Calvin stooped as he stepped into the Alchemist’s shop, wrinkling his nose at the acrid fumes swirling through the tiny room. The shop’s ceiling was oppressively low, and he felt like he was going to bump his head at any moment.

Other than the size and the malodorous content, the shop looked like any other well-kept establishment, with racks of nonvaluable alchemical products near the door, and the more interesting or dangerous stuff within cupboards behind a locked iron grate placed solidly behind the desk and its warden.

Lining the shelves were simple animal glues, skin balms, insect repellents, insect repellents that were also skin balms… the list went on. Behind the counter was a creature he’d never seen before.

It looked like a tiny woman, almost four feet tall, with somewhat distended translucent pink flesh and skin that was shiny and stretched tight like a grape. Her rotund stomach pushed her breasts up, two big spheres that stood up against their own weight on the front of her chest, barely contained by her tiny apron over a thin shirt.

Cal had heard about Jibbleya, but he’d never actually seen one. Supposedly they had a resistance to harsh chemicals that might kill a human, so they naturally found themselves filling a niche as alchemists.

He hadn’t expected their body shape to be quite so…exaggerated.

“Welcome to B and Bee’s Alchemy shop!” she said cheerfully in a high-pitched voice. “I’m Bee, can I help you find anything special?” she said, putting a lilt at the end of her words that would have been sickly sweet had she not been small enough to pull it off. She kind of reminded him of a talking berry. Perhaps not quite so rotund, but close.

“Yeah,” Calvin said, pulling out his wish-list and clearing his throat to hide his staring.

“Do you have, or can you acquire…unhardened spider-web protein, An exceptionally strong acid, compressed steam, refined fire-worm extract, or some other self-igniting substance, a steel plate, maybe seven inch by four by two… a bottle of nothing, fine steel darts, confetti, Swamp beetle extract, soporific steam… bottled light if possible, and umm…that’s it. It’d be for the best if all of those things were under extreme pressure, actually. ‘cept for the steel plate.”

I already told you, you can’t bottle light, doofus, and even if you could, you couldn’t isolate it long enough for the spell to take effect, a photon is way too fast to pin down, and even if you could do all of those things, duplicating a hundred pounds of light would literally nuke you.

I don’t know what a nuke is.

It’s bad.

“That’s it?” she repeated incredulously. “That’s order’s almost as big as you!”

“Every other alchemy shop I visited referred me to you. Seems like you’re the best in town. If you can’t help me then I guess I’m shit outta luck.” Cal said, watching the woman change colors as she blushed blueish.

He’d been given a stipend of four Stones to buy supplies for his post as Andra’s underling. That had covered the tailored uniform and basic supplies, and he’d managed to have two Stones left over when he was done. Cal had taken the opportunity to seek out an alchemist that might be able to provide him with ingredients to use with Splitting to create more flexibility.

Unfortunately most of the shops he’d visited in Mujenan were unable to create them the way he wanted, or unwilling to sell in such small amounts. B and Bee’s was referred to him as specialists able to tackle more complicated problems.

“I can handle almost anyone’s order, but this is…” She took the list out of his hand and pouted as she looked over them.

“You don’t have quantities written down.” She said, glancing up at him

“Generally a vial or two of each, about yay big,” Cal said, holding his thumb and forefinger apart. “It’d be nice if they were all the same size and shape, make it easier for them to fit in a travelling pouch.

“Uhuh,” she reached under the desk and pulled out a piece of charcoal and started making notes on the side of his list, quick calculations.

After a minute of that, she scratched her head for a moment, then turned to the back room.

“Da!”

“What!?” came another voice from the back room. A bit older, a bit more masculine, but still high pitched compared to a normal man’s voice.

“Come take a look at this!”

An older Jibbleya with a greying beard and darker blue flesh came out of the back room, stripping heavy leather gloves off of work-hardened, semi transparent, slightly chubby hands.

“What is it?” he asked, taking the sheet of paper out of Bee’s hand. He glanced back and forth between Cal and the paper, his brows furrowing more and more.

“Whaddya want with all this weird shit in… half-ounce vials? Whaddya gonna do with it? prank someone? burn somebodies ear off? Get high?”

“Spells.” Cal said. “I’m a wizard.”

“And I’m human.”

Cal shrugged, unperturbed.

“Ah well, If I turned away every idiot that wanted to light themselves on fire, I’d be out of a job,” he said, leaning over with the charcoal and grumbling to himself as he marked it.

He crossed out the bottled light, the metal plate, the caltrop, and the soporific steam.

“Can’t sell you drugs or poisons without a license, and the steel you’re better off getting at a blacksmith’s.” he said by way of explanation as he hunted down the list. “But in the quantities you’ve got written down here, I can sell you a tiny bit of God’s Fire.

“What’s God’s Fire?” Cal asked.

“It’s a gooey gel filled with pyreheart shavings. When a shaving makes contact with air, it bursts into flame, which then ignites the gel, which burns hot enough to slag steel. In the amounts you’re asking for, it’s used as a firestarter or toy.” Bee said helpfully, smiling up at Cal.

“It’s real pretty in an oxygen free environment,” She said, playing with a strand of her hair.

“Ung,” her father grunted, marking numbers beside each of the remaining pieces.

“He wants them under pressure, da.” She said, looking at his numbers.

“Agh,” the man began grumbling as he smudged out the numbers next to each of the items and writing new ones.

“And they don’t need a lid. Completely sealed off so they can last indefinitely…” Cal chimed in, balking at the man’s glare. “…Would be best.”

He smudged out the new numbers and wrote new, larger ones beside them.

“Not only do I have to pay Isaac a visit, I gotta hire a Shaper who can do glass and steel,” He grumbled.

“Is it too difficult?” Cal asked.

“Nothing is too difficult for Borus Igglebaum. The questions is, can you pay?”

He asked, handing the sheet back,

“well, that’s not as bad as I thought,” Cal said.

“The price is in Quarters, son.”

Cal’s eyebrows raised. The smallest number was a two, next to the compressed steam.

All told it would cost fifteen Stones to buy everything the alchemist hadn’t crossed off.

“Why is it so expensive?” Cal asked.

“Because I’ve got to take time out of two other master craftsmen’s day to make a trinket.”

“For two stones, could I get the web and the god’s fire?” Together the price the old man had calculated had been two and a half stone. Just those two would allow Cal to do things he’d never been able to do before, and do them repeatedly.

“The prices are non-negotiable,” Borus said grumpily.

“You’re visiting Isaac tomorrow, Da! You can easily add that to the docket. The only cost is the shaper! That’s enough to knock half a stone off.”

“Are you on my side or his?” Borus asked, scowling at his daughter.

“Agh, fine,” he said, watching Cal fish the two notes out of his envelope.

Cal pulled out the two notes and laid them on the table.

A stone was a government backed note that guaranteed its bearer could exchange it for a very specific amount of the opalescent Nem, about a half-inch cubed. Of course Nem never came in a specific amount, and cutting it smaller to fit specific sizes wasn’t a great idea, so a stone would generally net you a pebble sized rock and a bit of Nem dust. A stone. Hence the colloquial name.

Nem itself was valued for its beauty, and the way it shimmered, seemingly shifting and shining without a tangible cause. A long time ago, some observant adventurers had realized the fluctuations in the shimmering responded to Warp in the air, and so there was now a small subset of people that used it as a medium to measure the Warp in the air, but most people still used it for eye-catching, expensive jewelry.

“Let me see that.” Borus said, dragging the notes along with the envelope across the table and peering down at them.

“This was issued by General Andra to buy necessities.” He peered up at Cal. “Are you really some kind of wizard...Some kind of dirt-poor, implausibly young spellcaster, which I find highly unlikely, or did you lift that off a new recruit?”

“Watch,” Cal said, picking up one of the delicate vials off the rack in front of him with a ten dust price tag.

“Pretend this is the vial you’re going to make for me, and this,” Cal picked up a smaller cork stopper and dropped it inside, rattling it around. “This is the contents. With me so far?”

“Yup.”

Shaping.

5/11 Bent Remaining.

Cal reeled back the power of the spell, making a thirty pound cork stopper appear in midair, slamming down on the desk, rattling all the delicate glassware and causing the aging craftsman to nearly jump out of his skin.

“And this,” Cal said placing a possessive hand on the cork log so it didn’t go anywhere.

“This is thirty pounds of compressed God’s Fire. With me so far?”

“heh, Hah! HAHAHA!” Borus began chortling madly as his daughter looked on in confusion.

“I See! Oh, yes, I like that! I like that very much! Yessss…” Borus rubbed his palms together greedily, grinning from ear to ear.

“Bee, get me a commission form.”

“Sir,” she said, and hopped into the back.

“And are you working directly under the General, implausibly young wizard friend of mine?”

That was Cal’s understanding of the arrangement.

“Well, yes.”

“Now that I understand its purpose, you’ve given me a challenge and a delight to work on. I’ll send the bill to your commanding officer, now shoo.”

“But I,”

“Shoo!” Borus said, sliding the two stones back over to Cal before he turned and went into the back room, without giving Cal a second glance.

Well, I guess that worked out okay.

Cal looked down at the two stones he didn’t end up spending, and finally shrugged. Looks like I’ll be getting that metal plate anyway.

Come to think of it, he didn’t need caltrops as long as they could fit inside the plate. Come to think of it, with Shaping and Mass Splitting, the plate didn’t have to be very big. He could copy a tiny caltrop out of a small plate, use shaping to bring it up to regular size and Mass Splitting to create a hundred pounds or more of them.

Cal shook his head.

The more he thought about it, and the more he experimented, the more depth the Skill seemed to have. Then again, it is supposed to take a long time to get to level eleven.

Cal headed out the door and went to the nearby smithy, where he commissioned a cube of metal about an inch on a side, with a loop for a string. The smith raised an eyebrow but only charged him four pinches of dust.

After all was said and done, Cal managed to go back to his temporary room at the barracks with a stone left over from shopping, whistling a jaunty tune.

The next morning, Calvin was roused from bed by a wave of ice-cold water followed by an iron fist clamped onto his ear. Cal staggered and groaned, taken off balance by the sudden grip on his lobe. He blinked the last bits of sleep out of his eyes and was met by a furious Horas, and a stone faced General Andra.

“This found its way to my desk this morning. Care to explain?” Andra said, holding up a commission order with Borus’s signature on it.

“Ummm.”

“You know, spending government money without authorization is a crime. The Jibbleya says I’ll find it necessary, but I find myself...critical.” Andra said, rolling up the document.

“If I don’t sign it, you’ll be receiving a lashing. You are under military discipline now, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t spend my money without my consent.”