The first Quest was easy.

I retrieved the handful of blackberries, a tillandsia, a grape popsicle, and four pounds of 75/25 ground beef from Chelsea Market, and left it in the windowsill of 194 West 9th Street.

The wooden token that I found taped to the back of a fire hydrant across the street from Yankee Stadium I burned, but not before extracting two fingerprints first. They led me to the requester, a girl in her twenties by the name of Beatrice Stallard.

I followed her progression closely over the next several years, as she seemed like she had a good head on her shoulders. Smart but also creative. Willing to take risks. So many of our ilk had gotten lazy and entitled that it was refreshing to see someone take on the Quests with zeal.

Then I started hearing whispers on the streets about new alchemic creations.

I dismissed it at first. People had always been searching for hangover cures and the like, and if someone had decided that that was the market they were going to corner, well, I had bigger fish to fry. But the rumblings continued. A substance that made you strong as an ox with just one bite. Another that made your mind sharper than Einstein and quicker than a Jeopardy champion. That had been more troubling.

I eventually traced the source back to her and set up a meeting. Well, more like tracked her for a few days and then quietly approached her when her guard was down. She was cagey when I asked her for the source of her prima materia for what she called the “strength buff.” A stupid name for sure, reducing the majesty and might of magic and alchemy to something out of a video game. I didn’t even bother to check the location she told me, as I immediately knew she was lying. Also, it was all the way at the northern tip of the island and that place brings back bad memories.

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But I knew from after that meeting that Beatrice would have to be dealt with, one way or the other. The Guild is powerful, sure, but it likes playing with a stacked deck. The relative stability the organization has enjoyed for the past hundred years allowed it to quietly and methodically move pieces across the board to finally set up our endgame: the reintroduction of magic into the wider world with the Guild acting as the steadying hand for the tumult that would follow.

And Beatrice threatened to upend all of that before our work was finished.

Fortunately, an opportunity had presented itself in the form of one Douglas Kettner.

A disaffected millennial who had discovered the Quests, as so many do, during a late-night Internet search for meaning and purpose in this lonely modern world, Doug had become Beatrice’s trainee. And a potential entry point to use her for our purposes.

I observed them for several months and it soon became clear to me that I was mistaken. Not only was Doug infatuated with Beatrice, but that he lacked the necessary constitution to make an effective tool.

It would have taken some time, but I would have beaten him into shape as a dog trainer educates his charge.

Except Beatrice had other plans and that is why I found Mr. Kettner sitting at a table in one of the 6 ½ Avenue atriums, on the verge of death. I had known what she was up to weeks before, the prima materia required to make her death kiss a far cry from the pigeon spleens and rat entrails staples used by your run-of-the-mill alchemists.

And so I applied the antidote with relative ease and after a few minutes, Doug’s eyes fluttered open and he stared at me with a puzzled expression.

“Who … who are you?” he said.

“You can call me,” I said with a smile, “Gilbert.”