Jeb woke up inside his bed.
Something about that felt off, for all that he always woke up in his bed. Looking outside, it was nearly sunset.
Maybe that was the issue?
No, that wasn’t it.
Well, it was sunset, and that was strange, but that wasn’t the issue at hand.
Jeb’s mind felt strangely fuzzy as he tried to consider what felt wrong. Maybe standing up will help, he thought. With far less grace than his 21 Dexterity would suggest, Jeb finally made it out of his bed.
Trudging to the door, he felt somehow disconnected from his body.
Still, he managed to open the door and start walking down the stairs.
At the bottom, he saw his family all gathered for dinner. They looked at him with concern.
“Are you ok, Jeb?” his sister asked.
“Yeah!” he said, “though I am a little confused. It is sunset, right?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” his aunt asked in a sharp tone.
Jeb thought.
“Ummmm,” his mind felt blank. What was a memory? Had he ever remembered anything?
A look at his Status Sheet reminded him. “I unlocked Brewing,” he said, and his aunt nodded as though he should go on. “And you told me that I should go talk to the bees?” he inflected as a question. It felt like a truth, but he didn’t explicitly remember it.
“And then?”
“And then-” he suddenly realized the issue. “Oh no! Where did my lute go?!” He didn’t have the lute when he woke up. That must have been the issue.
“Right here,” his aunt said, handing him the lute. Jeb quickly took it out of its case.
Thankfully, the lute remained undamaged.
“So you went to talk to the bees,” his aunt reminded him.
“I went to talk to the bees,” Jeb confirmed. Holding the lute seemed to bring back some memories. “I told them about what I had been up to, and then I decided to start working on the Song.”
“And then?”
Jeb tried to remember. “The bees were moving with the Song. I remember that clearly. I figured out how to get the five strands all weaving together into a thread, and then-” Jeb stopped.
What had happened next?
“I don’t remember what happened next,” he admitted.
“Well, you’ve been unconscious for nearly two days,” an uncle finally chirped up. “Maybe try not repeating whatever went wrong.”
“Not the time,” Esther snapped, “Jeb, try to think about what happened.”
As Jeb started to eat, the fog on his mind started to lift. Knowing that he hadn’t eaten for two days, part of the fog seemed reasonable.
“I got the cord moving right, and then I ran out of Mana,” Jeb remembered the feeling of the thread snapping against his soul. He shuddered in memory. “Then I had bad Mana backlash, and I must have gone back to my room to sleep?” Jeb didn’t remember walking back, but that was the only explanation he could think of.
“Do you remember walking back?” his aunt asked, seeming serious.
Jeb thought about the question. “No?” he finally replied.
“Good. You didn’t walk back.”
Before Jeb could ask what that meant, she continued on.
“You collapsed in the middle of the field and one of your bees came to tell me. What went wrong?”
Jeb thought about that. “I think I just didn’t connect the thread of Mana to my lute, so it ended up backlashing against me instead.” His family stared at him, and he realized how strange that must sound without context.
“I’m really not sure how to explain it,” he said.
“Do you think you can avoid it in the future?” his aunt asked.
Jeb thought about that for a moment. He didn’t have a good way to increase his Mana, but he should be able to get his Song spinning more quickly. Maybe he could even guide the thread into the lute so it didn’t need to search.
“Yes?” he said, hesitantly.
“That doesn’t sound confident,” his uncle interjected.
“Pipe down.” his aunt said.
“Well, Jeb,” his Uncle Albert chimed in, “while you consider how to learn your Song without passing out for days at a time, would you like to learn another way to lose track of time?” He chuckled, then stopped as he saw that no one was laughing with him.
“I don’t get it,” Jeb admitted.
“It was a joke about how alcohol-” his uncle cut himself off, “never mind what the joke was. Do you want to learn Distilling with me tomorrow? At worst it will give you some more time to think about how to learn your Song.”
“That sounds great!” Jeb said. The idea of trying his Song yet felt somehow totally wrong. He knew his spirit hadn’t totally healed.
Dinner wrapped up and Jeb went back to his bed. To his surprise, despite having just woken up, he felt himself drifting off to sleep as he lay in bed.
Jeb woke up relatively late that morning. The first rays of sunshine were just breaking the horizon. The fog was lifted from his mind, though his spirit still felt sore.
After breakfast, Jeb followed his uncle to the Brewery again.
“Welcome to Distilling class,” his uncle said, “it should be much faster than learning Brewing. If we do it right, we should have you done with the Skill by the end of the day.”
Jeb nodded, growing excited.
“The most important thing to know about the Distilling Skill is that it does far less for a Distiller than Brewing does for a Brewer. A beer doesn’t need to age for a decade, after all, and most of what you wait for is the few weeks to months as yeast settles down. Various Class Skills can help with that, though.”
“So Distilling doesn’t reduce aging times?” Jeb asked.
“I hadn’t planned to get into a Theorycrafting lesson on Distilling,” his uncle admitted, “so I don’t have great answers to that. Yes, there are things Distillers can do to speed up aging. More than that, though, there are ways Distillers can improve the quality of what comes out of a still.”
He continued, “Sure, you can drink something straight out of a still, but it won’t taste good. Much of becoming a Distiller is in what you do to the liquid after it leaves the still. Since we’re helping you get this Skill for Magic, we can skip most of that information. Distilling as a Skill covers concentrating materials of interest by systematically extracting them with heat. I, not being a Mage of any sort, mostly concentrate alcohols.”
Jeb followed his uncle over to a looped creation of glass and copper. “Today we’re going to make some firewater, as it is one of the few alcohols that is rarely, if ever, aged. At its best, it is just alcohol and water, which is part of why it’s less interesting to Distillers, though it has uses. If you make firewater with wood alcohol, for instance, you can make something vaguely poisonous.” Jeb made a mental note for that. He didn’t think he would need to poison anyone, but knowing how to was never a bad idea.
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After a moment of thought, he realized that it would also be good for him to know to avoid poisoning himself or others.
“To make firewater, we start with a fermented liquid, usually prepared by a Brewer. Since all we care about is the alcohol, we use whatever source of sugar comes cheapest and whatever yeast will brew it the strongest. Go ahead and try a sip of the mash.” he gestured to the liquid in the pot.
Jeb did.
He nearly spit it out.
“It tastes awful, right? That’s because there are a lot of different and bad flavors in it that come from stressed yeast. If we were planning to drink it as is, we would need to let it age for a while just to let some of them degrade. Instead, we are just going to pull the alcohol off and leave the bad flavors behind.”
“How do we do that?” Jeb asked, a little confused.
“Alcohol and water boil at different temperatures, so if we slowly heat the mash, the alcohol will boil off first. We collect it,” He pointed to the different copper contraptions in the room, “and then cool it down. As you keep boiling it, different parts of the mixture start boiling off.”
“I’m still not sure I understand,” Jeb admitted.
“Have you ever poured a bunch of salt or sugar into a glass of water and let it evaporate?” Jeb nodded. “Similar to how the sugar or salt was left when the water was gone, the water will be left when the alcohol boils off. Of course, without anything else to take the heat, the water will boil pretty quickly too. That is why we collect the distillate in various portions.”
Jeb watched as his uncle heated the copper device. A slow drip of liquid slowly poured into the container at the other end.
“Now, before I keep going, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk to you about the two major kinds of stills. Generally, stills come as either pot or column form,” his uncle gestured at the two contraptions in front of Jeb. One resembled a massive kettle, and the other just looked like a massive column. He had his guess as to which was which.
“A pot still works much like a kettle on the stove. Liquid evaporates and moves up it. It is then cooled down and condensed.” That made sense to Jeb, especially since his uncle showed him what parts of the still were doing each piece of the process.
“A column still, on the other hand, adds a long tube to the top. As the evaporated liquid rises, it slowly cools off, which we can help by running water along it. Over time, this results in a much better temperature gradient, which we can then collect.”
“I don’t think I understand the difference,” Jeb admitted.
“Using pot stills, you cannot get to high levels of separation in a single batch, which is why coupled stills,” his uncle gestured to what looked like two pot stills welded together, “are used. In a column distiller, though, you can get all of that separation at once.”
That made some amount of sense to Jeb.
“Now then, pour the mash into this pot distiller.” Jeb did.
“Oh, I suppose I should mention while we’re here, most stills used by Distillers are made of copper. That’s because it heats well and removes bad flavors and smells from liquids poured into it, but we don’t have enough time to cover the many theories for why that is. Now, then, I’m just going to have you distill this mash to dry. Collect the material in these jars,” he gestured to a collection of small jars, “and whenever they fill up, replace them and seal the top so the liquid doesn’t get contaminated. Make sure to keep the jars in order. The slower you heat the liquid the better your distillation will be, so please take your time. Whenever you finish, come let me know and I’ll plan our next steps for getting you the Skill.”
“How should I heat it?” Jeb asked.
“Well, Esther mentioned that you can make fire, so I’d use that. Using Skills of your own generally makes it faster to learn new Skills, as opposed to having things handed to you. Whenever you run out of Mana, I’ll come over and show you how I generally heat the still.”
“How much fire should I be using?” Jeb asked, “sorry, I just don’t really know what I’m doing at all.”
“Start making it and I’ll tell you when you’ve got enough.”
Jeb called his Glyph to mind and a small fire kindled beneath the pot. Or, that was the plan at least. A large flame showed up as he forced his Mana through the Glyph in his soul.
“So less fire than that,” his uncle said, seeming unconcerned as tongues of flame licked up the still. Jeb forced the fire to grow smaller, struggling to hold control over the flame. The flame slowly grew smaller, aided by the lack of fuel outside of his Mana, but hindered by the new Depth of Mana that Jeb had. It was quickly becoming clear that he needed to focus more and more his control as his Mana grew deeper.
“That should be good. If the liquid starts coming out at more than a steady drip, you should turn it down, though.” his uncle said, then immediately walked away.
A quick look at his Mana showed Jeb that he still had plenty to keep the fire going for a while. He took a seat and watched the flames for a few minutes until he heard the first drops of liquid into the jar. A steady drip started going, and the first jar filled quickly. Jeb swapped it out for another jar and capped it.
As he sat there, Jeb realized that using his Mana wasn’t hurting like he’d thought it would. The matter of fact way that his uncle had told him to use it had distracted him long enough to prevent any panic.
Jeb’s Status Sheet at End of Chapter:
Jeb Human Age: 16 Class: Least Mud Initiate Level: 1 Experience: 3705/100
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Total Statistic Load: 250 Physical Load: 124 Strength: 28 Dexterity: 21 Endurance: 30 Vitality: 41 Presence: 4
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Mental Load: 126 Intelligence: 25 Willpower: 20 Magic Affinity: 43 Mana Depth: 21 Charisma: 17
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Mana: 570
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Glyph Attunement: 18 Least Shape Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Earth (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Shape Earth - Efficient (Modified) Tier 3 Spell Least Move Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Conjure Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Shape Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Water (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Air (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Destroy Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Move Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Hold Fire (Modified) Tier 1 Spell Least Create Mud (Modified) Tier 2 Spell
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Skills: Least Mud Magic Meditation Mana Manipulation Spell Glyphing Improved Glyph Groking Gift of Gab Running Identify Soil Savvy Animal Handling Fertilizing Lifting Athletics Lute Playing Singing Musician Pollination Brewing
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Achievements: Focused Meditator Student of Magic
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Quests: Major: Slay the Dragon of the West (Progressive)