Chapter 16: Chapter 16 – A Heaven To Jabirians

Hitz’s lab was a thing of vast, awe-inspiring beauty.

Well, a thing of beauty to me, who grew up on mad scientists with equally mad cackling.

The entryway opened into a room that was easily a thousand square feet of contiguous space, with a half-dozen doorways scattered around. Huge, fragrant ropes of what seemed to be herbs and flowers hung down from the ceiling, a ceiling that might have been fifteen feet high, and more were growing in pots that ran along the sides of the building. Sunlight streamed in through tall windows, and the air was suffused with a sourceless light that illuminated everything without casting a single shadow.

And what a sight everything was.

I walked forward, entranced, towards what was obviously the primary distillation column. There were seven of them, each with an entire supporting framework of pipes, additional entry points for gasses and liquids, condensers of all kinds, and what looked like aeration chambers; each also had a bunch of reaction chambers where who-knows-what would happen.

I could trace the plausible path of one subsection, but only one subsection. A vat of something would be distilled, boiling and fractionating into five different gaseous outputs even as a liquid trickled through a filter of some sort. I didn’t actually remember enough about continuous fractionating columns to remember how the exact mechanics worked, but the piping was obvious enough, and most of those pipes went to other parts of the whole.

Two didn’t. One of them went to a condenser and then to where a flask would clearly sit. The other would blow—that was clearly a blower of some sort, though its mechanism wasn’t clear—over a series of flattish trays and then through a liquid of some sort. After that, the liquid would drop into a chamber where something would be steadily added via a geared funnel, and the gas would continue on into a circular tank.

That was just one section—the smallest, simplest section of this spectacular arrangement of machinery. All in all, it took up hundreds and hundreds of square feet, and it called to me on a primal level.

Look at this, I thought to myself, grinning ear to ear. You’d think I was transported into another world or something.

Kelly’s hand touched my elbow, and I turned to see a soft, hungry smile on her face. It was like a revelation, the way her smile made me feel and what it revealed about her, and she saw my recognition in the same moment I made the connection. There’d been a word for it, a word I no longer had, but I recognized the look of someone finding joy in my own happiness.

“Glad you’ve trusted me so far?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Specifically, there were too many things I could say to that, and I fought a half-dozen responses that were too flip or didn’t seem right, trying to figure out how I actually felt. She gave me the time, not rushing me, just standing there with her hand on my elbow and smiling.

“You said that you love new people, new stories,” I began eventually. I hesitated, but she nodded at me to continue, so I did. “This isn’t just to brag. These moments. And it’s not just about a love of novelty, which I’m guessing is… unusual?”

Something dark flashed across her expression, and her body language tensed up and then relaxed again in the span of a moment. Her smile was flatter, though, and I regretted that even though I’d needed to ask. “Yeah. It really is unusual.”

“Then thank you.” I held her eye, feeling my smile continue to stretch my face. In the end, it didn’t matter all that much why she was so determined to do a good job, did it? “Really. Thank you.”

She looked at me blankly for a moment as I smiled. “For what?”

“Kindness, dedication, some degree of respect. Honesty. Being a person worth trusting. That sort of thing.” I was joking, but I wasn’t joking, and there were important conversations we had to have, but they could wait. “For loving novelty, for helping me out, for smiling like that at me.”

She punched me lightly in the side, only flushing a little bit. “We don’t use Hitz’s rig. Obviously. We don’t touch any of this, nothing in this part of the room. They do consignment stuff, some sorta thing they don’t talk about much that takes, well, all of this. Us, we use that stuff.”

I followed where she was pointing to a corner that was clearly set up for experiments. It was spacious, by comparison with the labs I was used to working with, and I could immediately start picking out salient details. “That’s still a lot,” I said with a quiet glee. “I’ve worked a lot of time in places less equipped.”

Shelving, both wire and solid wood, separated it from the rest of the warehouse. They formed walls at about chest height, delineating a space without blocking line of sight, and there weren’t any of the hanging herb-bunches in that area. Nor were there in a dozen feet of the shelving; there wasn’t anything, just stone… with visible scorch-marks and spots where acid might have dissolved parts of the floor.

“It’s not what you’ll have starting out. Don’t get too attached, okay?” She started following me; I hadn’t even realized until I heard her footsteps behind me that I’d been walking slowly towards the workspace. “I know the basics better than this stuff, but I have some Skills that’ll help. Learning, finding, using, the works. Anything we use up or break, we do paperwork, get it replaced; Hitz is doing me a favor here.”

“Burners,” I noted serenely, pointing. “Hot plates. Heat-grips, those are obviously for heating up the thing they’re holding, but I don’t know how they’ll actually work. Mortar and pestle, but it’s not in use, judging by the dust; three things that are obviously automated grinders of some sort, those are being used. Drip pans, gloves, goggles, masks.

“Bottles and flasks and vials, eleven different markings of glass tubing—diameter, length, types of joins, shape, could be anything. A cauldron, a small vat, both of them have a bunch of complicated stuff that looks like magic machinery. Scales, flat panel thingies that are next to the scales, a whole shelf labeled reagents.

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“Off the top of my head, I don’t see… tongs, secondary containment, something for air purification? No fume hood. Paper and pencil? I can use mine, but we need to write down anything we use, right?”

“Air purifiers, air filtering… [A Friend in Need, Fulfilled],” Kelly whispered, and a familiar shiver ran through the world. She set down the basket she’d been carrying, a basket I hadn’t even noticed until it hit the table with an audible wham. Then she walked, eyes half-lidded, towards a box labeled Cyclers. “I guess they’re in here!”

I followed as she opened the box, shaking my head. “That seems like a helluva… Skill?”

“It’s a Feat-Skill,” she said absently. She pulled out what looked like a T-shaped pipe with a parabolic dish on each of the short ends. “What is this?”

“A cycler, I guess. You don’t know, huh?” I tilted my head quizzically, peering at it. “The long end of the thing obviously plugs into or joins with another pipe, but what are the dishes?”

“I can look it up!” She grinned at me and pointed to a set of boxes on the end, near a wide table. “Reference books! But we know what it’s for, now.”

“What’s in the basket?” I glanced in one of the boxes, marked I Can’t Believe I Kept This Shit. It had a set of glass, ceramic, and metal alembics in it, spotless despite the box’s title. They looked functional enough, and my eyes passed over them, dismissing them as irrelevant to our needs.

“Food,” Kelly said. I was confused for a split second before realizing she was answering a question I’d asked just a moment ago. The basket, right. “It’s a double double. Four meals’ worth of work-food; two for two each. We gotta bring the basket back, they’re pretty heavily enchanted.”

I took a deep breath, looking around with my hands on my hips, taking it all in again. “Alright. This is… a lot.”

It really was. Shelves filled with boxes, clear containers, or unpacked equipment took up all the separating walls of the experiment nook. Two large tables and three small ones filled most of the center, and there was a series of posts with hooks and pipes whose purposes I didn’t understand yet. There were clamps mounted on the sides of the tables, ones with interesting fasteners that looked like they tightened onto—ahah.

“I think those glass cubes are probably what I’m supposed to use for experimental containment. Never thought I’d miss having a fume hood, because this seems… not optimal! They go in the clamps, so that they’re secured, and there’s other clamps for flasks, probably. Tongs, tongs. I’m sure we’ll find tongs.”

“There’s an index.” She’d drifted over to the boxes of books, pulling one out and setting it on the table. She opened it and flipped through a couple of pages, smiling. “It’s sorted by… actually, there’s two of them. One of them’s by function, the other’s by where it is.” Apparently on instinct, she flipped again to the end of the book, nodding to herself. “Not two, three—at the end there’s another index, alphabetical order and page numbers.”

“So that we can look something up that we’ve seen, or we can find something by name or by function.”

“There’s a recipe set, too.” She held up another book, waiting for me to take it from her hands. “This one’s got the Journeyman-ranked Basic Set for alchemy in it.”

I paged through the book absently, noting the level of detail and rigor of the recipes. They didn’t have a whole lot in the way of context or safety information, but they were absolutely meticulous in the ingredients, measurements, and methods. Is there… ah, yeah. Good. I smiled at the end-notes for one of the experiments, seeing the same level of care lavished on storage and cleanup of the end-products and intermediates.

I put the book down on one of the smaller tables. “This is impressive.” I shook my head, impressed, and walked over to the reagents. Glancing through the beautifully labeled jars, I could feel a mental itch coming on that I hadn’t felt in years and years. “You know what I want to do instead of just staring at all this equipment?”

“I couldn’t possibly guess.”

For a moment, butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth, she was so performative in her naivete. She lost it a second later, grinning impishly. She has dimples, I thought to myself. I knew that, but forgot it. How totally unfair.

Well, I’d allow it.

“I want,” I said grandly, drawing myself up to my full height and stretching, “to engage in a radical act, an act to mark a fundamental change from the life I once lived. I want to stride boldly into one of my possible futures and indulge in creation, and also maybe in some joy and delight and highly tedious detail-oriented planning and execution.

“I want, in short,” I pronounced, pausing dramatically and flaring out my coat, “to do some alchemy.”

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