Albert’s ‘guy,’ as it turned out, wasn’t a guy at all, but a woman. And she was none-too-pleased when Albert walked into her shop, a gaggle of buddies in tow.

The shop in question, called Dire Brew according to the sign over the door, had a glass façade that was taken up entirely by a complicated display of various ampules, bottles, and vials; a small cast iron cauldron even simmered merrily in one display window.

When they entered the shop, a small bell tinkled merrily to announce their arrival. The interior was laid out like a headshop, with glass display counters lining the walls and a path behind them for the shop’s employees.

A very beautiful woman sat behind a counter at the rear of the shop. She had an olive complexion and long, dark hair that flowed past her shoulders in sweeping waves.

Albert raised a hand in greeting as they entered, calling out, “Mary the Apothecary! Great to see you again!”

“What the hell are you doing in my shop?” Mary hissed. She raised an arm with a large bottle in her hand, which held what looked like a roiling black smoke.

Griffin surreptitiously pulled Aaron by the arm so that the large man was between him and whatever was in that bottle, just in case the woman decided to throw it at them. Albert held his hands up in front of him and wheezed a quiet laugh, which probably didn’t do much good in the way of de-escalation. Kiara looked like she was ready to pull out a shank, but she also put her hands up.

“Let’s everybody keep cool, okay?” Kiara said.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Griffin added.

Mary’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead and she fixed Griffin with an incredulous gaze. “Then why are you walking around with him? He’s nothing but trouble!”

“I might’ve forgot to mention that Mary is an ex,” Albert stage whispered sheepishly. “It, uh…it didn’t end great.”

“It didn’t end gr-” Mary began, before Kiara cut in.

“Listen, I work with this guy so I know he’s a pain in the ass, but we’re not here for a social visit. We’re here to buy.”

“We can make him wait outside. Y’know, like a dog,” Griffin offered.

“I’m not going to let this mook slime up my shop — not even for a minute — for a few silvers in trade,” Mary said.

“We’re not here to buy bubblegum, we’re looking to spend gold,” Kiara said.

Mary rolled her eyes and sighed. She addressed Kiara and tried very hard not to even look at Albert. “What are you looking for?”

“Healing potions, mostly, but we’d be interested in some utility draughts, as well.”

“What kind of utility?” Mary asked.

Griffin stepped in to answer that, pulling Aaron into a one-armed hug. “Our buddy here wants to do some delving with us, so we’re looking to make sure he’s got a couple panic buttons in case things go sideways.”

“Something that will get him out of trouble for a bit, especially if we’re separated,” Kiara added.

Mary tapped her lips with her index finger. “A vanishing potion would be the obvious choice. They work best in low light with slow movement.”

“So like an invisibility potion?” Aaron asked.

“No, nothing as potent as that. I doubt you or your friends want to spend that kind of lux for a first-time delver,” Mary said. “It combines a bit of light diffusion, shadow manipulation, and chameleon effects. It will make you much harder to spot, especially with favorable conditions, but it’s not nearly as powerful as a true potion of invisibility.”

“That sounds fairly solid, but do you have anything with a little more versatility?” Kiara asked. “Like, for instance, if you don’t have time to assess your environment or prepare to maximize the benefits of a vanishing potion?”

“You could get a shadow body potion. It lasts ten minutes, which is as long as a vanishing potion, but it turns your body into an animated shadow. Costs more, but you get way more utility out of it.”

“That sounds rad,” Griffin said. “How much for each?”

“You want the prices in gold or lux?” Mary asked.

Griffin scratched his head. “What’s the difference?”

The difference, as it turned out, was that Mary hated doing the math to convert lux into the various coinage as much as Aaron did, so she discounted her products if you had the coin and didn’t force her to make change. The arbitrary differences in the level of discounts proved it was an engine of personal convenience and not an issue of economics.

If you paid in coin, Mary cut almost twenty percent off the price of invisibility potions, ten percent off healing, and less than five percent off shadow body. It might have looked like it followed some kind of logic, but invisibility potions were cheapest at one gold each and healing cost five times as much. If it were a ploy to pad her bottom line, Mary would likely only discount the healing potions by five percent and the shadow potions, squarely in the middle price-wise, by ten. She cut into her profit margins slightly just so she could round down to the value of the nearest whole coin.

“Let’s get three healing, two invisibility, and one shadow potion,” Kiara said. “That should be twenty gold.”

“Right on the money,” Mary said.

Albert leaned one elbow on the counter between them, grinning at Mary with a loose approximation of charm. “Would you be willing to apply your ‘no math’ discount to the total and let us get everything for two plat?”

Mary closed her eyes for a moment and took a slow, deep breath in through her nose. Then she turned to face Albert, the ex-boyfriend vibes were stronger than ever.

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“You’re already getting a discount of two gold and two silver because I can’t be bothered to do a bunch of arithmetic and now you’re asking if I’ll shave another two gold off?”

“I just wanted them to see that you use the discount as an excuse to cover for your generous nature, not because you can’t do the math,” Albert said, winking at the alchemist. “‘Two gold and two silver,’ she says.”

Aaron and Kiara studiously arranged their faces so the laughter they were holding in wouldn’t be so obvious. Griffin, meanwhile, ostentatiously — and noisily — dug about in his waist pack for the coins, producing much more clinking from his hidden waist pouch than was strictly necessary.

One of Mary’s eyes was twitching and it was even odds if she would lunge across the counter or hurl some vial of explosive poison at Albert.

Before things could take a turn for the stupid, Griffin stepped up to the counter, looming over Albert and Mary and disrupting their staring contest. He placed four coins on the glass — two platinum and two gold — and directed a big smile at Mary.

“This is a real bargain,” the big man said, beaming. “Albert says you do quality work and for these prices? Yes, ma’am, it’s quite the bargain.”

Something about the way Griffin was talking had a sinister air; there was a quality to his bearing or tone that set Aaron’s hackles to rise. He didn’t know why, at first, and that made the incongruity with what he knew of Griffin’s personality that much more jarring.

Then he realized that Griffin’s smile — that wide, beaming grin — didn’t reach the big man’s eyes. It gave Griffin’s height and powerful build a menacing air instead of the ‘gentle giant’ aura he usually exuded. Mary noticed, too, because she stopped packing the small vials of potions into a little slotted box and gave Griffin her full attention.

“I can tell Albert annoys the shit out of you — and rightly so, since he’s an annoying little rodent — but,” Griffin continued, still grinning that mirthless grin. “I’d hate to think your frustration with him caused a slip up that led to you selling us potions that were, uh, let’s say unreliable.”

“Griffin,” Kiara said, though quietly enough he could pretend not to hear.

“If something like that happened and it led to our friend getting hurt, or worse,” Griffin said, pausing to let the idea hang in the air. “Well, then I don’t know what.”

In the wake of Griffin’s implied threat, the shop screamed with silence. No one seemed quite sure how to respond or, barring that, at least move the proceedings along in a way that wasn’t horridly awkward.

Aaron neither enjoyed nor appreciated someone making threats on his behalf; he felt like this was a moment where staying quiet would have been no better than making the threat himself.

There’s a time for that kind of tactic, he thought, but a friend’s ex selling you stuff from their small business isn’t it.

He stepped up to the counter, placed a hand on Griffin’s shoulder, and took a deep breath, not entirely sure what he was going to say until his mouth started moving.

“Save it for the longhouse, you gargantuan Swede,” he said, before turning to Mary. “I’m sorry for him, he’s being an overprotective, paranoid goon. And I’m sorry for Albert, he’s being… well, he’s being Albert. I could see how that would be trying in these difficult times, but I’m sure your products are great and I have complete faith in them.”

There was a round of nervous chuckles and Mary resumed placing the vials into the neat little traveling box she used in lieu of shopping bags. She waved one hand in front of her face, as if to brush away the awkwardness of the moment.

“I stand by every potion I sell, but even if I didn’t… how can I put this?” she said, pausing to choose her next words. “It’s like this — if Albert were drowning in a river of piss, I’d stop long enough to put on gloves and poke him in the eyes. That doesn’t mean I’d ever try pawning off shoddy goods to the fucking dragons. That’s a one-way road to ruin.”

Aaron frowned. “If we have to be an awful nation-state, I’d rather people think of us like a post-war America rather than a vengeful and vindictive Rome, but I guess that’s picking nits from a wider perspective. Not much difference if you’re the one being stomped on by the big kid in class.”

“Nobody wants to be the baddies,” Albert said.

Mary rolled her eyes, closing the lid on the small box with the potions they’d bought inside. “In any case, I hope you won’t need the potions, but they’ll do what it says on the label if you do. And I’ll welcome any future business you might have for me, too.” She paused for a moment, then jerked a thumb towards Albert. “Although, maybe you could leave that weasely fuck at home, if at all possible.”

“We can’t promise that — he might piss on the carpet, after all — but we’ll try,” Kiara said.

When they were outside Mary’s shop, Griffin and Kiara took turns smacking Albert on the back of the head. They gave the smaller man two earfuls of shit about ‘bad comms’ and ‘shoddy intel’ for not making them aware of his past relationship with the alchemist, especially since that it had ended so obviously poorly.

“So when, exactly, did you date that woman?” Kiara asked, her tone icy. “And how did you manage it when she’s so far out of your league?”

Griffin was nodding vigorously. “I’ve heard a ton of your sketchy hookup stories, but I had no idea you’d ever actually had, like, a relationship.”

“Well it was ages ago, the world was a completely different place,” Albert said.

Kiara snorted derisively. “How was it a completely different place? It’s not like any of us are all that old.”

“I mean, I can prove it,” Albert said, pulling out his phone. He scrolled through it for a few seconds, then held it out to them. “Okay, look at this.”

His phone was open to a Spotify playlist titled My Alchemical Romance. There were groans and much eye rolling from the others, but they went through the playlist. It included quite a few songs Aaron remembered being massive hits back when he was in college, or maybe a little before.

Some of them were really famous, like We Are Young by Fun, We Found Love by Rihanna, Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, and Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye. Those songs had been on the radio for what felt like forever, played in a near endless loop of beating a horse well past death. But there were some really odd, meme-y songs in the mix, too, like Thrift Shop by Macklemore, What Does the Fox Say? by Ylvis, Threw It On the Ground from The Lonely Island, and Gangnam Style by Psy. Aaron didn’t know what the playlist was supposed to be proving except that Albert could make the most erratic playlists in the history of music.

“This is the most absurd playlist I’ve ever seen,” Aaron said.

“That’s the playlist I made while we were dating, from like 2011 to early 2013,” Albert said. “You’re going to tell me the world that existed before Gangnam Style is the same as the one that existed after it? Come on, be serious.”

Aaron, Griffin, Kiara exchanged long looks, each searching for something to say in response to that. These songs weren’t exactly world-shattering or anything, but they were a small heap of cultural touchstones that had all come quickly on each other’s heels.

Griffin puffed his cheeks and blew air out of his mouth. “Man, 2012 was a wild year on the internet.”

“Whatever. Given your screwup, we’re going to go to the wand shop I use instead of some rando you’ll turn out to have a blood feud with,” Kiara announced.

“That works, since I don’t actually have a wand guy,” Albert said.