timothy and his sister would not wake to such a nasty creak, he turned the key and opened the door, barely having time to realize that his invitee had already entered, swiftly as a bolt of lightning. Once again Francis Dashwood, not only a despicable species of black market villainy but also an accomplice, had graced him with his presence in the still of night, where law-abiding citizens slept peacefully to let the underworld revel in its dark deeds and desires…

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… Okay, that was boring as hell. Well, I’m trying a slightly different way of storytelling than in my Yami no Matsuei fic. Please review and tell me what you think! Every single word will be of great help! No reviews means there will be no smut coming up either! (oh, how evil I am, hehehe)