Jason Marchase supposed it fell to him to check up on his father, as the older years wore on and eroded the rationality and finer decision making abilities of his old man. Jason remembered when the Marchase name was respected across the British Isles, letting young Jason have his choice of lovers as he blossomed from an awkward youth into a powerful, tall and respected gentleman associated with Dukes, Earls, and the nobility. But then his father's downward spiral began.
He began ranting and raving in paper after paper, roaring into the dead of night about the designs that were haunting the stygian cracks of his mind and threatening to seep through. Everyone involved lamented the slow decay of the man's mind even as it seemed his inventions only got more brilliant. Yet also somehow more deranged in composition and form. Each design incorporated jagged edges, vile swinging blades and pendulums...the nobility were at once both taken with the mad gift of Arling Marchase, and also somewhat frightened - wondering what sort of madness would descend on to the blueprint pages next.
For Jason, this meant a loss in the number and caliber of his lovers. He swore he would one way or another return his old man to sanity, whether it required commitment to asylum or not...but no matter what Jason thought he was going to see when he stormed into Arling's abode, he was still surprised by what he saw. He turned his nose up and held his arm to his face, gasping for air from the foul odors bombarding him.
A dead donkey laying in the corner of the room, four chair legs skewering the poor beast through its own legs. Its mouth jammed shut, and foul liquids seeping out the wounds.
A bird flitted around frantically in a cage, looking for all intents and purposes reduced to skin, bone and feather - its cries were not of merriment but of desperation for some kind of food.
He saw a bear skin on the floor oozing with blood - like it had been transformed and returned to an earlier state.
This was a room full of perplexing, maddening darkness. Jason at once wanted to run away from it and void his meals in the hallway, but at once he was also fascinated by the horror. How in the world? How in the world had a donkey ended up like that? He wanted to know. How had the bear skin it seemed been freshly skinned when it was bought already skinned five years ago? He had to know...
And then he saw what remained of his father. Hanging from an improvised noose on the side of his bed, drooling, his mouth stretched open in a strangely bloodcurdling smile. His eyes were wide with all sorts of odd pleasure. It would be like, Jason thought, if he'd dropped dead in the midst of something truly astonishing in the scope of its pleasure...and going by the shattered finger nails on his father's hands, horrid in its pain.
Laying by the side of his father's body was a strange little device. Jason edged closer, not wanting to touch anything here for fear it would all leap to life, or emit one final horror for him. He knew what would haunt the depths of his nightmares, but nothing, he thought, could probably match whatever occurred here. Twas like the subject of some macabre poem, speaking of death and decay.
He picked up the device, looking better at it. Green and white, shining with light. Complicated in every single conceivable way, shifting and reforming and interlocking between plates and gyres. He felt a strange electric sensation between himself and the device, and heard a voice whisper to him from it, "I am either your Devil to Deal with, or your Angel to Bargain with. Let ye know this device can and will change and reorganize your flesh, bones, bodily function to align to your desires. Speak to me, Son of Arling."
Jason was horrified and dropped the device in time for its many interlocking plates to shift around and produce a new configuration.
Jason ceased cowering before it in time to see it produce a strange whole body image of him, denuded and standing there, as if a portrait made of light. He chuckled at the lewd nature of it though he was not as offended as some of his cohorts would've been. "My, that is quite a licentious display. Showing me nude as Adam..."
He took a moment to admire the craftsmanship of it - it got him to the slightest detail. His muscular, strong arms and shoulders, defined enough to make him a presence in the room. His chest, heaving and strong and thick. His abdomen, a powerful pillar of fat and muscle, and his two strong legs. He was the love of every woman he could charm and he knew it...yet the image shifted more. As if displaying measurements and details, some of which were beyond his comprehension. Yet it also listed him quite correctly as a 32 year old Englishman, displaying his sterling health.
"What be these? Some sort of intriguing witchery? What has my father wrought?" Jason thought as he examined the choices he could make and what he could do with this. Perhaps it was making some offer. What would happen, he wondered, if he made some sort of change in this baffling device?
He headed out of the room of darkness back toward his own, a grin on his face as he thought about the potential. By the time he returned to his room, the words of the device were all he could think about, and he was overeager to get this on the way...