For lack of anything better to say, when Lucas opened the cider house door and found nothing but the messy room and the Viscount’s shocked face, he called out, “Honey! I’m home! You’ll never believe who I ran into while I was out.”

“Wait, I thought you were…” Adin started to say, but his words trailed off as the dwarf walked in behind Lucas, and the orc ducked to walk in after that. “What— How— I thought you were—”

“Dead,” Hura'gh chuckled in a tone that was menacing even though he didn’t mean for it to be. “Yeah. We know. We thought the same thing about you.”

“I thought ye’ said we were going to a noble’s estate Lucas,” the dwarf chimed in as he looked around disapprovingly. “This place is kind of a shitehole.”

“Now, wait just a minute,” Adin said, sitting up as anger flashed across his face. “This building is—”

“A hell of a lot better than a clearing in a goblin-infested forest, right?” Hura'gh interrupted.

“Aye, it is at that,” Kar’gandin agreed, completely ignoring the fuming noble. “Still, if we’re going to put out anything of quality we’ll be needing more than this, I think. You said that your potions had very precise recipes, did you not Lucas?”

“Yeah,” he commented, noncommittal. “I mean, I can make do with a campfire for easy shit, but if we want to make good shit… well, I’m going to need a proper stove, glassware, reagents that we’ll have to order from abroad. You name it.”

“Bricks for the stove and lumber we can probably handle ourselves if the good Viscount has some hand tools we can use, but glassware and all the rest for your little blue liquid, that’s going to cost a lot of kings, no?”

“Wait, I thought you said that you weren’t making Blue?” Adin asked again.

He was as baffled by the conversion as he was by the way the dwarf was walking around inspecting different parts of the dilapidated structure and pacing things off as the wheels in his mind began to turn. Once Kar’gandin had inspected the rusted cider machinery, he looked at areas of rotting wood and even the holes in the ceiling as whatever he was starting to plan slowly came together.

Lucas didn’t know about all that. He wasn’t a big picture sort of guy. He just wanted to make some potions.

“Well, you could say that after consultation with all parties we’ve opted to go with plan C,” Lucas told the lordling before turning back to the dwarf. “Well, I already thought about that, and I was kinda thinking we could sell some easy potions to build up a little bit of operating capital, then switch back to something more delicate.”

“What’s plan C?” Adin asked, but no one listened to him.

“Why don’t we just swing by your old lab and get what you had there?” Hura'gh asked.

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea,” the dwarf agreed, stroking his beard.

“I don’t think going anywhere near my old operation is a good idea for now,” Lucas answered cautiously. “They had a mage the night they arrested me, and after the jail break - well it’s entirely possible they’ve tracked me back to that little rat hole. It's not worth risking everything for a couple dragons worth of alchemy equipment that we can buy somewhere else.”

That's what he said at least. The truth was the really valuable stuff was buried underneath a stone in the earthen floor. He wouldn't be heartbroken if he lost the flasks or his still, because everything worth keeping would stay put until the heat had died down and he could go get it.

They debated that for a moment, and he eventually relented that it might be worth sending around a messenger of some kind to check on it once the heat died down. “There’s no point in having a fancy setup if ye’ be working in filth anyway,” Kar’gandin said finally, agreeing with him in a backhanded sort of way. “T’would be like trying to forge mithril with nothin’ more than a rusty hammer and a tree stump for an anvil.”

Lucas didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded along anyway. “Yeah, good work is hard to pull off with the basics,” he agreed. “Like… check these out.”

`

Lucas handed him a couple of the potions he’d made with Adin the day before, ignoring the fact that their lordling was trying to get his attention. “These aren’t great, but for something made in an old pot over an open flame, these aren’t so bad, you know? I figure we brew these up and sell them off for a few weeks while we work on our setup, and then we move on to bigger things. No one in the palace is going to start a manhunt over some bootleg potions.”

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Ya know, these aren’t bad,” the dwarf said, looking at them with a far away gaze for a moment. If we could get these to my cousin Burken, in quantity, he might give us a king or maybe even a king and a half a pop.”

“You’ve got an identify skill?” Lucas asked, surprised. “I didn’t think dwarves had magic.”

“It’s more of an… appraisal skill,” the dwarf said cagily. “I just know what my cousin pays and—”

“Will you all please shut up and let me speak!” Adin yelled finally. “What is plan C? What are you all doing here, and why don’t you seem to think you need my approval? This is madness. I am certainly willing to work with you, but I am a Viscount, and this is my home. I will have a say, damn it!”

“Plan C is for cooking, Your Majesty,” Lucas said after everyone else in the room regarded Lord Parin coolly for a moment. “It comes right after plan A which was abscond from our prison cells, and plan B which was breaking out of the castle. It comes just before plan D where your lands end up getting sold to pay your debts, you dig?”

“But even so,” the noble swallowed hard, “I—”

“But nothing,” Lucas interrupted. “You wanted to cook; we’re going to cook. You wanted to escape; we escaped. You’re in this now, just like everyone else, so man the fuck up, or get the fuck out.”

Adin looked at him in shock and opened his mouth, but after a moment of silence, he closed it again. Lucas took that for agreement, or at least compliance, and looked around the room at everyone else.

“I mean it. I got thrown in that cell and almost tortured to death because the last guy I worked with threw me under the b… wagon to save his own neck, so if you’re thinking about stabbing me in the back, save me some fucking time and stab me in the front right now instead, because I want to build something here, you know?” Lucas felt exasperated. He didn’t show it, though. Instead, he showed only steely determination.

This was something that had been building up in him for days now. More than even his annoyance with the Viscount it was probably the reason he’d wanted to ditch town. He’d been betrayed more than once in his short time in this world and in this body, and he was completely sick of it.

“We’ve all got a price on our heads,” he said as he looked each of them in the eye, “And only a single reason to trust one another: gold. We’re in this to make money. Which means sticking together, keeping our mouths shut, and stacking coins.”

Lucas’s impromptu gang warmed a little bit to what he was saying, so he continued.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to be an alchemist forever,” he continued, gesturing to the milk crate full of red potion vials. “I want a nice bar with some pretty wenches, some tequila, and some motherfucking hot sauce. I’m sure you all want things too, and I’m telling you, with this group, we can get all of them. We can buy back our good names, we can pay off the Viscount’s debts, we can—”

“Why should I care about paying of this guy’s debts?” Hura'gh asked. “You and Kar’gandin have skills. You are both valuable allies, but a rich man without riches? He’s worth less than a sword without an edge.”

Lucas agreed with him, though he didn’t plan to say so out loud. The truth was that the half-orc’s muscle and the dwarf’s connections were infinitely more valuable than a broke junky that could barely be trusted to gather herbs on his own. Saying that wasn’t going to build the unity he was going for here, though, and the second these guys decided one member of their posse was worth booting, he might be next.

So instead, he shot back, “You think so? You think that Adin here has nothing to contribute.”

Lucas laughed. “Not only is he the one that gave us a convenient hide-out to buy us some time, but once we get things straightened out, he’s going to be our golden ticket.”

“Golden ticket?” Hura'gh asked even as Kar’gandin and Adin mouthed the unfamiliar phrase.

“Yeah, man,” Lucas said, trying to get excited about this. It wasn’t his dumbest idea so far. He’d probably be fine. “Golden ticket. He knows people. Like - the important kind. How many of your friends are going to be able to float a dragon-a-week drug habit? Do you think the average working stiff on the docks is going to be able to afford to buy our shit? They might buy a bootleg potion for their aching back, but blue? We’re going to want to be selling that to knights and earls and wayward dukes that are fourteenth in line of succession and whoever else has a heavy coin purse, ya know?”

“Names open doors,” the half-orc agreed, “But his name is mud, what good does that do us?”

“His name is mud… for now,” Lucas said, “We’ll find a way to get him off the shit list, and until then, he can just sort of… steer us in the right direction. I’m sure that you have a good idea of who might have the right sort of proclivities to want to get to know us better, don’t you, Adin?”

“Umm, yeah,” he agreed. He was obviously having trouble keeping up with all of this. “The Brussons, the Maldins, and of course the Duchess of—”

“Fine,” Hura'gh grunted. “The little man can stay, but don’t expect me to go picking berries or whatever else.”

“Nah man,” Lucas agreed. “That would be a complete waste of your talents. You’re here to crack skulls and make problems disappear. Some of the ingredients I’ll need come from beasts and monsters, so you can help with that too. We all got our roles to play in this.”

The conversation continued for a while longer as they discussed plans and divided responsibilities. That was the easy part.

Explaining why these strangers were here to Gerwin and Adin’s sister when they came by that evening was somewhat harder. Denaria seemed overjoyed to see Lucas, though, and she even gave him a hug despite her manservant’s frowns, so she accepted his statements that this was their best option easily enough.

“Mistress… y-y-you can’t be serious!” the old man sputtered. “These are hardened criminals. The good name of house Parin will—”

“Be completely obliterated in a few years if we don’t do something drastic, I agree,” she interrupted in a calm, clear voice. “And if there’s one thing we can all agree on about this, it’s that this will be pretty drastic.”