47 – Cleanup

It had been almost an hour since she began cleaning the store alongside her comrades, and Zef’s mind continued to wander while her body did all the hard work. Of all lessons she had learned in the military, it was the ability to mentally check out for long stretches of menial labor that she valued most. Her marksmanship was her pride and joy, but it was something she had cultivated since long before she got snatched up in the cogs of industrialized warfare.

She liked the street performer’s music, she liked it quite a lot, even if his lyrics were a little too political for her liking. There was genuine feeling to every song, every word. From songs about how Ikesia could have never won the war, to songs promising ruination to all those who would seek to kick her homeland while it was down, the distant bellowing of the man’s voice and strumming of his instrument served to help pass the time.

At one point she heard him strumming a completely uncharacteristic rhythm, accompanied by the sound of a phonograph replaying a recording of his own voice as backing vocals. What a curious solution to the issue of being a lone performer. “How did he get his hands on a phonograph anyway?” she wondered. Her train of thought was rammed off its rails by the doorbell’s upbeat chime sounding through the store again.

But… They weren’t expecting anyone. Zef was the closest to the door, her mind still dwelt on her towering lover, a small voice in her head telling her that perhaps it was her back from the hunt. She poked her head above the counter, and much to her surprise, there she was. Standing in the doorway, covered in gashes and dry blood, her chest-bindings shredded at the bottom and only held on by the reddish-brown crust.

Zefaris was fully aware of the risks beast-slaying entailed, of how common grievous injury and even death were in the business - these and many more were the factors that kept the profession almost exclusive for those capable of Fog-breathing. She had fully expected Zel to come back at least scratched up and with a couple bites, and though her rational mind was not surprised at all, she still felt dread wash over her as she leapt from behind the counter.

“W-what the hell happened?! Are you okay? Can you move alright?” flooded forth a flurry of questions, attracting both Sig’s and Makhus’ attention.

“I’m fine,” Zel reassured. “I downed half a bottle of Liquid Vigor on the way back, breathing barely hurts at all. Just need to wash all this blood off… Please tell me this place has a working bath.”

Before Zef could muster up any real response beyond panicked ogling, Makhus had already leaned into the doorway and given Zel a once-over, offhandedly remarking, “Boy, talk ‘bout gettin’ bloodied. Lots of surface wounds, doesn’t look like anything serious. Yeah, I’m pretty sure the bath’s good. If it’s outta juice, you do still have both the Aqua and Ignis crystals in Fog Storage.”

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 column-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.