The mixture ignited

with a sudden FOOMF, leaving me standing there with charred & smoking fur.  I sighed, Gramaryed the ashes out of my pelt, and tried again with a smaller dose.

It filled the room with acrid smoke and I had to go outside for several minutes.

The next attempt was watery and completely inert.

This was turning out to be much harder than I had anticipated!

Alchemy, at least in theory, should be just like cooking .. but the problem was that I had no idea what the ingredients tasted like!  How could I concoct the perfect flavor without tasting the ingredients?  I was going to have to sample this exploding powder, to get a better idea of what I was working with.

I used Gramarye to carefully command a small pinch of powder not to be poisonous, without losing any of its essential flavor.  I timidly licked it ...

OH!  It was AWFUL!!  The taste was reminiscent of ultra-salty charcoal mixed with marinated egg and feral cat pee!  How could I ever make anything appetizing out of this??

It seemed like a hopeless task.  Maybe Ethel was right; maybe it couldn't be done.

I decided to take a break from my alchemical attempts, and scry on the progress of the battle.  Surely Angela would be employing her best strategies, since she was so desirous to impress me.

I peeked out over the stone circle, and nobody was there.  The surrounding forest was eerily quiet, and seemed even tulgier than usual.  Where was everybody?  I had expected my officers to maintain a command center nearby, but perhaps they had moved to be closer to the theater of conflict.

I concentrated on Ethel, picturing her clearly in my mind, and sped my scry-sight above the forest toward her current location.

My perception zoomed toward the village of Tulgeyside, to Ethel's house, through the window and into the sitting room.

My War Marshal and my Minister of Disinformation were sitting quietly in rocking chairs!  P.J. was smoking a pipe and reading a large sheet of densely-lettered text, while Ethel appeared to be knitting a blanket.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" I bellowed.  "I didn't appoint you to your positions so you could sit around and goof off!"

"Did you hear that?" Ethel asked as she and P.J. looked nervously around the room.

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