The next couple of hours were a pleasant mix of music, wine, and science. The recipe I've used before calls for the dandelion petals to be steeped into a tea for up to a day, so finding a way to speed that up was my first task. I ended up settling on a few different methods to see which one would work best.

A quick boil being the first and most obvious way to extract the tea. I also tried shredding the petals with magic before boiling, along with crushing and squeezing them to get the juice out. But, the method I feel most confident about was one thought up by Amelia. She thought it would be a good idea to run hot, but not boiling, conjured water through the petals to extract their juice much like how I extract the sap from the rest of the plants.

Those four batches became twelve with the introduction of the sugars since I want to try out fructose, sucrose, and glucose just to see how each one turns out. And, twelve became many when I introduced the yeast.

"I work in a wine shop and I had no idea that brewing was so complicated." Helen says while waiting rather impatiently for the actual brewing to finish.

"This is nothing, sweetheart." Delilah corrects her. "Sorrel hasn't even started messing with the recipe yet, he's just trying to find a good yeast strain. Though I am interested in the different sugars, I never knew that plain white sugar was just two smaller sugars stuck together."

"I will be using fructose for the bulk of what I'll make in the future, just because I have so much extra." I explain. "But, I am curious about how the others will turn out. I only know the basics of brewing, but each strain of yeast has its own properties that will affect the brew to one degree or another. The most notable being how much alcohol they can produce."

"Are you adjusting the temperature at all?" Delilah seems just as eager as Helen, if not quite as impatient. "I'm no expert either, but I do know different brews work better at different temperatures."

"I have the yeasts all adjusted to their optimal temperatures right now." I nod. "But, I will be experimenting later by pushing them hotter and colder to see how it affects the flavor profile."

"They're starting to clear up already." Helen is practically vibrating at this point.

"Yeah, just let me rack them and they should be good to test in about a minute." While pushing the yeast and sediment back with nature magic, I make the brewing vessels pour their contents into wooden pitchers. Each one only holds about half of a liter, but this is more than enough for us all to get a taste.

"I suppose that's one way to do it." Delilah lets out a laugh.

"Amelia, would you help me cool them down?" She snorts at me, still a bit annoyed for earlier but does as I ask. "Oh, it looks like Apricot has already sniffed out a winner, the glucose and white grape yeast from the conjured water group."

"Some of the others are good too, mostly the ones that used Amelia's idea, but this one smells the best." She points out a handful of other batches. "A few of them didn't work out at all though." A double handful gets pointed out this time.

"I'll trust your nose." The bad ones get pushed back while the good brews get pulled forwards. "Now, shall we start with the best, or the worst?" I open the question up to the group, but they're already crowding around Apricot's chosen.

"This is pretty good." Lauren is the first to comment after taking a sip. "Especially for something made in minutes rather than weeks or months." A round of agreeing murmurs follow her words.

"Yeah, I've drunk worse." Helen smacks her lips.

I like it as much as everyone else does, but I'm more interested in the one fructose wine Apricot pointed out along with the sucrose and boiled petals batch. These both use the yeast I pulled from a fig. I only took the most populous strain from each fruit; otherwise, there would have been hundreds or even thousands of batches to test.

"This one's not bad." I swish a bit of the fructose batch around in my mouth before extracting the ethanol from another small sample. "Looks to be just over ten percent alcohol content." Magical distillation is much easier than figuring out the specific gravity.

"Wait, you can just pull the alcohol out? No need for a still or anything?" Lianna's eyes light up. "Thank the gods, I thought I would have to drink half of these pitchers just to get a little tipsy."

"I know beastkin have higher tolerances, but that much? Really?" She and all of her friends nod in answer to my question.

"Li-Li has always been like that." Delilah speaks up. "She's great for dealing with annoying men when we're out on a girl's night, but not so great if we want to have any coin left in our purses the next morning."

"Shut up." The redhead very gently swats her friend on the shoulder.

"Well, I'll be happy to make something stronger for you while we're working on the rest of the wines." I offer. "The rejects were just going to get turned into vinegar anyways."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Alright, I'm sold." She beams a smile at Amelia. "You can keep him; any man that can keep me supplied with alcohol is not one I want to see you getting rid of."

"Heheh, she can do the same trick." The blonde glares a bit at me when I say that. "And, Apricot could probably teach her to speed up the yeast too."

"Well, never mind then. Ditch his ass and keep the pixie." Lianna sticks her tongue out at me.

"Fine, I'll just take my clothes and leave." A melodramatic sigh leaks out of my mouth. "It's not like any of you wanted bespoke outfits or anything."

Helen, Lauren, and Delilah all tackle their friend, pinning her down and pasting their hands over her mouth. Amelia just looks on with a laugh for their antics.

"Don't listen to her." Lauren says with all the seriousness she can while sitting on the beastkin's chest. "Lianna's just a lightweight; she gets crazy and says all sorts of stupid stuff when she's drunk."

"Yeah." Helen nods along. "It's probably for the best that you cut her off entirely."

"MHRMRMRMM!!" Lianna tries to shout and throw them off, but they've got her pinned tight. This is obviously not the first time they've done this.

"Oh, let her up, girls." Amelia says with a sigh. "Sorrel isn't going anywhere, even if he is a bit of a jackass sometimes."

"But, I'm your jackass." I simper at her. "Ow, no hitting. At least save it for the bedroom later. Hahahahah." I crack up when she flushes and start walloping me for real.

"Go easy on him." Delilah speaks up in my defense. "He still needs to make us some clothes after all." Or maybe not.

"Don't forget about the booze." Lianna adds once they free her mouth.

"Heh." I chuckle after Amelia runs out of steam. "I should probably make some charcoal to filter out the different brews. It won't make up for a proper aging, but it might help. I'd like to make some activated charcoal, but the easy method takes time and the fast methods require strong acids or superheated steam. Two things I should probably not be playing around with in a party atmosphere..." I trail off as a thought strikes me.

"What is it?" Amelia has something of a long-suffering look on her face. "I know that look, you've thought of some way to make this fancy charcoal of yours."

"Oh, it's nothing really." I wave it off. "I just thought that the inverted draw matter spell might work well for this. It wouldn't be perfect, but if I can push away everything except the carbon during the charcoal making process. That should get me at least half-way there."

"Oh, fine." She rolls her eyes after Apricot sends her a puppy-dog look. "But, make us a batch of Apricot's favorite first. Some chairs too, we might as well get comfortable while you play around with magic."

""You're the best!"" Apricot and I say the same thing at the same time before pulling her in for a quick three-way kiss. "We should move around back, I'll set up a seating area by the river." I add after we separate to the cat-calls of her friends.

"Are you really going to invent a new spell?" Delilah steps closer to me as I lead the way around the house.

"Oh, I've already modified this one spell half-a-dozen times already." I pause for a second. "But, I guess since I'm inverting the basic idea it should count as a new spell on its own. I should give it a new name too since I'm not really drawing matter out anymore, I'll be moving unwanted stuff away. Maybe push, expel? No, Separate! Yeah, that works."

"Wine and chairs first." Amelia reminds me when with a flick to the forehead when I start slipping into spell creation mode.

Heeding her request before she decides to beat me up some more; I swiftly craft a dozen seats, each in a different style. All surrounding a depression in the ground that will soon be a fire pit.

"What is this?" Apricot giggles when I pick her up and set her in an egg-shaped, wicker basket full of cushions that is hanging from a tall wooden stand by a thick piece of rope.

"I saw how you were eyeing the girl's swing set." I reply with a smirk on my lips. "This isn't exactly the same, but I thought you would like it. Now, would you be a dear and help me pull up some stone for the fire pit? And, before you say anything. No, I won't strip down in front of Amelia's friends; I've been pushing her with my teasing enough as it is today."

"Fine." She pouts. "But, only because I like the chair." She makes it spin around in a circle before reaching out to pull up stone from the bottom of the river.

Amelia's friends look on with wonder as stone after stone rolls its way up onto dry land and into the depression I made for the fire pit. Once it looks like there's enough to work with, I take over and start shaping them together into one solid piece. After drawing the moisture out, of course. I don't want this to explode any more than the glass mold I made earlier.

"Nice." Apricot shoots me a thumbs up when she spots the hidden features I added to the carved exterior.

At first glance, the outside of the fire pit looks to be made up of a series of stylized flame carvings. But, if one looks closely, the negative space in between the carvings reveals a series of feminine forms. Forms that very much resemble the six women present, and in poses ranging from the sensuous to the downright erotic.

"Just wait until the fire is lit after dark." I reply with a smirk while waiting for the rest of them to notice. "I arranged the quartz so that the light of the flames will leak out."

"Sorrel, Baby. What is this?" Amelia says in a tight voice while pointing at an image of Lianna arching her back, her bare breasts pointing towards the heavens.

"What do you mean?" I put on my most innocent face. "It's just a fire pit; I thought the carvings would add a little something special to it."

"What is it?" Her friends crowd around to see what she's pointing at, but Delilah is the first to spot it and has to clasp her hand over her mouth to hold back the laughter. "Hahahahaha. Oh, gods. Are we all there?"

"You didn't?" Helen is the next to spot it and then starts hunting around to find the rest. "You did! Hahahah!" Her laughter erupts out when she finds one where Lauren looks like she's being 'embraced' by the flames.

"What is it?" Lianna stamps her foot on the ground after Lauren's face pales when she figures out what Helen is laughing about. "I can't see anything."

"Look between the flames." Delilah gasps out between giggles, her laughing fit renewed with every new hidden image she finds.

"I don't... wait. Oh, wow." She traces her hand over the first image that Amelia spotted. "How cool. But, man, I wish my tits were that perky in real life." This sets all of us to laughing, even Amelia who has been fighting to keep up the pout directed at me.

"... Fine, you can keep it." The blonde relents after seeing that her friends like it so much. "Just get started on the wine already." She rolls her eyes before flopping onto a chaise lounge.

"Yes, Ma'am." I prep a large batch of the wine Apricot picked out and start experimenting with some other fruit wines.