How long had it been, he asked himself, since he’d escaped the underground? All these months past, and nothing about his impoverished circumstances had changed-- nothing but his lifestyle, and his skin, he supposed, which had finally begun to darken under the warm light of the sun.
And then there were the scars, the burns that had marred his face and body, but those he preferred not to speak of. Still, they liked to be remembered, and reminded him, painfully, that they would be there despite his longing to wipe their presence from his mind.
Today, a fortuitous day, they ached less than they had in weeks, which had helped Norton to better present himself to the man who always sat at the back of the bar, the one whose mutterings he’d listened in on for days now, of fortunes to be made by extraordinary circumstances… He’d approached the stranger with confidence, eased his way into the conversation and sold himself as someone who’d previously heard of their ‘work,’ spinning an unfounded narrative that he bolstered with his knowledge of the land and its materials, and ones, perhaps, from elsewhere entirely-- the meteorite magnets which he kept upon his person.
How easy it had been… Irritating, nonetheless, but easier than he’d expected. Although Norton had no intention of giving up the otherworldly metals he’d extracted from the cave, the man seemed especially intrigued by them, and took his aptitude as a prospector at face value, enough to offer him an opportunity: an introduction to the society belonging to the stranger and his even stranger companions, a chance to join them in their unconventional pursuits of wealth, and maybe something greater.
Norton’s desires stopped there, however. He cared little for anything but the riches he was after, but kept this much unsaid. There, in the belly of the lonely bell tower, was a man who grabbed his eye, dressed in mechanical garb and moving somewhat erratically, like a frenzied scientist at work.
“I’ll fetch him,” said the man from the bar. Evidently, they needed to be introduced.
Struggling to keep his impatience under wraps, Norton stood forcibly still until the other began his unsteady approach.
“Norton Campbell.” He introduced himself at once, and wasted no time in cordially extending his hand. “I’m a prospector.”
The man was, quite possibly, the strangest-looking person he’d ever seen, with a head full of bandages and those obtrusive metal rings extending from his neck, but parts of the rest of him as well, that were mechanical to the point of seeming inhuman. Something on the skin of the left side of his face seemed to glow… and the disposition Norton had been met with was curious enough on its own that it was near impossible for his attention to stray elsewhere.
