on the wall in the corner of the room. It was clearly a blank wall. But the floor, the pillars holding up the ceiling, the couches and the people sitting on them had depth and dimension and a completely solid feel.
The high-resolution holographic image revealed the worried expressions on the faces of the patients and the hard, scowling countenances of the muscle-bound enforcers wearing garish aloha shirts and white kung-fu shirts standing guard at the foyer doors.
Setsura said, “They sure don’t look like patients.” This Setsura was the curious senbei shop owner. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Whatever might be wrong with it only made it that much more interesting.
“Do they have an appointment?” Mephisto asked.
The nurse said, “A gang based in Hyaku’nincho, the Killer Light Society. It seems their repeated demands for operating fees and protection money have gone unanswered.”
“So they made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, eh? Oh, how scary.”
The same young man who’d just fought off three monsters while barely breaking a sweat—a genie who’d give one of those ancient Greek gods a run for his money—couldn’t resist a touch of portentous melodrama. Or comic relief.
“You’d better hurry up and put some clothes on that girl and hand her over. As a parting gift, I’ll throw in an Aki Senbei five-thousand yen sampler value pack.”
“Your senbei has been getting sweet of late,” Mephisto said with a dour smile. “The extra-thick variety in particular has not been up to snuff. You need to devote more time to your day job. Well, then.”
“Care if I ride shotgun?”
“Don’t do anything embarrassing in front of the patients. Unpleasantries are liable to break out in any case. Put operating theater number two on standby.”
The nurse bowed and left. Mephisto got to his feet. The sweep of his white cape stirred the golden chains around his neck.
The patients had crowded into a corner of the waiting room. They looked more tired than frightened, being plagued by internal diseases that were no less terrifying than these ruffians.
This being Demon City, that meant the face of one had half-turned into a gooey throbbing mass.
From between the bandages wrapped around the hands of another peeked out bristly appendages that could not possibly be human, probably a side effect from a low-grade shape-shifting drug.
A woman with what looked like vines or tentacles descending from her nose all the way to the floor.
The first impulse of those suffering from diseases rarely found anywhere outside this city was not to seek care at the National Hospital in Shin-Okubo, or the privately-funded Multidisciplinary Medical Center in West Shinjuku, but to put their fates in the hands of Doctor Mephisto.
The Demon Physician.
He glided through the waiting room towards the yakuza like a ghostly will-o’-the-wisp. Nobody knew the real name of the beautiful man in white. He’d appeared in Shinjuku fifteen years before and purchased this building—the former ward government building infested by gremlins and demonic spirits—and founded the hospital that bore his name.
A flourishing success from the start, the facilities had been packed to capacity ever since.
But what really secured his reputation in the public imagination was successfully treating the mayor and prime minister after their helicopter made an emergency landing in the center of Shinjuku’s Chuo Park during an aerial inspection tour.
They’d gone missing for two days in Demon City’s DMZ, as Chuo Park was known, before being rescued by a suicide corps made up of three hundred SDF commandos and Shinjuku police and mercenaries supplied by private security firms. Only one hundred twenty-four made it back out alive, and half of those had already mutated into life forms barely recognizable as human.
When the most advanced surgical techniques outside the ward couldn’t do anything for them, Mephisto restored them to
The high-resolution holographic image revealed the worried expressions on the faces of the patients and the hard, scowling countenances of the muscle-bound enforcers wearing garish aloha shirts and white kung-fu shirts standing guard at the foyer doors.
Setsura said, “They sure don’t look like patients.” This Setsura was the curious senbei shop owner. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Whatever might be wrong with it only made it that much more interesting.
“Do they have an appointment?” Mephisto asked.
The nurse said, “A gang based in Hyaku’nincho, the Killer Light Society. It seems their repeated demands for operating fees and protection money have gone unanswered.”
“So they made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, eh? Oh, how scary.”
The same young man who’d just fought off three monsters while barely breaking a sweat—a genie who’d give one of those ancient Greek gods a run for his money—couldn’t resist a touch of portentous melodrama. Or comic relief.
“You’d better hurry up and put some clothes on that girl and hand her over. As a parting gift, I’ll throw in an Aki Senbei five-thousand yen sampler value pack.”
“Your senbei has been getting sweet of late,” Mephisto said with a dour smile. “The extra-thick variety in particular has not been up to snuff. You need to devote more time to your day job. Well, then.”
“Care if I ride shotgun?”
“Don’t do anything embarrassing in front of the patients. Unpleasantries are liable to break out in any case. Put operating theater number two on standby.”
The nurse bowed and left. Mephisto got to his feet. The sweep of his white cape stirred the golden chains around his neck.
The patients had crowded into a corner of the waiting room. They looked more tired than frightened, being plagued by internal diseases that were no less terrifying than these ruffians.
This being Demon City, that meant the face of one had half-turned into a gooey throbbing mass.
From between the bandages wrapped around the hands of another peeked out bristly appendages that could not possibly be human, probably a side effect from a low-grade shape-shifting drug.
A woman with what looked like vines or tentacles descending from her nose all the way to the floor.
The first impulse of those suffering from diseases rarely found anywhere outside this city was not to seek care at the National Hospital in Shin-Okubo, or the privately-funded Multidisciplinary Medical Center in West Shinjuku, but to put their fates in the hands of Doctor Mephisto.
The Demon Physician.
He glided through the waiting room towards the yakuza like a ghostly will-o’-the-wisp. Nobody knew the real name of the beautiful man in white. He’d appeared in Shinjuku fifteen years before and purchased this building—the former ward government building infested by gremlins and demonic spirits—and founded the hospital that bore his name.
A flourishing success from the start, the facilities had been packed to capacity ever since.
But what really secured his reputation in the public imagination was successfully treating the mayor and prime minister after their helicopter made an emergency landing in the center of Shinjuku’s Chuo Park during an aerial inspection tour.
They’d gone missing for two days in Demon City’s DMZ, as Chuo Park was known, before being rescued by a suicide corps made up of three hundred SDF commandos and Shinjuku police and mercenaries supplied by private security firms. Only one hundred twenty-four made it back out alive, and half of those had already mutated into life forms barely recognizable as human.
When the most advanced surgical techniques outside the ward couldn’t do anything for them, Mephisto restored them to
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