Without speaking so much as another word, the alchemist returned to his menial work of sorting seal-bottles, leaving the two of them standing there. The door’s self-closing mechanism made it ring the bell again, starting Zef out of her concerned state of hyper-attentiveness.

Zelsys felt a tinge of annoyance at herself for not thinking of using her wounds as a means of initiating something earlier. It was all too easy to just nudge the markswoman in the right direction.

“It got me a couple times on my back,” she brought up, raising her arm to make visible the huge bloodstain that had spread underneath her armpit. “Mind helping me clean the wounds?”

“I- Yes, of course! There’s a bathroom upstairs,” Zef responded without missing a beat, immediately turning to lead her there. She was all too swept up in concern for another’s health to consider any less than platonic implications.

When he heard the two of them walking up the stairs, Makhus let out an annoyed sigh and stood from the neat little regiments of various bottles he had arranged across the floor. “Bottles are sorted. I’ll go check out the lab,” he responded to Sig’s amused glance. “Fill a couple and let me know if there’s any evaporation issues with the seals.

Down the stairs and to the massive door, which swung open without making so much as a sound and sealed when he closed it much in the same manner. He felt a sense of childish wonder overtake him, with a grand laboratory easily comparable to those of state-sanctioned alchemists stretching out before him. Were he to wager, he’d be able to confidently guess that many alchemy colleges didn’t have labs such as this one, and that at least one other building on this street didn’t have a basement at all because of the lab’s sheer size.

It held many closets and tables, both up against the walls and in the center of the room. There were two separate sinks at opposite ends of the room, both connected to their own easily accessible water synthesizers with the Aqua crystals clearly visible inside cages on the wall. Makhus walked through the lab, trying to decide which apparatus he wanted to test first.

The rational side of his mind told him to ensure the floor-to-ceiling industrial-type Viriditas still in the corner would need a lot of use relatively soon. He knew he should go check the Ignis crystal, to make sure the burners all work properly, to clean out what was most likely months and months worth of desiccated plant matter inside the distillation chamber.

But he didn’t. That wouldn’t be engaging enough to take his mind off the real reason he was down here, why he wasn’t contently sorting through seal-bottles and copying the seal designs to improve his own. Makhus instead chose to flit from one table to the next, examining all the near-pristine alchemical apparatuses until the initial sense of intrigue wore off, only to move on to the next jumble of glyph-etched tempered glass.