The potion-made full-body VR tub was fashioned from a padded, double-walled zinc vat mounted securely within the central dorsal depression of Titus’s upper shell armor scales.
Below the zinc basin, Titus’s earth-shaking body heat kept the surrounding water jacket at an unvarying forty-two degrees. Arthur Vance, his sleeves rolled to the elbows and his Zeiss-Vanguard monocle clicked down, carefully poured the contents of three heat-proof glass flasks into the steaming vat.
First came the melted essence of the Mire-Hydra’s jade core. A thick, rainbow-bright silver broth that swirled with metal soft glow.
Second was a crushed mid-air of stygian bog-iron melted rock waste, providing the dense carbon-iron lattice matrix needed to support heavy skeletal mineralization.
And third was Dr. Morrigan Calder’s proprietary catalytic trigger. Forty drops of distilled willow-tannate buffer spiked with fen-spider enzyme to strip away any cellular dirt.
As the three solutions mingled, a soft, high-hum filled the air around the flatbed trailer, with the crisp, biting scent of mountain ozone, crushed mint. Then it freshly struck flint.
Arthur engaged his monocle’s chemical synthesis overlay:
“Bath heat is steadied at thirty-nine-point-two degrees,” Morrigan announced, her eyes glued to the digital fire gauge. “The white-gold colloidal specks are fully suspended in the rich fat emulsion. If she enters now, the trans-skin aether-osmosis will begin right away.”
