Brewing Bad Ch. 19-23

Ch. 19 - Change of Plans

In that moment, Lucas expected a lot of terrible things to come charging out of the bushes. The size seemed to rule out another pack of goblins, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have a hob for a chieftain.

Lucas could probably take one of those, but if it was a beastman or, worse, a giant spider… well, he should already be running. He was conflicted, but he didn’t think he’d gone into the dark wood deep enough for either of those to be a problem.

The almost eight full tall silhouette looming out of the forest disagreed, but even as his urge for flight overpowered his urge for fight, he was stopped in his tracks by a booming laugh. “Well, look who it is…” the man-shaped thing said.

It took a second to figure out that the voice was familiar and another to figure out that he wasn’t looking at a man, not in the most technical sense. He was looking at a half-orc. After he put those two pieces together, it only took another moment of fumbling to come up with a name.

“Hurag’gh - you son of a bitch!” Lucas roared, dropping the spear and sheathing his knife. “How in the hell did you get out?”

There was no point in playing it cautiously at this point. The giant bastard could twist his head clean off with or without a strength potion. That made friendliness by far the smartest play, even if the guy still held a grudge that Lucas had left him for dead.

He didn’t seem to, though. Instead, he offered up a big toothy grin and extended a hand to shake Lucas’s. “You didn’t see? Me and Kar’gandin let loose a bunch of horses and thundered across the draw bridge as soon as you and your buddy with the Brandy sounded the alarm.”

“Well, I was kinda trying to go for a little swim in the moat… wearing armor,” Lucas said wryly, “So I didn’t exactly see a whole lot.”

This induced another round of laughter from Hurag’gh, so Lucas continued. “Anyway, we didn’t slip. I thought that was you.” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Don’t you remember going berserk and fighting your way across the courtyard with a trail of bodies in your wake?”

“I remember every trail of bodies I’ve even left in my wake,” the half-orc said, sharing Lucas’s confusion as he tried to figure out how their stories might have gotten so different. “And the only blood I spilled that night was in the torture chamber when I put that monster and his… victims out of their misery.”

Lucas thought for a long moment, trying to square that circle, and then he figured it out. “Son of a bitch, it wasn’t you!” he shouted before quickly looking around to make sure he wasn’t attracting any more hungry goblins.

“That’s what I said,” Hurag’gh answered, shaking his head. “Me and the dwarf - we were going to give you another day or two, but we figured you and his highness never made it out.”

“If it wasn’t you or me that alerted the guards, then it had to be Hardcore,” Lucas blurted out.

“Who?” Hurag’gh asked. “The guy in the armor? Nah - I’m pretty sure that guy was stone cold.”

Lucas was sure he’d figured it out by now but was unwilling to tell the half-orc exactly why. Nah, man - the berserk side effect of the toxic potion I gave you might not have affected you, but some of it got into that guy’s head wound, and he went insane, he thought dismissively. Yeah, there was no way that conversation would end well. It certainly explained why that guy didn’t go down fast, though. Not only was he wearing armor, but he was hyped up on potions.

He didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he told Hurag’gh, “Nah, man, it makes sense. He wakes up pissed, he comes out of the dungeon looking to murder everyone. That sounds the alarm, and the guards spot me and Adin. So we have to jump over the wall into the moat, and when they open the gate to try to get us, you ride out and ruin their whole plan. Couldn’t have worked better if we’d planned it that way.”

“Maybe…” Hurag’gh said as he turned and headed back the way he came, beckoning for Lucas to follow. “You know what? Doesn’t matter. He didn’t make it, and neither did the noble, so we gotta get with Kar’gandin and—”

“Woah, hold up, I gotta get these vines…” Lucas said, scrambling to pick up his shit and follow before he lost track of the big guy.

A couple of minutes later, they were traipsing deeper into the woods, and the smell of wood smoke was getting stronger while Lucas argued that he couldn’t just leave his horse alone, but the half-orc ignored him, and soon enough, they came upon a small clearing with a pair of horses, a couple hanging carcasses of game, a primitive shelter made of dead wood and leaves, and a familiar dwarf sitting by the fire smoking.

“Look what the orc dragged in!” Kar’gandin yelled. “Now we can finally stop waiting and get to work!”

That was when Lucas remembered why it was they were waiting here of all places. It was because he’d talked a big game, so they’d help him break out. Now they expected him to set up a drug lab with them… He swallowed hard and took a moment to think that through and try to figure out a way out of this mess.

“He’s not dead,” Lucas corrected Hurag’gh as Lucas heard him repeat the falsehood. “He just got shot with a crossbow. I got him patched up. He’s recovering nicely.”

“But you said—” the half-orc protested.

“Well, if he’s not here, and he’s still breathing, lad, then where did ya’ dump him?”

“Dump him?” Lucas asked in confusion, “he’s hiding out in a shack on the edge of his family’s estate. That’s where we’ve been the last couple of days.”

For a moment, both of their expressions darkened, and Lucas wasn’t quite sure why until Hurag’gh opened his mouth and bellowed, “Why in dragon fire are we camped out in the green wood killing goblins while you two are all nice and cozy on a noble’s estate?!”

Lucas was about to laugh off the complaint, but he saw some of that same annoyance reflected in Kar’gandin’s expression, so he took their concern a bit more seriously.

“Hey - first off, I didn’t even know you two made it out, and second of all, the man was dying; what did you want me to do?” Lucas shot back defensively. “His sister had the medicine I needed, and I spent the last couple of days making healing potions to replace the ones I used. Simple as that.”

“Well…” the half-orc growled. “I guess that means we can pack up this shit hole and build a hideout over there, then. I don’t see how you’re going to brew shit with these constant goblin attacks. I told you the Greenwood was a miserable place.”

“Hold up,” Lucas said as he realized they were getting the wrong idea.

“I reckon we won’t have much to take with us,” the dwarf said, taking a look around the camp. “The deer carcass has another day or two of good eaten in it at least. I guess we could—”

“Honestly, I was thinking about skipping town,” Lucas blurted out, not sure the best way to approach that.

“What? Why?” both of the other men asked, talking over each other.

“Well, you know - they’re going to be looking for us,” he said, suddenly on his back foot. “I was thinking maybe we go to Niv and Heinen.”

“There’s more wealth in one distract of Lordanin than both those bergs combined,” the dwarf laughed.

“And I hear the weather’s miserable in Heinen,” the half-orc said. “No, I think we’re staying here. They’ll forget about us in a couple weeks anyway.”

“That’s right,” Kar’gandin said. “I’ve seen it before; we stay out of trouble for a few months or a year, and the powers that be won't even remember our name to put on wanted posters.”

“You don’t think that might change if we start flooding the streets with blue?” Lucas asked.

“Well - not if we put some coins in the right pockets.” the dwarf smiled. “A golden dragon, when put to proper use, can be almost as persuasive as a real one.”

“Fine,” he said finally, frustrated and more than a little confused.

He wanted to get out of the city, but that was as much because of the Viscount as any real danger. He did owe these people, too, though. So what’s the right answer? He asked himself. But he didn’t know. He didn’t exactly trust these two, but the way things were going, they still probably ranked highest on the list of people that were least likely to screw him over.

So, for now, he’d go with it, he decided as his new-found friends led their horses back to his, and together, they made their way back to the Parin estate.

On the way back, the three of them chatted, and he slowly started to feel better about the whole thing. Hurag’gh wouldn’t be much good for anything but muscle, but as long as they were going to be making frequent trips into the Greenwood, that had its place.

The dwarf, on the other hand, seemed like he knew anyone who was anyone. He’d be able to get Lucas the berries he needed and the glassware and whatever else. He was also probably the biggest danger in the whole thing: once he knew the recipe, there would be nothing to stop him from stealing it and sharing it with his clan, and that wouldn’t exactly be hard to do.

So, on the way back, he regaled them with stories about just how badly Adin had screwed up his first attempt at healing potions and practically made a poison in the process.

“Alchemy is tricky business,” Kar’gandin nodded. “I had an uncle who was a maker of fine alcohols. Everything from spirits to stouts. Eventually, he even began to make certain elixirs, too, for a tidy profit. He said that there was only the finest of lines between medicine and poison. He’s dead now, rest his soul.”

“I’m sorry to hear that?” Lucas said. “Did he accidentally make the wrong sort of poison, or…”

“Nah,” Kar’gandin answered in a sad tone. “His potions were fine, but one day, gods rest his soul, he finally passed away from drinking too much.”

“A dwarf?” Hurag’gh asked incredulously. “Is that even possible?”

“Only if you own a brewery!” At this point, the dwarf’s sad facade shattered, and he began laughing so hard that there were tears in his eyes before he was done.

At the end of the conversation, Lucas wasn’t sure if the uncle's existence had been a joke or if the manner of his death had just been too funny to deny, but he went with it while he tried to figure out what he was going to do.

How in the hell am I going to explain any of this to Adin without coming off like an asshole? Lucas wondered as they approached the cider house through the backwoods.

Ch. 20 - We Got Nothin’

For lack of anything better to say, when Lucas opened the cider house door and found nothing but the messy room and the Viscount’s shocked face, he called out, “Honey! I’m home! You’ll never believe who I ran into while I was out.”

“Wait, I thought you were…” Adin started to say, but his words trailed off as the dwarf walked in behind Lucas, and the orc ducked to walk in after that. “What— How— I thought you were—”

“Dead,” Hurag’gh chuckled in a tone that was menacing even though he didn’t mean for it to be. “Yeah. We know. We thought the same thing about you.”

“I thought ye’ said we were going to a noble’s estate Lucas,” the dwarf chimed in as he looked around disapprovingly. “This place is kind of a shitehole.”

“Now, wait just a minute,” Adin said, sitting up as anger flashed across his face. “This building is—”

“A hell of a lot better than a clearing in a goblin-infested forest, right?” Hurag’gh interrupted.

“Aye, it is at that,” Kar’gandin agreed, completely ignoring the fuming noble. “Still, if we’re going to put out anything of quality we’ll be needing more than this, I think. You said that your potions had very precise recipes, did you not Lucas?”

“Yeah,” he commented, noncommittal. “I mean, I can make do with a campfire for easy shit, but if we want to make good shit… well, I’m going to need a proper stove, glassware, reagents that we’ll have to order from abroad. You name it.”

“Bricks for the stove and lumber we can probably handle ourselves if the good Viscount has some hand tools we can use, but glassware and all the rest for your little blue liquid, that’s going to cost a lot of kings, no?”

“Wait, I thought you said that you weren’t making Blue?” Adin asked again.

He was as baffled by the conversion as he was by the way the dwarf was walking around inspecting different parts of the dilapidated structure and pacing things off as the wheels in his mind began to turn. Once Kar’gandin had inspected the rusted cider machinery, he looked at areas of rotting wood and even the holes in the ceiling as whatever he was starting to plan slowly came together.

Lucas didn’t know about all that. He wasn’t a big picture sort of guy. He just wanted to make some potions.

“Well, you could say that after consultation with all parties we’ve opted to go with plan C,” Lucas told the lordling before turning back to the dwarf. “Well, I already thought about that, and I was kinda thinking we could sell some easy potions to build up a little bit of operating capital, then switch back to something more delicate.”

“What’s plan C?” Adin asked, but no one listened to him.

“Why don’t we just swing by your old lab and get what you had there?” Hurag’gh asked.

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea,” the dwarf agreed, stroking his beard.

“I don’t think going anywhere near my old operation is a good idea for now,” Lucas answered cautiously. “They had a mage the night they arrested me, and after the jail break - well it’s entirely possible they’ve tracked me back to that little rat hole. Its not worth risking everything for a couple dragons worth of alchemy equipment that we can buy somewhere else.”

They debated that for a moment, and eventually relented that it might be worth sending around a messenger of some kind to check on it once the heat died down. “There’s no point in having a fancy setup if ye’ be working in filth anyway,” Kar’gandin said finally, agreeing with him in a backhanded sort of way. “T’would be like trying to forge mithril with nothin’ more than a rusty hammer and a tree stump for an anvil.”

Lucas didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded along anyway. “Yeah, good work is hard to pull off with the basics,” he agreed. “Like… check these out.”

`

Lucas handed him a couple of the potions he’d made with Adin the day before, ignoring the fact that their lordling was trying to get his attention. “These aren’t great, but for something made in an old pot over an open flame, these aren’t so bad, you know? I figure we brew these up and sell them off for a few weeks while we work on our setup, and then we move on to bigger things. No one in the palace is going to start a manhunt over some bootleg potions.”

“Ya know, these aren’t bad,” the dwarf said, “looking at them with a far away gaze for a moment. If we could get these to my cousin Burken, in quantity, he might give us two or maybe even two and a half crowns a pop.”

“You’ve got an identify skill?” Lucas asked, surprised. “I didn’t think dwarves had magic.”

“It’s more of an… appraisal skill,” the dwarf said cagily. “I just know what my cousin pays and—”

“Will you all please shut up and let me speak!” Adin yelled finally. “What is plan C? What are you all doing here, and why don’t you seem to think you need my approval? This is madness. I am certainly willing to work with you, but I am a Viscount, and this is my home. I will have a say, damn it!”

“Plan C is for cooking, Your Majesty,” Lucas said after everyone else in the room regarded Lord Parin coolly for a moment. “It comes right after plan A which was abscond from our prison cells, and plan B which was breaking out of the castle. It comes just before plan D where your lands end up getting sold to pay your debts, you dig?”

“But even so,” the noble swallowed hard, “I—”

“But nothing,” Lucas interrupted. “You wanted to cook; we’re going to cook. You wanted to escape; we escaped. You’re in this now, just like everyone else, so man the fuck up, or get the fuck out.”

Adin looked at him in shock and opened his mouth, but after a moment of silence, he closed it again. Lucas took that for agreement, or at least compliance, and looked around the room at everyone else.

“I mean it. I got thrown in that cell and almost tortured to death because the last guy I worked with threw me under the b… wagon to save his own neck, so if you’re thinking about stabbing me in the back, save me some fucking time and stab me in the front right now instead, because I want to build something here, you know?” Lucas felt exasperated. He didn’t show it, though. Instead, he showed only steely determination.

This was something that had been building up in him for days now. More than even his annoyance with the Viscount it was probably the reason he’d wanted to ditch town. He’d been betrayed more than once in his short time in this world and in this body, and he was completely sick of it.

“We’ve all got a price on our heads,” he said as he looked each of them in the eye, “And only a single reason to trust one another: gold. We’re in this to make money. Which means sticking together, keeping our mouths shut, and stacking coins.”

Lucas’s impromptu gang warmed a little bit to what he was saying, so he continued.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to be an alchemist forever,” he continued, gesturing to the milk crate full of red potion vials. “I want a nice bar with some pretty wenches, some tequila, and some mother fucking hot sauce. I’m sure you all want things too, and I’m telling you, with this group, we can get all of them. We can buy back our good names, we can pay off the Viscount’s debts, we can—”

“Why should I care about paying of this guy’s debts?” Hurag’gh asked. “You and Kar’gandin have skills. You are both valuable allies, but a rich man without riches? He’s worth less than a sword without an edge.”

Lucas agreed with him, though he didn’t plan to say so out loud. The truth was that the half-orc’s muscle and the dwarf’s connections were infinitely more valuable than a broke junky that could barely be trusted to gather herbs on his own. Saying that wasn’t going to build the unity he was going for here, though, and the second these guys decided one member of their posse was worth booting, he might be next.

So instead, he shot back, “You think so? You think that Adin here has nothing to contribute.”

Lucas laughed. “Not only is he the one that gave us a convenient hide-out to buy us some time, but once we get things straightened out, he’s going to be our golden ticket.”

“Golden ticket?” Hurag’gh asked even as Kar’gandin and Adin mouthed the unfamiliar phrase.

“Yeah, man,” Lucas said, trying to get excited about this. It wasn’t his dumbest idea so far. He’d probably be fine. “Golden ticket. He knows people. Like - the important kind. How many of your friends are going to be able to float a dragon-a-week drug habit? Do you think the average working stiff on the docks is going to be able to afford to buy our shit? They might buy a bootleg potion for their aching back, but blue? We’re going to want to be selling that to knights and earls and wayward dukes that are fourteenth in line of succession and whoever else has a heavy coin purse, ya know?”

“Names open doors,” the half-orc agreed, “But his name is mud, what good does that do us?”

“His name is mud… for now,” Lucas said, “We’ll find a way to get him off the shit list, and until then, he can just sort of… steer us in the right direction. I’m sure that you have a good idea of who might have the right sort of proclivities to want to get to know us better, don’t you, Adin?”

“Umm, yeah,” he agreed. He was obviously having trouble keeping up with all of this. “The Brussons, the Maldins, and of course the Duchess of—”

“Fine,” Hurag’gh grunted. “The little man can stay, but don’t expect me to go picking berries or whatever else.”

“Nah man,” Lucas agreed. “That would be a complete waste of your talents. You’re here to cracks skulls and make problems disappear. Some of the ingredients I’ll need come from beasts and monsters, so you can help with that too. We all got our roles to play in this.”

The conversation continued for a while longer as they discussed plans and divided responsibilities. That was the easy part.

Explaining why these strangers were here to Gerwin and Adin’s sister when they came by that evening was somewhat harder. Denaria seemed overjoyed to see Lucas, though, and she even gave him a hug despite her manservant’s frowns, so she accepted his statements that this was their best option easily enough.

“Mistress… y-y-you can’t be serious!” the old man sputtered. “These are hardened criminals. The good name of house Parin will—”

“Be completely obliterated in a few years if we don’t do something drastic, I agree,” she interrupted in a calm, clear voice. “And if there’s one thing we can all agree on about this, it’s that this will be pretty drastic.”

Ch. 21 - Small Improvements

To say the next few days were filled with baby steps was an understatement. Lucas’s initial hopes were quickly clouded over by bickering and infighting. It wasn’t that his little gang didn’t want to work together. It was that they all thought they should be in charge.

Adin at least still did what Lucas told him, despite his attitude, and was content enough to go and gather more Elderberries and Rosewood bark, but the other two… Lucas found it hard to concentrate on anything while the two argued about how exactly they were going to retrofit their little cabin.

Honestly, he didn’t care if they knocked the damn thing over and started from scratch if it would shut them up, but that didn’t seem to be an option. Finally, after noon, when he ran out of ingredients, he went in to try to break them up and found the cider house to be almost completely unrecognizable. Despite their feuding, they had succeeded in cleaning most of the debris and broken down furniture from the place, but only at the cost of filling the whole of the one-room building with choking clouds of dust.

“What in the hell are you to doing in here?” Lucas gasped, coughing.

“Demolition,” shouted Kar’gandin at the same time Hurag’gh grunted, “Taking out the trash.”

“I see,” Lucas said, only a little concerned that they might kill each other. “Well, don’t demolish it too much. We still need somewhere to sleep.”

“That’s what I told him!” the half-orc grunted. “I told him that the Kingdom of Nye wasn’t built in a day.”

“It’s all work that needs doing,” the dwarf insisted. “We’ll need to clear areas for brewing, ingredient preparation and storage, and all the potions ye’r about to start maken’. That’s going to involve more than just moving a couple beds out of the way. We’ll need lumber and bricks, which means clay. We could hire someone, but it would be cheaper if we just made em ourselves, and after that, we could make a kiln and save a lot of money on potion vials if we—”

“Do we even have clay around here?” Lucas asked, trying to keep the conversation from spinning out of control. “I didn’t really see any…”

Currently, they could get their ingredients off the ground, and if any of them ran short, he supposed they could always switch to collecting scum lilies and skunk blossoms since pine nuts weren’t really common around here. It wasn’t his favorite potion to make, but they would still sell well, and there would be no overlap with the materials they’d need for blue, unlike mana potions. Thinking about kilns and warehousing space seemed a little like putting the cart before the horse to him, though, and he could kinda see Hurag’gh’s point.

“Do we have clay, he says…” the dwarf said, shaking his head. “Pha! Of course, we have clay. Did you not see it? The white bands amongst the tawny grey silt down by the stream? Digging out would be backbreaking labor, no doubt, but exactly how do you plan to brew your ingredients at carefully calibrated temperatures without a proper firebox and dampers. Do you even—”

“You think digging a hole is back breaking?” Hurag’gh laughed. “I thought that was what dwarves did? Dig holes!”

“Careful…” Kar’gandin growled. Until then, he’d been fidgeting with a piece of wood that looked like it had once been a chair leg and drawing in the dust where he thought different things like ovens and chimneys would go. Now, he was holding it like a cudgel.

Thinking fast, Lucas said, “Hey - go easy on him Hurag’gh, not all of us are as strong as you, okay?”

The dwarf flashed a look of anger at Lucas but paused when Lucas gave him a quick wink before turning back to the half-orc. “I’ll bet you could dig up that much clay in a couple of hours.”

“That’s right, I could,” Hurag’gh agreed. “More even. Earth would never pose a problem to a warrior of the wide plains.”

Lucas thought for a moment about asking him why a warrior of the tribes would be slumming it in Lordanin, but he already knew the reason, just he knew what an insult it would be to ask, so he ignored, and said, “Well then by all means, don’t let us stop you, if it’s so easy why don’t you go take care of that, while I help Kar’gandin air this place out.”

The half-ork looked back and forth between the two of them with suspicion, and for a moment, Lucas thought he was about to be called out for his bullshit reverse psychology, but even as Hurag’gh opened his mouth Kargandin said, “Bah, talk is cheap, but digging is—”

“Fine,” Hurag’gh roared. “I will dig out your red clay. I will dig your weight in earth in a single hour. Then you will see!”

“You don’t have to do that,” Lucas said, but even as he spoke the half-orc was storming out of the room and as soon as the big warrior grabbed a shovel from the shed his footsteps retreated into the distance.

They both waited a few seconds after that before Kar’gandin let out a low chuckle and said. “Very smooth for a youngin’ like ye’, Lucas; I will have to keep an eye on ye’ lest you find a way to lead me around by the nose like that.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked, feigning innocence. “I’m just trying to make sure all the work we need to do gets done, you know?”

“Aye,” the dwarf nodded. “And there’s a lot of work to do. The wood is rotted through in places, and though getting the straw to re-thatch the roof will na’ be too hard, I’m not exactly plannin’ to build a sawmill to redo this shiplap, if ye know what I mean.”

“I get it,” Lucas answered as he looked around the room. “This place doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be functional for now. Once we have the funds we can find some place more… defensible.”

“Defensible?” the dwarf laughed. “That’s just another way to get more eyes on ya’ laddie. We don’t need defense. We just need to keep a really low profile. Sell to wholesalers, show no flash, let others take the fall?”

“That’s kind of a weird thing to say when talking about your cousin,” Lucas said, a little disturbed.

“Oh, no one will be taking the fall for some bootleg healing potions,” Kar’gandin said. “And I wouldn’t get him involved in anything that’s truly illegal. He’s too much of a straight arrow for that. He thrives in gray areas, and I see no reason to change that now. When the time comes, we’ll just have to negotiate with one of the gangs for a cut of the profits. That’s all.”

“I tried that already. Twice, actually,” Lucas confessed as he started opening up all the shutters he could to clear the air. “The first time was with the assholes that run the market distract, and—”

“Ah, The Blind,” the dwarf nodded ruefully. “Why did you ever think you could trust those maggots?”

“Well, when I first showed up here, they seemed like the only game in town, so I tried to partner up with them. When I was small time, it was fine, but once I started to make real money…”

“They tried to gut you like a fish and steal your recipe?” Kar’gandin asked, pretty much finishing Lucas’s thought.

“Pretty much,” Lucas agreed.

“Well, that makes things simple. We’ll approach the Knights of Brass or the Red Lantern Gang. They hate the beggars, not that we can trust them either.”

“No shit!” Lucas yelled at the feeling that his paranoia had somehow been vindicated. “That’s why I went to Brog and—”

“Brog… Verdwin?” Kar’gandin said with a disbelieving laugh. “The dwarf who owns the Chimera’s Chalice? Why’d you get in bed with that snake?”

“How was I supposed to know he was a snake,” Lucas said defensively as he picked up a broom and started angrily sweeping. “I was told that he was a dwarf with his finger on the pulse of everything, and that was just about what I needed.”

“Yes, a dwarf on the pulse of everything… for Prince Raston,” Kar’gandin chided Lucas. “The man has his talents, but the only reason he got in bed with you was to sell you out to his true master.”

“Now you fucking tell me,” Lucas griped. “So, who are you going to sell me out to? Your clan?”

“Nah,” the dwarf said, taking a step back and grabbing another broom. “The last thing I want is to mix clan Bronzebeard in with drugs. We have a bad enough reputation in certain circles. I’ll happily take my cut, and then once I’m made whole from Lordanin’s legal deprivations, I’ll go home and count my blessings. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

Lucas considered those words long after they switch topics, and even after they stopped talking at all. Bailing on something like this was probably the smart move. There was deffinitely such a thing as too much of a good thing. How will I know when I get there, though,  he wondered.

Lucas reflected on his last life while he worked. There’d been a number of points, usually just before he got arrested or beat down, that he thought he couldn’t lose. That, he decided was probably the trigger. When everything was great, it just meant that something awful was lurking around the corner.

The rest of the day turned out to be a productive one. Adin eventually came back with whole basket’s full of mostly the things they actually needed, Kar’gandin managed to strip every last thing out of the now empty cider house except the four best beds, and Lucas brewed up everything they had, with pretty decent results.

Tainted Lesser Healing Potion (2 doses): Lesser healing, poison 1, endurance 1.

It was only when the three of them went to see what the half-ork was up to that they found a real surprise. When he hadn’t come back after a couple hours, Lucas had expected that he’d given up or decided this was a waste of his time. That’s what Lucas would have done.

Instead, they found Hurag’gh in a pit that was past his waist not so far from the stream next to a mound of clay that was both taller and wider than Kar’gandin. “See, did I not tell you?!” the half-orc boasted as soon as they got close. “It isn’t back breaking, it’s easy!”

“Yeah, you sure showed us,” Lucas called back with a pasted on smile as he approached the pile and played with a handful of the plastic red earth. “This going to do the job Kar’gandin?”

“Aye,” the dwarf nodded. “We just need to make some brick molds, make a whole pile of bricks, and then we’ll fire 'em.”

“Fire them?” Adin asked. “How do we do that? I thought that was careful work for guild artisans.”

“It can be,” the dwarf admitted with a shrug, “But in my experience, it’s easy enough. You just need to keep a good campfire going for a few days, and that’s that.”

“Digging clay… making bricks… Cooking them… It just seems like a lot of work. Wouldn’t it just be easier to, I don’t know, buy them?” Adin asked, still looking at the whole thing with obvious distaste.

“Certainly,” the dwarf said with a wide smile. “You could get a few labors to bring you a whole wagon load for a copper a brick. Maybe less if you order in bulk, or you could get a couple of guild artisans out here to turn this clay right here into bricks for you just the way I described for maybe half that. All you need is five or six golden dragons. I don’t suppose you have a few on you?”

“Well… that’s not so much in the grand scheme of things, but until we sell these potions, I’m afraid I’m a little short,” Adin confessed.

“No, I’m a little short,” Kar’gandin laughed. “You, you’re flat busted, so we need to make what we can and spend where we have to. Maybe in a few weeks, that will be different, but for now… welcome to the lower class with the rest of us.”

Lucas and Hurag’gh both laughed at that as the dwarf offered the noble his dirty hand. Adin didn’t see what was funny, but he did shake the offered hand just the same.

Ch. 22 - Stacking Bricks

“Why does everything in your plans involve cooking?” Adin asked as he stood next to Lucas, stripped to the waist, laying out bricks to dry in the sun on the field between the cider house and the barn.

“What’s that?” Lucas asked.

Until that moment he’s been a million miles away. He had been since the man they’d sent to deliver six dozen potions of healing and a letter of introduction to Burken Bronzebeard had come back earlier. The Parin servant had returned with a pouch full of gold, and a letter for Kar’gandin as expected, but he’d also come back with one other thing: a wanted posted.

Burken had promised a good price for any other potions that Kar’gandin wanted to send his way and promised that one of his men would look through Lucas’s Greybottom laboratory and report back, but if the dwarf were to be believed, the wanted posters were up all over town, which was exactly the opposite of what Lucas’s friends had thought would happen after over a week in hiding. Lucas had feared exactly this sort of scenario of course, but he said nothing. Instead, he just worried.

Technically, he should have worried the least. The drawing for Hurag’gh and Adin was pretty dead on, Kardargain’s had been okay, but Lucas’s had looked nothing like him. That told him they still had no idea who he was, but he’d be lying if part of him didn’t think that was an excellent excuse to get while the getting was good.

He didn’t run, though. Instead, he listened as Adin repeated himself and then said, “First of all, these bricks aren’t cooking; they’re baking, and second of all - I like cooking. What’s wrong with that? Chemically or culinary speaking, both can be a lot of fun.”

“That doesn’t seem to be the case to hear the servants talk,” Adin mused. “It sounds like quite the chore if you ask me. Personally, I’ve never tried it for myself.”

Yeah, and it shows, Lucas thought wryly. He said nothing, though. Instead, he laid his last wet clay brick down on the grass to dry and went back for another load.

According to Kar’gandin, they only needed a hundred or so to make the small firebox Lucas had asked for, but it was hard to fire so few bricks, so they were going to make a couple hundred anyway. That was kind of a pain in the dick, of course, but Lucas, more than anyone, was looking forward to having fire that he could regulate at a nice steady temperature. He was getting sick of campfire cooking, and now that they had the money for some real glassware, he didn’t want to risk ruining it in such an unstable work environment.

At least the first step was done, though. Now, they just had to pack the clay into wooden molds and leave the resulting bricks out to bake in the sun for a couple days on each side. According to their dwarf, whom Lucas trusted completely in all matters related to construction, once that was done, they could finally bake them.

No matter Adin’s complaints, it really was like baking, too. They even used sand like flour to keep the sticky red clay from holding too tightly to the wood once it had been packed hard inside the frames.

The three of them had been hard at work on this for a couple of days now, and only Hurag’gh was missing. He’d proclaimed this work beneath him, so Lucas had tried and failed to convince the half-orc to take a break.

“Once this is done, I’ll help you chop down some trees so we can start seasoning firewood,” Lucas told him.

Predictably, Hurag’gh hadn’t been interested in help. Instead, he’d decided to show the weaklings he was surrounded with how to fell trees and gone off with only an axe. Lucas hadn’t seen him in half a day, but from the sound of chopping, he had no doubt they’d spend a good portion of tomorrow hauling and splitting the logs that their giant was making.

Some of them would become counters for his future alchemy shop, but most of the rest was destined to be split and stacked to become firewood. I just hope that son of a bitch is cutting down the dead trees, Lucas thought with a sigh. Not only were the living apple trees going to be a good source of sugar for his still when they started brewing their own shine for potion making, but green wood would take forever to age and dry.

The days were exhausting, but they were going by uneventfully, at least. That was enough to make him smile even as he sweated under the noonday sun. Lucas had brewed and sold over a hundred healing potions so far, and even though they were still broke because almost all of that cash had been immediately used to order new glassware with the glassblower's guild and secure shipments of other rare reagents he’d need, it still felt like progress.

Plus they were eating better too now that they’d started giving Gerwin a meal budget to work with. The man was not happy that the four of them were squatting at the edge of the Parin estate and putting his mistress in jeopardy. Despite that, though, once the started paying him a dragon a week for the kitchens to provide food for the four of them, he became a lot less stingy.

For the first week, it had been nothing but stale bread and stew composed mostly of leftovers. Admittedly, that had still been pretty good for free food, but now that Lucas was making sure they were contributing to the failing finances of the house, they were finally getting real meals. The house would deliver them sweetbreads for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and last night, they’d had potato soup and sausages for dinner.

All in all, it wasn’t bad. Except for Hurag’gh’s chainsaw like snoring, and Adin’s subtle insinuations that he’d really love to get another hit of blue, life was pretty much perfect. He even had a pretty girl that was obviously trying to catch his eye.

Lucas had no intentions of getting with Denaria, of course. She was much too sweet and innocent for a girl like that. He would ruin her without even trying. She was more like a butterfly, and every time she found an excuse to come out and visit him amidst their labors and ask about this or that, he had to remind himself that no matter how beautiful the blonde girl could be when she smiled, touching a butterfly was the surest way to kill it.

Besides, he reminded himself, Taking off all of those petticoats… Netflix and chill would take all night in a place like this. We’d run out of movie before we ran out of clothes.

No, now wasn’t the time for women. When everything was back under control, and the heat had died down, maybe he’d take a stroll through the red light district and find some romance the old-fashioned way: with his coin purse. For now, women would only distract him.

Right now, they needed to work. While the bricks were drying, Kar’gandin chopped wood, and he and Adin went looking for more brewable ingredients. They’d run out of elderberries and sage root in just about every direction, and orange vogel blossoms were out of season, so that put healing potions off the menu for now.

Instead, they were hunting for anything that might eventually be turned into blue, along with ingredients he could use to make potions of stamina, potions of strength, and potions of iron will. That last one, admittedly, wasn’t for selling, it was just something that Lucas wanted to brew up to see if it would help Adin grow a pair and kick the habit.

Kar’gandin had wanted Lucas to try to brew the love potions that the lordling had mentioned around the campfire the other night, but for now, Lucas put that off. When the dwarf demanded to know why he wouldn’t make something that would sell so well, Lucas had claimed they’d have to order most of the very expensive ingredients, but the truth was that he didn’t trust him to make such complex potions without access to his notes.

That was a problem for a great many recipes he had. They might be out of mats for common healing potions, but Lucas was fairly sure that he could whip up some greater healing potions, or even some healing salves and balms if he had his notebook. Unfortunately, those were in his hideout too.

Unlike the flasks and beakers, which had only been hidden amongst his other dishes and behind cushions, his notes were buried beneath the earthen floor and the hearthstone in front of his tiny hideaway’s small fireplace. So, while they were almost certainly safe, he wouldn’t be getting to them any time soon, and he wasn’t about to send someone to go and fetch them in his place.

If he made the mistake of trusting either Kar’gandin or his cousin, it would be the easiest thing in the world for them to tell him, ‘So sorry, my man found nothing, they weren’t there anymore,’ and make off with the last couple years of his alchemical research. That was unacceptable.

It was something he thought about often between other tasks, but it didn’t stop him from working, and three days later, they finally gathered the sun-dried and stacked them into sort of a giant cube. It was only partway through the exercise that he realized what they were doing.

“We’re building a damn oven,” he blurted out when they were stacking up the third course.

“Indeed,” the dwarf agreed. “An oven that cooks itself.”

Lucas had never given it much thought before, but he supposed it made sense. Bricks needed to be baked until they were hard, so why not bake them in an oven that was made out of unfired bricks? It was an elegant solution.

In the end, they ended up with a cube of uniform tan bricks four feet on a side surrounding a fairly large empty cavity in the middle that had been stacked full of wood. The top had a large chimney hole, and the sides were riddled with smaller holes to allow the whole thing to breathe.

Lucas thought it looked pretty ugly, but as the sun set and they lit the fire, all that changed. Slowly their bonfire picked up steam, moving from barely visible to all consuming. They couldn’t just let it burn itself out though. According to Kar’gandin, there was a lot of work left to do.

First, they had to keep adding fuel for hours as the thing slowly became a blast furnace. Then, once that was done, they had to start closing the thing up with rocks and sand to keep all the heat in.

“I’m kinda starting to feel bad for those bricks,” Lucas joked. “We built them a little tiny hell in there.”

“Aye,” Kar’gandin agreed. “Hotter than Embermaw’s breath in there. That’s how you get the buggers nice and strong.”

“How will we know when they’ve been in there long enough?” the half-orc asked. “Will they not crumble to ash if we bake them too much?”

“Nah,” the dwarf laughed. “A little blackening is a good sign, but as a general rule, more heat is better. It's true for the forges and true for… now, what do you suppose is goin’ on over there?”

As one, the three of them turned to where the dwarf’s stubby finger was pointing, and Lucas instantly recognized the torches from their last visit. “Shit,” he muttered. “The guards - they’ve come back.”

Ch. 23 - Really Cooking!

The four of them chatted tensely for a few minutes, and it was only when some of the lights started getting closer that apprehension burst out into full-blown panic.

“Why do I have to stay here,” Lucas demanded, as he stood there with nothing but his shovel and an expression of disbelief as everyone else started to retreat into the woods.

“We’ve talked about this,” Kar’gandin growled. “Nonhumans in human cities stand out like sore thumbs, and they’re here looking for Adin, so you’re it,” before he took off into the night.

Lucas sighed as he turned back to the approaching lights, feeling entirely alone. The plan made sense. That was why he’d agreed to it before, because, honestly, it would have been even more suspicious to just disappear and leave a halfway rehabbed building or a pile of burning bricks with no one to watch it. Such a thing might be enough to make them sure the Viscount was here and justify a complete search of the overgrown orchard where the rest of his crew were hiding.

So, he just kept doing what he’d been doing, and covered up the bricks, one shovelfull at a time. By the time the half a dozen guards arrived he was basically left with a sweltering anthill with only a few glowing gaps on the upper parts that hinted at the hellish conditions inside the mound.

“What do we got here?” one of the guards called out.

Lucas turned to answer him but his voice caught in his throat for a moment as he recognized the tall guard and the short guard that had arrested him on the night this had all started a couple weeks back. “Don’t mind me officers,” Lucas said finally, just managing to keep his voice from shaking. “Just sweatin to the oldies back here.”

“Sweating to the what…” the short one asked. “What are you making there?”

“Me?” Lucas asked. “Nothing. I’m just here to work the shovel and watch the bricks burn, sir.”

Both of them eyed him suspiciously for a moment, and a couple of other guards spread out and began to look around the cider house. “We've received reports of suspicious activity,” the guard said, trying again. “Word is the Viscount might be hiding out back here and—”

“Who?” Lucas asked, prompting the guard to shove one of the wanted posters into his hand.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen the man,” Lucas said after spending a moment studying the images.

“I don’t get out of the city much, though. This one,” he said pointing at Hurag’gh, “I think I’ve seen him before at the drunken donkey before, but not, you know, recent like or anything.”

“The Drunken Donkey, huh?” the short one said, eyeing him suspiciously. “Say, Rob, does this guy look familiar to you? Didn’t we pick up someone like him the other day?”

Lucas cursed himself for using the same bar as he had last time and triggering this guy’s memory. Fortunately, the tall guard was already looking past him and moving toward the cider house. “How in the pits should I know that Sten?” he said, walking past Lucas. “We crack 10 heads a night; if the masonry guild wants to hire drunks or vagrants to tend night fires, why should I give a single goblin crap about that?”

“Yeah, but—” Sten said, still eyeing Lucas.

Lucas decided to lean into that, though and bowed slightly. “I won’t deny I’ve been on the wrong end of the watch’s baton more than once,” he interrupted. “Shameful though it is to admit, more of my meager wages go to drink than I would like, but I have no one to blame for that but my own self, good sirs. I hold no anger toward the guard for helping to keep me in line, and I’d be happy to help you in whatever way I can before—”

Lucas’s obsequiousness earned him a shove from the shorter guard as he moved past Lucas to rejoin his fellow, but no more than that. “Do you know what the bricks are for or what the lady of the manor plans to do with this building?”

“I can’t say,” Lucas said with a shake of his head. “I think I heard my masters talking about refurbishing this building and clearing up the orchard, so I assume they’d start making cider again, but it's really not my place to speculate.”

The rest of his crew should have cleared out the place, but as he followed the guards inside, he still held his breath. There were still a few crates filled with odds and ends, but nothing too intimidating, and once they verified that the Viscount wasn’t hiding under the bed, they soon lost interest.

“If you see anyone strange in the woods, you let your masters know,” Rob cautioned him as the group turned to leave. “There might be a good turn in it for you the next time you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”

“I’ll do that,” Lucas promised, even though he had no plans of ever talking to the law again if he could help it.

Instead, he went back to plugging gaps in his pile of smoldering bricks until none of the ember light escaped. Then, when that was done he watched the torches retreat into the distance. Even once they were gone, though, he stood there sweating until the torches have given up and began moving back to the city.

“They’re still looking for you, man,” Lucas told Adin when he saw the three silhouettes emerging from the woods.

“Why? Why are they hounding me and not either of you?” the Viscount said, angrily railing at the half-orc and the dwarf.

“Who says they aren’t laddie?” Kar’gandin said, sounding tired. “My cousin said they’d visited him and other business associates, too. They’re definitely still looking for all of us.”

“Well, if they’re going to keep looking for us here, then why in the hell are we building an alchemy lab here!” Hurag’gh bellowed.

Honestly, it was a good question. Lucas had assumed that the last search had been kind of a one-time thing. Not that it was a two time thing, though it could just as easily become an every week sort of thing, which could put a real crimp in their plans.

“Well, as I see it, we’ve really only got two choices,” Lucas told them. “We either keep building here but we make it look like a boring operation that makes nothing but cider or we start over somewhere else before we get too much father along.”

“We could build further back in the orchard,” Adin volunteered. “If we chopped down the middle part of the grove, we wouldn’t be visible from the road or the house. We could start over and—”

“Nah, laddie’; I think the better choice is to stay right here but be a bit more subtle.” the dwarf said, stroking his beard.

“What?” the half-orc bellowed, sounding almost as surprised as Lucas was by the statement. “Why? Do you want us to get caught?”

“Sometimes, when you’re being searched on a regular basis, the best place to hide is in plain sight,” the dwarf said, walking over to an unsplit log before sitting down so that he could begin to load his pipe. “If they’re going to keep coming back, they’ll eventually search that orchard too, and anything they find there will be instantly suspicious. Here, at least, we can make everything look like it might have another purpose.”

He reached over and stabbed a twinge into the mound of burning bricks and then used the burning tip to light it, taking a couple puffs before he continued speaking. “The Parins have an orchard and a cider house - no reason in the world why they might not use it to make cider. We could even import it into the city and pay taxes for the stamp and everything. If we pack it right, the gate guards ain’t gonna open it up to look for potions they don’t know about. We’d be able to get a better price from my cousin, too.”

“A better price?” Lucas asked. “Why? Would that get us a better price?”

“You don’t think he’s getting paid a smuggling fee?” Kar’gandin laughed. “You want him to sell our goods, that costs. You want him to smuggle it in to Lordanin and tell people that it was made by guild alchemists, that costs too. Everything costs, including hiding from the guards, but I think we can manage it with a little work.”

Wait, that mean's he's probablly getting a cut too, Lucas thought to himself as he mulled the situation over.

It was an annoying realization, and Lucas vowed to explore exactly how much the dwarf's connections were costing them, but for now, he didn't bring it up. Instead, they debated it for a while longer, but in the end, that’s what they did. They ordered some barrels and set the cider presses back up just like they were waiting for the fall harvest and made some clever hiding places for the most incriminating things behind a bookshelf and under some beds.

All of that took time, but they had nothing but time right now. Sure, the changing of the seasons would eventually screw him over and bring everything to a halt, but for now, as long as Lucas kept finding ingredients to brew into something worth selling, the money kept going in, and over the next few weeks he built up quite a respectable lab set up, complete with a wide fireplace, a copper still, and a number of beakers and boiling flasks.

He took solace in those little vials as everything else moved on around him. Light blue concoctions of iron will, brick-red potions of strength, and other colorful tonics and elixirs briefly passed through his lab before being bottled into little glass vials, packed into straw-filled barrels, and whisked away to the city for sale.

Even the failed potions cheered him up. This was the part that Lucas loved: experimenting. The muck weed mixed with the rust fern and the yellow lichen didn’t quite mix into the antidote potion he thought it would be, but the resulting foul smoke that billowed out when he combined the three negative poison ingredients was enough to clear everyone out of their shack until it had been properly aired out.

That had earned him the ire of everyone for an afternoon, but even days later, Lucas couldn’t think about the moment without chuckling softly to himself. That shit was hilarious.

Alchemical Mixture (10 doses): Poison -3, endurance 1, strength 1, incompatible mixture: noxious fumes

Through all that, he put off making hard drugs and focused on other smaller projects until the sour dwarf berries arrived. It was only then that he was ready to start making blue. Well, he was ready to grab some goblin bile, at least. That was the only ingredient he was missing before he could start really making some money, but for that, he and Hurag’gh were going to have to go on a little hunting trip.