The smile on Horton's face grew ever more abject.
"The Death Poetry Society only invested in me in the early stages. Obtaining the [Exquisite Puppet] and [General Puppet] was entirely an accident."
Of course, Horton understood what Arthur was getting at.
After all, he had done the same thing before.
He had used the [Exquisite Puppet] as bait to draw certain people in, then used the [General Puppet] to finish them off.
Or simply kept the [General Puppet] as his trump card.
"An accident?"
Arthur showed interest.
"Do you know Damato, the Puppet Master?"
Horton asked.
Immediately, the image of that bare-assed teleportation surfaced in Arthur's mind.
Arthur remembered this fellow practitioner-of sorts-quite vividly.
Without that master and apprentice, his early plans would never have gone so smoothly.
"I do. A very interesting man."
Arthur offered an assessment that surprised Horton.
Damato, the Puppet Master, truly had swindled, cheated, conned, and stolen. His reputation in West Berlin had been utterly rotten in his earlier years, forcing him to come to South Los.
And he had even clashed with the Medium standing before Horton.
Did he find him interesting because he was taken in by his bluff?
Or was he being sarcastic?
Horton pondered this, but kept talking.
"I found the [Exquisite Puppet] and [General Puppet] through a treasure map of Robin, the Puppet King, that he sold me-it cost me eleven gold coins."
Arthur froze.
The young Medium genuinely hadn't expected an accident like this.
Clearly, Damato, the Puppet Master selling supposed treasure maps of Robin, the Puppet King, had never imagined that a map in his possession was real.
And there must have been plenty of those maps.
It was the same principle as the luck-changing crystals at 2 Kirk Street.
But who could have known that a genuine