Full Immersion [for what it's worth]

>Follow the man~!

>Ask the man if he is planning to create an abomination of science by making new life from the dead. And no, not undead. You would have said undead if that's what you meant.

> Ask him if he likes bananas, then uppercut him as hard as you can.

Jarod has an idea. "Do you like bananas?" he says, and then does a mental double-take, the old man along with him.
"Excuse me?" he says, stopping momentarily in his tracks.
The wolf-man shakes his head. "S-sorry, I don't think I've sh-shaken off all of the crazy yet. I h-have a guess what you're doing."
"Go on," says the man, starting to walk again.
"I-if I understand correctly, undead aren't exactly people. L-like, it's okay to use them for manual labor b-because whoever the bodies used to belong to..a-aren't there anymore, right?"
"Yes."
"B-but, you're no necromancer. You're t-trying to, actually, bring people back to life somehow. R-right?"
"Indeed." The man sounds very pleased.

By now they've reached a house that to Jarod seems fairly small, but must be about average for the setting. The most noticable quality of the house, even in the middle of the night, is a tall, somewhat crude spire of metal on top of it. The man opens his door and leads the way inside, saying, "I'd love to show you how."
They go through an entry room into a cramped library, full of books. The man walks to one of the few vacant spots in the wall and pushes in the brick, causing the nearest shelf to turn about 45 degrees and reveal a passageway. At first it's quite dark, but after a few seconds a mild humming begins, and Jarod is somewhat surprised to see some apparently modified lampstands holding what look to be primitive light bulbs.
As they head inside of the passageway, which quickly turns into a spiral staircase downward, the man says, "Ahh, yes. I didn't invent those devices, but I'm very proud of having understood their design enough to replicate it without a sample. And the person who did invent them couldn't find a way to make them practical."

At the bottom of the stairs is a wooden door with a very conspicuous lock to it; the man reaches somewhere in his robes and gets out a key, which seems to have a symbol on it that's glowing faintly blue. The key works as intended in the lock, and the door swings inward to reveal what is almost certainly a mad scientist's laboratory.

The bulbs hanging on the walls here are not terribly efficient at making light, giving more than enough to read by but leaving a kind of dramatic darkness over the whole space. There are two large cabinets on the wall across from the door and a metal table in the middle of the room with something human-body-shaped underneath a big white sheet on it. The rest of the room is quite disorganized, with fragments of weapons and armor, tangled wires and tubes made of who-knows-what, and what strike Jarod as partially-built steampunk robot parts, each in separate piles scattered all over the place.

The old man makes a few steps aside to as near a corner of the room he can, seemingly to give Jarod a full view of the place, and folds his arms, giving the kind of sigh a person gives on coming home after months abroad--tired yet satisfied, and a touch proud. "This is where I get my work done," he says.

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