Steele Alchemist

by Deck Davis

  Over by the wall to his right in the main room, there was another wooden counter. Instead of vials, there was a woman stretched out on this one.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  She had ropes tied around her wrists and ankles, and a leather strap had been fastened over her mouth. This wasn’t good. Had he stumbled into some kind of serial killer’s hideout?

  He rushed over to the woman. There was no sign of blood on her, but her face was pale. Her lips were so drained of color they were almost milky. On her right hand, her index and middle fingers were missing, reduced to small stubs with smooth skin capping them.

  Was she dead? He watched her chest to see if it rose and fell. If it did, he was missing it completely. He touched her wrist, waited a few seconds…there. He felt it. She was alive.

  Jake had always been a sucker for a damsel in distress. He couldn’t help it. If he saw a girl across the street drop something, he’d rush across two lanes of traffic to pick it up. There were two things that brought out the reckless idiot in him; getting a flood of adrenaline through his veins, and seeing a girl in trouble. The adrenaline part was the reason he spent so much time in abandoned buildings. He actually enjoyed the recklessness it brought on him.

  Until now, he’d never seen a damsel in genuine distress. This one was definitely serious, since the girl in front of him was tied up. Some people would have just run away. Not everyone, but some people. It’d certainly be the sensible thing, since someone must have tied the girl up. And they could come back.

  Maybe he should just go. Leave the serial killer’s business alone.

  Damn it. No way could he leave.

  He pulled out his dagger and started sawing at the ropes that bound her wrists. The woman’s eyelids flickered. She had red eyes the color of an autumn leaf, which were all the more striking when compared to her ghostly skin. She looked at Jake but didn’t stir. There was an absent look to her face. She must have been sedated.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Whoever did this isn’t here. I’ll get you out before they get back.”

  He cut through the rope on her left wrist and let it fall to the floor. He cut as quickly as he could, but he was aware that he didn’t have much time. Whoever did this could come back at any moment, and by all accounts, they weren’t very nice.

  “Nearly there,” he said.

  He’d just started on the right, when the door flew open so hard that the glass vials rattled on the counter. One of them rolled off it and smashed on the floor.

  Jake winced. A tremor shot through him.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself. It’s just smashed glass.

  Ever since the night his parents had died, Jake had gotten a fear of glass breaking. He knew it was stupid, and that accidents happened, but whenever he heard a crashing sound and saw glass debris sprinkled over the ground, a cold dread washed over him. Seeing smashed glass made his scar throb.

  Ignore it. You have better things to think about.

  A man stood in the doorway. He was older than time itself judging by the wrinkles on his face. His hands were blackened in places, as though he’d been burned so many times that he’d lost skin pigment. He had a grey beard that covered his face, apart from an apple-sized section on his jaw where the hair wouldn’t grow and the skin was badly scarred. His eyebrows were thick and pointed, giving him the look of a stern owl. His salt and pepper hair was slicked back over his head, and it reached his shoulders.

  “Who the fuck are you?” growled the man. Then he held his hand up. When he did, Jake saw that his shirt was torn at his waist, and blood gushed from a nasty wound. “Forget it. I have bigger things to worry about.”

  He needed to be wary of this man, but he wasn’t leaving here without taking the girl. He still had one wrist rope and two more around her ankles to cut through, but he couldn’t do it without the man seeing.

  “Don’t move an inch,” said the man. “I need to sort myself out.”

  He turned to his glass vials and started twisting them so he could see them better. As he did, Jake carefully drew his dagger and passed it behind him to the girl. He just hoped she was alert enough to figure what he was trying to do. When he felt the dagger leave his hand, he breathed in relief.

  “Bugger me,” said the man. He rifled through his bottles quicker and quicker until they clinked together. The more he looked, the more frustrated he got. “Damn this all to buggery. Why didn’t I brew more potions after I used the last one?”

  He ran his hand through his matted grey hair, then turned to look at Jake. When he did, flames of anger fired in his eyes.

  “You goddamned twat!” he shouted. “What the hell have you done?”

  The outburst shocked him. Jake wasn’t thin-skinned, but being called a twat by a man who’d abducted a girl and tied her down seemed a little too much.

  Then a hand grabbed his neck.

  It felt scaly; like dried, calloused skin. He turned around to see the girl behind him. Her good looks had left her now, that was for sure.

  Half of her face was covered in an ink-black mossy growth, though parts of it seemed to have hardened into rock. A rotting smell came from her. The moss had spread down her shoulder, to her arm, and to her hand.

  Before he could do anything, she squeezed his neck with a steely grip.

  10 HP lost! 102/127

  Man, she’s got quite a hold!

  She wrenched his neck like it was a pillow, cutting off his air in much the same way he had earlier with the banshee. Damsel in distress my ass!

  Jake curled his left hand into a fist and punched her. The blow glanced off the now-hardened skin on her face, and his knuckles stung.

  The old man picked a vial off the counter which such haste that two others tipped over, rolled out and smashed on the floor.

  Jake shuddered. He forced himself not to look at the glass.

  The man crossed the room and removed the cork from the vial.

  “Hold her face,” he told Jake.

  Jake’s lip scar tingled. He felt like he could see the glass out of the corner of his eye. In his head, the crashing sound it had made echoed on and on.

  “Hold her damn face!” shouted the man. He stepped forward, and his boots trod over the smashed glass. The crunching sound sent a shudder through Jake, but he ignored it.

  He did his best to grip hold of her calloused chin, locking her face in place. She struggled, but he held firm.

  The man tipped the vial into her mouth and poured the liquid down her throat. The girl spluttered, and for a second her grip on Jake tightened. He choked, and made rasping sounds as he sucked in air.

  Was he going to have to punch her again?

  And then her grip started to slacken. Jake grabbed her fingers, pried them loose, then pushed her away from him. She hit her head on the counter and then slumped onto the floor. No god damn way was he checking for a pulse this time.

  He edged away from her. “What the hell was that?”

  “Do something useful,” said the man. “And brew me a healing potion. You’ll find the edium leaves in the brown jar.”

  The man looked in a sorry state. Although the blood had stopped running from his waist wound, the crimson stains all over his shirt and trousers indicated that he’d lost slightly more blood than most people usually like to.

  “I don’t know how to make one,” said Jake.

  “Then what are you doing sneaking into an alchemist’s hut, you shitbag? Just follow my instructions to the letter.”

  Jake found himself gritting his teeth. Since getting to this delightful place he’d been attacked by a banshee and then by a girl he’d tried to save. To ice over this asshole of a cake, he’d been called a shitbag. Still, he had to keep a check on himself for now. He needed answers, and this burned-up old weasel might save been able to give them.

  “Fine,” he said. “What first?”

  “The edium leaves are already cut and crushed, so just grab a handful.”

  He opened th
e brown jar that the man pointed to. The edium leaves were as red as cherries and gave off a sweet smell. He took a handful.

  “Now you’ll find base powder in a few vials. It’s the grey stuff, looks like gunpowder.”

  “Got it,” said Jake. “What now?”

  The man groaned in pain. “Next we make a fucking potion.”

  Jake followed the man’s instructions as best he could. To be honest, getting yelled orders for a potion by an angry man wasn’t so different from mixing a cocktail for a drunk. The only difference was that Jake could tell the drunk to piss off if he’d had enough of him.

  Finally, after following his instructions, he had himself a potion.

  Potion of Healing *Poor*created

  Class Gained – Alchemist (Novice)

  A man of science, of concoctions, of potions, of poisons. As an alchemist, you will study the properties of the things around you and combine them for mysterious effects.

  An alchemist can work in the shadows, he can serve lords, he can brew potions for armies. The path you take is yours, but without an alchemist master to teach you, it may be slow going.

  Skill Gained – Brewing Level 1

  -Brewing Speed 1/50

  -Potion Quality 1/50

  You can brew basic potions…badly. Through practice, diligence and experimentation, your skill will improve. With each level potions will become easier to make, more potent, and will use less ingredients.

  25 Attribute Points unspent. Please choose:

  Intelligence –

  Strength –

  Charisma –

  Agility –

  Endurance –

  Luck -

  He needed to spend his attribute points, but it was better to wait just a little while longer. He still knew jack-all about being an alchemist, despite being the proud creator of one healing potion with a ‘poor’ quality rating.

  Maybe the old man could tell him more. He evidently wasn’t a serial killer, Jake knew that much. He still didn’t trust him, but he got the sense that the man wasn’t dangerous.

  “Listen…”

  “Give me that thing,” said the old man, and grabbed the newly-created potion from Jake’s hand.

  “Just ask next time, you rude old bastard.”

  As the old man gulped the potion down, Jake thought about the text alerts. He was glad to have a class, since that meant he could spend attribute points.

  It was disappointing that he didn’t get to pick his own class but it was fitting that he was an alchemist, in a way. Back in the Rum Drum bar he’d designed half of the cocktail menu himself; he loved experimenting with things. If messing around with gin and vodka wasn’t alchemy, then what was?

  Still, stuff hadn’t at all gone his way lately. After all, he’d run through a portal and gotten stranded in a foreign world, where he'd been attacked twice in the space of twenty minutes. Thing was, he had a motto that he relied on when times got hard. A two-word piece of wisdom that saw him through tough times.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  The old man looked up. “What’d you say?”

  “Just a little motto of mine.”

  “Damn you and your shitty potion. Barely enough to heal a scab on my arse,” said the old man.

  Then, he must have noticed the venomous stare Jake was giving him, because then he added: “But thanks all the same.”

  “What do we do about the girl?” asked Jake.

  “Do about her?” said the man, then shrugged. “She’ll come around eventually. We go through this performance from time to time. Never had anyone in here stupid enough to untie her before.”

  Chapter Five

  “Listen,” said the old man, as he led Jake outside. “I’m sorry for being a cock back then. It’s one of my many faults.”

  “Is now a good time to ask what the deal is with your shack? It looked tiny from the outside. And then I step in and…woah. It’s huge.”

  The man shrugged. “A toddler wizard can make an effect like this. It’s just the Endless Depth Bag trick, but on a bigger scale. Simple. Bought a scroll ages ago.”

  Jake couldn’t help the huge grin spreading across his face. Something about this filled him with excitement. Sure, there were dangers here, but magic shacks? Alchemy? It was fascinating.

  “You’re not from round here, are you?” asked the man.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Aye. I could tell from the potion you made. Weak as piss.”

  Jake’s ‘poor’ health potion had revived the man to the tune of precisely 11 hitpoints, he’d told him. It was enough to get him back on his feet, at which point he whipped up his own.

  Jake watched in amazement as within a few seconds he prepared the edium leaves to perfection, mixed them with the gunpowder-like base, and then created a ‘master’ health potion. It wasn’t just the name tag that marked it as better than Jake’s; this potion had more color, a deeper red, and a more aromatic sweet smell.

  “I’m sorry I untied the girl,” replied Jake. “Call me a dickhead, but it seemed a natural reaction at the time.”

  “Thought I was a murderer or something, aye? Well, maybe once. Not anymore. Time we got acquainted, anyway. What’s your name? Don’t tell me…you look like a Barnabus.”

  “It’s Jake. What about you?”

  “Name’s ‘Whispering’ Cason Carver, and I’m an alchemist of pretty big renown. I’m sixty-five but my body’s forty and my cock is thirty-two. Not literally, of course. My cock isn’t actually thirty-two years younger than the rest of me. It’s just that the older I get, the more of an appetite I have for pleasures of the flesh. You know; fun stuff.”

  To be fair to him, he didn’t have the physique of a sixty-five-year-old. He was in good shape, with wiry muscles that had decent tone to them. In fact, he was a lot more athletic than an alchemist pushing for retirement age had any right to be.

  His skin, however, told a different story. Written on the contours of his slightly-tanned skin were decades of alchemical work and mishaps. He had burn marks of various sizes, patterns and colors staining him, with a red one on his left arm the shape of an ostrich. Whether it was just a coincidence or this was the alchemist’s way of giving himself a tattoo, Jake didn’t know.

  “Do you have ostriches here?” he asked.

  “Ostriches?” replied Cason.

  “Tall bird, walks on two legs. Kinda mean-looking.”

  “Oh, you mean a Goo-Daa-Tan. Sure, we have those.”

  The most prominent of Carson’s alchemical body mishaps was on his right arm. Stretching from his elbow to his wrist, and only covering the underside of his arm, was a sheet of silver metal. At first glance, it looked like a brace that fighters used for armor, but closer inspection showed that this metal wasn’t just fastened to Cason’s arm, it was welded to him like a strip of metal skin.

  “Had a little accident a few years ago,” Cason had explained to him. “A warrior-lord up north once asked me to create alchemical armor that he could carry in potion form.”

  “Did it work?”

  Cason held his arm up. “People think a master alchemist can do anything. That we can play god. That ain’t the truth, no matter how good the alchemist. Still, gonils are gonils, and I won’t stop a fool from parting with them. This is what happened when I spilled some on my arm. I warned him not to drink it, but he wouldn’t listen. Can you guess what happened to his throat?”

  “Ugh. Nasty.”

  “And that, my friend, is why a warrior clan in the northern fire wastes call me the Lord Killer, and why they’d rip me limb-from-beautiful-limb if they ever saw me again.”

  Cason stood under the tarpaulin outside the hut. He started unfastening his shirt to reveal his hairy chest. When he caught Jake looking he turned it into a sexy dance, moving with snake hips as he undressed.

  “Enjoying the show?”

  “I didn’t think I was gonna see a naked old man today. Don’t get your shriveled dick out.”

  “Don’t
worry, it’s just my chest for today. Don’t want to get more blood on me.”

  The wound on his side had almost healed. There was just a red line where it had closed, and dried blood was smeared around it. It seemed that the health potions here were pretty amazing.

  Cason walked around the hut, and when he came back he dragged the corpse of a giant deer. He held it by the horns and positioned it under the tarpaulin. Then he went inside, and came out again with a knife with an edge so sharp it could cut a grain of sand in two. While they talked, he started butchering the deer. Soon, the air was clogged with the iron smell of blood.