Not a tear was shed. They all knew the cost, and now perhaps their infantile leader did too. And all this for what? Power? Power in the hands of a child who knew nothing. All of this was just a game to him perhaps, some petty squabble to be played with the lives of others like pawns. Surely they had their worth, and the bugger had just traded a loyal knight to give himself something to ease his own insecurities. Rufus could have given Aloyisus an earful, should have even as rightfully so, but words wouldn't get past the boy's thick skull anyways. It was all wasted on a man who saw only his own stupidity as genius. The old man could only hope whatever was gained was worth it. Nevertheless, Rufus had resigned himself to the company of these practically prepubescent teenagers and their eternal need for drama and attention. It was a necessary evil to court these hormonal punks that were organized into a loose society of lost boys and girls. They were all probably sleeping with each other at this point like his accursed students. And if it ever came a time for anyone one of them to lay naked before Rufus...

He was almost finished. Although time had little meaning to one who controlled it, the Irishman took pride in the personal nature of the work. An intermezzo at the bar the evening prior, something to wet his whistle after working the long hours. Three hours invested into the painstakingly slow process of cutting, curing and tanning the hide. The first hour spent harvesting the skin, the incisions made with a surgical scalpel into the warm flesh. Once the rigor passed, the limp body was far easier for him to manipulate upon the table. The layer of fascia and fat just beneath peeled away by the fine edge, as gloved hands reached deep to separate out the tissue. The head and extremities were difficult, but this wasn't the first time Rufus had completely skinned someone, planning his cuts to section off the pieces to be sewn back together later. It was a shame the boy died, but at least now his ink would be immortalized. The tattooed skin of Tybalt's corpse, set to be stretched out between the frames in pieces, stretched out to soak in the solution and then time-accelerated to be treated for tanning. But it was worth it, wasn't it? For three hours out of it he had preserved the dead boy's artwork against the ravages of time. And this was merely the beginning of the process Rufus undertook to destroy the body as a safeguard against anyone who would seek to use the dead boy's body beyond death.

The complete process of turning a corpse into immortalized art took two days, once the skin was removed and the muscles sheered, the dis-articulation of the ribs and long bones at the joints. Indeed he was a professor of biology, capable of teaching students a wide field of topics learned through his decades of living, but more so the life experiences he had were invaluable to the skills he gained. Any trade he could learn back in his early days, back in Ireland before the famine and wars, before the wretched trouble, he dipped his hand into. Tannery, metalwork, the sawmill, anything to keep himself fed as being a magi did very little these days. Even in the emerald isle, full of fey enchantment, guild membership forbade the use of magic to prosper. Officially at least, the families than ran the show were still dabbling their grimy little claws on wealth accumulated over the years of having used magic to their gain. But for the rest of the lot of yah, no, it was forbidden. So what could a descendant of a long line of celtic druids do to in hard times? Take up a trade, reflected in the old ways he went about processing the rest of Tybalt. A butcher proper, who worked to hack off the meat from the bones, cleaving tendons from flesh as the bloodless body lay to the whirring of the bone saw through the lad's skull. 

The organ harvest, returned to the scalpel to take it all, detaching the viscera with his elbows deep in the the skinless effigy, the wax injections to fill the hollow organs after the cuts made to empty everything and the tailor-esque stitches made to repair the incisions into the tissue. Yes, Circe was a murdering psychopath, but Rufus was a different sort of crazy. For what sort of man takes a dead boy's body across state lines to a old Connecticut farm owned under one of the aliases of Hank Morgane? With all the lives he led, perhaps one could begin to question if Rufus was even his name, and not just an moniker he had adopted as another character of his to be lived out and strutted upon the stage. And yet, he had returned the morning to his work having successfully rigged his explosives the evening prior. An act of terror small, but enough to arouse suspicion. It was about sending a message wasn't it? Not a bloody invitation a la that crazy girl.

The molten bronze had cooled, melting all the organic tissue trapped between the layers of the mould and wax, the biological components had been erased. And now all that remained was to send the boy's bones through thousands of years of mineralization until it petrified. Then Rufus could being the final process of this bizarre embalming, the reassembly of all the stone pieces with the bronze, stitching of the leather over framework, the pouring of sawdust to fill the missing meat, and the insertion of the glass eyes. And if Rufus was left alone for the rest of the day, he could make it back to their little base and present the group with his latest masterpiece: Tybalt.

And if he had the good fortune of stopping by another bar for another carbomb? That would be grand.