Yes, soon enough the pieces would be in place and he could - wait. If the Philter’s current stage had already finished, it must’ve been at least an hour and a half since those two were down here last. Indeed, a glance at the clock confirmed his suspicions - it had been damn-near two hours, the clock’s brass hand slowly but steadily advancing towards the end of the store’s open hours.

Despite his confused frustration, the thought of going upstairs to ask what was the matter didn’t even cross his mind. He would wait here until they came, for as long as it took. It wasn’t as if he was starved for work. Stabilizing the Philter at this stage was a task of negligible effort, seeing as it was still little more than component soup. Indeed, a couple minutes later he had the proto-Philter securely in a flask and the Philosopher’s Heart ready for use… And no signs of Zel or Zef.

More work it was, then.

Another couple minutes passed, and Makhus worked. He went through his notes on the Necrobeast Serum, re-reading the same section for the nth time despite the fact he could close his eyes and read it in his mind’s eye by this point. It was a particularly bothersome aspect of the solution that he had tried and failed to get rid of multiple times throughout his time working on the serum.

With the Heart at his disposal, it was different. He now had the sheer alchemic firepower to just purge this undesirable aspect altogether, but it would take a long, long time. More time than was acceptable. At least, unless he first used the Heart as a force-multiplier for another fundamental alkahestry method to destabilize the undesirable element within the solution and only then try to extract it. The Heart would effectively allow him to rip out a foundational block of the Azoth all at once without causing the entire solution to denature into essentia slurry.

He’d rearranged the glassware and set the Heart into the new arrangement, already having filled it with the Necrobeast Solution. It’d just run on its own for a little while, but the arrangement was limited by the lab’s glassware. At a pivotal point in this step, he’d need to switch out a column which destabilized a target component for a column that would actually filter out said component, in doing so hopefully stripping from the serum certain aberrant traits endemic to the Necrobeast. He doubted Zel would appreciate trace amounts of Nigredo in all her bodily fluids and the all-consuming stench of decay that would come with it, benefits be damned.

It would be a task of undoing the fasteners, removing the several-kilo, half-meter tall glass column, and replacing the new one in the two-second window that he would have, and if he failed the destabilized solution would go spraying all over the place under pressure while it denatured into its foundational building blocks.

In short, it’d make him rot alive where he stood.

And yet, the consideration of this danger never once crossed his mind. Makhus’s greatest concerns lay in the possibility of losing his Magnum Opus, and so he took every precaution possible.

Not protective equipment, or some other means of mitigating possible damage, but self-enhancement. This would use the same skills that his swordsmanship was built upon, by doing this he would unite the discordant aspects of who he was as a swordsman and an alchemist. A swordsman couldn’t do this, and neither could an alchemist - to Makhus’s ego, this was something only he could do.

He grabbed a small mason jar of bright-yellow citron-scented alchemic gelatin, an experiment in suspending Daytime Dust into preserves for better customer appeal. It was also the only palatable form of the drug he had access to at the moment, with all the rest stored as disgusting semi-liquid gruel waiting to be processed into its jelly form.

Due to the low concentration, he had to down half the jar to get the same dose he normally put in his tea - that was his only consideration, not the fact that he usually consumed a mug of the tea over the span of hours, just quickly enough to mitigate his body’s metabolization of the substance. His tongue ached with tangy bitterness and his nostrils filled with a cartoonish caricature of citron scent by the time he was done. By the second his blood pressure rose, as did his awareness of everything. The side effect was, unsurprisingly, twitching.

Such a dose of alchemic stimulants in a short span of time, mild and safe as they were, inevitably made the body a little too responsive. Exactly as he’d intended. He walked over to the tangle of glassware, readying himself to begin the fateful operation and invoke sensory enhancement just to be absolutely sure he would perform the column switch quickly and correctly.

With a breath of Fog he uttered, “S.S.S.S. Arts: Sensory Enhancement…”

Pupils dilating, eyes aching, sight amplified to the equal of a Homunculus Eye.

Then two sets of footsteps stomped down the stairs. One booted and light, although uncertain, while the other was barefoot and heavy. His head had already whipped around to stare wide-eyed at the door just because he’d thought about it, even as he poured the Necrobeast solution into the Heart.

It was Zel and Zef as he’d hoped. Despite the fact he didn’t actually care about what they wore, his momentarily hyperactive perception made him take note anyway. Zef had changed into a white sundress, starkly contrasted by the clean, if heavily worn pair of warm-weather combat boots on her feet. Zel didn’t even bother with footwear, or anything beyond the most basic of modesty for that matter. The same trousers, sans any of the belts - despite this, they seemed to fit perfectly. Neither her weapon nor its holster were to be seen, but in her hand she gripped that familiar white stone Tablet.

Either her already tree-like legs had grown over the last few days, or the Fog-infused fabric had grown attuned to her.