It was time for science.

First, Manoel mixed everything that Eva gathered together with the ingredients that he already had. They were mixed via a process of crushing everything up into a fine powder and the mixing it into a cauldron that looked to be filled with some sort of thick paste. That was how his preferred brand of alchemy worked. The result was a slightly glowing, pink, thick mixture that smelled like medicine and didn’t promise a much better taste.

And the first one to try it was going to be Eva.

“You may want to lie down,” Manoel said. “Could be easier to reorient yourself if you start on your back than if you are standing.”

“I’ll be fine. Wings and tail,” Eva replied, taking a bottle filled with the new brew from Manoel’s hands. “You need to work on making your potions taste better.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They always smell and taste horrible.”

“Do they? I like them.”

Eva sighed. “Well, as long as you like them, that’s all that really matters. Anyways, down it goes.” She tilted her head back and brought the bottle’s opening up to her lips. Nothing immediately happened aside from having her taste buds assaulted, so she kept on drinking until she downed the whole bottle.

And the result…

Was a very loud, vulgar burp.

“I feel…” Eva paused. “Gassy.”

“Hmm. That is not the intended effect,” Manoel commented.

“I think that much is obvious. This might be good for a prank if you can make it smell and taste better, but right now? I’m… not feeling anything other than gas.”

“You know I would never prank somebody!”

“I know, you goody-two-shoes.”

“That’s right I am! Now, I wonder what went wrong? We included the husk of a grav beetle, but that didn’t do anything. Perhaps we need more?”

Grav beetles were large, slow beetles that seemingly floated across the ground. Upon first discovering them, players thought that it was a visual glitch in the game. They looked like they were assets not properly interacting with the ground, instead floating above it. It turned out that they were actually just… capable of hovering above the ground. How? Their shells. Why? Nobody really knew. They just hovered everywhere. Even if they were flipped upside down, they would continue in the same path that they were already going. The only way to stop them from hovering was to remove their shells, which also killed them, so the scholars weren’t entirely sure whether or not they stopped hovering without their shells or if they just stopped hovering upon death.

“Wait, Eva, try jumping,” Manoel said. “See if you can feel a difference.”

Eva nodded and did a little hop. Surely enough, she actually did feel a bit lighter than before and managed to hop up higher than she thought she should have been able to. “I think it’s working? Well, there’s definitely a difference, but the effect isn’t strong enough.”

“Hmm. So, I need to make the effect stronger. I’m thinking… we use a potion distiller and then add an amplifying agent.”

“If you really want to go all out, I would make a potion with the amplifying effect, distill it, distill them both, and then combine them.”

“A distilled amplifying potion combined with the distilled experimental potion? That’s dangerous.”

“Extremely.”

Manoel smiled. “Let’s do it!”

Eva smiled back and ran off to get everything they needed.

A few minutes later and Eva was back with all of the required equipment. That allowed them to get to work.

First came distilling the potions. That involved boiling the potions at a temperature where the water inside of them would boil and evaporate off into another container while leaving all of the actual potion within the starting container. In the world of FTO, water tended to boil at a lower temperature than all the good stuff in potions, so distilling was fairly simple.

Once each potion was distilled, they were poured into the same bottle and thoroughly combined together. The result was a potion that glowed significantly more than before with an even worse smell.

“Great,” Eva said. “I forgot that it would be concentrating the scent and flavor, too.”

Manoel stuck his tongue out at Eva as she downed the potion.

She could already tell there was a difference by the time that she finished the potion. Her arms felt weightless and she could feel herself drifting up into the air with only a slight flutter from her wings. “I think it’s working?”

Manoel dropped to the floor to look between it and her feet, confirming that there was nothing connecting them. “It’s working! Well, kind of. Not really, actually, now that I think about it.”

“What do you mean? I’m floating. What’s wrong with it?”

“I didn’t want to make a potion that makes somebody float or one that simply cancels out gravity. I wanted to make one that reverses gravity. Like turning the positive side of a magnet into the negative one rather than simply removing both sides.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, I guess this doesn’t really fit that all that well then.”

“I want to be able to drink a potion and then go flying into the sky because of my gravity being reversed!”

“That would be fun. This is kind of nice, though.” Eva used her tail and arms to position herself in the air so that she was floating on her back. “I wonder if zero gravity is good for the spine? Would it be healthier for the back to sleep like this?”

“I’m not sure. You could always look up the effects that sustained time in zero gravity has had on astronauts. From my understanding, though, it does more harm than good to the body. Especially when readjusting to Earth’s atmosphere.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll add it onto my list of things to look up when I’m back in the real world. Anyways, do you have any idea for how we might make this reverse gravity rather than cancel it?”

Manoel paced back and forth while tapping on his chin to try and think of a solution. Unfortunately, coming up with a solution to their problem was going to be considerably difficult.

But they wouldn’t have been members of the Hermetic Scholars if they didn’t like overcoming challenges in the pursuit of knowledge.

Unfortunately, the act of reversing gravity rather than simply canceling it was significantly harder and neither Eva nor Manoel had an idea for how to improve on their potion.

Well, there was one thing that they could have done.

A practice that many scientists relied on throughout history.

And that practice?

It was trying random bullshit.

Fortunately, the scholars even had a potion that was basically designed to be the embodiment of random bullshit.

“A chaos potion might work,” Eva said.

Manoel nodded. “Just what I was thinking.”

The chaos potion was an invention of the scholars that randomized the effects of whatever it was mixed with. If mixed with a healing potion, for example, it could potentially boost its effectiveness, reduce its effectiveness, completely reverse the effect and poison the drinker instead, temporarily boost the “health” of a player or reduce it, and so on. The chaos potion was something that would take an effect and then add a strong dosage of—well, chaos to it.

Unfortunately, it was a very valuable potion and there was only one means of earning permission to use it.

They had to go to the leader of the Hermetic Scholars.

Trismegistus.

Fortunately, he was online and available when Eva and Manoel went to his personal study to get permission.

“Come in,” their leader said. He was a man who very, very few people outside of the Hermetic Scholars ever saw. Most had no idea what his name even was, and they certainly had no idea what he looked like.

When it came to the leader of a scholarly faction, though, it was probably safe to assume he was going to look like some old wizard with a long, white beard.

That couldn’t have been farther from the truth in Trismegistus’s case.

Sitting at a chair, writing his most recent observations down in a book, was a very large and muscular man. Not just a man, but an orc. He looked more like a barbarian going by his body, but he wore the robes of an educated scholar and glasses. He at least had some white, braided hair and a short, white beard to make him at live up to the stereotype a tiny bit.

“Ah, Eva, Manoel,” Trismegistus s aid, offering the two a polite nod and smile. “What brings you to me today? Trouble, I am sure, but is it at least interesting trouble?”

“We think so,” Eva said.

As for Manoel, he stood behind Eva by a couple of steps. He was never too good at dealing with the big guy in charge of things.

“Well, Manoel?” Trismegistus said, calling Manoel out.

“A-ah, sir, uh,” Manoel mumbled and forced himself to get out from behind Eva, “I—I wanted to get permission for the use of a chaos potion.”

“Interesting. What for?”

“I want to make a potion that reverses gravity.”

Trismegistus looked at Eva, who was still floating a little, and said, “It looks as if you have already accomplished that. Unless you mean to literally reverse it rather than simply cancel out its effects.”

Manoel nodded. “Yes. That.”

“You plan on using it outdoors if you can get it working, don’t you?”

Manoel nodded once more.

“Hmm. That could give us valuable information regarding the world’s upper limits. As you know—”

Eva and Manoel looked at each other and sighed as soon as they heard those three words. As you know. The three words that always began one of Trismegistus’s rambles. He especially loved to ramble on about knowledge that everybody in the scholars already knew. Nobody knew why he enjoyed going over the basics that weren’t new to anybody, but he always did.

“—flying is only able to get somebody so high and no method of propulsion to take somebody higher has worked, whether it be from chemical reactions or magic. Making it into the low stratosphere is as high as anybody as ever accomplished, and that was with a character who maxed out their flight-related abilities and combined them with explosive magic to serve as a jet and a pseudo jetpack made with combustive materials. Unfortunately, once they made it high enough, their wings alone were not enough to carry them and bringing even greater amounts of fuel would weigh them down too much. Unfortunately, simply scaling things up would not help as, at that point, the game prevents such creations from working due to getting too close to real world rocketry. But if it is a potion that performs the job, that is something done entirely through fantasy means. It may just work to make somebody ascend to even greater heights.” He paused, only for himself, to nod before saying, “Alright. I will grant you use of the chaos potions in pursuit of breaking free from this world. All I ask is that you make sure you have set a nearby spawn as I struggle to believe you will survive if you manage to leave the atmosphere.”

Manoel and Eva looked at each other again with excited smiles.

“But.”

There was always a but.

“Manoel, in exchange… do you know what it is that I want?”

Manoel hid himself behind Eva again and gulped. “Is—is… it another massage?”

Trismegistus let out a relaxed sigh encouraged solely by imagining the massage. “Yes. It has been too long since you have blessed my back with your hands.”

To be fair, even Eva knew just how incredible Manoel could be with his hands when it came to massages.

But that wasn’t what made her suddenly perk up.

Instead, she perked up when she remembered what Fenrir’s and Tabitha’s project was.

They wanted to build a submarine capable of launching ICBMs.

Chemical propulsion probably wasn’t going to work, at least not to the degree that they wanted… unless they could drastically reduce the amount of fuel needed to propel the missiles.

And what would reduce the amount of fuel needed?

Decreasing the effect gravity had on them.

The potion that reduced gravity without completely removing it would probably be perfect for that. She just had to figure out a way to apply it to an item. But once that was figured out, the rest would be easy.

“I—I… alright,” Manoel said with a defeated sigh. “I will give you a massage once we have perfected the potion. Is that alright?”

It was Trismegistus’s turn to nod now. “That will do just fine. Ah, and Eva?”

“Yeah?” Eva answered.

“You queried me regarding technology capable of animating or controlling giant golems, yes?”

Eva completely forgot about that, but she did for Tabitha’s sake since she recalled Tabitha wanting to build a giant, controllable golem to use as a mecha. “Yeah. Find anything out?”

“Apparently, our dwarven friends have figured out how to make controllable golems, but they are using a method of controlling them still secret to us.”

“They figured something out that we haven’t?”

“Indeed. That is why I have committed our best information gatherer to their city to learn everything that he can.”

“Thelmes?”

“That’s right. Once he finished his task in Port Tugator, he took on an independent project researching the effectiveness of fish-based weaponry and armor for some reason, apparently due to a man he met during his time there, so I assigned him again once he was done with his research.”

“Fish… based weapons and armor?”

“Indeed. I have no idea what went through his splendid little mind to inspire him so, but I never saw him so passionate. He even created a form of gatling gun using a fish that shoots smaller fish out of it.”

“I—alright. I know better than to question him. Anyways, we should go continue work on our potion.”

“That you should. Allow me to grab you some chaos potions. Five should suffice for your trials, yes?”

Eva looked at Manoel who nodded.

“Then that means one redeemable massage per potion. I agree!”

Manoel stepped back, not having the courage to disagree with his leader’s terms, and sighed.

It wasn’t that anything inappropriate or rude happened whenever he massaged Trismegistus. It was just… the large orc was very vocal while receiving a good massage. The moans, groans, and grunts haunted Manoel every night whenever he tried to sleep after giving him a massage. Unfortunately, it was one of the few things that his brain refused to ever forget.

But it was worth it for the sake of science and properly reversing gravity.