Richard reached his destination, spotting the house he was supposed to go to. He stopped a few hundred feet from the burned out shell of a house, wondering why anyone would choose to live there. The nearby town had hundreds of buildings in fine condition, but maybe there was something more going on. Being a cult member wasn't the most worldly of professions after all, and even after a couple years he didn't really know what the rules of the world were now, or if there even was any. Problems came at him, and he dealt with them. Priest had called it a ghost town, and that might not have been a figure of speech. Richard was as curious as a dead cat, which was to say, not at all.

  He approached the building cautiously, not wanting to get roasted by a fireball or something. He called out several times, but no one replied. His voice echoed, and he flinched when it came back. It had sounded like additional voices had added onto it. The voices hadn't been saying what he had. “If I wanted to listen to you, I wouldn't be talking!” He angrily yelled at the voices. They echoed back cries for help, which he ignored.

  Richard reached the charred front-door, that only had a frame on one side, the other side was just a hole into the house. He could see right into the house, but the entryway turned into some living space. He knocked and waited, not wanting to intrude on some alchemist, or whatever the man was supposed to be. Who knew what he would do if surprised. Richard had all day, he could wait.

  Only after fifteen minutes did he notice a strangely shaped, black metal, door knocker. He knocked it gingerly, half expecting it to come alive at his touch. It didn't make any noise, but it had vibrated with the force of knocking. He heard sounds from inside, and watched a man in a torn and dirty suit walk up. His suit was made with too many pockets, poorly stitched on to what had been an expensive suit. He had a patchy beard, and thinning black hair, slicked back. He had a large forehead and ghostly pale skin.

  Each of his steps seemed to move him less distance than it should. Richard wondered if it was some moonwalking trick. He had no proof the man was anything special after all. Just because magic was real, didn't mean people weren't hoaxes. If anything it was more likely, what wouldn't someone believe these days.

  One time Richard had robbed someone, who offered to sell him someones soul instead. It had been the ballsiest play he had ever seen. Richard had laughed in his face, and took the backpack of supplies the person had. Walking away, he had kept an eye on the dude with a mirror. It was to his horror that the figure vanished into a puff of smoke. He had left behind the backpack, wanting to move past the whole event.

  The man flung open the door, and stood there, staring into thin air. He looked around confused, before staring at the door knob. “Kc~e~ehg, ut~kbmf~k~gcbvs,” he babbled, the noises sending adrenaline through Richard. The man withdrew a spray bottle, and spritzed his mouth.

  “Of course, the 'kbmf' always hurts my throat too. I find speaking English easier, or any human language really,” Richard muttered to himself, as the alchemist didn't seem to hear.

  The man's face was screwed up in concentration. He cleared his throat with an unholy noise. “Come in, I'll just be a minute,” he said in strange accents. He gestured, and walked back into the house. His steps again were regular speed, but seemed to move him only slightly. Richard slowly followed him into a living room, and the alchemist settled on an only slightly burned chair. There was no second chair, so Richard kept standing.

  The alchemist pulled a syringe and rubber hose out a pocket, and shot up with whatever was inside it. It was some clear liquid, but whether speed, or angel tears, he had no idea. Richard wondered if there was any point in destroying the T.G.I.F, or if everyone was insane. It could be was the last sane person in the world. Julius had implied there was some civilization, but he had been pretty crazy himself.

  He waited patiently as some color returned to the alchemists face, and the man slowly stirred. Richard looked around the house, but the only other furniture was a dirty cot, and an appliance that resembled one of those automatic single cup coffee makers. “Sorry about that, I was in an upper phase, essential to my work,” the man said. His face looked like a raving lunatic, with a massive grin, and eyes showing whites all around.

  “Of course, of course,” Richard replied graciously. “I didn't catch your name, I'm Richard.”

  “You'll never catch my name!” The man screamed leaping up. “Not in a thousand years could you reach the peaks on which it has been secreted away. You fool, with yours I shall bind you here, as my slave for a year and a day.” The man began scrambling in his pockets, but before he could do anything Richard had his shotgun out. Richard butted him in the gut, putting the man on the ground wheezing.

  Richard aimed the barrel at the man's head. “I'm getting tired of this shit. Just give me the HCN, and I'll leave,” Richard demanded.

  “Wait, you're not one of them?”

  “Five, four, three,” Richard began to count down.

  “One of the manyfaced, with three arms, and wretched mechanical treads. I thought you had followed me down here disguised as man to trick me. Taking the methotrexate always makes me paranoid and jumpy. I'm sorry, please lower your weapon. I don't even know if you can bind a person.”

  The man certainly seemed less squirrelly. His eyes even seemed somewhat rational now. “Let's try this again, name?”

  “Meridin.”

  “Okay Meridin, you can sit back down on the chair. Then explain everything that's going on here.”

  An hour later Richard was confused, but Meridin had calmed down, and no longer seemed like a threat. From his explanation it seemed he took drugs to ascend to a higher phase, where this house was a laboratory he used to do alchemy. Other things were in that phase, and sometimes came after him.

  “So why do you want cyanide?” Meridin asked. He picked through the bag of crap Richard had brought as payment.

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  “What, I asked for HCN.”

  “Yeah hydrogen cyanide, it's a liquid poison.” He pulled out a bone from the bag, and licked it. “Good stuff,” he added, either about the bone, or poison.

  “That son of a bitch Priest, he must want it for the cult.” Richard had been forced to listen to Priest's sermons, and he now saw the hints that had been laid in them. “He's planning on using it when we get to the top of the mountain.”

  “Group suicide, very cultist,” Meridan replied seeming inordinately pleased.

  “I'm supposed to kill them all, dammit,” Richard swore.

  “Well from a certain perspective you will be.”

  “Not personally. I wonder if this... Shit, how do I not drink the punch without giving myself away,” Richard scratched his head, trying to figure out if his plan could still work.

  “I'm a little lost on these finer points, but if you want I could make you some antidote to cyanide?”

  “There's an antidote?”

  “Well it's kind of a different poison, sodium thiosulfate, but the two cancel each other out, more or less.”

  “How more or less?” Richard asked.

  “Hopefully not too much, though I could add a couple extras to help your odds, a bit of B12, and some other ends. I would need to go back up for it though, and the manyfaced might be waiting for it.” Meridan suddenly flew into panic. His nostrils flared and eyes rolled, like a spooked horse.

  “I could go with you, if that's what it would take.” Richard offered quickly. He was not exactly eager to trip balls and fight nightmare monsters, but anything was better than cyanide poisoning.

  “A second person would give them pause,” Meridan considered. “Very well, I can explain in detail while we prepare.” He went into the other room, and brought back the coffee maker. He fiddled with it, then put a package in the top. When he started it, the thing made a terrible noise, and Richard felt a drip of blood from his nose. The room spun around him, and he sat down on the floor. “My bad,” Meridan apologized, and tossed him a small bag. “Take a sniff of that, in each nostril.”

  More blood was coming out of both nostrils now, and Richard considered bolting for the door. The bag was full of a white powder, that was either cocaine or flour. Neither of which seemed that bad considering. He resolved himself, and took a sniff, relieved not to feel anything from the powder as his nose stopped bleeding.

  Meridan settled down, and adopted a lecturing tone. “To perform my brand of alchemy I must shift into a higher phase. You see, magic is like music. There are certain combinations of natural laws that form a chord, a place of ideal power, a resonance point in existence, each of these are a phase.”

  He gestured around. “We exist on one such phase, but the rules are different on each phase. In the higher phase I can use processes to magically convert chemicals into others. In the lower phase I can tease out matter from the zero. I don't go down lightly though, only very rarely. The whole world is different on this higher phase, and this shack is a guarded palace. There I reign as a lordm among beings beyond our senses.”

  “So on this phase you could turn lead into gold?” Richard asked. It was the most basic thing of alchemy that he knew.

  “Not on the phase we are going, but on one yes. You would not be able to handle reaching such a phase, alive at least.” He pointed to the coffee maker. “That is making sounds to adjust you towards the phase, and the brew will help.”

  “So would gods live in one of those phases?” Richard asked.

  “Of course, multiple at a time I would presume. Along with quite a few additional dimensions.”

  “So to kill one, you would have to attack all the phases together?”

  “It would certainly be wise. A deadly blow in one phase may just be scratching the skin in another.”

  Richard withdrew the case Julius had given him. “Would a nuclear explosion do that?”

  “What do you have there?” Meridan asked, seeming genuinely excited for the first time.

  “Plutonium-238, one kilogram of it.”

  Meridan let out a low whistle, through his yellowed teeth. “Now that is of some value. I suppose that much energy would spill over into multiple phases. I assume you don't have the components to actually achieve fission? Without that it's only so much rock. Could I convince you to part with it?”

  “If you can help construct me a bomb that will work, I can give you a third of it.”

  Meridan licked his lips. “A cloak of protection might do it. If you wrap enough explosives in one, with the magic bouncing it all back in. Then a second one wrapped around the plutonium, with an Achilles heel that allows all the force to enter in to a single point. Yes, that could work.”

  “Can you make those, cloaks of protection?”

  “I would need elements of great power to create the debasing agent, along with plundering my stores for the focusing reagents. The smallest batch I could dope is six liters. It would still take a hundred and sixty nine grams of the plutonium to do. I need to convert that into the proper elements. The process itself would take some time.”

  “The plutonium would come out of my share, I guess,” Richard said, figuring as much.

  “That would still leave you half a kilo of fissionable material, a hardly inconsequential amount.”

  “You said the smallest batch you could dope. Is that more than two cloaks then?”

  “My usual recipe results in an Achilles heel somewhere on the object, but having to make one without such a crutch would leave me still several liters of debasing agent,” Meridan answered, seeming to sketch the figure out in the air.

  “Then I want you to use the rest to enchant my coats.”

  “Very well. It is an equivalent exchange, I suppose.”

  Richard stripped out of his coats, tossing a few of the worst ones. With all his coats off he realized he was bare-chested. Whatever shirt he had once worn had literally fallen to pieces. He was instructed to keep the coats in a bundle on his lap, along with the plutonium. Much to his surprise, Richard realized he had abs. The fat he had lost since the apocalypse had revealed a hard core of muscle. With amazement, he looked at his lean, athletic build. An unfamiliar feeling of pride welled up, and his ego ballooned. He considered that his new self-confidence might have something to do with the drugs he had taken. He dismissed that as loser talk.

  The coffee maker dinged, and Meridan brought him the cup. Richard grimaced, preparing to drink whatever the strange brew was. With a mix of surprise and horror, he watched Meridan withdraw a syringe. He sucked up the liquefied sludge. “Quickly now, the back of the brainstem.”

  “I'm having second thoughts,” Richard objected, starting to stand up from floor.

  With a kick to his knee, Meridan sat him back down. “Now, now, much too early for seconds thoughts. You've barely gotten started.” With a jab, Richard found his strength disappearing. He rose up, as his body slumped. Parts of him he hadn't known existed swelled into full glory. Colors he had never seen before ran around him, and buoyed him upwards.

  With the most magnificent rush of drug induced euphoria, Richard fell unconscious.