Lucas spent the next few days immersed in mind-numbing books. Porentheo’s Guide to Elemental Alignment was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to reading. He’d also tried The Nature of Light, Balance in all things, and most recently, he was attempting to suffer through Lessons in What not to Do by Mortemel Baraba. Lucas had yet to make it halfway through any of them.
Not only did he disagree with them on the most basic levels, but sometimes they seemed flat-out wrong. Several times he had to remind himself of that damn experiment that the gnome had done, though, and force himself back to the table.
“Magic doesn’t have to make sense, Lucas,” he reminded himself. “That’s why it’s magic.”
Lucas never fancied himself as a scientist. He knew that if you added A to B and kept it at the right temperature, you’d get C. He also knew that if you used some ghetto shit, you’d get some pretty crappy C, and if you let the temperature get too high, the whole thing would burst into flames. It all made sense. Garbage in, garbage out. Actions leading to consequence.
None of that was affected by whether he made his drugs in a cave or up a tower, yet here he was, reading one of the defining texts of modern alchemists. It was about a gnome, Mortemel, who spent his whole life expanding the nature of alchemy one botched experiment at a time. The failures made for interesting reading, at least.
He was happy to have the blooper reel as the gnome discovered which ingredients could not be mixed together because they resulted in poison, acid, or sometimes even explosions. Those parts made the author seem like a real person, and Lucas could certainly sympathize with some of the mistakes. Those parts are what kept him reading.
It was only as the book went further along and devolved into the man’s epiphanies he made in his hermitage by the sea that Lucas began to lose his patience. Not only did he not believe that the sea would contribute nothing but relative humidity to the whole arrangement, but reading about a grown man naval gazing was positively insufferable.
To hear Heisenburgle talk this gnome was like Issac Newton of Alchemy, but Lucas didn’t see it. Especially not after reading page after page of Mortemel wondering if his own thoughts at the moment of catalyzation or the clothes he was wearing that day might also have an effect on the nature of alchemical transformation.
So, Lucas was more than relieved when the next night, Heisenburgle declared that they had all the reagents to make blue and they were ready to cook. Lucas could have had them sent overnight from his own supplies, of course, but he had no intention of tipping his hand anymore than he had to.
Besides, as long as they weren’t making Blue, he was learning other shit. So far, at least, between the weird achievement he’d unlocked and the interesting questions that the gnome had unlocked between insults, that was a hundred times more interesting.
Now was the time to put the gnome in his place, though, and Lucas relished that as much as he had anything in days. Well, anything besides sending notes home, of course. He’d been leaving folded-up pieces of paper shaped like little cranes on his window sill every other night, wedged in a crack in the wood where they wouldn’t blow away.
He had yet to see one of Danaria’s birds take them away; he was certain that was what was happening. They were always gone in the morning. The notes were intentionally vague. They were just letting everyone know that he was okay.
‘I honestly had no idea this many reagents existed in the whole world. Might stay here a while.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Making new friends.’
‘Learned a new trick today. Tell you about it when I come home.’
The messages were basic, but he knew that the situation at Parin Manor was fragile. It had to be. Power vacuums in drug organizations got messy pretty fast, and regular reassurances that he was fine and he’d be home soon were at the top of his to-do list most days. Of course, the fact that I’m starting to miss Danaria has nothing to do with that, he thought to himself with a smirk.
“Alright, Mister H, you ready to cook?” Lucas said when the gnome arrived at the appointed hour, sometime after dinner.
“Heisenburgle,” the gnome grumbled, “and we are here to perform alchemy, not any common cookery. We…”
Lucas rolled his eyes but said nothing. He’d set the poor guy off on purpose that time, and he knew it. It was hard to take an egomaniac very seriously when you knew exactly what to do to spin him up.
“Well, you’ve shown me your high-brow alchemy already,” Lucas said with a smile once the gnome stopped rambling almost halfway up the stairs, “now it’s time to show you my low-brow cooking.”
“Hurumph,” Heisenburgle snorted. “You said it, not me.”
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“I did,” Lucas agreed. “As much as I love this shit, not all of us have dragon scales to play with, you know? Some of us have to play with the hands we’re dealt.”
“Hence, the reason why alchemy is so expensive, Mister Blue,” Heisenburgle answered dismissively. “It would be a poor alchemist that could not turn a dragon's worth of reagents into ten dragons worth of potions.”
Lucas thought about explaining that most people would never have ten dragons to buy those potions but decided against it. Instead, he continued up the stairs in silence, waiting for his chance to start giving the orders.
Once they were in the laboratory, Lucas started setting up everything he would need to work his own magic under Heisenburgle’s watchful eye. First, he gathered 4 different flasks, almost with his five different ingredients. Then, he processed the witch grass blossoms in a mortar and pestle before adding them to a flask with a solid dose of alcohol.
“What are you doing?” the gnome asked testily. “You didn’t specify alcohol at any point in your recipe. You said five ingredients, not six!”
“Well, I kinda thought it was standard practice to purify the ingredients before you used them, you know?” Lucas answered with a shrug as he started to do the same thing with his wizened gnome caps. “So, it’s not really an ingredient to Blue, it’s more like a… catalyst, you know?”
“What?! Don’t you know that alcohol destroys most of the more delicate reagents?! ” the gnome asked, bordered on apoplexy. “Eastern mungwort root, Gnoll Marrow, Trent Sap… I could list a hundred ingredients that would be destroyed by such an addition!”
“You mean the lesser properties?” Lucas answered, only half paying attention as he focused on doing his job right before he switched to his blue esper willow vine sap. “You have to; there’s no other way to get the poison out.”
“Poison, what poison?” the gnome demanded. “We are making alchemical potions, not poisons!”
“Look, all I’m saying is that alchemical ingredients can be some pretty toxic shit, and if you don’t take care of that… well, you’re going to get someone killed, you know?” Lucas answered, playing it off as he realized he’d almost said too much.
“Some potions can be hard on the digestive systems of those who are not prepared for them, it’s true,” Heisenburgle agreed with obvious hesitation. “But that is all the more reason for us to strictly follow tried and true recipes. Not mixing together random scraps that might be found in a woodland ditch. Is that understood?”
Lucas ignored the gnome and focused on making sure his flask of bubbling sap was at just the right temperature before he added alcohol and moved on to the bile. It was clear that he had no idea what Lucas was talking about. He might be hot to trot on elements, but on poison or any of the other stats that Lucas saw so clearly, he was completely in the dark. Lucas would wonder about that later. For now, he was busy.
“Listen, we’re going to try it your way once this is done,” Lucas said with a barely suppressed sigh. “I’m sure of it. But you wanted to see me do it my way - this is my way. So get me some cheesecloth and watch.”
Lucas waited until the goblin bile was boiling away because the viscous fluid had to be stirred so frequently before he started filtering out the rest. When Lucas got to that step, though, and finally started tossing the reagents and instead kept the colored alcohol, the gnome really lost his shit.
“Wha-what you are doing… why it flies in the face of every right-thinking alchemist. Not even a rogue school could dream of such a thing!” Heisenburgle declared.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lucas said with a shrug, “But if it looks stupid, and it works, then it ain’t stupid.”
The gnome didn’t say anything after that. He just stared on, waiting for Lucas to fail as he mixed one flask together with the next and the next. After they were mixed and the midnight blue fluid was boiling together in a largish flask so it could get thoroughly mixed, he started crushing the dwarf berries.
When that was done, but before he added them, Lucas said, “Alright, now pay attention because this is the cool part.”
Only then did he drizzle the final ingredient in. He didn’t stir it immediately. Instead, he let the reaction take place as slowly and as visually as possible. He let the gnome watch as a tendril of glowing aqua swirled ever lower in the flask, making the whole thing glow for a moment with blue light.
Heisenburgle was slack jawed. “What is that,” the gnome asked finally as Lucas dismissed the little pop-up he always got from this step.
Catalyzed: Poison -> Euphoria.
Brew of Mana Intoxication (pure) (48 doses): Euphoria 9, poison 2, intelligence -1, mana regeneration decreased by 180% for 1 hour.
“It’s just how the reaction works,” Lucas said, deciding not to mention the catalyst. “You’re the famous alchemist. You tell me.”
Lucas noted that the mixture was a little stronger than he usually made it, even though he hadn’t started boiling it down to get a condensed reaction. He wondered if that was because he was 50 feet in the air, then decided it was probably the same mysterious message he’d gotten the other night about his increasing skill. For now, he filed that thought away under no freaking clue and focused on his baffled partner.
“I’ve never seen such a reaction. Not without much more expensive ingredients anyway…” the gnome said, adjusting his spectacles and peering more closely at the liquid that had now lost its glow and taken on a royal blue color. “It certainly looks like the real thing, at any rate.”
“What else would it be?” Lucas asked with a laugh before he realized the gnome’s paranoia was actually serious.
“Well, we won’t know that until we have someone take a taste, now will we?” the gnome said, looking at him.
For the briefest of moments, Lucas thought the runt was going to make him try his own potion, but instead, he poured some into a smaller vial, then corked it, turned off the burners with a muttered word, and started downstairs. “Come along. There’s nothing left to be done up here for now.”
When Lucas realized he was going to feed the potion to some prisoner, his heart sank. Saddling someone with a terrible addiction just to make sure the product was pure was a pretty shitty thing to do. Still, he made no move to stop the gnome. He just picked another book he hadn’t started yet and made his way down the tower with Heisenburgle.