If Boulavie Queen looked like a dumpster, I don’t know what the arcade Battle Quest looked like. Trash everywhere, more than outside the building. Four out of five machines weren’t working. They were either broken, torn apart, or crumbling. Few were just busted but physically intact, and the least percentage was barely working machines.

The walls had lost their paint job and the carpet flooring, which might have been some sort of blue or purple with rhombic designs of yellows, greens, and reds, were coated in dust, dirt, and unidentifiable crud of an apparent variety of sources: food, drinks, oil, body fluids of all kinds, the list went on.

The smell -- Sweet Mary -- the smell was fetid. I could feel my body wanting to gag at the smell of the place, but I had to contain myself from doing so. A wizard has to maintain appearances. And besides, there was an alchemist, who is also a friend, walking with me. There is no way I could let myself look weaker in a situation like this.

Tedet croaked, hissed, and snarled behind me: “Grat dagtedet,” he could have said. “This is revolting,” he said while he made a harmonic array of sounds little, a hauntingly beautiful sound to what I supposed was a similar act to human retching.

And just like that, my friend killed my efforts and the image I had on alchemists.

“Damn alchemists,” I whispered barely audible. Thank god for the carpet flooring and the multitude of trash bags, and old, rotting wood around me that swallowed all sounds. Tedet didn’t hear me.

“Why would your nephew come to this place?” Tedet asked.

“I would like to ask him that,” I said. “But I have a better question: where is everyone? I was expecting a reception party.”

“You aren’t that famous,” he said jokingly. One of the few things he managed to learn, and he was getting better at it too.

“Yet,” I said following his joke. “I was imagining a scene. Us breaking down a door.” I made a kicking a quick motion. “Walk inside finding a bunch of dumb-looking kids looking at us, one of which is my, also, dumb-looking nephew, and saying: ‘it’s your curfew, time to go home.’ ”

“That must have sounded better in your head,” he answered not even looking at me.

“You didn’t have to be rude about it.” Tedet needs to learn how not to hurt someone’s feelings. He speaks his mind as if it was common sense to just say what he felt about anything. “Damn alchemists,” I whispered again.

I have nothing against alchemists, I really don’t. Using that phrase on him has become part of our inside jokes. He calls out wizards when he disagrees with me, but he doesn’t hate wizards… well, he doesn’t hate most­ of us.

Alchemists in general are relegated to the magical community. They don’t have to be sensible to magic, unlike wizards and sorcerers that need to be. In actuality, you could learn the magical arts without being sensitive to the energies, but that would be like ‘a blind person learning how to paint’ -- that’s what I’ve heard. However, magic can be done if you’re capable of learning how to make rituals. Many mortals have used rituals to invoke demons and angels before. But rituals and spell casting are different things.

As for alchemists, their magic is something similar to rituals, they need a source of magical power, and a circle that holds and helps weave the magic into the spell. Unlike normal rituals, that use a source of magic, an alchemical spell (or ritual if you will) uses pure natural energy, the same that is stored in chemicals, like oil and coal, or sugar; the same that comes from the photons that travel from the sun, or the heat that comes from the mantle and makes geysers, or the wind that moves windmills, or the gravity that moves the tides and makes dams useful. That same energy that can be stored in a simple battery.

An alchemical circle is complex, because in order to make it function for every mortal – including those that aren’t sensible to magic – one must take time. A lot of time. Sometimes it can take as little as months, but sometimes they take years to function completely. A huge alchemical magic circle must be inscribed perfectly on a perfectly flat surface, made out of a material of very high purity (no matter what it is). Then the magical circle must be powered with magic of any source by ritualistically siphoning it from somewhere. Blood is the simplest and fastest one, but some use the energy of their soul, the planet, or the waste magic that people make by just existing. Each takes longer than the one before.

Finally, one can create their own Philosopher Stone. The size doesn’t matter, what matters is their purity; if the purity isn’t high then it won’t work. The Stone then forms part of a potion -- when a potion makes life-lasting effects, they are called elixirs. The elixir that comes from the Stone is the Alchemist Elixir, mostly just called the Elixir. The only known elixir that works. The to-be alchemist then drinks the Elixir and he can finally be able to control energy and matter. They are in total control of thermodynamics.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Most wizards respect their hard work, but they don’t like their magic, it’s seen as an incomplete type of magic -- phony magic. Mortal made magic that tries to imitate real magic, the magic that has always existed in the world, passed down by gods, demons, faeries, or ancient beings to mortals.

Alchemists are also open to the world, they don’t care that others know that magic exists, so mortals normally think they are crazy, and wizards hate that they are so blatantly reveal something that has been kept secret for millennia. The world of the supernatural isn’t something mere mortals can know about.

But they don’t care. Alchemists have gone through so much to gain power. That’s why they are socially awkward, moody, emotionally unstable, alone, lacking empathy and sympathy, stoic, among many other things. Wizards seem to be like that because we are grumpy. We use emotions to power our magic, we let them run wild, it’s easier for us to get angry. Anger, fury, fuels magic like no other emotion.

But I like Tedet, he’s my friend. And he likes me back, he considers me his friend. And we do so much for each other. We’ve been through thick and thin. Those kids that attacked us a few minutes ago? We’ve had a few of those encounters, before -- not with kids, mind you, with fewer but real, old thugs. This time was nothing different than what we have done before. So were lost kids, but this time someone was actively looking for one. All we had to do it take my nephew home, and then I just have to worry about the torviela.

I’d like to say it was simple but someone was playing hard to find.

“Damn it, where is he?” I asked annoyingly. “We’ve searched everywhere here and we haven’t found him.”

“The torviela,” Tedet said. “He lied.”

“He couldn’t lie,” I repeated. “He swore by his family. They can’t lie. It’s a vampire-slash-torviela thing. Unlike us mortals, when they swear by their family’s name they can’t lie. It becomes impossible.”

“So, he did know about this place,” he became pensive. “Then why isn’t your nephew here.”

“He can’t lie, and unless he tried to manipula--” I trailed off in quick thought. “Son of a bitch!” He had manipulated the information. “How could I be so stupid!”

“You didn’t ask the right questions,” he stated.

“He said he stayed at the arcade!” I emphasized the word. “He didn’t say he was staying here! And after that, my questions followed his pattern! Damn it! Damn fucking leeches!” I punched a machine in fury; it broke flimsily on my fist.

“So we have no clue where he is, just that used to stay here, and now he’s gone.”

“And gone he is,” called out a man from beyond some arcade machines.

That startled me, I hadn’t noticed him in my fit of anger. Damn it, one mistake after another! I thought. But I readied my will and magic and directed my gaze at the source of the voice.

“The little mortal sheep,” he conveyed, “is with us now, hadtherad.”

I was about to correct him on the hadtherad part of his sentence, but this wasn’t a moment to be a wiseass. “Where is here?” I asked. “Where are you holding him?”

“Somewhere, little hadtherad,” he moaned, or at least that was what it sounded to him. He found pleasure in using me. “Give up on Kayeket. Cease being his champion and we shall return it to you.”

The figure appeared from behind the machine I was looking at. It seemed to be blending to the background a bit as if it was transparent. It was some kind of vail that, instead of making the object completely invisible, made the object fade into the background. It was surely a torviela, I could easily sense the bloodthirst of the humanoid monster beyond that vail now. There, a magical tingle in my senses that warned me of a blood leech, like the vampires and torviela.

“I can’t, I gave my word,” I explained.

“You are mortal,” he countered. “You can choose to go back on your word. Mortals always do.”

He was right, but then that would put me in a terrible pickle with Uderach. This vampire might be waiting for me to say that I do so that they can strike at Uderach. However much I hate the leeches, Uderach was a stabilizing force in our world and city, he might not have great power but it was enough for him to keep other big families away from most parts of this town, along with other similarly smaller families. If Uderach goes down, whoever he is going against will be taking control of the city.

I had to admit that even if the decision that I should take was the obvious one, I really want my nephew back and safe. I took my sweet time thinking about it. So much so, that Tedet looked intrigued.

“Just say that you will,” he offered me.

I grabbed his arm and pulled him hard. Tedet didn’t like physical contact and much less when it was violent, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t back down from forcefully ripping his arm away from my grasp. “Don’t you see what they want?” I whispered while holding him close to me. I didn’t want the monster to hear. “If I go back on it, they’ll kill Uderach and take his place. Whoever is this guy working for must be a big important family. We cannot let them take control of the city.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Then let’s deny him.”

“And what about my nephew?” I asked rashly. “Do I let him die just like that? ‘For the greater good?’ Life of a thousand is worth more than the life of my nephew?”

“I don’t get you, humans,” he rid himself of my grasp. “It’s just another kid.”

“My sister’s kid!” I whispered angrily. “How many times do I have to explain?”

“Then give it up, if he’s so important then screw them. Screw the torviela. Screw the city.”

“Damn it, it isn’t that simple.”

Tedet straightened his back. “Oh, yes, it is simple,” he said and turned to the torviela to speak.

“Wait, Tedet, what are you doing?”

“You, leech,” he addressed the monster, to which it hissed in fury.

“Fool, mortal,” it said. “Sick impostor. Take back your words.”

“We made our decision,” Tedet said.

I panicked and fumbled on my words “N-n-n-no. No, no, no. Wait, no. I haven’t. We didn’t.”

“Oh, yes we did!” he shouted without looking back at me. He kept walking at the monster.

“Excellent,” the thing said, savoring the free will in the air. “What have you chosen, mortals?”

“We chose--” Tedet tapped his pouch with his right hand and began to glow, the torviela was so ecstatic that it took him too long to notice the fist that was moving quickly at his gut. The leech received a punch that could’ve been compared to a car crash at high speeds, and it concentrated in the size of a fist. The body of the torviela exploded in the middle and two halves flew backwards, a lot of blood sprayed everywhere in the arcade. “Screw you all.”