White box

Timepiece

When Stephanie came home on Saturday, the house seemed silent at first, and then she noticed that her parents seemed to have become closer-- but that was the last thing she wanted to hear, so she slipped in her soundproofed room and went to sleep. It had been a packed day-- her mind was so full of all kinds of information that she needed a long rest to have it sorted out.

And next morning, she went to the Alchemy store and had a day much like the previous one, except now that she was an official apprentice/assistant/co-worker Carl gave her a uniform to wear. It looked the same as the clothes Carl wore - a dress-shirt, waistcoat and pants, and the customers thus recognized her right away as a staff member. How did Carl know her size? Who knows.

His answer: Intuition.

Stephanie did not know how to solve any of the problems the customers had, so she listened to Carl's answers. When there were multiple things to bring, she did bring some. The potions, or concoctions, how he called them, had fascinated her so much on the first day that she, more or less, remembered their locations.

On the times without customers, Carl kept telling her more about the various uses of concoctions, and this time, she joined in with making two different types of them. She had to make a paste from some leaves, cut some ingredients and, this time, precisely measure some powders. She had made a mistake with one of them; Carl asked her to re-measure by a look alone, saying it was best always to check three times, which Stephanie did from then on, knowing that these potions were expensive stuff, and also - he told her what would happen if the dosing was off. Some potions, mainly sleep based ones, could put a person into a coma if wrongly dosed, many turned into poisons with a single misstep.

Yet, Carl also said that the color of those was usually a little off. Same with scent, so he had her both smell and adequately observe the finished results, then made a tiny 'wrong' sample to show the difference.

Stephanie also had her first experience with enchanting. Just using the ingredients was not enough; one had to blend them correctly using aether. There were special spoons that aided novices with that, and Carl had her use that one. Using aether was like making breath flow into your fingers - a feeling that made no sense, but the spoon felt like it sucked it out of her fingers, so it wasn't that impossible.

Carl had her practice with the cheapest kind of concoctions, which were made up almost entirely of ground plant leaves and maybe a few magical bird feathers. She failed all of those, but Carl didn't look disappointed.

During lunch (the best take-out sushi in the universe), Stephanie finally asked about souls and what happened once you died. Carl said there was a transmigration cycle out there no one knew much about it, but that souls from various dimensions, planets, etc., circulated all around and that each dimension had it's own rules or methods on how to get in it. Urea's (this planet's rule was) - don't give up your own life or soul.

That was it.

Meaning, you do things to live, not things to die. But it wasn't that people who made stupid decisions or died in pursuit of enjoyment failed. Drug overdosers and Dead Alcoholics passed still, pursuing joy or easier life still counted as pursuing life.

Failure was putting a gun to your head, or saving someone else with full knowledge that it will kill you and stopping to struggle against it. If you fought till your last breath, then you passed.

But that said, Carl added. In the case of saving someone, the person became an apparition called a guardian spirit, which still usually passed into the transmigration cycle safely, just at a time when their protectee died. Unless they saved something lacking soul, in that case, they failed as well and - became an undead.