The sun rose over a pale morning.

A knock at the door yanked her from the haze of sleep. Her senses flooded in one by one - the warmth of the sun on a small portion of her face. Zef’s back pressed against her chest. Something soft gripped in the palm of her hand.

The lingering scent of poppy flowers on the markswoman’s hair. The pleasantly cold morning air that would soon be replaced by sweltering heat. It all mixed and swirled together with the remnant mental images from some forgotten dream, and Zelsys slowly drifted back to sleep.

Bits and pieces of a dream had gotten caught in the spiderweb of her half-woken mind, brief flashes of riding across a desolate windswept desert atop a two-wheeled machine, faster than any living steed. A forest bristling over the horizon, but not of trees - they were gigantic stone arms, reaching for the heavens. Skeletal golems pursued her in droves, but her metal steed screamed defiance and ripped the ground in its mad dash through this damned realm.

Another knock woke her in earnest. As cautiously, as gently as she could, she untangled her legs from Zef’s and slipped out from under the covers, slipping on her new underwear and wrapping her chest. She walked over to the door as quietly as the conceivably could, cautiously cracking open the door.

It was Makhus. His bloodshot eyes stared at her from bottomless pits underpinned by bags so heavy he looked a decade older. The alchemist’s lips were cracked and sallow, his voice dry and raspy as if he hadn’t drunk anything in a day.

“It… It’s done. I j… I got my composite purgin’ seals working last evening and one thing led to another and… I-it doesn’t matter, it’s done. I’d… I’d like t’be there when you drink it, an’ ideally right now. I don’t know for how long it’ll remain stable,” he stuttered out, his mind visibly shooting off in all different directions at every other word. Nevertheless, visibly sleep deprived though he was, he looked positively giddy to see his hard work come to fruition, and Zelsys certainly wasn’t at all reluctant to give him what he wanted to see. In part it was to get it out of the way and pave the way for reattaching her left arm, but also because she herself was inexorably curious to see what would happen. She hoped the beast’s essentia-breath ability would carry through, if only to give her an easy way to weaponize her Storm Engine trait.

“Alright, I’ll be right there,” she nodded. “And go drink some water, you look like a walking corpse.” Makhus gave a twitchy nod back, turning on a heel and walking into the kitchen. Zel stepped away from the door and quickly slipped on her trousers, then left with nary a sound so as to not wake Zefaris.

She found Makhus in the kitchen emptying a tall glass of water, refilling it, emptying it again, then refilling it, and emptying it yet again before he noticed her and followed in her stead. They soon entered the lab, and Zelsys was greeted by… One hell of a scene. Makhus had moved several tables to form a sort of inverted U-shape near the old writing desk, with four different tangled glassware apparati arranged on them, with the Philosopher’s Heart sitting in the apparatus at the left-hand end of the U-shape, idle and inactive, filled two-thirds of the way by a semi translucent milky-white liquid with many black ribbons floating about within it, like ink dropped into water. The table exactly opposite it held a tea kettle, a beaker half-filled with yellow dust, a jar of bright-yellow preserves, a plate with two half-eaten bread slices slathered in those very preserves, a small glass dish with some sort of lard-like substance, and a plate covered in the remnants of a pot-roast.

The alchemist surged ahead of her, making his way through the lab and doing something with the apparatus that held the Heart. He had removed it from its trappings by the time she caught up, clutching it in his arms as he looked around. After a moment his gaze landed on a nearby cabinet that held various things including flasks and… A little fetus-man in a jar? How strange. She’d seen it a few times before when she had been down here, but never this up close, and she had never given it any consideration.

“Say, can you get me a flask? Just… Just put it in one of the empty holders,” he asked, and she did just that, but she was unable to tear her eyes away from that little man in the jar. He was deathly still, until just as she found a good-sized flask, his eyes lazily drifted open and he turned within the liquid he floated in to look at her. He just… Looked at her, for what felt far longer than it really was.

Slowly, a weak smile spread across his face and he reached out a malformed hand, rubbing blocky text into the sediment on the inside of his jar.

MY GREAT WORK

COMPLETE THYSELF

Makhus audibly scrambled to get within sight, but the dwarf in the jar had already exhaled a green cloud that somehow reformed the sediment layer perfectly, erasing his writing, then instantly returned to motionlessness.

“D-dit it write anything?” questioned the alchemist. Giving him aught but a little smirk Zel turned around, closing the cabinet and walking over to a nearby table with a flask stand, placing the flask.

He came up to the table and took a deep breath, ever so slowly exhaling a single long wisp of Fog as he poured the Heart’s contents into the flask with hands so still one might believe he wasn’t running on daytime dust and sheer will. It was then that she saw the elixir to be the consistency of sugary syrup, slowly flowing from the Heart’s sole unplugged opening in a continuous strand. It coiled within the flask, slowly splaying out to fill its volume as it melded back into one mass.

The moment the last of the elixir was transferred, Makhus put down the Heart as if it were red-hot and looked to Zelsys with the self-same question as before, exhaling the last of his Fog as he asked her, “Did the homunculus in the jar write anything?”

“So it IS a homunculus,” Zel replied, thinking back to the time the Red Mantis had brought up homunculi living in jars. She didn’t really have a reason to deny the alchemist his answer, so she just added, “And yeah, it did. It wrote “My great work, complete thyself.” Perhaps the homunculus was made from some alchemist whose life’s work resulted in me?”