"Wernold! Come back inside!"

"Vait just a minute father! Pray just a little bit longer!"

Giggling and chortling, the raccoon of ten years old jumped off a bench, his wellington boots landing in a puddle of water and producing a mighty splash. Excitedly he moved his legs in a flurry, swishing his striped tail around with glee, pretending that if he just moved them quickly enough... he could kick the droplets scattered into the air before they landed!

Raindrops looked to him like diamonds in mid-air. Young Wernold had been read stories by his parents since he was in the crib. In them were tales of magic things, fantastic things that made no sense. Worlds where there were bridges of multicoloured light and tales of beasts who could produce the element of flame with but a breath.

The first time he was old enough to see the rain and remember it, he had marvelled with joy, for was it not miraculous to live in a world where water would fall from the sky? What God, or what quirk of reality, had ordained that such a thing be so? It must've been a God, he reasoned- because how else could it be so beautiful?

"Wernold! You vill bring your mother deep concern!"

"Da... okay, father! I am coming now!"

His kicking and flailing was to no avail. He could not keep the droplets in mid-air forever, although he took delight nonetheless in making them fly loose from his bright yellow raincoat. If he could only keep them airborne, or slow down their fall enough to be able to admire them up close even for a few moments! To do so would be like... extending the magic. Making it live longer. Because the most magical things young Wernold had seen always seemed to be the briefest. Raindrops couldn't last forever. Nor could the taste of his mother's apple strudel, or the day his father took him to see the aviation show.

Turning around, he scurried back inside through the open door leading in from the back garden. Taking off his dripping wet coat and putting it onto the rack, then grabbing at his tail to wring the water out of it. With one last wistful look back out at the rain, he closed the door with a slam and pressed his face up against the window. Smiling with glee as the rattling doorframe made trickles of water run down the glass. Admiring the patterns it made as the droplets formed their own network of tiny rivers.

"Wunderbar...!"

*****

The tiny rocket soared upwards into the sky, aiming for the largest cloud on the otherwise sunlit afternoon.

From the point where it impacted the shapeless mass... the creamy wisps drifting along darkened to a moody grey. A cocktail of silver iodide, potassium iodide, dry ice and other elements proliferating throughout the cotton-like cumulus. The transformation took place rapidly. A drop of rain fell down and splashed against the rectangular frame of Wernold's glasses. It was quickly followed by more, the weather forecast for that evening immediately rendered moot by his homemade monsoon.

Turning on his heel, the raccoon stomped with heavy boots back indoors through the backdoor of the clinic. Immediately upon entering his nostrils were assaulted by formaldehyde, ammonium nitrate and nitric acid. Though at this point his nose screened out the strong aromas and barely paid them any mind. His stance was rigid and his movements brisk. A tail no longer swished behind him as he walked, indeed, he barely felt the vestigial stub left behind from the docking procedure. There were many days where he often forgot he'd ever had a tail at all.

Floating in jars and preservation vats around him, his specimens were the only company that greeted him within the dim light of the laboratory. A severed hand suspended inside a cylinder here. An organ bobbing up and down in a jar there. In the largest tank of all there loomed the silhouette of a cadaver belonging to a deceased male he had purchased in the dead of night from sources of questionable repute. Not that his own reputation at this point was anything other than questionable either...

Bouncing against his chest with every step, the apron he wore held the tools of his trade; spools of thread, needles for stitching with it, scissors for cutting it, and injection tubes for precisely introducing chemicals where they were most needed.

He had never forgotten the lessons of his childhood. That nothing lasted forever and the most wonderful of magics were short-lived. Life was the greatest magic of all. As a doctor, he had sought to prolong that magic as long as possible.

Inside the great glass tank, the cadaver twitched at his approach... the specimen stirring in deep slumber.

Unfortunately, he had reached the limits of how long he could preserve life as a doctor. So he had abandoned that title and everything it stood for. As over time he had begun to find the restrictions it placed upon his work too limiting, chafing against the oaths that a physician was sworn to follow. As a scientist, he believed that preserving magic- preserving life itself- was an imperative to be pursued by any and all means necessary. The magic must survive.

He did not linger long in the laboratory though. His back was stiff from hunching over for hours and using thread to sew the seams in the flesh of his latest patchwork experiment together into a cohesive whole. A walk was needed to clear the mind. On his way to the front door, he took a red and white striped umbrella out of its holster and raised it up in preparation. Stepping out, he opened it over the top of his head like a shield. Droplets bouncing away like bullets being deflected.

Walking through the streets, he watched people scurrying around, some of them dressed in summer clothing and squealing as they sought shelter from the sudden deluge. He watched them passively. Every step marked by a splash as he walked through the slick streets of the overcrowded city so different to the countryside where he'd been raised.

In the air he could faintly smell the rain. Petrichor as it was called. But it was thin, artificially created. An imitation of the real thing that he'd brought into being on an illogical whim.

He'd mastered a power he'd once likened to the work of the divine. To make it rain whenever he wanted was a fantasy straight out of his childhood dreams. Reaching out with his free hand beyond the protective boundary of the umbrella's reach, he watched expressionless as the drops from the sky kissed his fingertips and rolled down his palm. Their touch was icy cold. Yet the cold at least stirred his flesh to feel something. There were days where he wondered if he had worked for too long with preservative chemicals that numbed and pickled everything they touched... he felt little where once he had felt much.

Perhaps the malaise he felt was more from within than from without, though. Spending so long looking at anatomical diagrams and dissected body parts, he'd become desensitized to blood and viscera. Some of the magic of life was lost when it was diluted down into elements on a periodic table. It was the same with the weather, which he now understood was a complex moving system rather than a miracle.

Why had he even bothered to make it rain then? Just to cheer himself up? He didn't feel cheered up by it. No, it simply made him remember a more innocent time where playing with raindrops was all he'd needed to feel happy. When he'd felt true wonder.

Coming to a stop on the sidewalk, he moved the umbrella aside. Looking directly up at the sky. Letting the synthetic storm splash water onto his glasses and soak the fur of his face.

It did still soothe him, he supposed. Just a little. It was better to remember a time when wonder had existed, than to have never felt wonder at all in one's life. Days like this were the ones where he questioned everything. If it was right to try to tamper as he had with the forces of nature, or indeed, to try to wrest life back from the jaws of entropy itself? The dead he'd managed to resurrect so far had been shambling automatons. Bereft of the spark they'd once had in life.

He wanted to restore that spark. Maybe if he learned how to do that, he'd be able to restore his own too...

"Wenn nur."

*****

Artwork done by the amazing Theirin !