Lucas left the manor, clean, well-dressed, and as prepared as he could be less than an hour after he arrived. Just like that, everything he’d spent so long was getting smaller and smaller behind him in the review mirror as he set out into the unknown. The rearview mirror was metaphorical, of course. The last thing he did was look behind him. Even if he was being followed, there should be nothing back there to see if they were doing their job right.

Instead, he adopted an expression of patient boredom and tried not to worry too much. There were too many things to worry about, and quite frankly at this moment he wasn’t particularly interested as to whether the bigger danger was that his little empire was about to get devoured by a large player, or that when this project was done he’d wind up with nothing but a knife in the back and a shallow grave to show for it.

Those were later problems, and later was a long ways away right now. In fact, it was almost four hours away, and well outside the city proper. Lucas had not been expecting that. He’d been thinking that wherever this was would be in the Princes back pocket, but instead they rode until almost dawn, to a structure nestled in the foothills of the mountains that started just beyond the Greenwood.

In the thin light of false dawn it looked like it might be a larger country manor, or perhaps a small palace, but as they got closer it looked a little more brutalist than that. This is more like a prison, he thought less than optimistically.

That was somewhere closer to the truth. The outer curtain wall surrounded an ample courtyard which contained a few buildings as large as Parin Manor, but those were dominated by a large, five- or six-story tower.

It was less than welcoming, but when the carriage finally came to stop, it pulled in front of one of the smaller buildings, where he was greeted by the same sort of staff he might have expected at any other mansion in the region, instead of the prison warden and guards that he’d feared. Those were obviously manning the wall that surrounded whatever this little bubble of privilege was.

“Welcome to Blackgate Mister uhh… Blue is it?” the sleepy looking headman said as he gestured toward the other two men to retrieve his luggage. “Do you have any idea how long you’ll be staying with us?”

“Hard to say,” Lucas answered, suppressing a yawn. “Weeks, not months, if I had to guess. What is it you do here? Is it—”

“And is this all of your luggage?” he said, gesturing to the single trunk that the men removed from the wagon.

“Yeah, just some clothes. Why? What were you expecting?” Lucas asked confused.

“Men such as yourself rarely visit Heisenburgle without certain basics…” the man said with a disappointed look. Typically, that includes, reference books, rare reagents, apparatuses… etcetera.”

“Sorry,” Lucas said with a shrug, “I wasn’t told to bring any of that. His Majesty told me to show up, I showed up. Now if you’ll just show me to wherever it is I’m staying in the morning I can—”

“Oh, our resident genius only works by the light of the moon,” the head man said with a shake of his head. “Your things will be sent to your room, but I’ll take you to see him now.”

Lucas shrugged at that. He’d already stayed up half the night. If he was going to be working with some kind of eccentric alchemist, he might as well stay up for the other half and start getting used to working the graveyard shift all over again.

The man showed him into the house, and then lead him down a hallway that was longer than it had any right to be. Truthfully, it was longer than was possible, and it was only when they reached the stairs that wound up for story after story he realized these people had built passages to connect all of the buildings he’d seen on the ride in without ever once going outside. It was something he’d rarely seen outside of Las Vegas, and struck him as more than a little eccentric, but then, if this was nothing but a glorified prison, that made sense too.

“I’ll leave you here then,” the man that was escorting him said. “Mister Heisenburgle is in the upper laboratory this evening, just at the top of the steps. You can’t miss it.”

Lucas sighed. He thought about complaining, but instead he just started up the stairs. There was no point in dragging his feet. The sooner he got this done and over with, the sooner he figured out what was going to happen next.

That was easy to think for the first two flights of stairs, but it became somewhat harder after that. It was only once he slowed down because he was wheezing bad enough that he was tempted to take a sip from his boosting flask that he noticed there was something weird about the stairs. He’d noticed the ropes that lead to some kind of dumbwaiter or bell in the center, other than wishing they’d installed an elevator, that wasn’t it.

The stairs were built in such a way that taking the stairs one at a time was way too little, but taking them two at a time was a little too much, throwing his cadence off. It was an interesting fact, but he didn’t give it any more than surface thought until he reached the top and saw a dwarf working diligently at a very low table.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

No, not a dwarf, he realized as he got closer. Something else. A different race. He’d seen a few of them a few times around Lordanin, but it wasn’t until the man finally turned in profile, and he could see the bulbous nose and outlandishly sized ears that he finally remembered.

“A gnome,” he breathed.

“What, dud you expect that the finest Alchemist in the region to be a man like you?” Heisenburgle asked, not bothering to meet his eye as he continued whatever it was he was working on. “Hmmppphhh, typical.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to get us off on the wrong foot or anything,” Lucas said, trying not to piss this guy off from the word go. He was clearly an ego maniac. Most academics were, in his experience. “My name is—”

“Shhhhhh, I know very well who you are Mister Blue, and we can discuss your little… product later, my research is at a very delicate stage.” the gnome answered in a dismissive whisper.

Lucas didn’t respond to that. Instead, he took in the room as he very quietly walked closer to the gnome. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and he had a better idea of where he was standing, he had a lot less interested in picking a fight with the man.

The place was a laboratory, a real one. It wasn’t like his cut rate basement lab where they brewed bathtub meth for the locals. This was a place where someone could do some real research, and suddenly he was in love.

Lucas had never wanted a peek inside the Alchemists’ guild before now. He’d turned his nose up at the very idea, but now he thought that might have been a mistake. The place was cluttered, but only in the sense that it was completely overloaded with all things alchemical. One some walls there were elaborate diagrams that laid out ingredients in something resembling an elementally flavored periodic table, while others were more like a series of overlapping alchemical Venn Diagrams separating similar yet slightly different ingredients. Ground Slyph wings were apparently very similar to, yet slightly more air charged than blue idriss petals, and nightingale pin feathers.

He’d never studied any of the ingredients before, but he probabl.ly could here. He could probably study half of everything here. The benches and the walls behind them were stacked with shelves that were full of an endless array of ingredients. At first he thought that maybe they were sorted by color, or by type, but based on the small brass placards affixed to each shelf, it quickly became clear that the answer was much more annoying. They were all ordered alphabetically by elemental balance. This section was for strong water, weak air, while that section was for strong water, weak earth.

God, elementalism isn’t an obsession for these guys, it’s a fucking religion, he thought, careful not to utter such a blasphemy aloud to piss off the little guy even more.

Still, just glancing around the room and seeing all the little pop-ups was more than amazing, and he hadn’t even cracked open any of the thick tomes that were lying around, or studied the complex hardware that this Hiesenburgle guy was using in his separation and distillation.

Lucas had felt like a king when his new ingredients had come in, but this… this was a whole new level, and even though the sun was threatening to rise, and his bed was calling to him, he kind of wanted to stay up here forever.

Red Dragon Scales (Pulverized): Endurance 4, poison 3. Grants a partial resistance to fire and extreme heat for up to three hours.

Deep Water Slime (Pickled): Water 3, Poison 2, intelligence -1. This is a powerful emulsifier.

However, no matter how many bizarre components caught his eye, eventually he was forced to return his gaze to what it was the gnome was doing. The short, gray haired alchemist was studying a vial of what looked to be almost pure light, which was surrounded on three sides by small mirrors. Nearby there were a few ingredients that were obviously part of what he was working on, like powdered limestone, elf tears, and crushed fireflies.

That was interesting enough. All of those were interesting, but none of them were as interesting as what he saw on the vial, when a small menu popped up there.

Distilled Starlight (minor): Poison -5, amplifies the effect of most potions when added in moderation.

For a second he saw the minor flicker to nothing, but that was when the sun rose, and as soon as the first rays topped the horizon and reflected through the vial, the interesting properties vanished. Instead, there was a faint acrid odor from the smoke it started to produce which was just strong enough to smell over the other hundred exotic smells in the lab, and it crystal clear liquid was replaced with something cloudy and gray.

Polluted Water: Poison -3

“Tarnfabulation!” the gnome yelled, clenching his hands into fists before turning and pointing an accusing finger at Lucas. “This is all your fault!”

“Me? What did I do?” Lucas asked. “I didn’t say shit.”

“You mere presence was enough to throw off the delicate distillation process!” the gnome raged in a somewhat high-pitched voice that made it hard to take him in any way seriously. “You might have had a dinner too rich in iron, or brought in dust from the road with a hint of lead in it! You-you-you… I doubt you even know what it is I was attempting to do, do you, human.”

“Distilling starlight?” Lucas asked, trying hard to keep his cool.

“You-you… how did you know that? Did the butler tell you? The guards?” the gnome demanded, trying hard not to act surprised, but he had a shitty poker face.

“Why would they know,” Lucas answered with a shrug. “I know starlight when I see it, and until the sunlight touched it… that’s what I was looking at.”

“You saw it you say?” the gnome asked, stroking his wispy chin whiskers as if he was lost in thought. “Well, then perhaps there’s some hope for you after all. Let us start again, human. I am Heisenburgle the Wise and Clever, but you have doubtlessly heard of me by another name thanks to those imperious busy bodies in the guild, Heisenburgle, the Black…”