Brewing Bad Ch. 150-151

Ch. 150 - Aftermath

When the potions wore off and his attributes fell back to their normal level, Lucas braced for the worst, but surprisingly, he felt mostly fine, at least initially. There was no obscene soreness like there had been last time. There certainly should have been, too, given that he’d managed to bend Heisenburgle’s fancy flaming sword during that final showdown. Even with the momentum of his jump and the hardness of the ice troll’s skull, that could only have happened with a truly unfathomable amount of torque. 

The gnome was quite upset about that and alternated between complaining about it and peppering Lucas with questions about his performance as he stripped out of his torn armor and applied a healing salve to his ragged wound. 

What did that level of strength feel like? What effects did his speed have on friction? Did he think it would be possible to increase the effects in future trials, or did he plan to focus on duration over intensity?

Lucas started off almost as excited as Heisenburgle and answered his questions as completely as he could as the two of them geeked out over alchemy. He even listened to the gnome's suggestions regarding some alternative ingredients he might consider. However, as the minutes passed, that became more and more difficult. Eventually, it seemed like he couldn’t get more than five or ten words out as what he’d done slowly caught up with him. 

He’d exerted himself to a superhuman degree, and now that it was over and his body was playing catch up, he realized he’d completely exhausted himself. He checked his status but didn’t see anything too concerning. Heisenburgle offered him a Potion of Greater Wakefulness, as he’d done before, but Lucas declined. 

Status:

Slightly injured (-5 to physical tasks. Recovery augmented by Salve of Moderate Mending and Healing Draught of Disease Resistance. Less than 48 hours to full recovery.)

Completely exhausted (-10 to all actions.)

He decided to take a nap instead, and he was out well before the guards came back with their menagerie of butchered troll parts. Lucas didn’t wake up until they’d returned to Black Gate. Even then, after hours of rest, all he wanted to do was go back to sleep in his own bed. All of that changed when he entered the main hall and smelled the kitchens. Then, he became ravenous, and his body demanded that he refuel it after all he’d put it through. 

Since Skylara had burned down his whole life Lucas had tried to eat healthy and exercise as he sought to grow stronger. That afternoon, though, he ate whatever they had available, devouring three bowls of soup, half a dozen sandwiches, and an entire tray of desserts. He felt a little embarrassed for being so gluttonous, and that only intensified as various guards and maids looked at him and exchanged whispers, but he didn’t stop. 

He didn’t find out until after he went to bed and woke up again later that day that they hadn’t been whispering about his eating habits. They’d been talking about the troll. Even though only a handful of guards had seen what he’d done, there was no way to stop the rumors, and that night, after the gnome had swept the room with his dust, he and Heisenburgle spent most of their time talking about the fight and its consequences instead of alchemy.

“As successful as your experiment was, there’s no way it will stay a secret from the Prince for long,” Heisenburgle assured him. “What is it you expect me to tell him exactly when he asks.”

“Tell him I have a death wish, and I’m acting on my grief in unconventional ways,” Lucas answered with a shrug. “It’s the truth.”

“It’s part of the truth, at least,” the gnome agreed. “Don’t you think he’s smart enough to… to figure out who it is all these preparations are for?”

“Oh? Do you want to talk about—” Lucas shot back with a cocky grin. 

“Ssshhhhhh!” the gnome interrupted. “Do not say her name. I have enough problems deciding what  to do with you without further complications.”

Lucas let the point go and suggested that he tell the Prince that Lucas was working on potions with military applications, but the truth was he had no interest in giving up those recipes to the man. The gnome had been right the first time. This project hinged on killing a single target. Once her mighty carcass lay dead at his feet, he’d put it back on the shelf and focus on other things. 

For now, his quest for revenge required more than just potions that made him unbelievably strong. He needed them to last longer. He needed other things to grant him important edges, like fire resistance and dragon poison. He also needed a stronger sword. 

While Heisenburgle was happy to let the conversation drift into metallurgy from time to time, today, he cut Lucas off every time he tried to transition a complaint about the gnomish firesword into a conversation about how he needed a stronger weapon.

“A stronger weapon? For testing? Pha!” Heisenburgle snorted whenever the conversation came up. “I will not enable your crazy plans, Lucas!”

He just shrugged at that. He had other things he could work on for now. Still, he knew that the gnome would come around eventually. He had to because he still asked probing questions about Lucas’ talent, and once that night, after staring wistfully at the mirrors he used to gather starlight, he even asked, “What did it feel like? To meet with them? The gods, I mean.”

Lucas left out the angels in this version of the story, too, but he told him about the elven palace and the way that Thrzealwick had leafed through his soul like an open book before changing it. Really, he tried to give the gnome as many details as possible about his own god while giving him as little information as possible about Lucas’ new capabilities.

Telling him some things was unavoidable. The last thing he wanted to do was give away all of his secrets, like his latest achievement progress. Not only had he completed one, he’d unlocked a new one, and both of them were intriguing. 

Divine Potential: 20/30 Increase all of your attributes and level to an average of 30+. The reward for this will vary based on which attributes are prioritized. 

Maximum Alchemical Potential 1: 35/35 increase an attribute to 35, the maximum for any single mortal attribute. Your attribute maximum has been increased to 36. To achieve Maximum Alchemical Potential 2, increase any two attributes to 35+. 

The new achievement offered no explanation, which was as exciting as it was frustrating. He didn’t have to know what divine potential meant to know that he wanted it, but unless he did some major leveling, he’d have to get his ability scores to an average of 34 to make it happen. 

Is that even possible? He wondered. He supposed that if he spent all his points on soul, intelligence, and appearance, he could get it within a couple levels, but that seemed like a huge investment for an uncertain reward. 

For now, the second one interested him more. On its own, it gave him nothing, but it basically opened the door to superhuman potential. Lucas knew from his experiments thus far that one point at the top end of the scale was worth a hell of a lot more than one at the bottom. Having a strength of 36 might make him 10% stronger than a strength of 35, and when he considered how strong 35 had been, that was crazy. 

For now, he didn’t get too distracted by all of this or the fact that he'd gotten no experience from killing the ice troll. This whole setup is so strange. He thought as he listened to Heisenburgle brag about something or another. Who ever heard of a game where you only get experience from one profession, and killing grants you nothing at all? 

His mind flashed briefly to Mister Twee, and Lucas carefully amended that statement to usually before returning to the conversation he was supposed to be having. While it had largely devolved into Heisenburgle explaining alchemical toxicity to him incorrectly, there were some bright sides to their talk this evening. The big one was that it definitely showed the gnome’s building interest in topics like talents and the divine. He was trying to be cagey about it, but even so, Lucas didn’t push his luck. 

Unfortunately, it came at the cost of making Heisenburgle much more interested and concerned about his experiments. Up until now, the gnome had largely given him free rein, but now that it was obvious to everyone what the goal of his projects was, the gnome took that away. Worse, he forbade Lucas from further modifying and upgrading his potions into the longer-lasting flasks that he wanted to make. 

“Only until I see how the Prince reacts to the news of your news concoctions,” he promised. 

Even so, Lucas chaffed at that level of supervision. I guess I only have myself to blame, he told himself, but even if he didn’t like it, he still didn’t get into a shouting match with Heisenburgle as he usually would have. Instead, he took it in stride. Lucas had other things he could work on for the time being, and he had no plans to see just how much he could maximize his attributes again any time soon.

He needed the gnome, after all. For him to have any real chance of doing this, he needed Heisenburgle on his team, both as a co-conspirator and as an engineer.

So, instead of trying to convince the gnome it was worth throwing in with him, Lucas continued to work on his various projects as his fatigue abated in the days that followed. He tried to get permission to lead an expedition to the Greenwood because he wanted to experiment with distilling certain poisonous anti-dragon reagents, but Heisenburgle forbade it. “Jubilanthric! You know I’d never be able to defend that!” the gnome cursed. 

So, Lucas set about working on another project he’d had on his mind for a while: fireworks. Dwarven fire powder existed in this world. He’d even been told they had guns, after a fashion, though they used them more like small, handheld cannons. 

Heisenburgle’s library didn’t have an exact recipe, though he did have several books that hypothesized the ingredients, and none of them were at all close to what he wanted, which was gunpowder. Lucas hadn’t paid attention in many of his classes, but chemistry was the exception to that rule, so he knew that it was made from charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. He just didn’t know the ratios in which they were mixed. For that matter, he didn’t know what saltpeter was called in this world since it didn’t exist anywhere that he could find. 

Vitriolic Earth (refined): Poison 1(iritating), air aligned, strong catalyst (alters the alignment of the highest attribute in the current mixture.) 

Charcoal (ground): Poison -3 (purifying). Reduces the poison of other ingredients in the mixture by half. Weak earth aligned, strong catalyst. 

Sulfur (very pure): Poison 3, agility 1 (twitchy), strength 1(inflamed), endurance -1(sickly). Strongly fire aligned.  

Lucas spent days reading through reagent-heavy tomes, looking for what turned out to be vitriolic earth. He’d seen that here and there on his adventures, so he knew it wasn’t too uncommon. What he didn’t know was how much of which ingredient to mix together, and there, his alchemy skills offered him little assistance since they were listed only as compatible on his display, without any guidance on the ratio. 

In these experiments, at least, Heisenburgle didn’t try to bar when Lucas explained that he was looking into elemental compatibility issues. The gnome was very benevolent when allowing him to make what he thought would be nothing but clumsy mistakes. 

For a while, he was right about that much, too. Whenever Lucas ended up with an amalgamation that combusted prematurely while he was mixing it or something that filled the lab with smoke rather than producing a single spark of flame, Heisenburgle would chortle with glee.

“You’re mixing earth, air, and fire together!” the gnome exclaimed as if that meant anything. “Of course, you’re going to get dangerous, unpredictable results. What else did you expect?”

Lucas smiled tightly at those comments but did not react. This was about more than gunpowder, or even more than fireworks now, and he was getting close to something big.

Ch. 151 - Ratios

Lucas’ first idea had been that he might be able to steal a page from Heisenburgle’s playbook and make a sword that was part weapon and part hypodermic needle. While he hadn’t invented deadly dragon poison yet, he would, and it would be a lot easier to shoot that shit straight into her veins if he could set off a gunpowder charge in the hilt of his weapon. 

While the plan struck him as a little gimmicky, he was going to need every gimmick he could get his hands on if no easier options presented themselves, and this really did turn into a fight. Even if he hadn’t owed her a particularly brutal revenge for all she’d done, there was no need to play fair with a hundred-foot-long fire-breathing monster. 

Killing a dragon was going to make killing an ice troll look easy, so he’d cheat any way he could. As time went on, though, he lost interest in that plan and became more obsessed with the ratios of the chemicals he was mixing. More specifically, the fact that he could make different products from the same set of ingredients. 

After almost a week, he succeeded in making gunpowder. His system insisted on calling it Highly Explosive Firedust, but it wasn’t the only product he’d been able to make with sulfur, charcoal, and vitriolic earth, and that raised a lot of questions in Lucas’ mind. 

Highly Explosive Fire Dust (single use): This dust burns violently on contact with fire. 

Poisonous Fume Volatiles (single use): 8 poison. This material burns slowly on contact with fire, creating 5 cubic feet of toxic smoke, which makes both vision and breathing very difficult for one minute.

Sulfurous Fulminating Powder (single use): This powder explodes violently on contact with fire. 

How many potions have I missed out on already? He wondered as he saw his experience tick up marginally with every new creation. 

With the exception of Blue, and to a much lesser extent during his brief foray into cosmetics, Lucas had really only tried a formulation or two, and once he got something that worked, he called it good and moved on. 

Was that a mistake? It sure felt like one. 

For a while, he let himself be distracted by using empowered alchemy to tune his gunpowder. That wasn’t because he needed to; it was because he wanted to see how far he could push the needle, and the answer turned out to be quite far. To him, it was starting to seem like he could make almost anything stronger just by adding mana to it. 

Volatile: 4% mana - increases strength by 50% but makes the dust more likely to detonate at random.

Stable: 5% mana - Remove the chance of random detonation without direct flame.

Potent: 8% mana - increase explosive force by 20%.

Abundant: 9% mana - Increase yields by 40%.

Lucas tried potent; he even tried a batch of double-potent powder, though he stabilized both batches first. That double-strength stuff was no good to him because it just blew through whatever container he tried to put it in, but it was still interesting, and he suspected that if he worked with a dwarf on it, they could get up to some serious shit. 

“I kinda wish I’d studied hard enough to know how TNT is made,” he sighed to himself as he very carefully put away his remaining powder where it wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Because that shit would be the bomb.”

While the gunpowder project had started as a weapon and slowly transformed into a way to show off to Heisenburgle, there were larger theoretical questions here now. Sure, he could throw in some paper tubes with iron and copper fillings and create some red and green fireworks just to show off, but the whole thing was quickly sending him down an unexpected rabbit hole. 

Rabbithole or not, he still showed off one night for the gnome, provoking exactly the sort of consternation he craved as he launched a barrage of tiny rockets, one after the other, little red and green explosions above the Black Gate Keep.

“Big deal,” the gnome said with a shrug. “Dwarves have long ago mastered the art of fireflowers. Why, once for the old king's birthday, I supervised—”

“Yeah, but these were made without a single grain of firedust,” Lucas bragged. “I can probably do other colors, too.”

“So you added some elemental essence to your noxious black powder or some other trick,” the gnome insisted. He refused to believe that Lucas had replaced the expensive dwarven firedust with a cheap substitute. 

The conversation that followed about ratios was even less productive, but Lucas didn’t really care. The gnome could insist that he was cheating, but Lucas wasn’t, and he was learning a lot of new things while he did it. For the first time since he’d started to feel at home in the cider house, he was really starting to enjoy himself. 

That, of course, made him feel bad, but in an entirely different way. As long as I have to pretend that Danaria is still dead and Skylara is still free, I shouldn’t be allowed to feel happy, he told himself. That was hard, though, given how excited he was about all of this. If he was able to make magical gunpowder with what were widely considered to be bottom-shelf ingredients, then who knew what he could make now that he was looking at the world in the right way. 

With the exception of sulfur, none of the books he’d read had mentioned anything particularly positive about the ingredients. Have I just been scratching the surface all this time? He wondered as he looked at a shelf full of expensive ingredients. He knew that chemistry powered this reaction, but he also knew from his experiences with empowered alchemy that man amplified it. 

So, since Hesenburgle still showed no sign of letting him go crazy with boost potions, he started to play around with some simple two-ingredient healing potions. This time, the goal wasn’t to make the strongest potion or the most profitable one. It was to look for things he hadn’t noticed the first time. 

Elderberry Seeds (processed): Healing 2 (enriching), mana 1 (tingling), poison 1 (irritating), intelligence -1 (forgetful)

Rosewood inner tree bark (leached): Healing 2 (nutritious), poison 1 (allergic), endurance 1(fortifying), intelligence -1 (dull)

Neither of these ingredients was complicated. Heisenburgle didn’t even consider the bark to be a real reagent. Nonetheless, it was one of the first healing potions that Lucas had ever learned how to make. It was even the one that he’d tried to teach Adin how to make so long ago. 

Small Tainted Lesser Healing Potion (1 dose): Healing 4(restorative), poison 1 (nauseous), endurance 1 (fortifying), those who imbibe have a 10% chance of nausea for one hour.

This time, though, he didn’t make the same potion he knew 

This time, though, he didn’t settle for the formulation he knew. He spent an entire night making twenty different batches. In the end, half of them were nothing but waste products.

I’m sorry, these ingredients have no active effects. +3 experience.

You have failed to make a viable potion, but keep experimenting! +3 experience. 

Half of them weren’t, though. Amidst the ten batches that produced something viable, he found three different healing potions, whereas before, he’d found only one, and that shocked Lucas. It shouldn’t have, but it did. Up until now, he’d still been stuck in the same stunned mindset as Heisenburgle and Thrzealwick. He’d been acting like there was just one way to do things. While there might be one best way to do things, it was becoming very clear to him that the answer was more complicated. 

Heisenburgle listened to him as he showed off the three different healing potions. There was a Small Tainted Lesser Healing potion, A Minor potion of Mental Healing, and a Tincture of Nausea Resistance. While the latter two didn’t seem particularly useful to Lucas, it blew his mind that just altering the balance of the formula within certain bounds created such specific curatives. 

“Are you certain they’re all different?” the wizened alchemist asked finally. “They all look the same to me.”

Lucas wanted to strangle him, but he supposed he couldn’t really blame the gnome. Almost all of the vials he’d made, including the failed batches, were little more than red-brown water. Some bubbled, and a few were a little darker than others, but if he didn’t have his pop ups, he could have very easily made that mistake. 

“None of them are going to change the world or anything,” Lucas agreed, trying to stay amiable, “But all of them treat different conditions; at least, that’s what my talent says.”

“Your talent,” he scowled. “Very well, tell me more about these supposed differences.”

Lucas explained all the ways in which the potions differed without using numbers. Instead, he described the symptoms they were intended for, but the idea that something could be done in many different ways almost offended the gnome. “I’m telling you there’s not just eight or eighty or however many different ways you say there are to make a healing potion. There might be eight million. We don’t know because no one’s ever tried before.”

“You are implying there are recipes that my God does not know?” Heisenburgle asked. “That’s blasphemous. Be more careful with your words, or he might well strip you of your talents!”

Lucas demurred then, not because he believed he was on the road to getting smited but because he didn’t want to piss the gnome off. He was trying to win him over, not irritate him. 

Still, even if Hesienburgle acted like he didn’t care about what Lucas was working on, he could tell that the gnome was getting jealous. For the first time, he wasn’t just making a potion that he needed to make to get paid or save lives; he was doing real experimentation. His options were starting to branch out, and he was adding different compatible catalysts and purifying his simple reagents to see what other strange edge cases he could find. Not only was he getting real results, but his enthusiasm while he was getting them was contagious.  

Day by day, it was getting to him. Lucas could tell. He could hardly blame the guy. He wanted to know more about alchemy than Lucas wanted to kill Skylara, and he wanted to kill that dragoness badly. 

Finally, Less than a week after Lucas had started, that moment finally arrived. “That’s it,” Heisenburgle said, obviously tired of not being able to share in Lucas’ strange insights. “I’ve had enough. I have to know. What is it Lwyn will want from me to arrange a meeting with Thrzealwick?”

“Not much,” Lucas said with a growing smile. “She’ll just want you to promise to kill Skylara. Do that, and she’ll probably help you with anything.” In that moment, it took everything Lucas had not to laugh at the bug-eyed, strangled expression that Heisenburgle made.