Gods-awful, ugly, disgusting, ruddy thing like a circus press box, he thought to himself as he saw his own conchoidal reflection in the gold railings standing at a vertical guard on either side of the red door way. It wasn't too ugly of a thing, though rather tacky- a big red box of a carriage cart drug along by a huffing and sighing moa. A single door lay at the back, whilst, where a window once was, now a pair of large, hinged-wooden doors waited to reveal a show beneath. Big gold letters burned into the side of the box, just recently touched up, announced Benton's arrival- Godfrey's Celebrated Medicines. He had worked years for this, worked just last year to start his business in Vienda through this beard- or lack there of.
It was not Benton who had arrived in Vienda. To Benton, of course, he was Benton, but, no, to anyone else who did not know Benton from any Pyoter or Stefan, this was Dr. Roderick Godfrey, some maybe-famous man from another land, by the looks of it. Indeed, this version of Benton looked slightly off, like a younger brother or a child had been asked to play Benton in a play written by someone who had never met him, close enough to maybe be right with a squint. This Benton had no grey hairs in his mess of a careless head, a mix of ink and molasses slicking his hair back tightly and hiding the growing fog of his temple. He had fully shaved, too, and, feeling facially naked, had perched a small pair of glasses that made his eyes just ever so slightly larger without hurting his head on his pointy nose. The heels of his shoes were stuffed with wedges of wood to raise him uncomfortably another inch, and he had reluctantly abandoned his cane for a pocket watch that told him how soon he could safely purge his nerves and aches with more drugs. So, no, he wasn't quite Benton, just as he wished. He was some unsuspecting foreigner who stuck out sorely, but it was a good sorely that made him seem foreign and a spectacle. He would just have to be careful. Drawing attention made such lies much harder.
The finishing touches to his lie were necessary. Pigeon, the scraggly moa, was bedded just behind the cart after they had pulled into a marketplace quiet under a quilted grey sky. She cooed now and again to make sure Benton didn't forget her, but he was busy. He shut the door of his carriage, though warm light still waved out from beneath it. He pulled open the large panel that covered his wonderfully displayed "medicines"- now just bottles of water while the real product waited safely inside away from disappointed thieving hands. Yet, the different shapes and different primary and secondary colors of the bottles made them look quite like real potions and medicines. They were, technically, real. The interior of the cart, barely big enough for Benton to stand hunched over, was lined with the real product. Laudanum droppers for aid with sleep and fussy babies, cocaine toothache drops, morphine cough syrup, and chew tobacco asthma solutions were all present on his shelf, and all, he knew, present in the shelves of many other apothecaries. They were medicines, however, he understood the dangers of such drugs. They were addictive, powerful, and the public could easily ignore it, especially when he named and marketed them well. Besides, they truly worked as they were supposed to. They just could come with an extra price that paid in a certain Eon's favor.
Doctor Roderick Godfrey exhaled through pursed lips, straightening a powder blue top hat with crisp white gloves. It was show time. Godfrey's Celebrated Medicines was back in business.