Brewing Bad Ch. 103-105

Merry Christmas everyone! Sadly, all I got you this year was words (again!) Still, please enjoy your bonus chapter in good health and holiday cheer!

Ch. 103 - Breakthrough

One ingredient at a time, Lucas prepared the latest batch of Blue. He moved a little slower than usual because of his recent brush with death, but he was resolved not to let a little stiffness hamper or delay this experiment. Truthfully, he’d probably overdone it with that little ride earlier, but he wasn’t about to show any weakness and let the gnome be proven right. 

Even though he worked just as he always did, though, there would be one key difference in the final step. Heisenburgle watched him work, but the man had seen this enough times that he asked no questions. Instead, he simply waited for an excuse to chew Lucas out when he inevitably did something below the gnome's exacting standards, but Lucas was determined not to give him that opportunity. 

He kept the heat low and shifted regularly between the different ingredients, mixing them all together a little at a time. Everything went exactly as he planned it, which was about right because he’d recently spent a whole day doing nothing but repeating this process over and over again. 

He felt certain that if he made this just like usual, it would have been his strongest batch so far, but then, it wasn’t going to be made like usual. Instead, he was going to replace the key catalyst ingredient with a completely untried alternative. That might be dumb, but he had a good feeling about it.

Even if it's not this catalyst, I know that it’s the problem, he told himself as he ground the pale white flower down with his mortar and pestle. 

He was certain. Just because his first try had been compatible because his old master liked to snack on them didn’t mean there wasn’t another better catalyst, in the same way, that all cheap cold medicines didn’t cook up the same back on Earth. Alchemy, much like cooking meth, was tricky, like that. 

Still, when everything was mixed and swirly darkly together, that didn’t stop him from adding the thin milky fluid to the beaker and silently crossing his fingers. 

“I don’t think this is going to work,” the gnome said, offering the first of what would almost certainly be many different I told you so’s. “The consistency is way off.” 

Lucas nodded. He didn’t disagree, but even so, he finished pouring the pulp of the reagent in, and then, he took a steel rod and slowly began to stir, letting the white mix and spiral against the darker background like a faint tornado. It dissipated in seconds, and then, just as he was about to give up, the whole thing flared brightly. 

As this was happening, Heisenburgle was pontificating. “I recommend we go back to the poisonous approach we were trying before. A methodical approach is the only way to…” but his words trailed off even as the liquid brightened.

For a moment, the flask was full of tiny stars. It was no longer the murky depths. Instead, it had become the night sky. It was hypnotic. Then, after a few seconds, it faded back into a dark, uneven blue color. It didn’t look like his Blue. Really, it looked like Blue that had gone bad, and was a few weeks past its best by date. 

“Well, something happened there,” the gnome said, quickly recovering, “But what?” 

“Who knows,” Lucas said, shrugging theatrically. “It’s nothing but garbage now.”

That was a lie, though, and deep down, his poker face was struggling. While he’d seed the same disappointing burnout that his gnomish companion had seen, he saw something else, too. 

You have created a new potion +104 experience.

You have created an imperfect potion of Lesser Communion.  

Imperfect Potion of Lesser Communion (1 dose): Poison 3, strength -3, toughness -2, euphoria -2, intelligence 1, allows one to communicate briefly with the elvish Goddess Lwyn.

That series of messages made it hard not to whoop with delight, but somehow Lucas suppressed it. Giving away this much information to the gnomish alchemist would almost certainly see Lucas put under his thumb forever. 

Instead, while the gnome laid out a new comprehensive testing protocol, Lucas carefully poured himself a dose of the stuff into a vial and set it aside. While he did so, he wondered how a container that large could only be one dose. 

Would someone have to drink all of that? He wondered. He quickly got his answer. As soon as the vial was full of the darkest liquid, he noted that it still read one dose, but now the large container had started to break down and merely read Poisoned Water. Indeed, it was no longer even that deep, ugly blue. It was now a murky brown with chunks of precipitate. 

Fucking magic, he sighed, pocketing the vial. Then he very theatrically dumped the rest of it down the drain. 

“Wait, aren't we going to test it on someone?” the gnome shrieked. 

“Why? Lucas asked, showing him the dregs of the bottle. “This is pretty much the opposite of Blue.”

The gnome grudgingly agreed and returned to his lecture on likely poisonous forest ingredients that might work. Lucas let him continue on with that for just long enough to make sure that the man was fully distracted by his own greatness. Then he asked, “Sure, this was a dead end, but what about that reaction. Have you seen anything like that before?”

“Myself? No,” the gnome admitted. “But in a technical sense, it would be referred to as an energetic catalyst reaction, and those are generally regarded as short-lived. Still, it was interesting.”

“So what about the dwarf berries? Why does that glow linger?” Lucas asked, trying to ignore the potion that was burning a hole in his pocket. 

“Well, clearly, it's a slow to medium catalyst,” Heisenburgle answered triumphantly. “This is a more common, and dare I say a more desirable, reaction in a number of common potions.”

Now that Lucas had wound him up, he watched him spin like a top. He spent the next twenty minutes explaining catalytic reactions to his human protégé and recommending several books on the subject. There were moments when he could have burst in to make jokes, but on the whole, Lucas ignored him. 

That set the tone for the rest of their night together. Heisenburgle showed off how smart he was, and Lucas pretended to care. Really, if the gnome had been less self-absorbed, he would have noticed that Lucas wasn’t smarting off to him every chance he had. That was more than unusual. 

His heart just wasn’t in it. All he could think about was that not only had he achieved a serious breakthrough, but he’d also managed to do so under the eyes of his collaborator and warden, with the gnome noticing. It wasn’t how he’d expected the night to go, but after that, keeping the dumb grin off of his face was a full-time job. 

Their night together ended with no incidents or progress. Heisenburgle had worked out a testing plan for the next few days and promised to send a man for Lucas’s tailor. 

“I want guards for him, though,” Lucas insisted. “More than there were for me, at least.”

“For a tailor?” Heisenburgle asked. “Why?”

“Because if they didn’t get me the first time, they could very well think he’s me the second time, and I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know what’s going to happen next in that scenario,” Lucas said. “The guy has kids.”

“Rocket surgeon?” Heisenburgle asked. “What is a rocket?”

“It’s uhhhh… a type of monster. It's a local expression where I come from. It means that it doesn’t take a genius to butcher something,” Lucas lied quickly. “But let’s not get distracted. I don’t want anyone killing my tailor thinking that he’s me.”

“Very well,” the gnome sighed, “Waste of resources though it is.”

The only productive thing that he accomplished was to make a new batch of Blue that he could bring to Lady Skylara as a present. If he was going to have to meet with her again, then he was certainly going to do it with a nice gift to stay on her good side, and if he could somehow make her overdose on it, so much the better. 

Brew of Mana Intoxication (pure, concentrated) (10 doses): Euphoria 15, poison 2, mana regeneration decreased by 250% for 1 hour. 

After that, normally, they would go their separate ways, but for some reason, Heisenburgle insisted on having breakfast with him that morning. Does he suspect? Lucas wondered, all throughout the meal of toast and poached eggs. He said nothing and did nothing suspicious. That was the first rule of holding anything, stay cool, don’t get paranoid.

Tired of talking alchemy, Lucas asked him about the assault. “Any luck with the wreckage?” he asked halfway through the breakfast, making the gnome practically choke on his biscuit. 

“Keep your voice down,” he insisted. “Officially, nothing happened. That wreck was caused by driver error, do you understand?”

“I get you,” Lucas agreed, “Don’t want to show weakness.”

The gnome nodded before continuing, “That said, the footsteps that came from the north side of the road certainly seem to indicate that it was, in fact, humans were there rather than elves.”

“I told you,” Lucas said, a little too loudly for Heisenburgle’s liking. 

The gnome shushed him before continuing. “Divination magic has given us some leads, but if it was truly a mage that you saw, then those are likely dead ends or even false plants.”

“So what do we do next?” Lucas asked. 

“You get your suit made and recover,” the gnome said, “and leave the rest to me. This weekend, we will both go to the ball and while we are there, I will ask the Prince to bring the registry from the guild of mages. It has portraits of each registered mage. You can pick out your attacker from among those.”

Huh, fantasy mug shots, Lucas thought. Makes sense when these guys are all the living equivalent of a machine gun or a bazooka. 

“So we find the guy, and then we take him out?” Lucas asked. 

“Take him out? Take him out?!” the gnome hissed. “Do I look like a mage hunter to you? That is an exceptionally dangerous job. No, we do absolutely nothing. The Prince will communicate with the head of the mage guild, and they will handle it for us. It is their job to police their own, and they will have no wish to stand on the kingdom’s toes in this matter.”

“But—” Lucas started to protest. He was far more interested in trying to figure out who was behind this. He had a sinking feeling that a certain junkie was in the mix, and if that was the case, then Lucas desperately wanted an excuse to choke the life out of him. 

The gnome shook his head violently at that. “No, no more talking about this. Not until the ball. I grow weary of the discussion, and I have no doubt half of the serving maids probably know everything they need to know about our dilemma.”

Heisnburgle left Lucas sitting there as he stormed off in a fit of pique. Fortunately, he took his paranoia with him. After that performance, Lucas was finally sure that the alchemist had no idea what he’d done in the lab. So, he got up and went to his room to play his own private game of potion roulette.

“Am I really doing this?” he asked himself when he got there and locked the door. “This thing could fry my brains.”

While he considered those words, he took out a lesser antidote and a healing tincture and set them on the nightstand just in case. There was no magical equivalent of Narcan, but it still paid to be safe rather than sorry. 

Yeah, like that hasn’t already been done more than once, his mind whispered to him. He nodded at that, then studied the evil-looking blue liquid for several seconds before he undid the cork and swallowed the foul draught in one go as he sat down on his bed. 

“Here goes nothing…” he said to no one in particular. 

Ch. 104 - Insight

The first sign that anything was happening wasn’t a vision from the heavens or a bolt from the blue. Instead, it was a loud gurgle in Lucas’ stomach accompanied by a sudden jolt of queasiness. That wasn’t so unusual in his experience. Lots of drugs were accompanied by nausea, and he wasn’t the least bit surprised that the foul, oily brew he’d just had inspired a similar effect. 

The dread that overcame him in the moments that followed was less expected. It started as a feeling that wasn’t so different, but as he sat there, he felt a crushing weight upon him. It was like he’d caught the gaze of something huge and terrible, and as his heart raced, his fear only grew. It wasn’t like he could run from it, though. His muscles were starting to stiffen, and he could feel his hands distantly clenching into fists as his eyelids drifted shut. With effort, Lucas forced them open again, trying to resist the effects of what he’d just taken, even though he knew that was useless. 

You buy the ticket, you ride the ride, he told himself, noticing the tracers caused by moving his head ever so slightly. 

His eyes tried to close again, even as his pupils started to dilate, and the room grew brighter. He resisted, though, and instead of being consumed by darkness, the world slowly dissolved into light. Lucas would have fought that if he could, but instead, he sort of fell into it as his brain slowly turned to mush in his skull. 

Even then, he didn’t feel afraid. Whatever this trip was, he’d had worse. He believed that even as he slowly came to in a vivid hallucination. He’d left behind the real world, But that wasn’t where he found himself when his brain started to work fitfully once more. Now, he was sitting in the impressionistic watercolor version of a world. Stranger still, he was sitting at a small table with a pot of tea and two cups. There was no one in the seat across from him, though.

There was someone walking toward him, he realized belatedly. It was a tall, slender woman, but at first, he had trouble picking her out of the forest background behind her. That is a background, isn’t it? He wondered as he squinted. 

In the end, by the time she reached the table, he couldn’t decide. Part of him was sure it was just a forest with some kind of heat shimmer effect, and other times, the whole thing seemed attached to her like the tail of a particularly outlandish peacock. It was hard to say. It might have been both or neither, and as she stood there smiling at him, he staggered to his feet. 

“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” she said cooly. “The first human to reach out to me in a thousand years, and he doesn’t even have basic manners.”

It took Lucas’s addled brain only a few moments to realize she was expecting him to pull her chair out for her. For anyone else, he would have told them to do it themselves, but the effects on the vial had said Goddess, with a capital G, so he was even less inclined to test her than he was to test Skylara. 

He hurriedly moved to her side of the table and pulled it out. Then, when she sat, he helped her push it back in. He was halfway back to his own chair before he realized he probably should have poured them both tea first. 

“It is alright,” she said. “You aren’t really from around here, are you? I shall be lenient with you on account of our differences.”

“How do you know that?” Lucas blurted out. 

That made the woman laugh. “I am a Goddess, Lucas. I see through you the way you might browse through a book, and if I might say so, so far, you make for a thrilling adventure, I wonder how the ending will turn out.”

“So then you know that I’ve been trying to make—” he asked, feeling a rising dread. 

“An elixir of power meant only for my own high priests, and that you use a bastardized form of it to make money?” she asked. “Or that you are doing so in ever stronger varieties so that you can appease a particularly mean-spirited dragoness?”

“Both,” he admitted lamely, wondering if she was about to smite him for his insolence. 

“Did you know that the reason she seeks the sacred spirit of Lwynthenll is so that she can challenge me to single combat and become a Goddess herself as she devours my still beating heart?” The Goddess answered entirely too cheerfully. “She’s been at it for, well, centuries so far, and you are by far the closest she’s come in a long time?”

“I’m sorry?” he said, not sure what else to say as he shook his head to try to clear it of the fog it was encased in. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, picking up the teapot and pouring both of them a glass of tea. “She’s only ever had the fake stuff anyway, so if you just keep making what you're making, that should satisfy her for a long, long time to come.”

“Fake stuff?” he asked, “If the elves know how to make the real shit, then why would they ever make something like Blue.”

“Real shit,” she smirked. “I love that. I think I will keep it. It is real shit.”

“None of that is important,” she answered. “I do not think you have put your soul at risk to have a conversation about elven mating customs and mortal weaknesses.”

“My soul?” he asked dumbly. 

“Yes, I could snuff it out, even by accident. Mortal souls are fragile things, and a human soul is far weaker than an elven one,” she said with a shrug. “But I will try to behave. Now, drink your tea before you get cold.”

Before you get cold, not before the tea gets cold? He wondered, but he said nothing. He’d already resolved to ask no more stupid questions. The problem was he hadn’t come here with any good questions in mind. He hadn’t even believed that it would work, and how he was here looking like an asshole. 

He gazed around the area, observing the indistinct and ever-shifting natural forms that surrounded them, and finally, he asked as he reached for his teacup, “What about the system… the pop-up windows I keep getting. Can you explain to me why alchemy is so broken?” 

“System? Windows?” she asked, “Ah, your talent. I see. Elves handle this somewhat differently than humans, but to me, it is clear that you handle it even more differently than most of them.”

“Yes…” she said to herself as she looked at him with unfocused eyes. “This is all very clumsy. I can see why you have had such hardship.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked. 

“I mean, your soul is connected improperly with your body and, therefore, your mind,” she answered. “They are compatible, but only barely. As to the alchemy, well, I am not the Goddess of alchemists.”

“Well, elves use alchemy, right? Can you tell me—” he started to ask.

“This is what a talent might look like to another human. Here is the interface for your friend, the tailor,” She handed him a scroll, which struck Lucas as odd, but when he unrolled it, he found much the same information as his windows generally showed. Attributes. Abilities. Skills. It was all the same thing, his just had more illumination. 

It also has a lot more killing, he thought, as he noticed the man had a long list of violent achievements. As soon as Lucas realized his tailor was basically a retired assassin, he rolled the scroll back up and decided he didn’t want to see anymore. Getting on the wrong side of a level nine murderer was clearly a bad idea. 

“Okay, so he sees the same things I do, but when he kills people or whatever, his experience goes up, right?” Lucas asked.

“It does,” she agreed. “But when he makes you a shirt, he gets nothing for that because he is not a tailor. In the same way, you get nothing for killing someone, only for making potions and learning about alchemy.”

“But only those that are on the approved list,” he agreed sullenly, putting the pieces together. 

“Exactly,” she agreed. “I can see the problem. It's because of this fallacious concept that you have in your mind that you call chemistry.”

“There’s nothing wrong with chemistry,” he shot back, feeling that little jolt of anger as it brought him back to life even more than the tea he was sipping. 

“Dare you to tell a Goddess she is incorrect?” There was still a smile on the elf woman’s lips, but it was an icy one. She definitely did not enjoy that. 

“Chemistry was good enough to get me here, wasn’t it?” he asked. “Magic is all fun and games, but science is what let me get here with some trial and error.”

“It has, I suppose,” she sighed, relaxing a hair. “It is something that has never been accomplished before. I will grant you that. Perhaps it is a technique of some use, but what does your chemistry have to do with alchemy?”

“Well, according to my, uhmmm… talent, it says that only certain recipes work and the rest of them are all junk, even if they work,” he said, trying not to step on her toes again.  

“There are exactly 8,002 recognized listed alchemy recipes that a mortal such as yourself might craft,” she agreed, “From a lowly healing potion all the way to Lwynthenll and the Transcendental Elixir of Immortality.”

“So there’s only one way to make a healing potion?” he asked, noting that his cup was starting to reach the bottom. Though he wasn’t sure quite why, that instilled a sense of urgency in him. He was sure that it was a signal his time was running out.

“There are eight recipes to make a healing potion,” she corrected him. 

“Well, I’ve made like thirty already, and I’ve only been at this for a couple of years. They’ve all worked. They’ve all healed people,” he declared, with a little more defiance than was probably healthy. “So that’s pretty much bullshit if you ask me.”

“Real shit, bull shit… it’s all shit to you, isn’t it, Mister Human,” she smiled as she set her cup down. “Still, I have heard your plea, and though it is inappropriate, I think it would be fun to see what you can come up with. Sadly, the potion you have made is not strong enough for me to grant you a boon. Our connection is incomplete.”

“I’m sorry, what boon?” he asked, trying to resist the rising feeling of dizziness that was making it hard to focus on her. 

“Your strange chemistry,” she said, acting like she was repeating herself to a child. “A Potion of Lesser Communion is simply for advice. An elder may craft one once and come to me with a question. To drink it a second time would be a deadly poison, so those elves that do often meditate for years or decades before they come to me.”

“That would have been helpful to know,” Lucas grumbled. 

“But to actually do something? To touch you without snuffing you out and fix the thing inside you that’s broken?” She hadn’t moved or changed expressions, but even so, Lucas found it difficult to follow what she was saying. “To do that, you will require a Potion of Greater Communion…”

“Yeahhh, but how do I do thattt?” he asked, slurring his words. 

“You’re so close,” she answered with another laugh,l pulling a strand of hair out of her face as she slowly dissolved into a watercolor mess. “One ingredient is just a bit off and… well, you’ll probably figure it out on your own. No hints! For a human, you are very clever…”

Lucas didn’t have time to consider her words. Instead, as he fell from that strange dream sequence, he plunged back into the greasy, sickened body; all he could do was stagger onto the floor and crawl to the chamber pot before he wretched his guts out.  

Ch. 105 - A Tight Fitting

Lucas had two full days to recover from the ordeal he’d put his body through, but it didn’t feel like enough time. While his body was still dealing with the fatigue caused by his near assassination, his mind was now equally ravaged by his brush with the divine.

She probably could snuff my soul out without trying, he told himself as he worked his way through a bowl of chicken broth the evening after it happened. The nausea faded quickly, but his hand still shook whenever he thought about that moment, and he was always thinking about it. 

He couldn’t stop. The worst part to him, beyond even the tantalizing glimpse that he was almost there, was that he couldn’t prove any of it was true. 

It might have just been the ramblings of a deranged mind, he thought. Lord knows I’ve seen crazier shit before when I was high. 

Still, it made sense, in principle. He’d come from a different world. His soul and even his ideas might be incompatible with the magic here. Well, partially compatible, he corrected himself. Compatible enough to glitch out and give me crazy ass dreams.

If chemistry was so incompatible with making magical potions, then why was it working so well? He didn’t have the answer, and as he assisted Heisenburgle on autopilot that evening, he was sure the gnome didn’t either. There was nothing in his alchemy tomes about any of this. If there was, he would have already told Lucas about it twice. 

Really, it was plain to see that the gnome wouldn’t have given him the time of day if not for the fact that Lucas was obviously on to something. Tonight, though, nothing was working. No matter which toxic ingredients Heisenburgle tried to add to the Blue to make it that much more potent, nothing special showed up. 

Oh, Lucas showed him that if they catalyzed only a single toxic substance, it produced something vaguely shimmering and opalescent in most cases. He did, however, neglect to mention that all of those potions that didn’t become toxic waste had one of two labels in his system. All of them became some flavor of Potions of Mana Intoxication, or in a few cases, like with troll blood, they became Potions of Health Intoxication. 

None of them were getting them any closer to their goal, though, and according to Heisenburgle’s rantings, they were becoming quite costly. Still, Lucas tuned all that out as he considered the Goddess’s words and tried to figure out what ingredient was almost there. Am I using the wrong kind of Blue Esper Willow Sap? He wondered. That seemed to be the most likely option. There were dozens of tree varieties that the parasitic vine fed off of, and Lucas knew for a fact that the properties varied from variety to variety. Still, the kind he used he’d chosen specifically because it was the bluest and the most poisonous, which seemed about right for what he was making. Would the purplish sap of a Blue Esper Beach Sap or the blackish sap of a Blue Esper Oak Sap be a better choice?

Blue Esper Beach Sap: Agility 1, poison 1, endurance 1

Blue Esper Oak Sap: Strength 2, poison 1, endurance -1, perception -2

When he suggested that to Heisenburgle, the gnome practically jumped at the idea. “These are not all things we stock,” the gnome explained, “So that trial run will have to begin after our upcoming party, but I’ll send for them at once.”

The fact that Heisenburgle seemed so enthusiastic about it counted against the idea as far as Lucas was concerned, and his excitement faded even as Heisenburgle’s enthusiasm increased. He was fairly sure the gnome liked the idea solely because it was cheaper than using Chimera Blood and Troll Bile.  

I suppose that I can’t really fault him for that, Lucas decided. He’d certainly used enough cheap filler to cut shit when he was out of the right stuff. What they had now was good enough to keep Skylara happy anyway, so that was all that mattered. 

So, by the time Mr. Twee arrived for him with a new suit and all the materials he needed to tailor it to Lucas’s exact measurements, the gnome was once again lost in the apparatus that he was using to try to distill starlight, and Lucas was happy to let him waste all the time in the world on that. It beat feeding poison to condemned addicts to see how they died. 

Still, it was only after Mr. Twee arrived, and Lucas saw how agitated he seemed in the presence of guards, that he finally realized something. It turned out that he might have a way to find out if what had happened was real or not. However, he wasn’t sure exactly how to broach that subject with his tailor. 

“Hey man, good to see you again,” Lucas said, walking up to the bespeckled milk toast man and shaking his hand as the guards finished inspecting his cases. “I’m really sorry you had to come all this way, but there was a… an accident, and my wardrobe didn’t make it.”

“Oh, my pleasure, Mr. Parrin, My pleasure.” Mr. Twee answered, shaking his hand with a grip that was just a bit too tight for the rest of his mannerisms. 

Lucas said nothing at that. He just escorted the man to his room, making idle chit-chat the whole way. When they arrived, the tailor spent a moment laying out his cases on the bed and getting out everything he needed while Lucas asked about his daughter’s health. 

“Oh, she hasn’t had a single complaint since she got better,” the older man smiled. “Really, I don’t think there’s a single sick child in all of Meadowin. We’ve got you to thank for that, I think.”

“Don’t thank me,” Lucas smiled. “Thank my repeat customers. They’re the unsung heroes in all this.”

The tailor laughed nervously, which was typical for him in Lucas’ limited experience but not so much what his vision would lead him to believe about the man’s true nature. I’m going to have to dig a whole lot deeper than small talk to figure this out, Lucas told himself. But how do I do that without scaring him for life if he’s not the man I think he is. 

“I’m sorry I only had time to make the one,” he said, showing off the fine dark suit he’d brought with him. “I made it from my notes regarding your previous order. ”

“It looks great,” Lucas said, pretending to admire the sharp lines of the suit. He didn’t really care, though, as long as it was presentable. “exactly what I was looking for.”

During the fitting, Lucas never really found the right way to bring the subject up. He had know idea how one was supposed to ask, ‘Hey man, is it true you’re a retired killer for hire?’ It was only when Mr. Twee was putting in the last few stitches to hem the pants that he said, “You know, those movements of yours are so sharp that you look like a dualist sometimes more than a tailor.”

The old man chuckled at that, but there was a hardness in his eyes when he looked up that hadn’t been there before. “What makes you say that?” Mr. Twee asked. “I come from a long line of tailors, nothing more.”

“Well, I just hear stories that maybe you weren’t always a tailor, you know?” Lucas said. “At first, I paid them no mind, but now I could see it, to be honest.”

“Could you now? How is that exactly?” The tailor asked as he straightened, folded up his spectacles, and put them in his breast pocket. “When I look at you, I see a crime lord trying and failing to blend in as a fop. I wonder what you see in me?”

The soft blue eyes of Mr. Twee were gone. In their place were the hard, icy eyes of a stranger who looked just like him. Lucas felt the overwhelming urge to draw his sword at that look. Fortunately, he wasn’t wearing it. It was hung over the chair not far from him. Still, he was certain if he drew on this man, he would die for it. 

So, he didn’t. Instead, he stood there calmly and said, “I see a man with blood on his hands who’s not looking for any more, a man who’s trying to put his particular talents to better use. That’s all.”

The man barely moved, but suddenly, there was a knife in his hand. Lucas recognized that the handle of the blade had been the handle to his small tailoring case a moment ago. That was enough to make him wonder just how many weapons the tailor had gotten by a fortress full of guards, but he said nothing. The only armor he had now was pride and self-assurance. 

Mr. Twee doesn’t want to blow his own cover any more than he wants me to blow it for him, Lucas told himself. He’s just trying to put on a show to scare me. That’s all. 

“The difference between not wanting more blood on my hands and not needing to is as slender as this blade,” the tailor said, turning the knife slightly so that it all but disappeared from Lucas’ view to demonstrate how slender it really was. 

“Well, even though you are a killer, I’m the last person you’d kill, well, the last person besides Danaria,” Lucas answered confidently. “Plus, if you aren’t willing to kill a couple people to buy your daughter extra healing potions, I would say that the odds are slim that you’re willing to kill at all anymore.”

“I promised my wife before she passed that no blood money would ever touch our little girl,” the Tailor countered. “So if I’m not getting paid for this, maybe that’s okay.”

“Maybe it is,” Lucas answered, spreading his arms a little wider in an inadvisable dare. “I’m just trying to get to know my people. That's all.”

“You still didn’t tell me who you heard those rumors from,” the tailor spat, holding his stiletto with the grace of a viper. 

“I made it up,” Lucas said quickly, certain that the man in front of him would kill anyone he had to, to cover his tracks. 

For just a moment he thought about throwing his least favorite junkie under the bus there. It would be a convenient way to make the man disappear, but Lucas decided against it. If Adin needed to die, Lucas would do it himself, letting other people do it was the coward’s way out.

“Made it up?” the man asked, confused by the answer. 

“I… there was something off about you, and I was testing a theory,” Lucas answered quickly, trying to decide what he would do if the man in front of him really went in for the kill. 

“Sharp instincts,” the man mused, sheathing his weapon back into the handle of the case, making it disappear completely. “I shall have to be more careful. What gave me away?”

“The look in your eyes when you’re pretending to believe my lies,” Lucas answered quickly. It was complete bullshit, of course, but it was bullshit that he would have believed himself. 

“I shall work more on my patience then,” Mr. Twee said with a small mocking bow. “Allow me to make myself clear. Those days are far behind me. I want no part in your organization, nor will I be drawn back into my old line of work again. All I wish to do is make clothing and raise my daughter. If you attempt to change that or draw too much attention down upon my new home, I will see to it that you suffer more than me.”

“I’m not looking for a killer,” Lucas answered with a shake of his head. “I’m actually slowly easing out of the drug business. I'm working on perfumes and cosmetics these days.”

“You came to Blackgate to work on cosmetics?” the tailor asked with a smirk. “I find that unlikely.”

“Well, this is a side trip. All of this is politics,” Lucas responded quickly. “You can tell from the suit and all the dancing. Trust me, the sooner I get this behind me, the better. Back in Parin Manor, though, trust me, we’re trying to go straight.”

“We shall see…” the man said, acting as if he could stare right through him now that his spectacles were off. “For now, though…”

Mr. Twee waved his hand, and a small swarm of needles flew through the air, going right in front of Lucas’s face before embedding in the door he was standing next to. “You will never speak of this to anyone. Not even your lieutenants, and certainly not to Miss Parin, is that understood?” he said as he picked up his glasses and started to polish them on his shirt. “This has been a significant enough interruption to my privacy. You are the first person to discover my secret in a long time and remain breathing, do you understand?”

“I do,” Lucas said, unable to keep his eyes away from the cluster of needles embedded into the door frame not so far from his eye. It went unsaid, but if any or all of those had been poisoned, he’d be in a world of hurt. “I won’t tell anyone on my life.”

The man nodded, seemingly satisfied by that answer, and then once that was done, he made a gesture and the needles flew back to him. They appeared in the palm of his hand once more before he tucked them back into an envelope. Then he finished putting that away along with all of his other tapes and thread. 

When he was done, and the glasses were back on his face, Mr. Twee was like a different man. The killer was gone, and the tailor was back. He shook Lucas’s hand with a wide smile. It was like the assassin that Lucas had glimpsed had never really been there. There was no trace of him. All that lingered was a fresh new suit lying on the bed.