6.48 - Back to Square One

6.48 - Back to Square One

Theo looked over his prototype stills, nodding with approval. He had placed many in the clearing, but only three survived. The two variations of the still with the paddle, and the one with the vertical shaking motion. Even with his wisdom, he couldn’t determine why the shaker worked. Perhaps the agitation action allowed the impurities from the mashed reagent to latch onto the iron better. Or maybe there was something about the air being mixed into the contents. Looking inside the finished paddle still, he withdrew the paddle, encrusted with alchemical waste.

This stuff was toxic. Neutralizing the crystalline waste was his priority after ordering a full-scale version of the paddle still. He took the two working stills into his inventory, leaving the clearing behind. The alchemist held a vial of essence up to the fading light of the day, sighing. He inspected the item.

[Healing Essence]

[Essence]

Common

Created by: Theo Spencer

Purity: 95%

2 units (liquid)

Concentrated essence of healing, used to create healing potions.

There was only a single change to the description. Grades were out the window, giving way to the purity entry. Drogramath’s alchemy was the end-path to a lot of other forms of alchemy, so he shouldn’t have been surprised that this wasn’t different. But this meant the Tero’gal potions would fall in line with the other methods. Which meant he wouldn’t get free attribute points for crafting his potions. Now that he had created the essence, the rest should have fallen in line the way he expected. But with only two units to work with, the alchemist wanted to wait.

“Throk,” Theo said, sticking his head into the workshop. He was surprised to find several apprentices working on various projects. Some were related to the rail system, while others were jobs for people in town. Throk himself was hunched over a table, working on a machine. “Let me get a big version of this one.”

Throk barely looked up. “How big?” he grunted.

“Fifty units,” Theo said. “And just one for now.”

Throk grunted his confirmation for the order, and Theo left the still near the entrance. The apprentices laughed to themselves as he left the shop. He headed out into the town, looking at the decorations for the wedding. That was tomorrow, wasn’t it? On the first day of the Season of Death—the first day of autumn. Broken Tusk would experience their first winter in Tero’gal this year. Year one of... something, he hadn’t decided what to call it yet.

“How are things going?” Theo asked, walking up behind Miana.

“Hey, stranger,” she said with a scoff. “You’ve been hands-off with the planning.”

“Things have been busy.”

“Well, we’ve got all the trellises up. I think they have a few boars to cook. Oh, they’re bringing musicians to play throughout.”

“So, what kind of traditions did they settle on?”

“For starters, there’s gonna be a fight.” Miana rubbed her hands together. “That’s local, of course. The other local tradition is the Ogre Snapper wrestling match. Zarali wanted those two. Xol’sa picked a few elven traditions, including the feat of power. That’ll be interesting. Otherwise, I expect a massive party.”

Theo nodded, that didn’t sound so bad. He couldn’t imagine Zarali and Xol’sa fighting it out to prove their love. But when he thought about the space elf, all he could imagine was his people. Standing like statues in some lost realm. “It looks good,” he said, patting Miana on the shoulder. He left the town square, making his way to the temple. There were more people here than ever before, praying to a Throneworld or one of the accepted gods. He rolled his shoulders, settling in on one seat near the front.

“I could just go to your realm,” Theo muttered to himself, keeping his eyes on the floor. “But Ziz worked so hard on this place. Why not use it?”

There was no answer from the altar. Theo didn’t know how praying worked or if the gods would hear him. The ascendants could hear him, before he did everything in his power to shut them all out.

“I don’t know if you do this kind of thing, Hallow. But if you could bless the wedding, that’d be great.” Theo shifted awkwardly in his seat, looking around to the others. They hadn’t looked up. “Maybe bless the whole nation while you’re at it. We might need the help.”

Theo cleared his throat, standing up before he felt any more awkward about the situation. Of the things he still needed to do, the wedding was the one he had the least involvement in. High on his list was helping the space elves. And that required functional alchemy—or so he hoped. There were other projects left to do. Some were small and some were too massive to undertake with limited time. The rail to the north was vital, it would serve as the base infrastructure in Tero’gal. Right now, people had to walk for weeks to get anywhere in the Throneworld.

“So, wedding, space elves, infrastructure... and loose ends,” Theo said, nodding to himself. “Oh, and potions.”

The essence produced by the experimental still looked normal. If it was only a matter of creating a more pure essence, they had done it handily. There might have been implications for the second tier of potion making, but that was a problem for another day. With daylight fading, Theo made his way to the lab for one last experiment of the day. He poured a unit of the precious essence into a vial, and considered his approach.

First tier potions were easy. One unit of essence to one unit of Purified Water and a catalyst to start the binding reaction. It was the most basic recipe an alchemist could use in creating distilled potions. Theo narrowed his eyes at the essence resting in the vial, looking for something that could go wrong. His heightened intuition seemed to agree this would work. With the impurities driven from the essence, he imagined there wasn’t much left to go wrong, but it was interesting to think about the interactions.

Iron Shavings acted as a catalyst in this stage. But when used on mashed reagents, it sucked impurities from the mixture. This might have been why the other distillation reactions he tried had failed, but it was hard to tell. Only the three things, essence, water, and shavings, would cause a positive alchemical reaction. If he had more essence to test with, he would try something different. He dropped the Iron Shaving into the water-essence mixture, taking a step back.

The potion bubbled, turning a pleasant shade of red. It put off a sweet smell that filled the lab, but no vapors came from the vial’s top. He placed the decorative stopper on the vial, holding the new potion at arm’s length. Too much work went into this potion. His first potion made with Drogramath’s tradition was easy compared to this. He inspected the item.

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Alex shot a stream of fire into the air. “I am a dragon!”

“You are the strongest dragon around,” Tresk said. “Don’t listen to the mean potion man.”

Alex was really good at absorbing energy, so perhaps this was a good path. There was something inherently powerful about the dragons. Not enough that they were considered an element, but Alex was listed as a Proto Dragon-Goose when he inspected her. So that was a start. It wasn’t the stage he expected her to enter, but whatever. Goose, dragon-goose, what did it matter? She had a way of twisting herself into whatever form she wanted. A dragon was just as good as anything else.

“Bye, sweetie,” Tresk said, waiting for Alex to lower her head for a kiss.

“Bye-bye.”

Theo didn’t know when Sarisa or Rowan had time to cook the massive steaks, but he wouldn’t complain. The scent of seared meat, melted butter, and some fantasy knock-off garlic wafted as they opened the door to the manor. He let out a heavy sigh, reminded of how little he had eaten today.

“Where are you guys finding suppliers of meat karatan?” he asked, falling into his chair at the large dining table. There were no greens with this meal. No zee to help round it out. Just a big slab of seared meat—grill marks still visible on the surface. The steak glistened in the light,

“Secret supplier,” Rowan said, removing his apron with a smile on his face.

“Still the elves,” Sarisa said, jumping into her chair and rubbing her hands together. “We bought them from the elves.”

Theo cut a piece of steak, failing to resist the smile that tugged at his lips. No cut of meat melted like this, almost as though the steak itself was butter. Of course Tresk took no time to savor it. She only cut it in half, swallowing each part in one bite. What conversation spread around the table was light, centering on the upcoming wedding. The alchemist wasn’t very excited about the wedding at first, but he was warming to the idea. He had imagined a stuffy ceremony, but it was shaking up to be something far more exciting.

“I’m stuffed. Let’s sleep,” Tresk said.

“I’m still eating.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Theo glared at Tresk, cutting another piece of his steak.

“Oh, you stink,” Tresk said, pouting.

Theo took his time with his meal. Not because he wanted to spite Tresk, but because it was good. She didn’t take it well when he took the steps slowly, yawning the entire way. But they dropped into the Dreamwalk all the same, coming out onto an imagined sprawl of Tero’gal’s landscape. He hadn’t even visited the Throneworld today, too interested in getting this new form of alchemy ready for production.

Accessing Tresk’s memory, Theo summoned the cliff containing dragon bones Alex was eating. It looked strange against the lush landscape around them. The top portion of a rocky face poked up from the ground, gray and chalky against the greenery. Several large sections stuck out, bleached white by the sun. While he couldn’t figure out what part of a dragon this was, the bone was massive.

“That’s a gigantic dragon,” Theo said with a nod.

“Yeah, yeah. We ate through most of that leg section.” Tresk gestured to an area missing a bone.

Theo looked at the pieces of the skeleton for a while, biting his lip. “Weird question, but do you think someone like Balkor could raise a dragon’s skeleton?”

“Ugh. Why do you have to spoil the mood?” Tresk asked. “Think you can help us move an entire skeleton into a dimensional storage crate tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I think that might be best,” Theo said, his mind suddenly searching for other dead dragons in the area. What if there had been massive beasts in the north that had died? “Let’s wake up early to take care of it.”

“Excellent idea. Now, can we fight?”

Tresk and Alex left Theo to the dragon bones. Once again, the Dreamwalk refused to allow him to take samples from the bones. It was just in that kind of mood after the influence of the new management.

Visiting the Dreamwalk put a cap on the day, though. Theo summoned his newest challenge, the paddle covered in alchemical refuse. There were many ways to decompose materials, but nothing he could think of that wouldn’t damage the iron. While he will accept this as a situation where the iron was disposable, he still needed to get rid of the alchemy byproduct. The Dissolve Essence might be a way forward, but he didn’t have a good feeling about that one.

“Are you gonna let me figure out how reactive this stuff is?” Theo asked, scraping the buildup from the paddle onto an imagined table. The Dreamwalk didn’t have a problem when he poured various solutions on it, to no effect. The Cleansing Scrub potion did nothing. Dissolve Essence didn’t work.

Theo clapped his hands over his ears as the paddle exploded in a ball of fire. He clicked his tongue, watching as the plume of smoke rose into the air. “Well, now I just scattered the junk all over the place. What if we light it on fire?”

The byproduct popped when it was lit on fire, but Theo observed something interesting. He was surprised the Dreamwalk let him take things this far. Placing a pan over an artifice flame, he scraped the crystalline substance into the plan and cranked the heat. It took a while, and some pretty intense heat, but it eventually went from solid to liquid. Some vapor was released as he allowed it to cool.

The resulting sheet of brown-black material was still toxic. The invention of filth ingots wasn’t pushing his problem forward, but it was a start. Applying heat to the substance was the only thing that had done anything so far. Perhaps some pressure would help...

“There’s only one way to find out,” Theo said, imagining a heated pressure still.