Makhus really didn’t like this. He briefly considered the possibility of the incident in the back alleys having been pinned on him, but… Something told him that wasn’t the case. He wouldn’t have been very politely and discreetly led directly to the governor’s office, and besides…
“Oh. Oh that’s why they called me,” another thought immediately shot through his head when he finally stepped through that opulent door and saw the absolute state the governor was in. It honestly looked like he’d aged a decade since Makhus had last seen him, and that wasn’t even mentioning the truly prodigious bags under his sunken, bloodshot eyes.
He toked from what looked to be a Viriditas-infused cigarillo, drawing it down to the halfway point as he looked at Makhus and waited for him to finally take a seat. Unable to shake the tension, which wasn’t helped by the oppressive silence that the office’s insulation created, the swordsman-alchemist took a seat. The whole writing desk was covered by the greenish-grey smoke-Fog mixture, and he immediately felt the second-hand effects in the form of a familiar vigorous warmth that washed over the body and numbed pains.
Before he could lean back in his seat or really ask anything, Crovacus began to speak.
“I’m su-” he began, only to break into a horrendous coughing fit. Soon he hacked up a substantial glob of emerald-green phlegm, which trailed green Fog on its way into the trash can.
“My apologies, where were we… I need a competent alchemist, and you appear to be the most readily available,” he placated, taking a short toke and laying out what he had to say in earnest, his tired eyes burning with the sort of determination that drove a man into this extreme degree of overwork.
“What would you need my help for, sir?” Makhus asked with a distinct lack of decorum as far as his intonation went, raising an eyebrow.
“Look around!” the man gestured with his cigarillo at all the papers on and next to his desk. He leaned in and desperation flashed behind his glare, for but a second, “I’ve been working day and night, nonstop, with little more than an hour’s sleep per day, for the last two and a half weeks. Viriditas can’t keep me going anymore, I’ve tried drinking it, smoking it, nothing. It’s too temporary, and I’m not so sure I’ll be able to fully recover if I keep going like this.”
Makhus furrowed his brow and nodded. Slowly, exaggeratedly.
“I get it,” he said. “However, are you aware of the fact that I do not have the supplies to produce more complex restoratives and performance enhancers? We’ve scarcely even re-opened the store.”
The governor grinned, “I have already sourced everything necessary to produce ten times as much as I need. Deliver at all, your payment will be three-hundred and twenty gelt per dose. Keep delivering, and I will arrange for a direct supply contact from Kargaria’s Bluesky Alchemist’s Guild. No border holdups, no trigger-happy Inquisitors, I’ll even give you a tax exemption on whatever you get imported.”
He didn’t even know what it was that he would be making, and already Makhus had decided to accept. The offer would’ve been too good to be true under different circumstances, but considering the governor’s current state, plus his political position and the politicking that likely went on in the background… He was more than willing to believe that a stately sum and a couple favors in Kargaria were an acceptable price to pay for the politician in exchange for his own health and wellbeing. After all, Crovacus Estoras had a reputation for frankly unreasonable perseverance in business and politics alike, so much so that even a nobody like Makhus had heard of him before everything went to shit.
“Oho?” Makhus mused. “What is it that you would have me brew, then?”
For a few seconds, a few eternal, agonizing seconds, the two men stared each other down. There was no animosity between them, yet they still felt a mutual tension in the knowledge that, had their circumstances been even slightly different, they would be trying to kill one another.
“Fivefold Philter,” the governor croaked. “I need you to make me approximately a week’s worth of Fivefold Philter, that is to say three doses. You get paid half before and half after. After that, we can speak further on the nature of further agreements. I expect to require more than the initial batch relatively soon.”
Makhus couldn’t help raising an eyebrow, “...I apologize for my skepticism, but I’ll need to see these supplies of yours to believe that you have enough to make even those three doses, let alone thirty.”
“Why don’t you see for yourself?” the governor said with a smile, slowly rising from his seat. He walked over to one of the many shelves of his office, this one in particular decorated with a great many exotic, if mundane artifacts. Oil lamps, puzzle boxes, sculptures, and so on. Makhus followed suit.
The governor’s substantial frame obscured what he was doing, but soon there was a quiet click and a section of the wall swung inward to the sound of escaping gas. Makhus let out an inadvertent chuckle at this, thinking, “Of course he had a hidden chamber built-in.”
As quickly as the hidden door opened, Crovacus slipped on through with Makhus following closely behind, at which point the governor pulled an entirely unconcealed lever on the wall that made the door swing shut and seal itself to the sound of a click-clacking mechanism. The alchemist was impressed, remarking as he followed in the governor’s stead, “Seals to prevent a draft, and opens inward to not leave any marks on the floor. Does the door somehow fake the sound of a solid wall when you knock on it too?”
“Nice guess, it does,” Estoras chuckled before he turned and walked down the hidden passage. It was too short to be called a corridor, little more than an intermediary room with another door at the other end. This one was effectively just a downsized vault door, likely there to stonewall any unwelcome entrants. It had four separate dials and two bizarre keyholes with multiple right-angle turns and zigzags each, obviously designed specifically to stump lockpickers.
Crovacus reached into the pocket of his suit pants and pulled out an elaborate, frankly ridiculous-looking key with a head consisting of multiple moving pieces, rotating several into position and sliding others all the way back so they wouldn’t enter the keyway. It didn’t even look like it would fit until he pushed it against the keyhole, only for some of the parts to fold under the pressure as the key clicked into the mechanism. With his left hand he reached for the first dial, turning it back and forth with practiced speed and precision as he slowly turned the key clockwise by small increments.
He had turned the key a quarter of the way by the time he stopped fiddling with the first dial, moving onto the second and continuing the process that now became clear to Makhus. Each correctly input number in the sequence allowed the key to turn a little further, and it would take all four dials in the correct order to open the door. Both that door and the room it was attached to had better been nigh indestructible with such a complex locking mechanism, seeing as it would be rendered useless by a simple hole in the wall.
It was at least another minute before the key had turned all the way around and the loud clack of the door opening resounded, swinging noiselessly inward on its hinges. Following the governor through to the other side, the alchemist saw that the hidden room truly was a reinforced vault, whose solid metal walls were etched with distinctly Grekurian-style glyphs. From kinetic dispersion and structural reinforcement, to glyphs that almost exactly matched those used on essentia-stabilization seals. A third of the room was stacked floor to roof with boxes, whilst another third had boxes of varying sizes and designs, from simple crates to elaborate puzzleboxes. There was a bulky, metal table off to the right, many smaller boxes stacked underneath it. Crovacus walked between a few crates, vanishing from sight for a moment before he re-emerged with a utilitarian-looking grey lockbox with two dials and a different, but still ridiculously malicious keyhole.
Setting it down on the table, the governor rearranged his key, slid it into the slot, and started turning dials again. Back and forth, back and forth, turning the key all along. Half a revolution for one dial, half for the other, and the box came open with a click and the hiss of escaping gas.
When he stepped in to take a look at its contents, Makhus knew the governor hadn’t exaggerated a single word of his claims, and he felt like a child in a candy store.
Within the box, there were recesses padded with pure white Fog-infused silk which gleamed iridescently in the light. In the largest recess, taking up some half of the box’s total volume, there was a flask of four necks and shaped like a human heart, densely etched with very particular, smooth-flowing glyphs both within and without. These glyphs were a masterful replication of a dead genius’s replication of the dungeons’ own internal machinations, improved upon and adjusted through decades of trial and error.
“Carved from a single piece of quartz that had been submerged in liquid Aether and bathed in moonlight,” Crovacus remarked, even though Makhus already knew this to be the case. It had to be, otherwise the flask wouldn’t be able to hold the core of its operation.
A spherical stone of black quartz no larger than an eyeball, so black it looked like a hole in the world itself. It was suspended in the center of the flask, surrounded by three concentric, glyph-etched rings that were each made from an alloy of cold-iron, electrum, and copper brass, bathed in human blood, and worn by a dying man at the moment of his death.
It was a tool that was so vital to the modern alchemist’s trade, so miraculous in its capabilities, that its name was almost an understatement of its importance - the Philosopher’s Heart. Never had the archaic creation rituals been strayed from with a successful result, for nearly nobody understood the bizarre machinations behind it all. Even its enigmatic creator seemingly didn’t understand his creation, his notes having been written in an alchemically-induced creative delirium that inevitably led to his death.
This inadvertently completed the containment ring creation ritual of the very first flask before it was assembled by the one who discovered his corpse: none other than the Sage of Fog himself, if the stories were to be believed. Makhus wagered the Sage was simply given credit.
The other recesses held more mundane, but equally vital items for the creation of the Fivefold Philter. There were three phials labeled as blood, assumedly the governor’s, three phials of glimmering, silvery liquid that he assumed to be liquid Aether, and nine phials filled with crystalline grains of varying colours.
Blood-red, sulfur-yellow, coal-black, bright orange, and light blue.
Rubedo, citrinitas, nigredo, ignis, aqua.
Pure, highly reactive essentia, stably suspended within a variety of salts. A highly compact, more shock-resistant alternative to seal-bottles, but far more resource and time-intensive to produce.
Struggling to tear his eyes away from the black sphere, the alchemist looked the governor in the eye. “I trust that you will make good use of this tool beyond making Fivefold Philter for me,” the governor said with a knowing smirk.
“You won’t want this back once I’m done?” Makhus questioned, having assumed up until now that he would only have access to the flask temporarily. It was a terribly expensive thing to procure, after all.
Except, the governor just shook his head, “A Philosopher’s Heart is useless without a competent alchemist to make use of it. Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately for you, an ex-military nobody like you is more trustworthy than most of my other options.”
Makhus left that office with the lockbox, its key, and the numbers to unlock it, plus the first half of his payment. It was of course under the promise that he would deliver three doses of Fivefold Philter as quickly as he could make them. He hadn’t lied about knowing how to make it - it was difficult and complex compared to basic elixirs, but the process was solid and consistent when done right. There was no need to babysit the setup throughout the entire process, like he had to do with the Necrobeast Infusion.
As he made his way through the town’s streets back to Riverside Remedies, Makhus dwelled on that creation. It was a resounding success as far as his original method of Azoth refinement went, but… Makhus’ inner curiosity wouldn’t let him leave well enough alone. He knew it could be improved with better equipment, the trait-bestowing effects could be made more potent, the impurities further purged.
After having dwelled in his own thoughts for most of the walk back, the alchemist finally recognized the familiar buildings that surrounded Riverside Remedies. A pang of concern shot through his head, for he heard a great deal of ruckus coming from the storefront. Yelling and arguing in a mix of heavily accented Ikesian and native-level Pateirian, which blended together into a mess that was barely coherent even as he got close enough to see what was going on.
A suspiciously heavy-set young man was banging on the door, yelling about how he’d “have the filthy war-criminals that run this drug den arrested”. He wore outwardly civilian clothes, but Makhus recognized a few telltale signs that pointed him out as a Pateirian operative, even though by his darker skin tone and brownish hair he looked to be some mix of Ikesian and Grekurian ethnicities. Very particular folds on the beige dress shirt, the green jade of his cufflinks, his distinct facial hair, and most egregiously the fact his boots were just outright taken from a Pateirian officers’ uniform. It wasn’t too uncommon to see folks wearing salvaged or traded ones, sure, but these were damn-near pristine, and they fit perfectly. In Makhus’ mind, there was no way in hell this guy didn’t answer to some malfeasant zipperhead.
With a heavy sigh, he sped up a little bit and switched the lockbox to his wounded arm so that he could knock the guy out with his good arm, if it came to that.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Y’mind layin’ off the ruckus? We’re closed, says on the door,” he said in as polite a tone as he could manage to grab the thug’s attention. The man whipped around, looked Makhus up and down, and grinned.
“How convenient that we’ve met like this!” he sleazed, barely able to suppress the singsong western accent, “The uh… The city quarter’s militia master has given the order to confiscate any military surplus weapons, and we’ve gotten a tip that you might be storing some war-knives and sparklocks.”
Makhus had to hold back a chuckle, as he knew that Willowdale’s militia was only divided by city quarters for the purposes of defending the town from outside threats, and that the people who managed the militia were not even called “militia masters”. The term “militia master” did match the literal translation of a Pateirian term for a town guard commander, however. Plus, no way in hell did the militia have the authority to permanently disarm any citizen for any reason, unless they were being tried for a serious crime.
Closing his eyes for a moment and letting out a sigh, the alchemist dropped any pretenses of amiability and stared the thug down with just a mote of the resentment that roiled behind his eyes.
“Just get lost,” he seethed, stepping forward. “I’ve got better shit to do than get lied to by some cat-eater’s pet thug.”
Anger flashed across the man’s face briefly before it was overtaken by a false, polite smile, as he said, “I’m sorry Sir, but I must insist. As per the War-crime Persecution Treaty, I am obligated to pursue any and all avenues of investigation.”
Despite the surface-level pleasantries, the man’s squinted eyes and honeyed words both dripped venom and hatred.
The Swordsman spat back with the very same venom, “Do you think you’re hard enough, little man? You think I ain’t seen ten dozen tinpot tyrants just like you in my service? You think I ain’t drown fuckers like you in trench mud for fun? You don’t scare me. Leave my store right this second or I’ll make you understand why your joke of an emperor hates us so much.”
“Will you really die for some tarnished steel?” the man laughed, too taken aback to be furious at the barrage of threats and insults he had just weathered.
Makhus allowed his hand to slide down to the hilt of his war-knife, looked the man up and down, then spat at his feet. He took a breath, focusing just enough to produce some Fog in his lungs. “Someone will, if you don’t leave right now,” he said, exhaling a silvery wisp big enough to make it clear that he wasn’t fucking around.
Much to his satisfaction, the thug quickly and quietly backed away, muttering something about how he must’ve made a mistake as he ambled down the street. After observing him for a little while to make sure he wouldn’t just stop and come back, Makhus slipped into the store and locked the door behind himself. He made his way down to the basement to drop off the lockbox, before returning to the upper floor to finish the meal that the governor’s investigator had so rudely interrupted.
“How’d things go? And what was the deal with that noise out front?” Sig murmured questions under his mustache, crunching down walnuts between words and reading some pulpy, fake martial arts book. Its overlong, gaudy title boldly touted:
Learn the Uragánrana, and other lethal maneuvers from far-off lands!
Makhus cut himself a piece of the disappointingly small roast chicken they had cooked, sat down at the table, and explained the situation as he ate.
----------------------------------------
Emerging from the Fog Gate at the other side had both Zel and Zef rearing at the complete incongruity of this chamber with all those previous. It seemed as though entering more deeply into the dungeon, as though coming closer to the dungeon core, only rendered the dungeon more advanced. More elaborate. And most likely, more lethal.
The architecture was more elaborate, more well thought-out, with arched ceilings and elaborately-decorated lightgems. They were set at a lower height in the wall, opposite pairs connected by glowing lines that ran down the wall and across the floor. Everything was clean, perfect, untarnished, as though not a single locust had stepped foot in this particular chamber.
It was just a rectangular room with a door at the other end and a towering statue right in the center, rendered entirely in black stone. The figure depicted a heavily abstracted, vaguely humanoid emaciated figure with a skull-like face draped by a curtain of hair and crowned with jagged antlers. Behind the long hair, one could see the gaping holes that were its eyes as well as a gaping maw. It was hunched over, its limbs long and distended, the right arm pulled back as if to lash out whilst the left just hung limp.
“What in the… Do you recognize that at all?” Zefaris wondered out loud, furrowing her brow as the realization dawned on her.
Before Zel could answer, the statue’s eyes lit up and it came alive, moving about with lifelike smoothness to the subtle sound of smooth stone rubbing against itself. It sat down with its legs crossed, holding up its long-clawed hands splayed out in a beckoning gesture. It was then that Zelsys noticed a major discrepancy. Its claws were not claws at all, but curved, hollow needles. For a few seconds she stood still, then took a step towards the statue to see if it would react.
“This is the man-eating beast I dealt just after we first arrived in Willowdale,” she said, still cautiously observing. “The dungeon offered to refine an Azoth for me, and I only had this one.”
“But… What is it? It looks like something I’ve seen in a book, but my memory is hazy…” Zefaris wondered aloud, audibly befuddled as she tilted her head and walked around the thing to get a look at it from different angles.
The statue did respond to that question, even though it was with a noticeable delay. It “exhaled” a long thread of Fog from a hidden spout in the back of its mouth, which as expected formed into writing in front of its face.
The Maneater of Retribution
It faded, then a new wisp came forth.
Azothic Trait Purged: Obligate Cannibalism
Then, another, this time faster.
Azothic Trait Purged: Hyper-Accelerated Metabolism
And another.
And another.
It sped up so abruptly and so significantly, that it flickered by faster than either of them could reasonably read. Zelsys managed to make out the general gist of it, the message being clear: The dungeon had excised the vast majority of what made the maneater a beast, whilst reinforcing the traits that it thought would be desirable. She quickly realized that the statue’s hands were not held out in a beckoning gesture, but rather held out so that she could place her forearms within their grasp, and this assumption was soon confirmed by the statue’s last exhalation. It wasn’t a thread that formed into words, but rather a continuous spout that slowly drifted down and formed into a humanoid shape in front of the statue. The shape stood upright with its back against the statue, with its forearms aligned squarely within the statue’s grasp.
Zel chuckled, already reaching for the straps on her arm-harness to pull it off. “Might as well get this done quickly,” she sighed, holding out the harness for Zef to hold so she wouldn’t have to just drop it on the ground.
Zef took it into her hands. Sounding more curious than distrustful, she questioned, “You think the dungeon is trustworthy enough for that?”
“It hasn’t lied to me yet. I honestly don’t think it could lie to us even if it wanted to,” Zel replied, stepping into place with the Fog silhouette and sliding her arms into the statue’s hands, dissipating the silhouette in the process.
“Fair po-” the blonde began, only to cut herself off when a cage of ribs burst from the statue’s chest and enclosed itself around Zelsys, tightly enough to hold her still. Two threads of Fog came forth from the statue’s mouth, both of which formed into the same words, merely mirrored so that both Zel and Zef could read them. Even still, Zelsys had to awkwardly crane her head.
The restraints are for the recipient’s safety.
Zelsys herself wasn’t worried, she had no alarming gut feeling, but she could tell that her counterpart was very much concerned, what with that look on her face and the fact she was reaching for her gun. She looked over and just gave a confident grin, nodding reassuringly.
Zef nodded back, though she still pulled that beast of a gun from its holster, justifying it with the words: “Just in case.”
The statue stirred to movement soon after, perhaps of its own volition or perhaps because it interpreted the preceding exchange as the signal to begin. Its grip closed around her forearms, its hollow, freakishly long claws rotating within their sockets ever so slightly before they slipped into her skin, some finding veins whilst others plunged into muscle. At first, the pain was what she had expected, but soon it was washed away when static-like heat shot up her arms and into the rest of her body from each of the needle-talons drawn along her skin by a visible silver glow.
A moment after that, Zel felt liquid flood in. Some of it entered her veins directly, whilst another portion was injected into muscle, but regardless of where it was injected, it burned. It burned not as if it were a high temperature or as if it were damaging her body, but it was… Some bizarre, icy burning that didn’t even feel like burning of any physical substance at all.
She felt it flowing up her bloodstream and into her heart alongside that strange thrumming pins-and-needles sensation, so focused on what was happening to her that she didn’t even notice the fact that she had shut out the outside world. For what, to her, felt like a scarce moment, she drifted away from the world of awareness, only to get yanked out of that peaceful abyss by a voice that sounded like grinding stone, echoing inside her head. It was like a murmur, at first.
Only, when she opened her eyes there was no chamber around her, and she wasn’t even secured in that statue-contraption. She still felt those needle-talons in her arms, the static, the icy-hot burning liquid coursing into her almost as quickly as her body broke it down and absorbed it.
Yet where she was now, Zelsys found herself standing on the surface of a sea that stretched to the horizon in every which direction, an endless cover of silver Fog rolling over its glowing-white surface.
“Be forewarned: The Parasite is trying to take control, that it might crush you using the statue,” it thundered over the foggy sea, simultaneously from everywhere and nowhere. It was loud and resolute, yet also soft and refined. In her mind’s eye, Zelsys imagined the source to be one of those soft, yet muscular statues she saw on the bridge, just made of black stone rather than white.
“You don’t speak like the dungeon core,” Zelsys guessed on a gut feeling, looking about in her utterly barren surroundings in an attempt to see something to latch onto.
“Correct. I am Subcore Delta, an autonomous part of the core,” the voice said, taking off on a short explanation. “Where the core cannot act on this floor, I step in. We still have some time, seeing as I’ve dilated your perception of time, so here is another piece of advice: The statue’s ribs are not strongly anchored. Even if the serum does not take effect immediately, or if its effect is particularly subtle, you should be able to force yourself free with that crude Fulgurkinetic method of breaking your physical limits. That is all I can say for now, though I wager we will meet...”
The thrumming sensation stopped shooting up through her arms. Simultaneously, the cold burning started to fade as Zelsys absorbed the last of the serum, and she felt a weird sensation at the points of injection just before she felt herself fading again.
Zefaris couldn’t help feeling concerned when she saw Zel so nonchalantly step into that macabre contraption, even if nothing seemed amiss for the first twenty or so seconds. The needles were huge, sure, but she didn’t seem unwell, until her eyes suddenly went blank moments before the chamber’s lightgems suddenly flickered to red and started flashing. At that moment she knew something was wrong, as she’d noticed that something always goes up shit creek when the light turns red, be it lightgem or glyph. So, she took a deep breath in preparation, felt the Fog filling her lungs.
She saw the statue’s claws pull back, leaving behind globs of black, tar-like glue that sealed the entry wounds, only for the statue’s ribs to stay put. Its hands twitched about, its eyes flickering between blue and red, even as Zel’s arms slipped out of its grip and hung loose by her side. It finally settled on red, the statue’s hands surging inward to impale Zelsys through the gaps in its rib cage.
There was no hesitation in her mind, when Zefaris saw it happening. Raising Pentacle to take aim, pulling the trigger, exhaling Fog, all in sequence as the statue moved to riddle Zel with holes. Zefaris planted a bullet in each of the statue’s shoulders, just in the nick of time, just as Zel’s eyes flickered open.
It was just barely in time, as the statue’s arms screeched and scraped to a halt just as a few talons sank a centimeter or so into Zel’s side. Zef could clearly see the jolt of pain jump across her face.
There flashed a strange light behind her right eye, a murderous glow accompanied by the emergence of a Fog wisp from the tear duct. It was brief and barely noticeable, but the Homunculus Eye still saw every detail. Was that something new, or old? There wasn’t time to ruminate now, as Zelsys sucked in a breath and, with a long exhalation, reached out, grabbing the statue’s arms. With a forceful pull that looked easier than Zef felt it should’ve, Zelsys finished the job and ripped the statue’s arms right off their shoulders to send them smashing down to the ground.
With another breath, she almost effortlessly yanked the stone ribs that caged her from their sockets. She reached out, her eyes wordlessly jumping to her cleaver and then to Zef’s face. The markswoman grabbed the holster by its straps with the hand in which she held the bayonet, hefting it over to her counterpart. Even with this greater strength, the blade still felt impractically heavy.
Zefaris looked on, watching her counterpart pull the massive blade free of its sheath and grip its guard with her left hand, taking a deep breath before she wrathfully roused its sawteeth and smashed them against the statue’s neck. To the markswoman’s surprise, the statue responded to its neck being ripped into, spitting some Fog that formed into a Pateirian symbol. Then, again, and again, and again. It formed new symbols at the same rate as it had previously, only they were in Pateirian and very recognizably different in handwriting than the dungeon’s.
Within seconds, Zel was out of breath, taking a few more seconds to fill her lungs again before she made the sawteeth continue their screaming. Seeing her so barbarously butcher the statue really made obvious just how different the Breath Engine breathing technique was from the one that came naturally to her - she spent almost as much time breathing as she did actually sawing away at the statue, where with engine breathing she would’ve been able to keep sawing with little to no downtime.
After the first four, or perhaps five cycles, when she was about halfway through the neck, Zelsys began audibly invoking the words of a technique she hadn’t used in a little while.
“Beheading Saw! C’mon, Beheading Saw!” she growled angrily, obviously just taking out her temper on the functionally inanimate object, though it had a very noticeable effect. Each time she invoked it, she exhaled substantially more Fog than she would’ve otherwise, and the saw sunk further into the statue’s neck than it would’ve just through its own ability to chew through black stone. It was only a little while longer before the statue’s head thudded to the floor, its weight breaking its antlers on impact. The lightgems flickered back to normal, signifying the departure of the malevolent influence.
Breathing heavily, the silver-eyed beast-slayer looked to Zef and she felt an ever so brief flutter in her gut.
“I ah… Y’alright?” she drawled, tilting her head as she looked down at the shallow, already-clotting puncture wounds on her lover’s torso.
Looking herself over, Zel stretched in a frankly shameless and unnecessarily teasing manner, then shot Zef a look of smug self-satisfaction as she said, “Yeah, I think I’ll be good. Might want to sit down for a bit, update the Tablet and see if it can show me what the serum did, though.”