Desari touched a rune on the stairs into her basement, she weaved a thread of mana through it, deactivating the defenses and turning on the lights.

She continued down, deep into the ground. Tables were filled with various alchemical equipment, shelves filled with ingredients.

Mya followed after her. “Well I was hoping for more of a dungeon vibe. The lack of windows is a little more ‘I live in the basement and the light hurts my eyes and skin!’ than ominous.”

“I spent a lot of time down here,” Desari said, running a hand over a table as she walked through the space.

“Something wrong?” Mya asked.

Desari kept walking, feeling the space around her, how many times had she imagined being right back here on their journey? Hadn’t this been the goal?

Mya might act the silly captain infront of all, but her mind was faster than most, she might accept a half truth or something to push off the introspection, but she’d see through them.

“I feel disconnected from all of this here. I thought that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my days and now I’m back here.” She stopped her steps and looked at an alembic, a gift from Egrin, she touched it, feeling the curve of the glass.

Mya didn’t interrupt her, waiting for her to come back to her thoughts.

“I’ve thrown myself into prowling the back alleys of Ilus. Spreading out the network I’d built up to the other cities and peninsula. I’m good at it, it gets my blood going. This is where I was supposed to belong. I wished so much that I could put down the part of Desari the scorpion and become Desari the student, the librarian, the alchemist, the teacher and caster.”

She turned, leaning against the table and crossing her arms. “I started training up people to take up my roles and they have, with great ability. Though now, it feels like I’m useless. They’re coming into their own and they don’t need me. I’m in the way more than I’m helping. Being out there with you and the others I feel engaged.”

“Life has changed and your mind hasn’t changed with it,” Mya said. “Life has a way of figuring things out, its about getting out of the damn way and letting it. You can feel guilty about doing the things that you want to, but there’s no right or wrong paths for you to take in your life. Its yours to live how you want to. Now.” Mya clapped her hands. “You were talking about explosives?”

Desari let out a sigh to hide her grin, moving to a clear space in her lab before she took out a book and a glass holding some gunpowder. “Right now you’re using several different ingredients mixed together to create your powder.”

Mya leaned on the other side of the table.

“From my testing the powder is highly controlled, it has a steady flame I thought that it would be more powerful in nature.” Desari quirked an eyebrow.

“You need it to be strong enough to fire the projectile, not so strong that it blows the damn gun up in your hands. A big part of powder that people don’t understand is you need it to burn uniformly, you don’t want it to detonate,” Mya said.

Desari flipped open her book with one of the ribbon placeholders using a pencil to make notes.

“Why the interest in powder?” Mya asked.

“Because its smoky as fuck and its hard to see through. Also I can smell the propellant still in the air which means that its not being all burnt up,” Desari said.

“Control freak,” Mya said with a sweet smile.

Desari flicked her eyes up from her notes as if dealing with a particularly obnoxious student. Mya’s smile only grew. Desari finished her note and put down her pencil.

“Valter and I were talking on projects one time and he started talking about your revolvers. The brass pressed cartridges.”

“Yeah?”

“He thinks that they’re great, allow you to fire faster and you can reload very quickly, but then the rounds by themselves don’t hit as hard as the flintlocks. You use runes on the weapons to increase the muzzle velocity.”

“Uhh huh.”

“If I was to come up with a new powder then the rounds would be coming out faster and hit harder and that rune work could be turned over to something else to increase the hitting power even more. Also if the rounds are in cartridges and standardized he can create a mold for bullets, each mold has different runes carved into it, so you have enchanted bullets.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Then I could cast spells on the rounds as well to increase their power even more.” Mya held her chin in thought. “We get a lot of stoppages on Mesurial’s turrets.”

“The ones that hang over the side of the ship? That Petor and Valter used?”

“Yeah, those are the ones. Right now its really liable for stoppages, but if we were able to make enough cartridges like the revolvers and within better tolerances then it should help out with the stoppages in a big way.”

“That will be more Valter’s side of things than mine,” Desari said as she started pulling out ingredients.

“Fair, so what are we going to do?”

“I know of several compounds that have similar effects to what you’re looking for. I’ll make them and then we’ll run some tests on them and see what works the best. First, limited to no flames, don’t want to blow ourselves up.”

With the wealth of knowledge in Ilus and students constantly looking to make new things explode or light on fire, Desari had a number of recipes she could work through already.

“Thankfully here we also have a lot of pure ingredients that makes things easier. Else we’d have to refine down everything to get to the base components.” Desari said, checked her notes on several concoctions she’d recorded.

“What do the concoctions do?” Mya asked, peering at her notes.

“I was looking for those that would were a powder form and were able to create a continuous flame.” Desari picked up a powder, rubbing it through her fingers and grimaced. “Sucked up the moisture, have to heat it up to take it out.”

“Though you said no flames,” Mya said.

“Some of these different ingredients are more or less flammable before and after the process. Its all about knowing what you’re dealing with.”

Desari threw the powder into a beaker, she activated the heating plate under neath, keeping the temperature low. “Also these plates don’t create flames, just heat.”

She let the powder dry out before turning off the plate and removing the beaker to cool.

“While we wait for that, can start on some others.”

Desari took out alcohol, measured it out into glassware, followed with powders to dissolve in.

“That’s some strong stuff, making me tear up,” Mya muttered.

“Liable to make even the most accomplished drinker go blind if they have it,” Desari used a glass rod to stir everything together. Can’t see the powder anymore.

She took out cotton and put it into the solution.

“Why the cotton?”

“It will soak up the powder and alcohol, giving us a solid to work from, instead of a liquid,” Desari said. “Though we will need to use a solvent to break it down into a paste that we can then dry out. It is reactive and delicate.”

“Why you’re just using a bit of solution and cotton?”

“Right, we just need to prove we can do it now, then we can scale up larger later.”

So it continued, Desari creating several different solutions and concoctions, each in different areas of the lab. With the recipes and ingredients the work went quickly.

It wasn’t long before they were standing before several concotions.

“I thought that there would be mad dashing, flare of flame and the like,” Mya said.

“We’re trying to stop exactly that,” Desari sighed as she checked the fume hood over her impromptu testing area.

Mya shrugged.

Desari took out the original gunpowder, putting it on the testing stone and making a line. She checked the length of the powder.

“Why are you measuring it?”

“We’re going to take the other powders, but them on the same surface at the same size and we’ll look at the color of the flame, how well it burns, if it consumes all of the powder and other parameters,” Desari said. “It’ll give us a great baseline to understand each of them compared to one another.”

“Okay.”

Desari ignited the powder with a flick of a fire spell. The powder didn’t make a noise as it burned along the stone steadily. Desari watched it through her various visions, taking note of the heat, height and speed for it to burn through.

“Alright, next one.”

Powder after powder went through the fume hood, some threw up sparks, some flames were different colors.

Essence flowed into Desari, in a trickle. More threads of green mixing into her yellow core.

Time went quickly and Mya was quick to add in her own comments, clipped and direct, a rare show of concentration.

“The third and the fourth are the ones that burn the best,” Mya said.

“Agreed, though the third will take four times as long to make as it needs more resting time because of its instability,” Desari said.

“So the fourth one.”

Desari nodded and pulled out a letter, leaving smudge marks of soot as she wrote.

“Why you writing a letter?”

“There are thousands of students in Ilus. I’ve come up with a few ways that we can increase the production speed and safety. There are many students that are looking to make extra coin and gain credit. I could make a small cask with my work today. Reaching out to the students we can get several barrels.” Desari looked up to Mya with a smile. “They do so love working on things that burn.”

A laugh escaped Mya.

“Makes sense to me and we have the gold for it.”

“Exactly. Time is better spent on new potions to heal us or keep us awake and alert for extended periods of time.” Desari finished off the letter and folded it closed. She picked up a vial of the third powder and stored it away.

“Lets get this to Valter so he can add it to your cartridges and bullets for testing. Then I have a favor to ask.”

“What you need?” Mya asked.

“I need to summon my remaining elementals.”