The door snaps closed behind me as I trudge into the penthouse. It wasn't until the last half mile back that my feet began to drag. With how tight the spiraling stairwell is up the interior of the building, I had to climb each step instead of navigating around with the use of my wings. As if to taunt me, the curtain hung across the open door of the balcony lists into the room, waving like a defeated white flag in the welcoming breeze.

"No one would try to stop me if I just flew up the outside of the building, would they?" I ask myself, looking at the open door. "Probably not worth the risk."

Kicking my boots off near the doorway, I slump forward, moving through the curving central hallway of the penthouse to collapse in a chair off the kitchen. The smell of something savory wafts from the room, splitting my attention between my own weariness and the desire to eat freshly prepared food.

I don't often get tired anymore, not very tired anyway. However, three days of non-stop "fishing" at the adventurer's league has a way of wearing out a girl. For three days, I have pit myself against all manner of burning monsters down on the land below Faeth. None proved much of a challenge, the highest being only level ninety-three. They all displayed an astounding ability to produce flames, which is what I was truly after. Disenchanting them landed me a fair bit of gold as well, and I opted not to break down the natural treasures that my first disenchantment creates from their corpses. Currently, I have more black dust than gold to bond it to, so there is no sense in making more.

"Dovik!" I call into the kitchen. "Food."

The kitchen responds with utter silence. Levering myself from the chair with a grunt, I push into the kitchen, discovering it empty. A plate sits out on the center island, stacked with bitters and a well-baked bird of some kind that I haven't seen before.

"Dovik!" I call again, scooping up the plate and applying an ounce of heat to the food to get it heated to a nice temperature. Idly, I toss a bundled package of beef into the icebox that I got from something called a "Raging Bull." I'm not one to let good beef go to waste.

Walking through the penthouse, pinching off pieces of the cooked bird and popping them in my mouth, I follow my nose. There is an acrid smell in the air, something I thought was the bird at first, but it becomes more distinct as I continue. The bird is actually quite good, more savory than any bird I am used to eating, with a bit of spice to it.

I find the source of the smell after less than a minute of searching, pushing open the door to my new laboratory. A wave of stinging air assaults my senses as the door swings open. Dovik stands over my long workbench, a small spot cleared on the far end where he attacks a stone bowl with a rock. After gagging and giving myself a second to acclimate, I realize that he is mashing something in a mortar with the rock, a bunch of red leaves from the looks of it.

Dovik's head snaps up as I let loose a particularly deep cough. As he turns to face me, I can see that a piece of cloth has been wrapped around the lower half of his face, and that pieces of cotton have been wedged in his ears. He plucks out one of the cotton balls.

"Eh," he starts. "Well, this is basically what it looks like."

"You are grinding up spices?" I ask, shoving another piece of bird meat in my mouth to overpower the stinging taste in the air. "Very bad spices."

He looks between me and the mortar in front of him. "Alright, maybe it isn't what it looks like. These leaves are supposed to be medicinal, but I never expected them to smell so bad. Though now that I think about it, medicine always smells bad."

Taking a bite of one of the bitter vegetables on the plate does far more to clear the taste of acid out of my mouth than the meat. The root is like a small pink turnip that is as sour as the briniest pickled cucumber, a new favorite for me. "That's been my experience."

Walking into the room, I take a look over what Dovik has done to my enchanting table. If I am being honest, I don't need nearly as much space as the table offers, and he barely needed to move any equipment to make room for himself. Eight different powders lie upon white paper around the mortar, each distinct in its coloration. Two buckets, one of clean water and the other dyed a strange brown color, almost akin to tea, sit near Dovik's feet. In front of the mortar, two books are open, one an illustrated and thick tome depicting nearly forty different well-depicted leaves. One of the depictions is a close match for the half-ground flakes Dovik has in his bowl. The other book is far more devoted to text, looking at first glance nearly like a cookbook.

"If I didn't know any better," I say, "I would say that you are attempting to become a potion man."

Dovik snorts. "I think the preferred term is alchemist," he says.

I shrug, using my eye to identify each of the powers set out on the tabletop. "I only met that one girl in the trial who made potions. They are supposed to be scary expensive." Leaning down, I sniff the nearest powder, a green substance ground so fine that it looks like sand. With a stern hand, Dovik slowly pushes me away from his precious powders.

"They are," he mutters. "However, I have recently learned that it isn't the most expensive profession to invest in learning. In a city like Faeth, an aspiring alchemist might even be able to make more than they lose in their tutelage. Also, if you want to smell any alchemical ingredients, there is a proper technique." Dovik leans over the powders, waving his hand in front of his face like he is inviting the air into his nose.

"I'm not doing that," I tell him.

"Then don't smell my things."

"Do you think any ground-up leaf is going to seriously injure me?"

"Injure you, yes. You heal quickly, that is a given for an alpha magician, but it might still inflict you with dizziness or maybe scorch the inside of your nose. You don't have a magical defense like mine."

"I'm not an alpha magician," I say, rolling my eyes. In mockery, I imitate the inviting wave to the air he demonstrated. The technique succeeds in preventing anything harmful from happening to me, as it also prevents me from smelling anything at all. "Useless."

"Charlene, from what you have told me, you survived being impaled on spikes for nearly a month. The qualification for becoming an alpha magician is to be nearly unkillable. If you don't qualify, then I don't know who would." His face falls as he reads something on my face. "I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean to bring that up like that."

"It's okay," I say, waving him off. I'm a bit surprised at how steady my voice stays. "So, you want to be a potion man because the ingredients won't hurt you?"

He smiles to himself, shaking his head. "When I said that I would follow you, I might have gotten a bit ahead of myself. I just…I needed to do something. It didn't really hit me until we got here that you were going to spend a whole year here, maybe more. What would I do, hunt monsters down on the surface like you've been doing the past couple of days? Maybe. Then what happens when Faeth is back over open water, would I just sit around this penthouse, reading romance novels or visiting sights around the city? No. No, I don't think that I could do that."

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"That's why you had Corinth get you a recommendation for the academy," I say.

He pauses, whatever speech he has prepared interrupted, and looks at me. "He told you?"

"I figured it out."

Dovik scoffs. "And I thought I was being so clever, too. I was actually surprised when your brother agreed to write one up for me. He did it then and there, right out on the balcony while you were busy counting your new horde."

"I don't have a horde," I say.

"I've seen your private vault, farm girl. You have a horde."

Now it is my turn to scoff. "So, you decided on potion making as your focus?"

He shrugs. "I tried a lot of things. Spellcraft honestly seems too hard, and enchanting is too expensive. I read up on the different areas that the academy in Faeth focuses on and found alchemy as an interesting path. The potions and elixirs are insanely expensive, but not on the manufacturing side. At least, if I understand it right. Even when looking at other areas after that, I kept thinking about how that night might have gone differently if I had a potion or something with me. What if I could have healed my leg? What if I could have fixed Illigar immediately? Could I have stopped him? I just can't stop thinking about it."

At once, I want to step forward and embrace him, or at least put my hand on his shoulder and tell him that it is alright, that he did everything he was able to. Something keeps me back. Maybe it is something in his bearing, the intense way he stares down at the stone bowl in front of him. Maybe it is something in me. Do I even believe those consoling words I would pour on him? I don't know, and I'm disgusted with myself for the not knowing.

"I think it is a good idea," I say, finding the will to say that little. "If anything you make explodes in your face, it probably won't injure you."

He huffs a laugh. "That is what I was thinking too. My father always said to leverage your strengths whenever possible. What in this world could be more dangerous than an alchemist who can take insane risks because his own brews can't injure him? The monsters will quake in fear."

"I have no doubt they will," I say. "But…"

"But?"

I point down at the bowl. The smell of acid in the air has only grown worse over the course of our conversation. "You are not going to do that in here."

"This is the only laboratory," he says, looking around.

"Use one of the guest bedrooms then, we don't need it," I say, pointing over my shoulder. "One thing I will not stomach is this place stinking like burning leaf."

He smiles at that. "I've smelled burning leaf before, farm girl, and it has a much different stink to this."

"You know what I mean."

"I do," he says. "Do you mind which I clear out?"

"Take whichever you like."

Our conversation turns towards plans for the future. I find out that Dovik didn't know about the entrance tests either, and the man has a lot less time to prepare for them than I did. I also kindly inform him that he will need to make some kind of craft as an exhibition for a panel of judges. Dovik is the one to end the conversation, quickly storing away all the things he left on the table in his storage ring before running out the door, yelling back to me something about selling furniture to buy other furniture. The smell of bile doesn't follow him out.

I cook the air with dragonfire for a good ten minutes after he leaves to clear the stink, and even then, I can still taste it at the back of my mouth. Whether it has become a phantom smell or not, I can't say, but I do my best to turn my attention toward my own work, taking sniffs of stored sweet cream to alleviate the persistent smell.

Loose papers crinkle as I arrange them in front of me, designs for the enchantment that I will begin working on today. The focus of my enchanting career has always been obvious to me. I am an adventurer, a magician, and being able to make equipment to use going forward will be an incredible boon, especially now that I am beginning to understand how my new armory skill works. I suppose that I could make equipment for my friends as well. I can offer them a discount, a friendly one. They would probably like that. Considering I am about to literally drag Dovik to hell with me in just a year, it is probably the least I can do.

Waving my hand above the table, a heavy pair of gauntlets falls a few inches out of my vault and onto the surface. The boom as they meet the wood makes me jump. I likely should have expected that.

For the past week, I have spent every day racking my brain, trying to think of some interesting and unique enchantment that I could make to impress the judges at the upcoming round of tests. Eventually, the idea of impressing them lost its shine, and I settled on trying to simply make something useful to me. I always knew I was going to make a piece of equipment, but what kind was the question. I have already been working on a chest piece, my stylish jacket, but already that path seems antiquated, given more recent developments. Rings, earrings, and other accessories are strictly out due to the intricate skill and instruments needed to work on such tiny enchantments as those strung together inside a loop of precious metal. Lastly, I simply like my boots and leggings too much to make them my first project in this new direction. Out of all the equipment that I currently use, the gloves are by far the most simple, offering a boost to only one attribute, magic.

The pair of gauntlets on the table whine as I drag them into their proper place, leaving a long scratch on the surface of the table. I wince at the mark, but without the power of the throne boosting my strength, they are simply too heavy for me to wield on my own. That, negating the negatives of heavy equipment and imparting its durability directly to me, is the greatest asset of my armory ability, and I plan to leverage it with this first creation. Four days ago, the same day I tried to sell my infused mediums to that man downtown, I found a smith in the city willing to take a commission for these gauntlets. They are made of a metal called obsidianate, a dark metal that can be mined from certain magical volcanoes.

The metal itself is fairly abundant in the right places, making it not too expensive a material to begin with. It was also several times denser than iron and more durable than anything I have ever come across. Apparently, magical metals have fantastical properties like that. The downside of its insane density is that it is also one of the heaviest metals that can be commonly found, making its uses for anyone other than me somewhat limited. Expediting the crafting of the gauntlets cost me more than I care to admit, but the extra time to work on the enchantment is well worth it.

I pull a specialized tool from my vault as well, one that will allow me to unscrew special fasteners that the smith included as a part of creating the gauntlets. In Faeth, given the abundance of enchantments, suppliers of armor and weapons have long since developed a way to allow an enchanter access to the inner pieces of an object so that they might implant their enchantments safely inside. The methodology is called sheathing, and the smith I commissioned included it as a part of the process without my needing to ask. With a few turns of the tool in the proper places, a top layer of obsidianate pulls away from the gauntlet I am working with, revealing a smooth worksurface beneath. I set the metal sheath aside, making sure not to scratch my table this time.

The intricacies of enchantment seem to expand the more I read about the practice. When preparing to create the plans that would lead to my new gauntlets, I found three distinct approaches to the craft. One would be to simply create a single gauntlet. It is not uncommon for an adventurer to have two different gloves or gauntlets, each housing a unique enchantment. It offers more versatility, is cheaper generally, and allows the wielder to switch items more easily if one is destroyed, damaged, or outgrown. I did not feel this approach was for me. After all, I am still a novice at this enchantment business. Creating two different items with unique enchantments is just too ambitious for me at the moment.

Then, when it comes to making a pair of gauntlets, there are two different approaches. In one, the vast majority of the enchantment is housed in one of the gauntlets, traditionally the right hand. Next, a mirroring enchantment is inlaid in the other, allowing the enchantment to emanate from both pieces simultaneously. This mirroring effect barely strengthens the potency of the enchantment beyond the level of only having one gauntlet enchanted, but it is easier to accomplish. The other approach would be to put the enchantment in both gauntlets. This doubles the cost of the craft, and barely increases the potency of the enchantment. Mostly, it just protects against destruction, as having one gauntlet damaged wouldn't affect the other. As far as I know, that isn't a concern for me, so I have decided to go with the mirroring approach.

I take a controlled and purposeful breath as I begin to pull items from my vault and set them out on the table. I don't have nearly everything I need to complete the enchantment today, but I can at least begin. Checking one of the papers splayed out on the table next to my new gauntlets, I find only three lines through the list of sixteen magical affixes that I need to secure to complete the item.

"At least I can get started on the underway," I say to myself, pulling up a seat to begin working. I don't stop until it is time for breakfast, and only then because Dovik makes me. This enchantment business is starting to get fun.

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