“Alkahest solution’s good… Burner’s good… Seals are good…” the alchemist murmured to himself, meticulously adjusting the tangle of glyph-etched glass and ensuring all of its myriad components were in full working order.

His mind was not entirely focused on the task at hand, but what distracted him was no longer the need to fight his own discomfort, but purely the intrigue of whether or not Zelsys was a homunculus. To his relief, even this small friendly exchange managed to assuage his inner turmoil, in no small part thanks to the towering woman’s overwhelming force of personality, which he was certain served as a social force multiplier. He wondered if even this powerful charisma was rooted in her possible alchemical origins, but giving it further thought dispelled such considerations. A traditional homunculus was a vertical slice of the original’s knowledge, but had no personality of its own. Besides, she didn’t look like any particular human he had ever seen - more like a mishmash of traits from a wide variety of dissonant ethnicities.

Sure, she could’ve come about as a result of a long and elaborate eugenics program, but such a family would quickly become famous if they had any success, not to mention the fact families who practiced human breeding were universally ethnic purists. In contrast, Zelsys was a nightmare in the flesh to any ethnonationalist. Facial structure like an Ikesian, skin like a Grekurian, eyes like a monk-noble, north-imperial ears, and who knew what those weird lines on her skin could be if it turned out they were natural. Did they have anything to do with her unnatural hair colour?

The thought crossed his mind that, perhaps, they were a visible manifestation of the way in which the theoretical homunculus would “become as one with Azoth” whatever the journal meant by that. The more Makhus thought about it in this way, the more he convinced himself of the plausibility of Zelsys indeed being a homunculus, and the more his hope grew that she would be able to show him some insight into her own nature, were she to ever uncover it.

“The Second Sage of Fog and her right hand sword-saint, Makhus of the Sword-Soul-Single-Strike,” he said to himself in a joking tone, chuckling at the absurdity of such an idea as he tightened the last valve and finally reached for the syringe, pressing the plunger until a few drops of the blood contained within dropped into the alkahest solution within the flask.

It didn’t immediately dissolve into a vague cloud of brownish-red as human blood usually did when exposed to even the lowest-concentration alkahest solutions. It remained stable for seconds, and before it even began to break down and dissipate into the expected cloudy form, seconds had turned to minutes. Makhus found himself entranced, watching this usually seconds-long process drawn out in slow motion as Zel’s blood resisted breakdown.

An idea.

“S.S.S.S. Arts: Visual Enhancement!” he murmured under his breath, feeling his vision fraying at the edges as his pupils stretched open to their absolute limits and the lenses in his eyes briefly honed themselves to the acuity of a telescope. This technique allowed him to either be extremely farsighted, or extremely nearsighted, and overuse-induced damage ultimately reflected whatever he used it for.

Even mere seconds of this strained his eyes, and more than a minute could cause permanent damage to both his lenses and his retinas if he looked into a light, but he knew the risks, knew how to mitigate them. He even knew how to brew special eye-drops to fix minor eye damage while half-blinded, which he had learned from a rather harrowing period of his military service, during which he had to abuse this technique for the sake of recon.

He had complained incessantly to his higher ups, and only three weeks later Zefaris was assigned to his squad as the reconnaissance specialist, much to his at the time nearsighted, elixir-addled self’s relief and fascination.

Staring into the cloud with his momentarily microscope-capable sight, most of what Makhus saw made sense and lined up with what he knew about the composition of human blood.

Most of it.

He didn’t recall anything about blood cell-sized Azoth stones.

Upon making her way to the upper floor and into the room from which she heard noticeable noise, Zel was welcomed by Zef’s figure facing away from her. She was standing in a strange stance opposite a full-body mirror that was leaned against the wall between the room’s two curtained windows, her right leg raised as she fiddled with a brand-new leg holster’s stiff straps.

Opposite the room’s single, albeit huge bed, atop an empty writing desk, sat both her Tablet and Pentacle’s lacquered wooden box, its lid sitting open and its contents still untouched beyond the very holster that Zef was trying on.

“The holster fit alright?” she asked offhandedly as she walked over to the desk, reaching into the velvet-lined box to retrieve the only thing her fingers could get any purchase on - a hard-cover book, sitting snugly in a recess just above the cold-iron behemoth. Zef just murmured a vague noise of affirmation, making last adjustments to the straps and moving her belt a little to adjust the loop by which the leg-holster was fastened to it.

It was obvious she wasn’t exactly used to more than a sling or perhaps a simple belt holster, but the markswoman expressed no dislike of this novel alternative either.

The manual was of no interest to Zelsys, and she just put it aside on the desk. She’d just wanted to get a good look at Pentacle in its assembled form, as Collier hadn’t shown them. She just took it into the store’s back room in pieces, then returned with that bulky box.

It was huge, complex, and beautiful. From the glistening cylinder whose surface shone like that of a mirror, to the dark hardwood grip and rose gold trigger guard. Beneath the barrel sat a lever attached to the ramrod mechanism, and in its assembled state it was clear to see how it would operate even without having to lay hands on it.

She would’ve happily taken it out of the box and gotten a good look at it, but… It didn’t feel right. This gun wasn’t hers. No, she waited for Zefaris to come over and, by her own words, “Do the honors.”