The Newt and Demon

As long as Void didn’t oppose the idea, Theo could test his new potions whenever he wanted. Something inside him told him to test it on something less valuable before he tried the space elves themselves. But there were few subjects he could think of, and most of them were animals. That wouldn’t be a good test, and he couldn’t afford to waste time. Although the gods had sealed themselves away, they left behind a ticking clock. There was work to do, and he couldn’t put off progress much longer.

Sitting at the massive table in the manor, Theo took small bites of his food. Sarisa and Rowan had prepared a pasta dish tonight, slathered in a light brown sauce with chunks of mystery meat inside. They refused to tell him where the meat came from, but were eating it themselves. Therefore, it wasn’t poisonous. They poked fun at him for being so pensive, but there was a lot to consider. The coming days and weeks would be packed with excitement and challenges.

“So, there he was,” Tresk said, giggling to herself. “In his underpants…”

Theo half-tuned Tresk out as she retold the story of the mostly naked elf for the tenth time. His only hope for testing his potion was within the Dreamwalk. Using it in the real world would be too costly, assuming there might be an issue with the way it functioned at a lower rank. At least he could hope…

“Rumors are spreading about a worldwide party,” Sarisa said, hitting Theo with a cautious look. “I wonder who came up with that.”

“I wonder how news spreads so quickly through the town.” Theo sighed. There was no reason to keep it from them. “I want to invite as many people as I can to attend. Which gives us the best chance of moving many souls to the other worlds.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna have a party!” Tresk said, bouncing in her chair. “A big one. With booze and games. Maybe a few more fights.”

“I’d like to keep the fighting to a minimum,” Theo said.

“Yeah, right,” Rowan scoffed. “You went all in on that fight with Fenian.”

“He didn’t, actually,” Tresk corrected. “Theo and Fenian both held back. I’m certain they feared the safety of the crowd.”

While that was only partially true, the alchemist wouldn’t correct her. But the sentiment for a worldwide party seemed exciting. Theo thought back to when he first arrived, dealing with constant monsters waves to the point where they feared the entire planet being overrun with them. Now they had mastery over their dungeons, and monsters hardly posed a threat so long as they were cautious and proactive. Now he gazed forward, into a future where he could let loose with people from the other nations. Once that was over, the party would continue into a wedding in their new world.

“What are we going to call the new town in Tero’gal?” Theo asked.

“Broken Tusk,” Tresk said, thumping her fist on the table. “What’s the point of bringing all our crap if we’re gonna rename it?”

“Agreed,” Rowan said. “If your plan is to move us, why change the name?”

Theo nodded along. That was an excellent point. There might have been some history to the name, but it was also just a decent name. Some ogre had likely chewed on a rock, breaking his tusk along the way. They then called it Broken Tusk because… why not?

“Let’s get to bed you little scamp,” Tresk said, poking Theo in the side. “I can feel how eager you are to test that potion.”

“Theo nodded, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a napkin.”

Dropping into the Dreamwalk was always a comfort. Theo felt his feet fall against cracking sticks. A landscape of sparse trees and snow-covered rocks spread before him. It was a memory from back on Earth. Somewhere in Canada, but he couldn’t remember exactly where. Not that it mattered. He had only been there once. They had delved into this place before, revisiting an old memory as some kind of magical therapy. While it had worked, he now found the environment uninteresting.

“Get to work, alchemy boy,” Tresk said, mounting Alex.

The dragon-goose had experienced more changes. Her face had taken on the appearance of half-goose, half-dragon. She had stunted teeth and little horns poking from her head. Patches of feathers had gone, leaving them more sparse than before. Her front legs were almost long enough for her to walk on all-fours and something of a tail was sprouting from her butt.

“You are the most hideous creature I have ever seen,” Theo said.

Alex performed a honk-roar that was somehow more haunting than either sound alone. “I’m beautiful.”

“Yes, you are,” Tresk said, patting her on the side. “And you’re almost a dragon-goose. Hooray!”

The pair darted off, leaving Theo to his grim work. He cleared the area before him, bringing forth an imagined thing he never desired to see. An elven man, similar in stature and skin tone to Xol’sa appeared. His eyes darted around wildly before he settled into a sneaking position, edging toward the alchemist. The Dreamwalk pushed back slightly, but only just. This was well within the parameters it held to for so long. He wasn’t doing anything weird yet.

“Time for your medicine,” Theo said, holding a bottle of Reforge Mind up.

The elf moved with erratic motions, darting across the distance between them in an instant. It wrapped its hands around his neck and squeezed, but nothing happened.

“Truly insane, huh?” Theo asked. “Outside of time and space for so long you don’t know what you’re doing…”

The alchemist kicked forward, sending the elf tumbling onto its butt. He planted a foot on the man’s chest, pinched his nose, and poured the potion down his throat. The Dreamwalk pushed back further, but couldn’t find a way to object. Theo had knowledge of the potion, what it should do, how the elves were behaving, and the likely reaction they would have to taking the potion. It had no grounds to oppose him according to its own rules. Tero’gal was the only one that could stop him, and it seemed uninterested in stopping him.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The elf went rigid, clawing at his throat for only a moment before freezing in a pose. Theo planned to let the potion do its work for a while before speeding up time. If he tipped the scales too far in one direction, there would be issues from the Dreamwalk. It had to work the biology out on its own while he waited. Until then, there were some other things he could test. So long as he stuck to the rules…

First was something loose. A thing that he could only imagine and let play out as a conceptual thing. He imagined a mine below him, stretching deep into the rock below. Discovering mythril was a boon for the town, even if they didn’t know it yet. Because once the power of Drogramath faded from the nearby dungeons, something interesting would happen. The alchemist turned his eyes to the sky, imagining the swirling purple energy there. It soaked into the ground beneath his feet as a small section of the Dreamwalk zipped past in fast-forward.

A few hundred years later, nodes of Drogramathi Iron appeared in the mine below, replacing iron nodes. He cut the energy off, removing the nodes and fast-forwarding about 60 days. The nodes didn’t regrow, which meant the energy faded quickly. They would be without Drogramathi Iron in a few weeks if they were lucky, along with the other aligned ores. That might include Barrowsteel, although it was hard to say if that was a truly aligned metal. It didn’t grow in Broken Tusk, so they only needed to worry about those aligned with demon ascendants.

It was unclear if Tero’gal ore would grow. The connection the throneworld held with the mortal plane was strange. It was more of a tunnel rather than a shotgun blast, making the effects of the world more direct. Theo couldn’t figure it out with the Dreamwalk, though. It refused to bend to his will, only giving him glimpses of what might be once the energy was all gone.

“Next phase,” Theo said, waving his hand. The mine disappeared, replaced by a sprawl of alchemy equipment.

The first tier of Tero’gal’s alchemy was as good as it was gonna get for now. There might be improvements they could make in the future, but what they had was pretty good. The alchemist approached Throk’s design for a centrifuge, inspecting the apparatus and nodding with appreciation. He loaded it with imagined liquid. First tier essence this time. Once the device went to work, he increased the scale of time and waited only a few moments.

The centrifuge transformed high-quality first tier essence into mid-quality second tier essence. Which meant they were missing something, but this was a fact Theo had anticipated. With Drogramath’s alchemy, they needed to perform a second phase of distillation to get second tier essences. While he tried hooking up the condenser to the chain, the Dreamwalk refused to allow it. Perhaps the alchemist had taken too many liberties tonight, but it was close enough to confirm it for him.

On Theo’s big to-do list, he still had the bones of the Dragon Ascendant Quindalias to experiment with. After checking off that item, he would need to discover how to make third tier alchemy essence, which likely involved more contraptions. Although he wanted to race to the third tier, it was important to get the second tier process down before they moved on. As the purity of the essence dropped, so did its stability. And the more complicated the third tier process, the more likely they would have a violent reaction.

Theo tore his mind away from the work of alchemy, heading off to watch Tresk and Alex practice their fighting. As the goose evolved, so did their tactics. Her wings became better for making swift maneuvers, allowing them to dart through the air with more grace. Those little forelimbs also added a lot to the way they fought, allowing Alex to latch onto enemies, dropping them from a height to hill them. The alchemist didn’t know what he thought about this change. He would claim to have no desire to change what he looked like, but here he stood in the body of a dronon. Belgar’s borrowed body, of course.

The more he watched them work together, the more Theo realized what Tresk had been doing over the past few weeks. Alex’s evolution into a proto dragon-goose was slow, but she had made steady progress. Those bones she was consuming were the catalyst but there might have been something more important. Tresk had given her an outlet to express those dragon aspects of herself, bringing them to the front with battle. Whether that was flying around, doing mock battles, or fighting monsters, she found the key to expressing those traits.

The Dreamwalk was unwilling to allow Theo to see the results of his experiment with the space elf. It seemed to hint at the elf getting better, even if it would take a while. But he was confident enough to test his potion in the real world. At least the elf hadn’t died.

Theo spent the rest of his time in the Dreamwalk planning his next day and watching his companions practice. When dawn finally came, he found Tresk rushing off to scarf breakfast down and work with Alex some more. It was a gravy and noodles breakfast, leftover from whatever Rowan and Sarisa made last night. The alchemist took his time eating his food. His assistants ate in silence, seeming willing to leave him to his thoughts.

An older version of Theo might have dropped through the fabric between the mortal plane and the void to test his new potion. His impulsiveness had been driven out of him by a good amount of mistakes, all reinforcing his need for caution. Instead, he made his way around town, finally finding Sulvan praying at the temple.

“How are things?” Theo asked, interrupting the man’s prayers.

Sulvan turned from his crouched position on the ground, giving Theo a stern look. “This is a place for prayer.”

“‘Bout to be a place for a bunch of voided up space elves,” Theo said. “Can you care for some elves being reforged?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course. I’ll just be upset if you decline.”

“Give me time to create an infirmary. How many are we expecting?”

“A few hundred.”

Sulvan groaned, turning back to his prayer. “I’ll inform you when I’m done.”

Before getting to some serious alchemy experimentation, Theo headed to Xol’sa’s tower. He made more noise than he needed to before entering, knocking a few things over on his way up the stairs. Zarali and Xol’sa greeted him. Considering the amount of strange magical device parts on the table before the elf, Theo assumed the tether and beacons were still in development.

“Any progress on those?” Theo asked.

“Just a bit.” Xol’sa said, shrugging. “Early testing shows we have some issues.”

“More than a few issues,” Zarali said, placing a comforting hand on Xol’sa’s shoulder. “Something in the way the magic functions changed.”

Theo clicked his tongue. “The heavens were sealed. That makes sense… How far did this push you back?”

“I can’t say.” Xol’sa swept a few devices from the table. Straight onto the ground. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“No disappointment here,” Theo said, shaking his head. He withdrew his newest potion from his inventory, holding the Reforge Mind Potion out for him to see. “I made a cure for your people.”

Xol’sa’s eyes went wide. “Are you serious?”

“That’s amazing!” Zarali shouted, clapping with excitement. “Are you certain it works?”

“Not really.” Theo didn’t want to lie to them. “I’m about 90% confident, but it could always fail. Sulvan will help with the effort.”

“So will I,” Zarali said, placing her hand on her chest. “I have a healing core. Perhaps I can help them. Once they’re here, that is.”

“Right. Keep me updated. I don’t expect the tethers to be ready tomorrow, so don’t rush.”

“As long as the gods don’t smite you first… Okay. I can do it, Theo.” Xol’sa locked eyes with Theo. “We’ll make it work.”