This was an imposing building, its white structure soaring into the clouds. A large sign above the entrance read: "Little Star Laboratory."
It was a stormy summer night. In one of the building's laboratories, a handsome young researcher was fiddling with a table full of chemical equipment. Flashes of lightning lit and darkened his face by turns.
By day, he was a forensic examiner for the city police department. At night, however, he preferred to use his own methods to punish those who had escaped the law.
For example, he would skin them, chop up their corpses, dissolve the pieces with corrosive chemicals, then mix the resulting sludge into chemical waste for the laboratory's centralized, strictly environmentally friendly disposal.
Which meant tossing the waste barrels straight into the Atlantic Ocean.
Tonight, under the cover of darkness and gale-force winds, he had killed another corrupt official. But once the killing was done, he discovered that he had run out of the corpse-dissolving solution he normally used to eliminate evidence, so he had no choice but to mix up another batch.
While waiting for the chemicals to react, he also secretly used the laboratory's materials to make something else.
The sort of thing that made people inexplicably happy—usually white powder or larger crystals. The kind everyone knew about. He had some mental issues and needed to rely on the stuff to keep his brain active.
He removed a round-bottomed flask from the apparatus, scraped its inner wall with a small spoon, and then brought the crystals on the spoon to his mouth, savoring them carefully.
Then he spat to the side and revealed a satisfied smile, one that looked somewhat feral beneath the dim lights.
"Grade-A stuff. At least three plus signs."
The young man muttered to himself in satisfaction.
As evaporation