Brewing Bad Ch. 170-171

Ch. 170 - Last Chance

They reached the River Palace a few hours before dawn, which was even bigger than he imagined it to be. He’d heard both Heisenburgle and Skylara describe it in passing as a lesser palace or a vacation spot of the prince, but neither did it justice. The thing was too elaborate to be called a castle, but that was the only word that did the scale of the three-story manor justice. 

The thing was made of stone, with a slate roof, surrounded by a carefully manicured lawn that stretched forever in all directions. That lawn, in turn, was scattered with various small gardens, further enhancing its elegance. 

If I had a vacation home like this, I’d never go back, Lucas told himself as they got closer. 

Despite the long journey from Blackgate, they arrived almost at the precise minute the gnome had planned, according to his pocket watch. Then, everyone got to work and started setting up the hundreds of little details that just might save his life in the battle to come. There were supplies to hide, pyrotechnics to stage, and, of course, Heisenburgle’s Hyperquadabulator to position. All of that had to be done before notifying the servants of their arrival. That was Heisenburgle’s decision, but Lucas agreed with his logic entirely. 

“Even if they tell her nothing, merely acting strangely might be enough to tip the canny old dragoness off,” he warned. “She hasn’t survived for centuries by being stupid.”

Lucas thought about that the whole time they set up. The gnome was familiar with the grounds and had already picked the spot where he was supposed to lure Skylara, which was not far from where the gnome would be pretending to be a statue. It was a romantic little garden spot at the edge of the hedge maze that would be just right for the lover’s tryst that he definitely wouldn’t be having. 

The gnome went on at length, explaining why it was the perfect spot. It was close enough to the river to cover the noise of his charge, and the trellis would keep her from seeing him coming until it was too late. That, combined with the flat ground, made it pretty much perfect, but Lucas doubted that even perfect would be good enough. 

“You’re going to be half blind when you crash through those vines,” Lucas said in hushed tones as he pointed at the trellis. “Not much time between here and there to correct. What if you spear me instead.”

Really, it was worse than that because, by the time the gnome broke through the garden wall, his lance would already be halfway to the target. He’d have a second, or perhaps two before it struck home. While that was good from an assassination perspective, it was hardly a clear shot, and a thousand things could go wrong. 

“All I need to do is aim for a specific spot. It will be your job to put her there,” the gnome scolded him. “Simply stand right here as if you were about to couple with her on this stone bench when you hear the bells chime the tenth hour, and I’ll do the rest.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to have to,” Lucas complained, “Because I’m going to be standing here with my dick in my hand. No armor, no sword, no nothing. Not even the damn cloak I bought.”

“If you think that wearing a dragon skin cloak in the company of a dragon is a good idea… Well, I’m not sure what to say,” the gnome said with a low chuckle. “I’ve told you before, if you put on weapons of war and challenged her to her face or even tried to ambush her, she’d squash you like a bug. There are very few professional dragon hunters for a reason.”

“Yeah, I know,” Luca sighed. He didn’t need anyone to tell him how dangerous she was. She’d thrown him around like a rag doll during their last encounter, and trying to pretend that he stood a chance in a fair fight was a really bad idea. He had a sword, and he had his potions. He’d be ready to do his part, but if Heisenburgle didn’t deal her one hell of a blow, he felt certain she’d be a hell of a lot tougher than the ice troll. 

He wasn’t saying Hesienburgle was wrong in any way, shape, or form. He just didn’t like it. Somehow, knowing that his fancy poison sword was wrapped in his magic cloak and they were both tucked just inside the hedge maze, didn't, along with a few other alchemical surprises for him to retrieve if everything didn’t go according to plan, didn’t help much with that.

They fussed with minor details until the sun was almost above the horizon. Then the gnome had trusted men load him into his now golden armor before lifting that onto his posed horse and fitting the hoses into place. When they were done, Lucas had to admit, it did almost look like a statue. 

“You’re really going to just sit there all day?” Lucas asked just before the gnome pulled the visor on his helmet down. “Won’t you get bored? What if you’ve got to take a shit?”

“I have taken a mild narcotic that will render me insensible for at least 12 hours,” Heisenburgle answered with a yawn.

“At least?!” Lucas answered. “What if you sleep through the big event? You can’t leave me hanging!”

“All will be well, Lucas,” the gnome answered sleepily. “You needn’t worry. By nightfall, I will be rested and ready to join you at the signal. Just stick to the plan, and we both may yet survive this. 

Lucas wished he could share the gnome’s confidence. However, when he returned to the carriage so that they could ride up the drive and pretend to arrive for the first time, he was filled with doubts. Still, he didn’t let any of that show on his face when he stepped out of the carriage and greeted the door. Instead, he stood there every inch the noble he so often pretended to be, and when the doorman asked his business, he didn’t say a word to the man. He just looked at him with disdain and handed him an envelope sealed with Heisenburgle’s mark. 

The doorman couldn’t actually read, so he was forced to fetch the Chamberlin, who was, in turn, forced to apologize to Lucas after he read the note. “A thousand apologies, my lord. I assure you that if my man knew you were here on behalf of the Duchas Skylara, he wouldn’t have made you wait.”

Lucas strode past the elderly man, uncomfortably reminded of the now-dead Gerwin, and saw no need to dwell on that. So, he walked past him and into the entryway of the minor palace, which was one of the prettiest buildings he’d seen in his entire life. The floor-to-ceiling windows really did offer it a commanding view of the river and the valley past it, which made what he had to say next that much stupider. 

“I was lead to believe that this place would be clean and presentable for the Duchess,” Lucas said, feigning a sneer. “I see that report was in error.”

“B-but we weren’t expecting—” the chamberlain started making excuses, but Lucas cut him off. 

“You have twelve hours to make this place presentable for a queen. She will be here for at least one night and, with any luck, several,” he commanded. “At a minimum, this room, the dining hall, and the finest bedroom should be dusted, mopped, and turned down well before her arrival. I want a nine-course feast for two started immediately as well. Inform the cooks that if she is dissatisfied with a single course, all of them will be out on the street!”

“Bu-but…” the chamberlain stammered. “We’ve had no notice, we’ve kept the palace…”

“I don’t want excuses. I want results,” Lucas roared, cringing as he used the line that one of his old bosses had wielded so carelessly. “I don’t care if you have to bring in the gardeners and the stable boys to help. You will get it done.”

The servants sprang to life immediately, but Lucas ignored them. Instead, he let their fear suffuse the place while he walked to the back patio and, looked down and took in the view. In truth, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the place. It was clean and presentable to anyone of any standing in the kingdom, and he felt bad for berating them, but the fewer people there were anywhere else on the grounds, the less chance they would notice the preparations that Lucas and Heisenburgle had spent making, which was enough to make the deceit necessary. 

Once everything was in motion and the house was entirely abuzz with work, Lucas borrowed a smaller guest bedroom to lay out his supplies and take a little nap. All of this was a distraction. It was those preparations that were truly important. 

He hung up his last good suit, along with a flimsy ceremonial saber he’d wear with it and all the potions he planned to drink beside that. While it seemed counterintuitive to carry a weapon to make someone feel at ease, he genuinely believed that Skylara loved to be reminded how invincible she was, and a shiny sword that was no more harmful to her than a broomstick would do just that. 

The potions came in two batches. The first were the ones he’d put in blue glass vials so he could look like he was doing drugs with his hostess while he was really pumping himself up for battle, and the second was a small bandoleer of potions he planned to wear that he might want in battle. He could only drink three of them at max before the toxicity got to him, so he’d mostly brought powerful healing potions along with a number of Wrymsbane-infused smoke bombs. 

Would that be enough? He couldn’t say. Lucas would much rather have a tank or a fighter jet, but he had no idea how to make those. 

I wonder if mages have a spell to nuke things? He wondered with a yawn as he started to strip to nap before she arrived this afternoon.  

Ch. 171 - The Main Course

Lucas woke sometime before sunset, which gave him plenty of time to get ready. He bathed and shaved and even put on an awful cologne of +3 attractiveness to try to make the evening go smoother after he’d put on his dark suit and strapped on the various vials beneath it. When he was all done, he studied himself in the mirror, and even he had to admit that he looked pretty sharp. 

He adjusted the collar and pressed on the places where he’d hidden his potions to make sure they were visible. Really, he was just fidgeting, though. He told himself that he wasn’t nervous, but as the hour grew closer at hand, that became less and less true. Strangely, it wasn’t the battle or even his impending death that he feared; it was the prospect of having to wine and dine Skylara all over again. 

Doing so the first time was one of his greatest regrets, and the thought of doing it all over again made him sick. So much so, in fact, that he’d been avoiding Danaria for weeks. He’d left a note with Kar’gandin to give her should the worst happen, but even that wouldn’t contain a word about this part of the battle, merely his reasons for why he did what he did. 

As he stood there, he looked through his system interface for anything he might spend points on that would help, but he found nothing. There were no other relevant combat skills of damage resistance. Alchemist, it would seem, was not a very combat-oriented talent. He’d done his best to crank that up to eleven, but… 

Well, he would just have to see. It wasn’t even worth blowing them all on attributes and hoping for the best since he was maxing out those physical stats with potions. The battle would be won or lost in five minutes. 

“Maybe if I survive this, I really will learn magic,” he told himself as he went downstairs to await the guest of honor’s arrival. 

When he arrived at the main gallery, he made a big deal of inspecting various rooms and finding minor faults to send people scurrying. In reality, everything was perfect. He’d never been in a place this clean in his entire life. It was like an operating theatre done up in marble and gold. 

Even though he knew that her identity as a monstrous wyrm of legend was a state secret, he was still surprised to see her carriage come up the gravel drive. He’d expected her to fly here in all her terrible majesty, to make a point or something. 

That didn’t happen. Instead, her coachman pulled in front and opened her door with a white glove to reveal the woman herself. The Duchess was a beautiful woman in her way. She was a bit voluptuous and fleshy for his tastes, but then, he’d seen her naked. Even if he hadn’t, though, her dress was indecent enough by this world’s standards that it left very little to the imagination. 

Normally, she wore a red sequined dress to parties with enough decolletage to be scandalous. This outfit, though, was a new one, with a gauzy cloak that was the same pale pink as her terrible wings. It also had a tightly laced, red leather corset that reminded him of her dragon form’s underbelly, even as it sucked her belly in, giving her an hourglass figure that was a little too extreme to be beautiful. 

“My darling Mr. Blue, you did come,” she said with a smile as she hiked up her hooped skirts and came up the steps on stiletto heels. “I knew you would.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said with a smile that he hoped was convincing as he bent to kiss her black-gloved hand. “How have you been?”

Drunk, it was a toss-up when the dragoness’ favorite topic was. It might have been sex, drugs, or Lucas specifically. Sober, though, it was definitely herself. She waxed on, at length, about endless trivialities while Lucas listened and nodded attentively. She talked about problem courtiers and illicit romances amongst her friends at court while they were escorted to a sitting room to wait until dinner. 

To Lucas’ ears, she sounded like a child playing dress up, which, in a way, despite her vast age, she was. She was not a Duchess; she wasn’t even human. Skylara had no stake in the outcome of these events. They were all her playthings, and if Lucas was her sex toy, then the other men and women in her life were even more disposable. They weren’t even pawns on a chessboard. That became clear over the course of the discussion while he laughed and nodded along to some of the insane things she said.

“Can you imagine?” she chortled as she sipped her tea. “Believing it was acceptable for peasants to plead famine? That’s what I told her. I told her taxes were taxes and harvest or not, she’d have to find some way to pay.”

While Lucas had been aware of this sort of awfulness before at prior parties, it never really impacted him because it tended to evaporate by the time he spent any real time with her. By then, all she wanted to talk about was drugs and sex. Still, today there was no avoiding it, and really, the longer she stayed in bitch mode instead of turning into a ten-ton succubus, the better. 

If she tried to make out with him now, he’d have no choice but to play along. Complaining about the misery of others was far better, even if it made her seem more and more like a cold-blooded lizard in a human suit, which made it easier to fantasize about hacking her into bloody pieces. 

Less than an hour later, at sunset, dinner was finally served, and the two of them strode arm and arm toward the dining room. Lucas made an effort to kiss her then, but she resisted. “Nowhere the servants can see…” she said in a scandalized tone. 

“Can you blame me?” Lucas asked, appealing to her vanity. “It’s been so long. Too long. I—”

“Why, my Lord Parin,” she admonished him flirtatiously. “I don’t know how they do things in the lands you come from, but here, we serve dessert after dinner.”

Lucas restrained himself during dinner, pretending only occasionally that it was difficult as they sat across from each other at a vast candle-lit table that was empty save for the two of them. He also restrained himself when it came to eating, but that was harder because the food was beyond sumptuous. On any other night, he would have gorged himself, but fighting on a full stomach wasn’t a good idea. 

That was alright because his date made up for it. It shouldn’t have surprised him that she ate an inhuman amount, but it did. While he savored a few bits of the squash soup with spiced croutons, she put away a whole tureen of the stuff, and when he was served a thick slice of prime rib, she was given the rest of the platter. She was voracious. 

But then, isn’t that the case for all of her appetites? Lucas thought forlornly. He heard a bell toll six distantly, which meant that he still had two hours to go until Heisenburgle would be ready to make his charge.

Some part of him had wondered for a while what would have happened if he’d fallen in with her instead of Danaria when the Prince first hunted him. Back then, he’d been all about making a buck. Would he have thrown it all away to be with the wealthiest and most powerful woman on the continent? He’d wanted to believe the answer would have been no, but that doubt had always lingered like an infected splinter. 

Now he knew the truth. While this monster would have been impossible for any reasonable man to love, she would have been impossible for him to even tolerate for any length of time. One or two weekend getaways would have been all it took for him to hope that fucking angel would appear and scoop him up. 

The fucking angel, he thought in the midst of the fifth course. If I die, I’m going to have to deal with that prick again. That saddened him. He wouldn’t just be denied a relationship with Danaria. He’d be reincarnated somewhere else as someone else. It was as final a death as he could imagine. 

“What’s the matter?” Skylara asked. "You’re barely touching this feast that the little people have worked so hard to prepare for us."

“I’m just saving room for dessert,” Lucas quipped immediately, pairing it with a gaze that he hoped was more lustful than angry.

That made her smile enough that, for a brief moment, he thought she might blush. She didn’t, though; instead, she simply changed topics. “To think, I once ate the beasts raw and unspiced. I was so foolish when I was young before I learned to wear a human shape. Were you foolish when you were young as well, Lucas?”  

“Was?” He asked. “I still am.”

“Still are what?” she asked between more mouthfuls. “Young or foolish?”

“Both,” Lucas laughed. “When I die of old age, I’ll still be young to you and foolish? Well, I think I might be allergic to wisdom. It would take a hundred lives for me to fix that, at least.”

“Most men are,” She agreed, amiably enough as she finished clearing her plate, and the next dish was brought in. 

This one was a nut-encrusted pork cutlets made in the shape of animals. Lucas selected the pig since that seemed the most appropriate, but Skylara ate the rest of the menagerie, one at a time while remarking on how she would have rathered that they’d been made to look like people. 

That comment soured Lucas’ appetite, but his smile was unshakable, and one at a time, dish by dish, they worked their way to the desert course. Along the way, she must have had five bottles of wine to his two glasses, but he doubted intoxication would help him much when it came to fighting a dragon, at least, the sort that alcohol inspired. He hoped that the high-potency blue he carried on him would do better. 

“Ah, at last, our banquet has come to an end…” the dragoness mused as she helped herself to an assortment of fruit pies. “I wonder what we will do now…”

“Well, I believe you mentioned something about a nighttime stroll through a garden maze?” Lucas answered with a voice heavy with innuendo… “To that end, I’ve prepared a small surprise for you…”

As he spoke, he laid out three different vials of blue for him and three different vials for her. As he did so, he fed her some bullshit about how he’d formulated each recipe with slightly different different effects. “The stuff I made for myself is much weaker, of course, he said as he laid his three vials out, But I want to make sure it’s a night to remember…”

“Oh my,” she smiled briefly before turning away and fanning herself in a poor attempt to feign shyness. “I’ll look forward to that as soon as I change into something more appropriate…”

“I mean, I’d be happy to help with that…” Lucas teased, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, she made her way upstairs to change into an evening gown while he waited there impatiently, wondering if all of his preparations would be enough.