She chewed on the thought for a few minutes as the professor prepared. Slowly, his students began to fill the room.
The students weren’t as young as she might have expected. All looked older than she was, the youngest in the second half of their twenties, and a handful looked like they must be grandparents. The sun was setting, and most of them were dressed for jobs. Not all scholarly academic jobs, either; over there, she saw a woman in a flour-spotted apron who had to be a baker.
This wasn’t an official class of Kanatalia’s grand Alchemical Academy. It was a collection of amateur alchemists coming to learn from a Guild professional.
Technically, Petal only counted as a journeyman alchemist by Kanatalia standards. Her master had removed her from consideration instead of sponsoring her, but by that time, the damage had already been done. She was in love with alchemy.
She had continued mixing, brewing, and testing solutions of her own since the day she had been cut off. She couldn’t stop now. There were too many lessons left to learn, so she picked up alchemy treatises or guides wherever she could, attending every alchemical lecture she could find at every port The Testament visited.
Where possible, she paid her own way. Where impossible, she snuck in. Or eavesdropped with a heavily invested ear-horn. Or drilled a hole in the neighboring wall. Or bribed one of the attendees for a transcript.
There was usually a way.
Today, the professor was picking up a series on the history of augmentary potions and their regulation. Tucked away in a corner of the rafters, she scribbled furious notes; this was a specific area of interest for her.
After the better part of an hour on the context and history, most of which Petal was familiar with, he finally got to the demonstration.
The young, bespectacled professor held up a tiny vial of bright red liquid. “This is a sample of blood provided by the Champion’s Guild, preserved in a fresh liquid state.”
A murmur of appreciation ran through the crowd. Champion blood was a valuable prize; it held proprietary alchemical secrets relating to the process by which Champions were created. Though the Champion’s Guild had to cooperate with Kanatalia to procure and produce some of those substances, they still kept their precise formula a secret.
They parted with their blood only reluctantly, especially to alchemists. Petal had read stories of Guild alchemists who had exhumed Champion bodies in order to examine the organs directly.
Those alchemists had, one and all, been caught and…discouraged from pursuing their research further.
The professor hurried to reassure them. “As I said, this is official business. We’ll not pry too deeply into the secrets of the Champions—not that we could, with only a few drops of blood. We’re going to learn how to distill the Kameira extract inside this blood to create a potion that will briefly allow a mere mortal to taste the power of a Champion.”
Petal shivered in excitement.
It became clear soon after that the professor was exaggerating; Champions relied on an intricate network of body modification supported by years of training and adaptation, and there was no way to provide anything of that level in a single bottle. Even if there were, an ordinary human body would tear itself to pieces under the strain.
But the fact remained, as he demonstrated, that it was possible to extract the physical powers of a Champion and use them to temporarily enhance someone else.
Which he illustrated by having the grandmotherly baker quaff a small vial of the completed solution and then crush a wooden desk to splinters with her bare hands. She stood straighter than she had before, her eyes clearer, and she laughed like a little girl as she backflipped from a standing position and landed exactly where she’d started.
The possibilities sent Petal’s mind whirling. The process the professor demonstrated was too complicated to follow after one demonstration; she’d have to practice. Even once she did, he made it clear that the required ingredients were exotic and expensive.
But the most exotic and expensive ingredient was the blood of a Champion, and she just so happened to live on a ship with a Champion of its own. And he was chock full of blood.
She began writing down ideas, inspired. If a temporary enhancement was possible, it was within the realm of possibility that permanent changes could be made with nothing more than potions.
Alchemists had known for centuries already that, if you abused potions to the point of addiction for too many years, they could permanently modify your body as though through surgery.
The principle was a cornerstone of certain treatments, though usually only as a last resort. There were always side effects.
Maybe someday, one bottle could make you a Champion. Maybe that was already how it worked, and the Champion’s Guild just didn’t want everyone to know. Maybe…
Petal blinked and looked up. Night had fallen, and at some point she must have waited for all the students to pack up, descended from the rafters into an empty classroom, and left.
She inferred this from context, as she remembered none of it.
She was wandering the streets of Kalvin’s Rest, a port town in northern Erin where she knew no one. There were only a handful of locals still on the wide streets, and several of those gave her odd looks as she shook and clutched her notepad close.
She had gotten too absorbed. This happened sometimes. She was only vaguely aware of the passage of time when she drifted into her own head. Now, she found herself in a strange place hours after she said she’d return.
Petal slunk back into the shadows between a squat brick building and a place that looked like a saloon. Raucous laughter came from within, and she felt no desire to investigate further. She had to make it back to the ship.
Then a voice she knew cut through the laughter.
“You’re just meeting out here in the open, are you?” Jyrine sounded amused. “Children hide their secret clubs better than you.”
A man’s laughing voice responded, his consonants noticeably slurring together, and Petal followed him around to the other side of the presumed saloon.
Jyrine stood surrounded by four men, and she was by far the youngest and shortest person there. The least of the men was twice her size, and just watching him, Petal started to shake.
The loudest of the men was brown-haired and red-faced, and Petal didn’t like the look of him at all. He gestured too broadly with his hands, he was clearly drunk, and he looked Jyrine up and down with an openly hungry expression.
The other three didn’t give off the same sense of danger as that one, but they were still technically surrounding Jyrine. Did the girl know how much danger she was in?
“Well, you’ll have to lead the way. Unlike you boys, I have someone waiting for me at home.” Jyrine’s earrings gleamed emerald in the starlight as she nodded deeper into the alley. Which…now that Petal noticed, opened up onto something that looked like a cave.
How did that happen? Had someone hollowed out the stone wall of a building? No, the stone shouldn’t be more than a foot thick. Not nearly enough for a cave. And she was sure the alley had ended in a wall just a moment ago.
Petal pulled her head back around the edge of the wall, taking deep breaths and gathering up her courage. It took her enough effort to talk to strangers at all, and she hated confrontation, but she couldn’t leave Jyrine alone with these outsiders. Petal had to be the older sister.
Gripping her spirits tight, Petal stepped firmly into the mouth of the alley.