Author's Note: Our first sidestory commission, by
@Tiny_Dic.
/-/-/-/-
Sitting around the small firepit, Jacqueline studied the back of her fingers and the patchwork Familiar at her side. He'd been a loyal companion these last few months, his cat-like form and long combat claws helping her escape those damn girls again and again. Sighing, the Witch studied her fire, before pulling out a tin of beans and using her Familiar to open it. As it cooked happily on a rock, she gazed up at the stars, plotting.
"Miss me, Jacky?" a voice said from the tree line, footfalls deceptively light for their jackboots coming towards her.
"Melchie, I'm hurt." Jacqueline said, her voice all too saccharine as she sketched a four-dimensional symbol in the air, the fire extinguishing into a pellet that flew into her hand. "I could never miss a spiteful bastard who's tried to kill me, oh, at least twice now."
"I assure you, that was only in the most professional of contexts." Melchoir said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a silver case engraved with a broken
hakenkreuz. "Care for a cigarette?"
"You know me too well." Jacqueline said, moving over to accept the cancer-stick before lighting it with a puff of lightning. It was always good to remind the boys what she could do, especially a man like Melchoir Tomislav. Not many Alchemists lived to be the ripe old age of a hundred and thirty-two, and fewer still could keep their good looks doing it. Aside from blonde sideburns and a long scar that trailed away from his right eye into a white shock of hair from a long-forgotten sabre-stroke in the trenches of the Isonzo, he still looked like the dashing young man who'd started practicing alchemy back in the death spiral of the twenties. Jacqueline still had memories- not hers, of course- of watching him laugh while drinking some hell-brew next to a stack of rifles and a burning pile of reichsmarks as he celebrated some accursed deed.
Two puffs of the cigarette, and her eyes started swimming pleasantly, while the beat of Jacqueline's heart started dancing spastically. Throwing back her head to laugh into the night, she grinned madly at Melchior as her hands went numb.
"Really? I thought we were friends." she said, draping her form over his with a too-wide smile as the arsenic coursed through her veins. "Trying to kill me in such a pleasant meeting would just sour our whole relationship, you know?"
Melchoir laughed, blowing out a plume of smoke. "Would you believe me that I'd forgotten I'd poisoned the smokes? The apprentices were stealing them again, and I figure I might as well take the chance to winnow out the herd."
"Well, fortunately for you," Jacqueline said, laying down carefully to let her mortal coil expire, "I have such an adverse relationship with old man Death."
"I so forgot how you looked, m'dear." Melchoir said sincerely, bending down to kiss her flickering hand as what was left of her soul flickered through a technicolor rainbow, distorting the very air around it with the perversity it exemplified. Limbs extended and contracted, until the very expression of the Witch that was Jacqueline had snaked itself around the small clearing they were in, letting the unreality seep through the ground and bones of the earth.
"Why did you come here, anyway?" Jacqueline asked, smirking with one half of her head and sighing with the other. "It can't be because you're interested in a little dirty dancing, unless I really did steal your heart last time."
"Alas, no." Melchoir said dramatically, setting down his rifle in the grass and leaning it up against the too-tall dandelion that had bloomed behind him as tall as a sapling. "I need your help for a trade."
"Really, Melchie, just business?" Jaqueline said, sighing dramatically as a lamia's torso and too-beautiful human face formed out into an exaggerated version of her human body. "We had so much fun the last time we rolled in the hay!"
"You also tried to suck my life out of me through my dick, Jacky. I spent weeks in therapy, not counting the time it took to grow a new one after you
bit it off."
Jacqueline tiffed, putting a faux-hand beneath her faux-head and snorted. "I was hungry, and you were so tasty though!"
"And you wonder why I never come to visit anymore." Melchoir muttered. "Before you keep distracting me, I do need to say what I actually need."
"You're here for what you're always here for, Melchie. A soul." Jacqueline said lazily, the curls of unreality creeping skyword until they created a laticed dome where an inverse of stars shined through. "Your law of Equivalent Exchange is so restrictive, keeping you out of your work. I know you need something still a little more possessed of intellect, of desire, of that spark of life that just dies when you turn everything into a mathematical balance beam that must come out exactly right."
"Jacky, you wound me with such lack of ambition!" Melchoir replied, standing up while lighting another cigarette. "I don't just need a soul, I need several souls- creative souls, bright souls, above all else souls with that sparkle of magic that means they can evolve ever further beyond."
"Oh, by the broken Cross, not this again." Jacqueline muttered. "Thirty-five liters of water, twenty kilograms of carbon, four liters of ammonia, one and a half kilograms of lime… start to sound familiar yet, Alchemist? An artificial human is impossible, and the last one of your ilk to try lost control and it killed him!"
"I'm smarter than Hanoch ever was, and that fat bastard never mastered making homonculi so his work is invalid." Melchoir said with a sniff. "We still don't know if he succeeded, which is the worst part. So much knowledge wasted."
"Hubris will forever be your downfall."
"And lust, therefore, unto thee."
The two stared at each other until the Bounded Field finished materializing, and with a snap they were transported. Planes stretched and slithered, coiled and folded, becoming separated and adjacent as coterminal nodes flashed into being. Physics itself went on holiday as the construction finished, Jacqueline's soul providing the teather and fabric itself of the demiplanar pocket. With a wave of her power, the mortal body that had been accidentally stopped was rewound like fine clockwork, foam and blood flying from the mouth as the poisons were purged and Jacqueline came back to rest in her prefered form.
"The topic of payment would be next to discuss, I suppose." the female form occupied by the Witch said, her words echoing out and around the fantastic landscape. "You know my prefered currency are the Westmost Ducats, but I'm apreciative of anything you would care to sweeten the pot with."
"You and I both know the Westmost Ducat has been deflating for three hundred years since the Frisians stopped minting them." Melchoir said, rolling a smooth golden coin between his fingers. "I can pay in Buffalo Dollars, and a corvee of labor from my apprentices. Well, the ones that are left anyway."
"Five thousand a soul, and two hundred hours of labor." Jacqueline said imperiously, her Familiar stalking up to her. "I require a broodmare for my poor St. Elzear here, as he has been terribly lonely."
"You know I can do that in under eighty hours of work from the apprentices, so let's cut it down to ninety." Melchoir said, smirking. "As for price per soul, I'm thinking around three thousand per."
"Why, I'll barely be breaking even on that deal!" Jacqueline said, poorly acting out a shocked expression. Really, remembering to animate one little sack of meat was kind of difficult when your consciousness- since as a Witch her soul was forfeit- was stretched over a hundred and fifty seven cubic kilometer bubble of demiplane. "Four thousand eight hundred a soul."
Melchoir winced overdramatically, picking up his rifle to sling it over his back. "You and I both know you'll end up eating one of my apprentices who fails to pay you hospitality or something, so I am obligated, obligated I say, to drive you down to three and a half thousand a soul."
"And is it not my right to deal with interlopers to my home as I see fit? Once the terms of contract are complete, they are guests in a Witch's domain, and it would behoove them to remember that."
"I'm not hearing a no…"
Flipping her hair back, Jacqueline sighed. "Four thousand even a soul, and that's as low as I'll go. A girl has needs, Melchie, and you'd best remember that."
"And to you, Jackie, I know exactly what needs those are and where you can have them fulfilled. I hear Rotterdam is quite pleasant this time of year. Still, three thousand eight hundred a soul wouldn't be that bad."
"Fine, you old graybeard. Three thousand eight hundred Buffalo Dollars a soul."
Melchoir smiled, and clapped his hands. "Excellent! I'll need ten."
Jacqueline nodded, before wincing in pain. "Oh! Good, very good. If you'll excuse me, though, I think we have us some intruders."
"Oh?" Melchoir replied. "Some poor, innocent souls?"
As a crack of explosives went off, Jacqueline winced again. "Hardly innocent, but yes. They've had me on the run for a few days I'm afraid. Their spell-weaver is incompetent, but I can't afford to make light of five of them."
"Woe betide me to not help a good friend." Melchoir said, pulling out a flask. "I'll handle it."
"Really?" Jacqueline asked, smiling. "Oh, someone's getting a present for Beltane this year. Would you rather she be fiesty, or meek?"
"Feisty. I need something to beat that isn't an investment." Melchoir said, drinking a hell-brew calmly as his form pulsed with arcane power. "Now hush, please. This will take some work."
Moving through the rolling hills of sugarsweet sand that made up the spineward part of the demiplane, it didn't take long for Melchoir to spot the girls. There were five of them, just as Jacqueline had said, spread out in a simple skirmish formation.
"You sure this is where the Witch headed?" one asked, glaring. "This doesn't feel like a full Labrynth to me."
"Damnit, of course it's a full demiplane!" another yelled. "Just look up for proof!"
Calmly, Melchoir loaded a packet of rounds into his rifle, and hauled the bolt back and forth. A regular round first, before he saw to with his limited sorcery. As the safety was clicked off, none of the girls thought they were in danger.
As the rifle cracked and the rearmost girl dressed in a ragged costume went down screaming, they were proven wrong oh so quickly. Running the bolt again, Melchoir scanned the battlefield. All the girls had found cover, meaning his first shot hadn't finished the job. Blast. Whispering words best forgotten, the barrel of the gun began to glow softly as the bullet inside soaked up an enchantment.
Six left now, the Master Alchemist thought, the knowledge of how to make lead sharp as glass leaving his mind to descend back into Hell.
The worst part of fighting magical girls was the waiting. Both sides could afford to be patient, but only one of them would reliably win at a protracted and long-range duel of the fates- and it wasn't the magical girls. As a screaming golem of clay blitzed towards the dune where Melchoir was hiding, he shot it in the forehead with the finality of someone putting down a horse. A perversion of his Art, and enough to annoy him as the clay beast continued charging. Another spell, another round, and finally it was enough to dislodge the primitive helmet protecting the Name of God and the motive force of the monster. The last round was eight millimeters of lead alone, but that was enough to stop the monster in its tracks.
"They're running for the breach they made." Jacqueline said calmly over Melchoir's shoulder, her incorporeal form permeating his personal space. "I'll count that as a win."
"Pitty. Might have been a good fight." Melchoir grumbled.
"We can't win them all."
