by Aaron Jay
“Yes, Miles. And what is alchemy?”
I knew her knowing my name without me telling her was an artifact of the system knowing my name. It still creeped me out.
“Alchemy is the ability to make potions?”
“It is transmutation. Alchemy’s greatest achievement is to reveal the interrelationship between mind and matter, between self and world.”
“Can’t I just learn recipes? You know, add some eye of this and liver of that.”
“If you want to make eye and liver soup.”
This was going to be a pain.
“Hold on dearie. A bit of unfinished business,” said witch number two.
They stirred and chanted and I waited patiently.
Two battle weary men in kilts arrived. The witches did a bit of a spooky mumbo jumbo routine and then gave them what sounded like good news about some possible career promotions. When the men left, the witches had me dump the cauldron over to put out the fire.
The three witches led me to a hillside where a lonely wattle and daub cottage with a thatched roof sat. Given their whole aesthetic, neighbors might come over with a stake and bonfire as often as to borrow a cup of sugar. It was probably safer for them to live in the middle of nowhere.
Inside, vials of odd materials and drying herbs were racked. Jars containing all sorts of odd specimens sat unlabeled on wooden shelves. A massive wooden workbench was marked with scars and burn marks. Mortars and pestles, alembics, glass and metal tubing were everywhere. All the Tarot symbols and I Ching hexagrams were illustrated on parchment hung on the walls.
They settled themselves with a lot of sighs and grunts of satisfaction for getting off their feet and out of the fog.
Then began a short argument about which of them should try first to teach me. I was to be put to work.
Merga, the youngest, lost. It turns out the sisters were Merga, Agnes, and Chedipe. Merga lost the argument and had to go back out into the foggy cold. They didn’t want a novice like me ruining their lab and home. Merga wasn’t happy about it.
“Seniority is a terrible system. We are ancient. And for all these years I still get all the worst jobs just because I am the youngest,” said Merga.
Despite her grumbling, she began to teach as soon as we left.
“There are seven steps to transmutation. Calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, fermentation, distillation, and coagulation,” she huffed as she led me around the hillside.
There was a shallow cave. In front was a bare patch where the grass looked like it had been either burned, trampled, poisoned or perhaps all three. A beaten but solid workbench sat in the cave.
“What potion do you want to try first?” Merga asked.
“Healing?”
She grunted and pulled out some ingredients and equipment. Once it was set up on the bench to her satisfaction, she ran me through the steps of potion making.
Calcination was heating or dissolving matter. Step one was using heat to break down the fundamental ingredient of your potion while burning off as many contaminants as you could.
There were a lot of different ingredients you could use for healing potions. Merga started me off with black cohosh. Specifically, the roots. They were a ball of skinny black and red tendrils that smelled of earth and something bitter.
Under Merga’s tutelage I placed roots in a pill furnace, which was basically a clay pot that you could seal closed, with legs to allow easy access for controlling a fire underneath.
Use too much heat and you ended up with useless charcoal. Use too little and you didn’t get rid of the things you needed to burn off or activate the powers of the material. It took me three clumps of the stuff and Merga insulting my eyes, brain and parentage to get the black cohosh calcinated.
Dissolution meant using a liquid to absorb the impurities released during calcination. At my level, that liquid would be water. But you can imagine how other liquids might be useful, like vampire’s blood, or the liquid inside a slime or ooze.
Merga had me first boil the water and then wait for it to hit the right temperature as it cooled. You had to pour it at just the right temperature. I screwed that up and we were back to calcination. This time it only took me two tries to calcinate the root. One more miss on the proper water temperature and another two calcinations and I could finally move on.
Thank god I was learning this in a training program. Mastering it in-Game would beggar me. Though I still cursed Maya for making me need to learn all of it in the first place.
Separation was filtering out the liquid and ashes and base material that the water trapped.
Merga explained that this step was relatively foolproof, which should be a comfort to me as I was clearly a fool. In any event, I was able to run the dirty water through a sieve lined with peat moss and dump what remained into a mortar and pestle.
Conjunction had me grinding the meaningful materials left behind. It was basic mortar and pestle work. Merga told me that there were subtleties to it that I was blind to, but that as I was only trying for a pathetic novice healing potion I probably couldn’t ruin it even if I had all the touch of a bull pawing at the ground.
Next, Merga explained that fermentation meant adding new life to the dead material created through conjunction. Ever wonder why drake intestines or giant snake gallbladder was alchemically useful? Why were alchemists looking for all sorts of disgusting body parts and fluids? Because they were chock full of the right kinds of stomach flora or biota for this stage.
If you want to add “life” to a potion, you are going to need odds and ends from critters.
I spent a lovely hour separating out the inner stomach lining of a darkmantle. If you don’t know, this is basically a cave squid. Fun fact: its stomach is made up of four different layers, of which the third is alchemically useful one. I separated out enough of the layer I needed and minced it up into a bit of water.
Back into the pill furnace went the ground black cohosh root essence and the darkmantle tripe soup. She had me watch this concoction until I saw a few bubbles forming. Whatever yeast or bacteria was in the darkmantle must have been starting to grow.
“Good! Good!” Merga encouraged. It was the first positive thing she had said. More tiny bubbles formed. We were on our way to creating the most disgusting soda ever invented.
“Now! Now! You blind baboon!” Merga ordered.
That is how I knew it was time to begin distillation. The idea being that you boiled down what you had created thus far, concentrating its powers and effects. Most basic potions stopped here.
She had me bring the concoction to a boil and then back down to a simmer. She did her best to instruct me in the finer points of simmering. She was quite an expert on the number of nucleation sites in a boiling liquid. These were the sites where a bubble would form as you turned a liquid into a gas.
The whole process was intimidating. As she explained it, the number of variables was astounding. With more advanced pill furnaces, you could adjust surface area and texture to alter the number and distribution of nucleation points or allow finer control of the heat or access to air. It was all I could do just to correctly stoke up or bank down the fire I had underneath my pill furnace.
Fundamentally, potion making was hot, dirty, disgusting and frustrating work. If I felt I had any other choice, I would have quit. But I couldn’t think of anything else I could do that might let me move forward in the Gathering Quest and hence my bet with Maya. If I was limited on quantity of materials, I’d have to increase quality.
After half an hour of a slow boil, Merga grunted. I took the pill furnace off the fire. She had me cover it as it cooled. After about five minutes, she started tapping on the furnace every few seconds until she heard a tone she thought was right.
I lifted the top off the furnace. There was a muddy, red slurry waiting for me. I poured it into five vials and examined them.
Weak Novice Healing Potion
The weakest possible grade of healing potion. Its m
edicinal properties are barely able to overcome the deleterious effects of the contaminants and toxins left in this poorly brewed potion.
Heals 1-2 hp over 20 seconds
Part of me was elated and part of me was depressed. I had made a healing potion. Yay! Yet, it was crap. And, now that I knew what was in a potion, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to overcome my gag reflex if I ever had to swallow one, whether I made it myself or not.
There was still one more step in alchemy to complete transmutation. If you needed more power, you could attempt coagulation. This final step was where you precipitated out the purified essence from your distillation. You did this by adding a reagent.
In layman’s terms, you added something that would make your potion a lot stronger by concentrating it down to its true essence.
I definitely needed to master this last step. If I didn’t, given my failure rate and the meager quality of my success, my healing potion would be a net loss on the Gathering Quest. Even if I didn’t ruin multiple batches, I’d lose more points on the raw ingredients than I’d get out of the weak potion I made.
Goddamned Maya and my lack of luck. Everyone else just throws the ingredients in and gives a few symbolic grinds with a pestle and boom: potion.
I made another batch, this time with less help from Merga. At the end I added a pinch of ground up sun garnet as a reagent. I should have seen something bad coming, as Merga ducked out of the cave with surprisingly sprightly movements for a woman of her age.
My attempt at coagulation was a horrifying failure. The sun garnet was supposed to pull the important bits out of the thick mess I created. Instead, the whole thing turned into a tarry black substance I came to call vomit napalm. It exploded and flew everywhere.
After that, Merga left me a stack of ingredients, told me to make 100 batches of the healing potion and left me to practice.
Over and over, I practiced the different steps. My success rate with calcination dropped from three to four attempts per success to only failing one time in ten. Dissolution would only fail on me one in five times. I would mistime the fermentation one in three times. I screwed up the distillation about one in five times.
Do the math on all that and you can see that I eventually ended up with about a forty percent success rate. A good rule of thumb for the Gathering Quest was a potion was worth double the point value of the raw ingredients alone, assuming you made a decent potion. So, I’d lose twenty percent of the point value plus all the time I’d spend.
Now and again I’d log out of the training session and into the game to see if the fallow had ended. It hadn’t. I did take the opportunity to start stockpiling herbs and other alchemy ingredients I could find along the edge of the Crib when I went to check the area.
I needed to learn coagulation.
Vomit-inducing tar mixed with chips of stone would blast me every time I tried. Over the hundred times I successfully got to a potion, I never once got the stuff to coagulate. The sides of the cave became encrusted with the tarry vomit. The patch of dead and absent grass expanded. I had cuts and rashes from where I did my best to remove the stuff when it got on me.
No matter what I tried, I couldn’t succeed at coagulation. I did manage to create one hundred vials of the basic potion. It was time to go see the sisters again.
The door creaked as I entered the sisters’ hut. The fire was banked down to some barely glimmering coals. It was so quiet and still that I thought they weren’t home until my eyes adjusted and I saw that they were all sitting still in their seats. A cat nearly gave me a heart attack as it jumped down from a mantle and ran past me into one of their laps. I heard a frog croaking somewhere in the shadows.
“Excuse me. I’m back,” I reported.
“Yes, we are old but our noses can still smell,” said Merga.
“Thank you. That is why I am here. I cannot get the potion to coagulate.”
“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain,” said Chedipe.
“I finished my hundred doses of the healing potion. My hands aren’t cutting it.”
“But sometimes not…,” she chuckled.
“A little help? Please?” I said.
“I’ve tried my best to teach him. But I am just the youngest. You are older and wiser sisters. Perhaps you can help him,” said Merga.
“Knowledge rests not upon truth alone but also upon error,” said Chedipe, chiding her sister.
“Probably, but unless you think I can learn from more error than one hundred attempts, I need some teaching,” I said.
Agnes, the middle sister, looked to her elder sister, who now ignored the rest of us.
“Alright. Come on. Let’s see what you are doing wrong,” sighed Agnes.
We made our way back to the cave. Agnes had me run through the recipe one more time without any advice or comment from her as I heated, strained, ground and all the rest. I would look to her for feedback but her bright eyes in her mass of wrinkles just looked at me and my work impassively.
It took me two tries to get to a potion. Once again, the potion failed when I tried to add the reagent. Some sort of magic shield snapped into place from a locket on Agnes’s chest and deflected the vomit napalm. She was kind enough to protect me too, or maybe the spell wasn’t that discriminating and I just received collateral benefit.
She huffed, got herself comfortable and took me to school. We tried to calcinate dozens and dozens of different materials. The leaves of feverwort, burdock, Mediteranean thistle. The flowers of citronella and beggar’s buttons. The bark of western buckthorn. The resin of salai guggul.
As I heated the different substances, their very differences helped me to see when and where destruction as opposed to refining would occur. I developed an instinct for the earliest signs of burning versus calcination.
I memorized hundreds of different plants. Their elemental valences. How to judge their quality. For example, the reddish and thinner black cohosh roots I had used for my healing potion were superior to the rest.
She ground conjunctions to a dozen different consistencies, from course grained to fine, and showed me why I might choose one over another.
I learned different signs of successful fermentation and how to tell when the biota had overdeveloped and was dying, which would skunk my brew. I memorized all the organs and humors of different species’ bodies, and how they related to different energies. How gallbladders are Yang cleansing as opposed to livers, which work on Yin principles.
My failure rate at brewing potions dropped bit by bit. Eventually I could confidently brew any beginner’s potion: mild buffs, healing, energy, mana. I could even make a minor potion of transfiguration to give someone the nose of a wolf, or the eyes of an eagle.
But I was never able to complete the final step of transfiguration. Coagulation was always beyond me. I learned the details of all sorts of reagents and what their effects should be. But every time I tried: vomit napalm.
Eventually Agnes, who was a much kinder teacher than her younger sister, felt she had done all she could for me.
“I can keep teaching you more different ingredients but there are thousands upon thousands of them, Miles. The world has endless variety. You know enough now to assess them and their likely uses. Books and exploring can do as much as I can at this point.”
“But I still can’t finish any of the recipes. I learned all the reagents just like I did the rest. Why can’t I do any coagulation?”
“It isn’t the reagents. It isn’t coagulation. You actually have been successfully accomplishing that step.”
I pointed to the crud-encrusted walls. She nodded.
“Your creations are unstable.”
“Why?”
“Why indeed,” she said, looking at me with pity. “The truth of alchemy is transmutation. The individual steps my younger sister and I have taught you are merely minor skills. The final step leads to the deeper mysteries. It isn’t that you can’t use a reagent to precipitate a
potion. You are unable to transmute reality. I am not wise enough to teach you how or know why you can’t. Are you sure you want to learn it?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She looked at me with pity.
“Recall what my elder sister told you. Alchemy’s greatest achievement is to create an interrelationship between mind and matter, between self and world. To accomplish transmutation, you must forge that interrelationship between your mind and matter. No, that isn’t the way to put it. She is better than me at this.”
She rubbed her gnarled hands on the worktable and then did her best to explain.
“It isn’t forging a connection between your mind and reality. It is the opposite. It is to learn that your perception of a separation between you and the material world around you is an illusion. Really, you need to speak with my sister if you want to try for the deeper mysteries. I’m not wise enough to explain them.”
After that she refused to answer any more of my questions.
This was like the story of the three little pigs. Only the oldest one actually knew her craft worth a damn.
Whatever old Agnes might be warning me of, I needed to learn more alchemy or there was no point in returning to the Game. A dread had been growing deep inside me as I began to fear that for some reason Brady wasn’t going to let the land heal.
The math was clear. Even if I ruined fewer ingredients, weak potions weren’t worth enough points. I needed to increase the potency of my potions or the limited ingredients I could collect would never get me over the finish line.
Back at the witches’ hut, the eldest sister was waiting for me.
“Harpier, go find yourself a nice mouse or vole,” she cooed.
I had no idea who she was talking to until an owl flew past me. She led us out onto the heath. We stopped by a dead tree.
“Chedipe. Can you teach me?”
She considered my request for a moment or two. I thought she was going to answer but instead her hand shot out like a striking snake.
