Chapter 18: 16 – Voltage

Zef turned to look at the Philosopher’s Heart while Zel explained the shock. Makhus could’ve sworn he noticed her face flush pink for the briefest of moments. A few moments later the syringe was full, and he taped it over with a cotton swab on a piece of medical tape before pulling the needle out.

Putting the syringe away on a nearby table and moving onto Zefaris, he saw Zel opening and closing her fist a few times before her attention turned to the severed arm on the table. She looked it over from every-which angle, incessantly poking the skin and moving the digits, remarking that, “It’s still warm, even stinks like gunpowder and locust guts…”

That last part was... Accurate. The arm stunk the way they did, just five times more intensely and with the addition of sulphurous fumes and… CP-T? He was almost certain he smelled burned CP-T. Where the fuck would they get CP-T? Makhus shook it off and just drew Zef’s blood, whose attention still remained fixed to the Philosopher’s Heart in its tangled throne of glyph-glass tubes, columns and flasks, adorned with myriad seals as drapery. Truly, it was the king of alchemic implements.

---

Zelsys had to admit that it was a little surreal, looking at her own severed arm now that she was back in a place with some context for normalcy. Back in the dungeon she hadn’t even considered the strangeness of it. There were broken teeth and bone fragments embedded in its flesh where it had been severed, and the whole arm’s cross-section glimmered with silvery strands. The inside of the bone held bizarre patterns that reflected iridescent glimmers, as if the marrow were a lattice of pearlescent enamel.

Poke. Poke. It was still warm. She felt Makhus walk by, then saw him pick up the other syringe and carry them both in one hand to a cabinet. He then emptied each one’s contents into vials with glyphs on the inside, corked them, and taped the corks over with seals one fourth the size of normal ones and inverted in colour - pitch-black paper, bright-white ink, shapes made of right-angles.

“That’ll stabilize it for now…” he murmured, placing them down in the cabinet and leaving the little doors open. Soon he stood next to her, looking down on her for once as she was bent over. Even now, Zef watched that bizarre glass contraption in the back, with the flask that contained the black ball that hurt to look at. Probably something real special. Zel wondered if Makhus had used it to work on the Necrobeast Serum.

Before she could say that question out loud, the alchemist said his own piece: “I think it’ll be better to just put the arm back in Fog Storage. Hate to admit it, but that Tablet seems to be better storage for a severed limb than anything I have here. No glaciogenic tubes, no stasis glyphs, really not equipped to deal with this kind of thing.”

Zel gave a nod and touched the Tablet, willing it to open the fog vortex again with the intent to store something. She didn’t even register the familiar thrumming in her fingers at this point. In fact, she’d grown sufficiently accustomed to the device that most of its functions could be accessed with pure thought, though it was still often easier to just find something manually.

“Help me here.” She turned to Zef, tearing the blonde’s attention away from the Philosopher’s Heart. Zef's face was still slightly flushed, even as she hefted the arm and lowered it stump-first into the vortex. 

During this effort Makhus continued, audibly trying to stay on-topic, “I’ll uh... I’ll take a look at both your blood samples to check for parasites and…  Unstable mutations, though I doubt I’ll find anything. And uh… The Necrobeast Serum will be done be tomorrow, I’ll make sure of it.”

By the time the arm had vanished, Makhus was left standing there just looking at them. He didn’t say anything until they once more turned their attention to him, and spoke before either of them could say anything.

“...Come down here again once you get that stench out. I know dungeons change people, but I need to know how this one changed you to know what to look out for.”

Zel and Zef just nodded and made their way to the lab door, stomping up the stairs and leaving Makhus alone in the lab once again. He forcibly steered his mind towards his nearing completion of the Necrobeast Serum and his newly-formed concerns over the possibility of locust-man parasites, lest it drift of its own volition to the implications of that electric discharge and its correlation to Zefaris suddenly growing flustered. By the Dead Ones, he hated the immaturity of his own subconscious.

---

The bathtub had been filled a third of the way by the time they got back up to the second floor. Zel wasted no time in sitting down on her bed and shedding her clothing, beginning with the bandages that held her braids together. Despite the dungeon’s purging of filth, even her hair had picked up considerable dirt during the trek there and back. It seemed that the dungeon’s Fog Gates didn’t scrub inert matter originating past a certain distance from the dungeon entryway.

Zefaris was close behind, passing her by just as she moved onto her boots, whose Fog-infused leather loosened and slipped off easily when she willed them to. It was a miracle that they hadn’t filled with Dead Gods know what during all that. 

“...I meant the zap as a little joke at first, but now I’m just disappointed that beardo interrupted us,” slipped a teasing remark from the one-armed amazon.  

No reply came, only the sounds of mattress springs straining under weight and of sullied attire being removed to break the silence. Both boots removed, they surprisingly didn’t smell of anything more than generously oiled leather, as if they’d expunged all sweat before it could build up. The foot-wrappings hadn’t fared nearly as well, the linen fabric had grown discolored and its stench suggested one might use it as chemical tinder. They were tossed to the pile with the same wrappings that had held her braids together, to be burned later.

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