That's a uphill battle if he chooses to go there, depending on how involved he wants to be. Honestly though, the simplest and easiest solution to helping the Hazbin Hotel is to send a gift through Terra with instructions and materials to make a growing pocket dimension to Hazbin Lucifer. Hell should be more than magical enough to push the dimensions growth to ridiculous levels.The Protag of Helltaker
Also Lucifer thinking about his alternates and kids really made me want to see more of his thoughts on them, was he just as disappointed in his Hazbin Hotel version as I was and does he like Charlie's drive/goal? And can he generate Quests for Alchemist to go to those worlds and help them?!?!
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 (Young Justice/Gamer/Multicross OC)
- Thread starter Mister Ficser
- Start date
- Location
- Isekai'd to this shitty world we're live in
Hazbin had gone to shit when they started talking about "innocents in hell". Only Helluva stayed faithful to the original premise.
Anyway, Hazbin is not a game, and I think Ficser said Al could only visit game worlds (not counting YJ DC).
Anyway, Hazbin is not a game, and I think Ficser said Al could only visit game worlds (not counting YJ DC).
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
After a little thought, I don't think Alchemist's request of Lucifer actually netted him much. Al doesn't use his Gamer system to learn spells directly. Instead, he reads the spells manually, uses the system to cast a spell a few times to get the feel for it, then learns to master it from there. The system basically keeps tabs on how much mastery he's acquired and makes mastery easier, but he actually learns them himself.
Honestly? I think he might have screwed himself, because he should keep all of what he knows until and unless his memories are erased, including the ones he's only a few levels in on, and Lucifer might have messed that up, although since his mastered spells are imprinted on his soul, he should keep the mastered ones even if his memories are erased, so there's that. And yes, that includes when and if he's reincarnated again, although this time not remembering his past life (as is normal for most reincarnates).
Now the question is, what does Lucifer feel is recompense for Kary helping him with a rather annoying irritant of a problem? It wasn't a huge boon she granted, but it's definitely helped him.
Honestly? I think he might have screwed himself, because he should keep all of what he knows until and unless his memories are erased, including the ones he's only a few levels in on, and Lucifer might have messed that up, although since his mastered spells are imprinted on his soul, he should keep the mastered ones even if his memories are erased, so there's that. And yes, that includes when and if he's reincarnated again, although this time not remembering his past life (as is normal for most reincarnates).
Now the question is, what does Lucifer feel is recompense for Kary helping him with a rather annoying irritant of a problem? It wasn't a huge boon she granted, but it's definitely helped him.
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Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
- Pronouns
- Something
Hnnn Im weary of the very sudden Hazbin Hotel integration.
Dont get me wrong, the show seems fine, heck I remember reading a Yoshikage Kira in hell fanfic way back then...
The problem is that the show is barely beggining, so there is not a lot of info about the world and characters out, even using the longer Helluva boss series for info.
So a lot of stuff you add to a fic about Hazbin Hotel could become obsolete or de-confirmed.
Dont get me wrong, the show seems fine, heck I remember reading a Yoshikage Kira in hell fanfic way back then...
The problem is that the show is barely beggining, so there is not a lot of info about the world and characters out, even using the longer Helluva boss series for info.
So a lot of stuff you add to a fic about Hazbin Hotel could become obsolete or de-confirmed.
Hence why it was limited to a throwaway reference for a character that's rarely seen and has little interactivity in-story.
It's a fun reference and a surprisingly good show but attempting to do anything more would be premature and would likely detract from the momentum I currently have. The forbidden material that Al ran into may or may not have some further play, or it might get relegated to the background until it's integral to a plot point.
As an example, Al hasn't yet done anything with Dilustel from Captain Atom and his plans for Willpower haven't been explored at all, yet.
It's a boon because he asked for abilities and spells, which not only includes alchemy and non-magical things he can do, and furthermore and I stress this highly Lucifer does not have (and is not limited to) Alchemist's system to quantify what differentiates them. Even moreso, there's a lot of mechanical discussion of mastery and I'm certain if the King of Hell wanted to honor the spirit of the request that's what he'd use, but if he wanted to, he could take that to mean anything Alchemist can do which he understands intimately and can turn to 'maximum useability' or some other arbitrary meaning of mastery. It depends on how much he actually wants to help Alchemist, I think. Or at the least how much it would amuse him to unleash such upon the worlds.
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Frescko
King of Silver 🏳️⚧️
Alchemist is probably the penultimate gamer in terms of actually using the system. He uses it but isn't solely reliant upon it like so many other gamers, and the system isn't just a refection of what he can do like some other systems are.
It grants him powers he normally wouldn't have, but if you take it away like as seen in some of the anime omakes he's still pretty powerful. Until some other gamers that if you took their system away would be powerless or at least unskilled but physically/magically strong.
It grants him powers he normally wouldn't have, but if you take it away like as seen in some of the anime omakes he's still pretty powerful. Until some other gamers that if you took their system away would be powerless or at least unskilled but physically/magically strong.
Chapter 275
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 Alpha Build 2.7.5
Alternative Title: Don't try to understand the gods, kid. Gods understand gods and they hate each other.
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
27/11/2010
Alchemist felt like his insides had been left to the mercies of an amateur tattoo artist. Something within him ached, itched and burned but, for the life of him, he couldn't actually point to any one spot in specific.
"Are you certain you are well, love?" Kary asked at his side as he listed upon teleporting the both of them to the mostly abandoned village on the mountain.
"Yeah," Alchemist told her as he propped himself up against the cold forge Andre had once used. "Just... strange. I think I'll need to take a break when we finish up here and just... heal up a bit."
The mage didn't know how to describe what Lucifer had done to him. The feeling of the Fallen Lord's fingers, probing and poking and burning at something inside of him, no... Lucifer had ignored everything outside of him and directly manipulated... Adjusted?
Changed. That was about as close as he could get. Lucifer had changed something about the very core of his being and it needed time to settle.
"I cannot tell if you are foolhardy or brave, love." Kary shook her head in frustration as the duo approached one specific cabin.
Alchemist had been leaving it alone in the hopes that the occupant would actually seek them out. Or at least interact with the others that had come from the crumbling world of Dark Souls.
And... well, he'd been busy. Constantly. Something always needed his attention, something else was in the process of falling apart, he had projects that could be incredibly important.
A problem that wasn't seen and wasn't heard had fallen to the wayside and Alchemist was only just dealing with it so he could prepare something special with the land he'd bought.
He was not proud of himself. Not on this one.
"Hasty is the word I'd use," Alchemist admitted as he rubbed a hand over his chest. "Or maybe impatient. What Tiamat did to Player One is still on my mind and the number of entities that can manipulate the soul -and- keep their word is pretty limited. I don't really think Lucifer would leave the matter of a debt unsettled, not for long."
Kary sighed and turned to face him as the duo stopped in front of one of the many identical cabins.
Well. Converted woodsheds. The new apartments he'd poured were easily twice as large, at least in terms of square meters.
"...You're likely right," Kary admitted as she crossed her arms behind her back and relaxed. A dim, black halo began to warp into existence over her head and her shadow grew a single pair of wings. "Still, I think I would sooner lose access to the benefits of your power before I would let the King of Hell tamper with the core of my existence."
"That's fair," Alchemist agreed as he forced himself to stop rubbing at the spot where Lucifer had buried his hand through Alchemist's chest. "I don't really think I can recommend it. At all."
He'd gotten a lot out of visiting Lucifer, significantly more than he'd expected.
Of course, he'd expected that he'd just drop off the homonculus and move on with his day. So a handful of strangely philosophical questions, encountering an item that his system wasn't allowed to recognize and then making use of the devil's debt were all a bit outside the scope of his plans for the day.
With a grimace, the mage turned his eyes over to his status. Specifically to his half-empty HP pool.
Just holding the spear that Lucifer had handed him had caused his hit points to start draining away. Whatever it was made of, the forbidden material that his system refused to name, it felt similar to Tenth Metal, or possibly a bit like solidified Willpower. Something that was less physical but more an idea imposed upon reality in a way that magic could only just crudely ape.
In a way, it was vaguely similar to the magical Deathbringer swords that Alchemist had collected in the Wind I.D. in that the spear was filled with the pure, refined concept of [KILL]. Though, that was about like comparing a toddler's finger painting with the likes of Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello or Michelangelo's masterpieces.
There were only a few sources of power in the entirety of the multiverse that could inflict soul death... And Alchemist now numbered among them.
It was not a particularly comforting thought.
He'd have healed himself but everything felt off, including his magic. And, to be fair, even at half he still had more hit points than could really be considered reasonable.
And, regardless of the difficulty of what he was about to do, he wasn't exactly threatened.
"Karla!" Alchemist called out as he knocked on the door of the last inhabited cabin. "Are you in there?"
There wasn't any answer. Just the whistling of the wind throughout the nearby chestnut trees.
"Love..." Kary mumbled as the mage pressed his ear against Karla's door. "Perhaps it would be best to leave it be."
"I'm not going to just abandon her," Alchemist told the woman. "I'd place better than even odds on the mountain getting raided by someone, villain or government, and I don't intend on leaving her behind."
He could hear breathing through the door, though it was quiet. An uneven rattle.
Had... Had Karla gone Hollow?
"Karla," Alchemist slowly and clearly enunciated as he tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked, though a quick application of Knock changed that. And left him tingling like he'd just licked a nine volt battery. "I'm coming in!"
The door swung open silently, not having suffered from decades of neglect like virtually everything from Karla's native realm, into a darkened room. And Karla's hissing, rattling breathing became even more pronounced.
Yeah...
Alchemist wasn't walking into that.
Instead he searched out an item in his inventory, one of the countless little things he'd picked up from the world of Dark Souls and never actually had a use for.
Extracting the small, almost-ethereal skull from his inventory, Alchemist could hear Karla's breathing hitch. He stepped back and away from the door and simply tossed the Alluring Skull on the ground a few meters away.
He was still nearly bowled over when the woman, stick-thin and clad in tattered robes, rushed past him to get at the shattered bits of bone and magic.
"She's worse off than I'd thought..." Kary whispered into Alchemist's ear as they finally got a look at Karla.
There were no eyes inside of her empty sockets and her flesh had turned brown and taken on an appearance not unlike beef jerky. She had no nose, no lips...
No sanity.
Alchemist was tempted to comment, to remind Kary that Karla had been imprisoned and likely tortured. That the woman had ridden the edge between magic and sanity, the 'humans' of her realm were perpetually at risk of being consumed within the Dark, of the gnashing teeth and chittering voices that would try and pull their souls free of their flesh. Or perhaps it was more akin to a single, great soul trying to recombine?
Either way.
Karla the Witch had been willing and able to pursue the dark magics of her world. And they were all-too capable of twisting the 'human' that delved too deeply.
Alchemist cast Heal on the woman and shuddered in discomfort as she froze in the act of clawing at the dirt to try and find more of whatever it was that made the Alluring Skull so... alluring.
He'd have tried casting Wish but Heal alone had felt like he was running a hand down a sunburn. On the inside.
"...What?" Karla croaked, frozen in place where she'd been scrabbling at the dirt. "What is going... What has happened to me?!"
"I think you might have been left alone for too long, Karla," Kary gently explained to the woman as Alchemist began to dig through his inventory again.
"I..." The hollow stood up from where she'd been crouched and looked to her hands, barely more than taught skin against her bones. "I thought... I could hear... things. Feel teeth gnawing at my skin. Tiny, wicked little things. They wanted in. They..."
Alchemist pursed his lips in thought as he listened to the woman while he dug through his inventory.
That was about what Irina would have said in the game, if he'd given her the Dark tomes.
Though, he'd refused to do such when he'd actually met her. He could read braille just fine, albeit slowly, and he had no desire to inflict that madness on her.
"...Here," Alchemist offered as he plucked an item from the inventory for her. An ash-grey tablet with a skull embossed upon it. A Purging Stone, holding a spell that would remove the curse of Hollowing and allow the user to regain their Humanity. "We've set up a new home, some place a bit safer. Kary can take you there."
Alchemist and Kary both watched in silence as Karla broke the stone he'd given her and her form reverted in an instant. Her flesh filled back out, her nose pushed its way back out of her face and a pair of eyes seemed to grow out from the back of her empty sockets.
"...Are you sure?" Karla asked, hesitation in her voice and uncertainty in her eyes. "Are you not afraid that I will, once more, succumb to the Dark?"
"The houses are bigger," Alchemist began to explain as he uncrossed his arms, put his hands in his pockets and considered the woman.
He needed to get her some better clothes. Something that wasn't tattered rags leftover from her time in prison.
Shopping trips. For everyone. He would literally throw money at Jinx to take care of getting everyone set up with more than the necessities he'd been providing or the requests he'd been granting.
"So you can room with someone else. Perhaps you and Orbeck might get along? This way you can speak with someone else, tell them if the Dark starts calling at you again. I can help, and so can my apprentice."
Alchemist watched the witch and crossed his arms, one finger tapping at his elbow.
There were no perfect solutions. And it wasn't a failure to recognize that and address the issues that did crop up.
But he still felt like shit for letting Karla's issues get so bad when it would have just taken a single spell to fix before it got too far.
"We will get things figured out," Kary told the wizard as she stepped away from his side to approach the silent witch. "What will you be doing?"
"Setting up traps," Alchemist told the woman as he extracted a troll doll from his inventory. He was going to have to shelve his ideas for a small platoon of Animated Armors until his magic settled but the dolls he'd empowered would make for a more than adequate task force.
"Lots and lots of traps."
-----
Robin didn't know how to deal with someone who, as far as he'd known them, had always had their powers.
Tiffany, Penny on the job, said she'd woken up to some windows telling her that her powers would come back, eventually, but there was no estimate as to when.
Honestly, the girl had just been dead quiet and it was kind of creeping him out. She'd been stuck in Mount Justice overnight with Red Tornado keeping an eye on her after the Flash had apparently left.
"So, uh, are you hungry? Or something?" Robin asked the girl.
She'd stayed in the base overnight. They didn't have a change of clothes specifically for her but for whatever reason they did have a couple of the closets in the living quarters just filled with different outfits, so Penny had at least been able to get cleaned up and showered and into some reasonably fresh clothes.
"...No," Penny told him, her voice small and quiet. The usual veneer of vague hostility, or maybe aggression, was absent.
The girl was just a husk.
Robin... thought that she might have been over-reacting. Just a bit. He could still do the Utsusemi: Ichi thing with the paper dolls that made shadows of himself. And the asterisk necklace that gave him a sweet ninja costume still worked.
So, her system might have been gone but the changes it had made were all still real. Or some of them were real.
Look, Robin could lose all of the progress he'd made from the whole 'Boss Rush' thing and he'd still get back out and kick supervillain butt. Whatever was going on with Player One? She could get over it.
Maybe Robin was a little testy because the girl was wallowing in self pity and he took a few issues with that.
Or maybe Robin was a little testy because Bruce had come back home the night before, smelling like he'd been drinking half the day and wouldn't explain why.
Or both. Both is good.
"Do either of you need anything?" Batman asked, his reflection glaring down at the two of them from the big screen television. Robin hadn't even heard him sneaking up behind the couch.
"No," Robin immediately replied as he turned around to look at his mentor. "I guess we're good."
In the background, he caught sight of Alchemist carting a few bags of groceries into the kitchen, along with a binder. Batman also turned to watch as the man began refilling the fridge and marking down notes on a pad of paper.
Upon noticing them, Alchemist didn't say anything. He just sent them a short wave, grabbed another bag that was marked as coming from... Legacy Firearms and Coins? And then he walked back out.
And Tiffany got up and followed after him, showing more initiative that she had for literally anybody else.
Robin shared a look with Batman, then got up and followed Player One, who was following Alchemist, who had apparently headed for the hangar.
They finally caught up with each other after reaching the hangar. Which now had the trucks of four semi-trucks all lined up along one wall and M'gann's bioship had begun to wiggle happily in its egg form.
Alchemist, meanwhile, had a folded, metal card table in his hands and looked just a touch confused.
"...Hi?" he offered upon seeing them after Batman closed the door. "If this is about the expense reports? I can get those taken care of before I leave for the day."
"No, I..." Tiffany spoke up, preempting both Robin and Batman. "I got a notification from my System and I wanted to ask if you knew what it meant."
"Oh, sure. What'd it say?" Alchemist asked as he began to unfold the metal table next to an outlet.
Robin stepped closer with Batman as the wizard set down his bag of materials and then began digging around in his inventory.
"It said I had a corrupted update, then it said it had to pull up an older version. Now it's 'reinstalling' and it doesn't know how long it's going to take." Tiffany's voice was pleading, Robin could tell that the girl was desperate.
"Well, that's pretty self explanatory." Robin felt a little concerned when Alchemist extracted a propane tank from his inventory, then began to hook it up to a hose that led to a small burner he placed on the table. "The system is rolling back to a prior version that worked while Terra figures out what happened to her current one."
"...And what, precisely, happened to her current one?" Batman asked, finally cutting into the conversation.
"The short answer is that I don't know," Alchemist admitted as he set several dark gray bars on the table and extracted a strange block that was split into two pieces. Each the half of a very, very large bullet. A... die? "The long answer is just a suspicion based on Player One's new information."
"What is it?" Player One asked, a note of hysteria in her voice. The girl had walked up to the card table that Alchemist was setting up and grabbed on to the edge, her knuckles turning white with the force of her grip and the metal visibly deforming under her hands. "What did Tiamat do to my powers?!"
"I think she sent a bad update at your System and it crashed the whole thing," Alchemist explained as he began to set tools down on the table, like a ladle with a spout coming out the side and a set of tongs. "Happened a handful of times in my old world to a few online services. Hackers throwing a hissy fit over something or other."
"So... your powers are vulnerable to outside interference?" Robin asked. He wasn't some absolutely amazing super-hacker but he knew how to break into the typical security systems used by most government or corporate servers.
What Alchemist had described would be a lot, lot more involved than what Robin knew how to do.
"Weld a chain between Diana's bracers, take away a Green Lantern's ring, throw some green rocks at Superman... Most powers are vulnerable to something from the outside doing something." Robin turned to look at Batman, trying to gauge the man's reaction. He'd known about Kryptonite and the ring vulnerability was simple enough to deduce but he had no idea about Wonder Woman's bracers. "Point is, it's a learning opportunity. Take the lesson for what it is and figure out workarounds. Or don't, I guess."
"...I'm so glad that Tiamat isn't in this reality," Player One moaned, releasing her grip on Alchemist's table. The girl had actually left fingerprints in the metal where she'd been gripping it.
So, Robin observed, the changes from her powers remained even if she couldn't access the whole thing. Like he'd suspected.
"Of course she is," Alchemist said, drawing one pair of panicked eyes and two other sets that were incredibly wary. "Or, well, a fraction of her. You'd have to find a Chaos Lord who isn't a festering asshole for some real information but I know she's sealed somewhere on Earth."
"...And were you intending on informing us about this in a reasonable fashion?" Batman asked as he raised a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
"Sure, be really helpful for me to go 'Oh, hey, just so you know. There's this sealed magical goddess of chaos out there who's been asleep for countless thousands of years. Not sure when she'll wake up, don't know where she is, don't know what all her powers are. But hey, this is all really helpful, right?' It's not actionable, at all." The sarcasm in Alchemist's voice was thick enough to cut with a knife and Robin did, sort of, see where the man was coming from.
It was basically a whole lot of nothing. Like a dossier made of question marks.
"And it's still more than the League was aware of prior to your mentioning it," Batman explained.
Tiffany just looked lost, like someone had just told her that, no, Santa Claus wasn't real.
"Pick a god, any god. Hell, pick a mythological figure. They're all real and most of them are unrepentant assholes. Kali? You've met Boston Brand. She's the one responsible for him lingering after dying. Amaterasu? Kind of a shut-in, doesn't do much these days. Santa Claus? Actually a badass."
Wait... what?
Did he just say Santa is real?!
"You can't seriously expect us to believe that Santa Claus is real, Alchemist." And Batman's tone was getting increasingly tired.
"Of course he is." But Alchemist was sticking to his guns. Even as he was working on his guns. "Go ask Superman. They've met."
Robin looked up to his mentor, confusion clear in his body language.
Batman was just completely still. Robin knew that he was processing, trying to slot the new information into place.
"Okay, that's cool and all..." And Tiffany seemed to be trying to move on. Or get back to the point. "But what about my System? Do you have any idea when it will come back?"
"I don't know, Player One. I'm sorry," Alchemist said as he placed a wide-mouthed crucible over the still-inactive burner and wedged a bar of lead into it. "I don't know how big the files are or how strong your connection is."
"And I can't believe that you guys have a power that looks like a computer system's user interface," Robin couldn't help but toss in.
It just... didn't make any sense to him. At all.
"Well, it was made to look like something a reasonably intelligent individual would be able to interface with," Alchemist explained, ignoring the snark and sarcasm. "Whether or not it actually has anything in common with a videogame is really up to interpretation beyond the surface level."
"...Aren't you just the least bit curious?" Robin asked. He certainly wouldn't be content to just let something be, not if it impacted him the way their powers did.
"I am not a god, Robin," Alchemist rebuked him, gently. "I cannot comprehend all of reality in the way that they can. I do my best, at least within the sphere that I can see, hear and touch but we are all so very limited in comparison. Striving to do more than what we can is all well and good but the mortal mind is simply not built to comprehend the vastness of infinity."
"...Didn't you say that you recall where you were after you died?" Robin remembered something like that. He couldn't recall the exact details, it had been back when Alchemist was using Leslie's body, but the conversation had ended abruptly with Alchemist practically running away in the midst of a meltdown.
"I do, in fact, remember that," the mage agreed as he turned a knob on the burner and a loud hiss filled the air.
"And didn't you say that the mortal mind isn't supposed to remember that, too?"
"I did say that, yes."
Robin turned to look up at Batman, unsure of what all it was supposed to mean.
There was a quiet click and the hiss turned into a subtle roar as the propane burner was ignited.
Quietly, the dynamic duo began to back away as Alchemist began to hum a tune that sounded... foreign. The rhythm was off but the words were in English.
Robin felt a little bad about leaving Player One behind with the mage as he and Batman left the room. There had been something distinctly odd about the whole encounter and he couldn't quite place it.
They were halfway back to the Zeta Terminal when Robin figured out one of the things that had been bothering him about the meeting.
"...Alchemist didn't use any magic, did he?" Discounting the Inventory, and Robin was pretty sure that wasn't magic.
"No," Batman agreed. "No he did not."
-----
Alchemist worked in relative silence as Player One fidgeted around the room.
The poor girl was anxious, left feeling vulnerable without unfettered access to her power. He got that. He'd asked the devil to fondle his soul bits to avoid being stuck in a similar position.
He didn't know how much he would actually lose just by having his System disconnected but he now knew it would be far, far less than any opponent would be expecting.
It wasn't a concern for normal foes but there was no shortage of gods who could manipulate reality on a local level. Or demons that could do the same given that they were often on par with those gods.
"...Has M'gann ever shown you how to feed the bioship?" Alchemist asked as Tiffany paced around behind him, clearly anxious.
"...No?" the girl asked, pausing in her pacing.
Alchemist turned down the heat of the burner and stood up. He needed to make the various parts to a bullet, then convert the pieces into the proper materials, load 'em, press 'em and label them in a magazine but the process could wait for a few minutes.
He definitely needed to re-familiarize himself with the process before he got around to making tank ammunition.
"Come on," he told the girl as he began to head for the door. "It's not too hard. The ship can go a while between feedings but I'm pretty sure it enjoys the extra care."
To the side, the giant egg-shaped living ship wiggled in place like it was getting ready to hatch. It was... cute.
And Alchemist was very glad that the ship didn't take on the form of an aeromorph any more to try and hug him. He had no idea why M'gann had given the ship the idea to try that and he could certainly do without an explanation.
Whatever the girl got up to was on her.
Tiffany's silence as she trailed behind the mage was... uncomfortable. The girl was usually confident, which could be grating, but now she was practically a shadow of herself.
"...I understand you've been going to Meridian," Alchemist asked, trying to be at least a little bit personable. "How's that been treating you?"
"...Fine," was the girl's short answer.
Alchemist simply shrugged and kept moving. He couldn't make a stone ta-
...Well, actually he could, in fact, make a stone talk.
"I like her," Alchemist continued, filling the silence for the both of them. "No-nonsense, serious, actually gives a damn about her patients. Most doctors that work with metas without being metas themselves are usually looking to make a paper out of it, or else trying to find a way to give themselves powers."
"...Yeah," Tiffany mumbled from behind him. "Doctor Quinzel talked about writing a paper back when I first started seeing her. I... guess that didn't really work out."
"Harleen Quinzel?" Alchemist asked as they entered the kitchen/rec room and he opened the cabinet under the sink.
Dropping a large bucket into the sink, he turned towards another cabinet to start hunting down the instant breakfast powder.
The bioship liked the strawberry flavored stuff, oddly enough.
"Yeah," Tiffany answered.
Facing away from her as he dug through the cabinets for some vitamin supplements, the girl couldn't see Alchemist pursing his lips.
"Any idea what she's doing now?" he asked as he lined the dry ingredients up along the counter and then went to the fridge for a gallon of whole milk.
"I heard she went to Arkham," Tiffany explained, unaware that she was listing out the steps that would send the brilliant but ambitious psychologist to her demise. "I think she wants to try and study the patients there."
"Well, that's good of her." It really wasn't.
It would put her within reach of the Joker. The soulless bastard that had a penchant for manipulating and killing children.
Alchemist had been willing to leave that problem alone, leave it for Batman. But Quinzel represented a fairly direct line to Player One, it made her an absolutely massive liability.
The wizard kept his features carefully schooled as he poured the milk into the bucket, followed by the various dry ingredients before he grabbed a hand mixer from its own spot on the countertop.
"The thing you need to remember for the bioship, Player One, is that it's incredibly large and is actually going through its own version of puberty," Alchemist explained over the sound of the electric motor, forcibly changing the subject.
He wasn't sure about how to deal with Quinzel. He had options, quite a few of them, but most of them weren't things he was willing to do to someone for something they weren't yet guilty of.
So, turning the woman into a toad, petrifying her and then using her as a garden decoration was definitely out.
And just trying to explain the risks the woman was putting herself under wasn't going to work. Harleen was a strong, independent woman and didn't need no man telling her what to do.
Violence wasn't warranted. And he didn't trust his own skills at diplomacy.
What was left?
"So, what's that mean?" Tiffany asked, pulling Alchemist out of his thoughts. "Does the ship need a lot of nutrients or something?"
"Yes, actually." Alchemist was glad the girl had picked that up pretty quickly. "And a lot of vitamins and minerals. I believe M'gann mentioned it normally having a diet rich in proteins and iron but I've noticed that it seems to enjoy having a lot of calcium in its food."
"...Do you think it can shapeshift stuff that's inside of it?" Tiffany asked as Alchemist finished mixing up the pink slurry. "Like, turn fats and stuff into calcium for bones?"
"I... have no idea," the wizard admitted as he turned on the water, thinning the slurry and rinsing off the beaters of the mixer at the same time. "It shouldn't be able to, but I won't say that it actually can't. J'onn might know, though."
That wasn't something science could really accomplish, back in his old world. He could do it with Convert, but that was magic. Which was cheating and telling physics and chemistry where they could go stuff their laws and rules.
"Anyway, just take this bucket and head on back. Go ahead and put it in front of the ship and step back, it'll do the rest."
"Alright," Tiffany said as she lifted the half-full nineteen liter bucket with one hand. She sent him a curious look and he waved a hand over the counter, indicating the mess and various things that needed to be put away.
Alchemist waited until she'd left before he exhaled and relaxed, his form expanding back into a dragon. Now with jeans and a shirt on.
And wedged uncomfortably between the sink and the island in the middle of the kitchen.
Awkwardly, the mage began to put the different vitamin bottles away and let his thoughts drift a bit. He needed to get back to the molten lead soon, absolutely...
But he also really needed to figure out a way of dealing with Harleen. And preferably soon.
Or... he just really needed more time.
The dragon briefly paused in the process of putting an empty bottle of children's multi-vitamins in the garbage as he considered that.
He did have something in mind. Not so much a project as it was basically a side-quest. He couldn't do it himself, not at the moment, but...
Jinx should be close to leveling Limited Wish up to Wish. And both she and Kary knew the Gate spell.
That, the man decided as he braced himself and cast the spell to change his form back into that of a human.
That was certainly an avenue he could explore...
Alternative Title: Don't try to understand the gods, kid. Gods understand gods and they hate each other.
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
27/11/2010
Alchemist felt like his insides had been left to the mercies of an amateur tattoo artist. Something within him ached, itched and burned but, for the life of him, he couldn't actually point to any one spot in specific.
"Are you certain you are well, love?" Kary asked at his side as he listed upon teleporting the both of them to the mostly abandoned village on the mountain.
"Yeah," Alchemist told her as he propped himself up against the cold forge Andre had once used. "Just... strange. I think I'll need to take a break when we finish up here and just... heal up a bit."
The mage didn't know how to describe what Lucifer had done to him. The feeling of the Fallen Lord's fingers, probing and poking and burning at something inside of him, no... Lucifer had ignored everything outside of him and directly manipulated... Adjusted?
Changed. That was about as close as he could get. Lucifer had changed something about the very core of his being and it needed time to settle.
"I cannot tell if you are foolhardy or brave, love." Kary shook her head in frustration as the duo approached one specific cabin.
Alchemist had been leaving it alone in the hopes that the occupant would actually seek them out. Or at least interact with the others that had come from the crumbling world of Dark Souls.
And... well, he'd been busy. Constantly. Something always needed his attention, something else was in the process of falling apart, he had projects that could be incredibly important.
A problem that wasn't seen and wasn't heard had fallen to the wayside and Alchemist was only just dealing with it so he could prepare something special with the land he'd bought.
He was not proud of himself. Not on this one.
"Hasty is the word I'd use," Alchemist admitted as he rubbed a hand over his chest. "Or maybe impatient. What Tiamat did to Player One is still on my mind and the number of entities that can manipulate the soul -and- keep their word is pretty limited. I don't really think Lucifer would leave the matter of a debt unsettled, not for long."
Kary sighed and turned to face him as the duo stopped in front of one of the many identical cabins.
Well. Converted woodsheds. The new apartments he'd poured were easily twice as large, at least in terms of square meters.
"...You're likely right," Kary admitted as she crossed her arms behind her back and relaxed. A dim, black halo began to warp into existence over her head and her shadow grew a single pair of wings. "Still, I think I would sooner lose access to the benefits of your power before I would let the King of Hell tamper with the core of my existence."
"That's fair," Alchemist agreed as he forced himself to stop rubbing at the spot where Lucifer had buried his hand through Alchemist's chest. "I don't really think I can recommend it. At all."
He'd gotten a lot out of visiting Lucifer, significantly more than he'd expected.
Of course, he'd expected that he'd just drop off the homonculus and move on with his day. So a handful of strangely philosophical questions, encountering an item that his system wasn't allowed to recognize and then making use of the devil's debt were all a bit outside the scope of his plans for the day.
With a grimace, the mage turned his eyes over to his status. Specifically to his half-empty HP pool.
Just holding the spear that Lucifer had handed him had caused his hit points to start draining away. Whatever it was made of, the forbidden material that his system refused to name, it felt similar to Tenth Metal, or possibly a bit like solidified Willpower. Something that was less physical but more an idea imposed upon reality in a way that magic could only just crudely ape.
In a way, it was vaguely similar to the magical Deathbringer swords that Alchemist had collected in the Wind I.D. in that the spear was filled with the pure, refined concept of [KILL]. Though, that was about like comparing a toddler's finger painting with the likes of Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello or Michelangelo's masterpieces.
There were only a few sources of power in the entirety of the multiverse that could inflict soul death... And Alchemist now numbered among them.
It was not a particularly comforting thought.
He'd have healed himself but everything felt off, including his magic. And, to be fair, even at half he still had more hit points than could really be considered reasonable.
And, regardless of the difficulty of what he was about to do, he wasn't exactly threatened.
"Karla!" Alchemist called out as he knocked on the door of the last inhabited cabin. "Are you in there?"
There wasn't any answer. Just the whistling of the wind throughout the nearby chestnut trees.
"Love..." Kary mumbled as the mage pressed his ear against Karla's door. "Perhaps it would be best to leave it be."
"I'm not going to just abandon her," Alchemist told the woman. "I'd place better than even odds on the mountain getting raided by someone, villain or government, and I don't intend on leaving her behind."
He could hear breathing through the door, though it was quiet. An uneven rattle.
Had... Had Karla gone Hollow?
"Karla," Alchemist slowly and clearly enunciated as he tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked, though a quick application of Knock changed that. And left him tingling like he'd just licked a nine volt battery. "I'm coming in!"
The door swung open silently, not having suffered from decades of neglect like virtually everything from Karla's native realm, into a darkened room. And Karla's hissing, rattling breathing became even more pronounced.
Yeah...
Alchemist wasn't walking into that.
Instead he searched out an item in his inventory, one of the countless little things he'd picked up from the world of Dark Souls and never actually had a use for.
Extracting the small, almost-ethereal skull from his inventory, Alchemist could hear Karla's breathing hitch. He stepped back and away from the door and simply tossed the Alluring Skull on the ground a few meters away.
He was still nearly bowled over when the woman, stick-thin and clad in tattered robes, rushed past him to get at the shattered bits of bone and magic.
"She's worse off than I'd thought..." Kary whispered into Alchemist's ear as they finally got a look at Karla.
There were no eyes inside of her empty sockets and her flesh had turned brown and taken on an appearance not unlike beef jerky. She had no nose, no lips...
No sanity.
Alchemist was tempted to comment, to remind Kary that Karla had been imprisoned and likely tortured. That the woman had ridden the edge between magic and sanity, the 'humans' of her realm were perpetually at risk of being consumed within the Dark, of the gnashing teeth and chittering voices that would try and pull their souls free of their flesh. Or perhaps it was more akin to a single, great soul trying to recombine?
Either way.
Karla the Witch had been willing and able to pursue the dark magics of her world. And they were all-too capable of twisting the 'human' that delved too deeply.
Alchemist cast Heal on the woman and shuddered in discomfort as she froze in the act of clawing at the dirt to try and find more of whatever it was that made the Alluring Skull so... alluring.
He'd have tried casting Wish but Heal alone had felt like he was running a hand down a sunburn. On the inside.
"...What?" Karla croaked, frozen in place where she'd been scrabbling at the dirt. "What is going... What has happened to me?!"
"I think you might have been left alone for too long, Karla," Kary gently explained to the woman as Alchemist began to dig through his inventory again.
"I..." The hollow stood up from where she'd been crouched and looked to her hands, barely more than taught skin against her bones. "I thought... I could hear... things. Feel teeth gnawing at my skin. Tiny, wicked little things. They wanted in. They..."
Alchemist pursed his lips in thought as he listened to the woman while he dug through his inventory.
That was about what Irina would have said in the game, if he'd given her the Dark tomes.
Though, he'd refused to do such when he'd actually met her. He could read braille just fine, albeit slowly, and he had no desire to inflict that madness on her.
"...Here," Alchemist offered as he plucked an item from the inventory for her. An ash-grey tablet with a skull embossed upon it. A Purging Stone, holding a spell that would remove the curse of Hollowing and allow the user to regain their Humanity. "We've set up a new home, some place a bit safer. Kary can take you there."
Alchemist and Kary both watched in silence as Karla broke the stone he'd given her and her form reverted in an instant. Her flesh filled back out, her nose pushed its way back out of her face and a pair of eyes seemed to grow out from the back of her empty sockets.
"...Are you sure?" Karla asked, hesitation in her voice and uncertainty in her eyes. "Are you not afraid that I will, once more, succumb to the Dark?"
"The houses are bigger," Alchemist began to explain as he uncrossed his arms, put his hands in his pockets and considered the woman.
He needed to get her some better clothes. Something that wasn't tattered rags leftover from her time in prison.
Shopping trips. For everyone. He would literally throw money at Jinx to take care of getting everyone set up with more than the necessities he'd been providing or the requests he'd been granting.
"So you can room with someone else. Perhaps you and Orbeck might get along? This way you can speak with someone else, tell them if the Dark starts calling at you again. I can help, and so can my apprentice."
Alchemist watched the witch and crossed his arms, one finger tapping at his elbow.
There were no perfect solutions. And it wasn't a failure to recognize that and address the issues that did crop up.
But he still felt like shit for letting Karla's issues get so bad when it would have just taken a single spell to fix before it got too far.
"We will get things figured out," Kary told the wizard as she stepped away from his side to approach the silent witch. "What will you be doing?"
"Setting up traps," Alchemist told the woman as he extracted a troll doll from his inventory. He was going to have to shelve his ideas for a small platoon of Animated Armors until his magic settled but the dolls he'd empowered would make for a more than adequate task force.
"Lots and lots of traps."
-----
Robin didn't know how to deal with someone who, as far as he'd known them, had always had their powers.
Tiffany, Penny on the job, said she'd woken up to some windows telling her that her powers would come back, eventually, but there was no estimate as to when.
Honestly, the girl had just been dead quiet and it was kind of creeping him out. She'd been stuck in Mount Justice overnight with Red Tornado keeping an eye on her after the Flash had apparently left.
"So, uh, are you hungry? Or something?" Robin asked the girl.
She'd stayed in the base overnight. They didn't have a change of clothes specifically for her but for whatever reason they did have a couple of the closets in the living quarters just filled with different outfits, so Penny had at least been able to get cleaned up and showered and into some reasonably fresh clothes.
"...No," Penny told him, her voice small and quiet. The usual veneer of vague hostility, or maybe aggression, was absent.
The girl was just a husk.
Robin... thought that she might have been over-reacting. Just a bit. He could still do the Utsusemi: Ichi thing with the paper dolls that made shadows of himself. And the asterisk necklace that gave him a sweet ninja costume still worked.
So, her system might have been gone but the changes it had made were all still real. Or some of them were real.
Look, Robin could lose all of the progress he'd made from the whole 'Boss Rush' thing and he'd still get back out and kick supervillain butt. Whatever was going on with Player One? She could get over it.
Maybe Robin was a little testy because the girl was wallowing in self pity and he took a few issues with that.
Or maybe Robin was a little testy because Bruce had come back home the night before, smelling like he'd been drinking half the day and wouldn't explain why.
Or both. Both is good.
"Do either of you need anything?" Batman asked, his reflection glaring down at the two of them from the big screen television. Robin hadn't even heard him sneaking up behind the couch.
"No," Robin immediately replied as he turned around to look at his mentor. "I guess we're good."
In the background, he caught sight of Alchemist carting a few bags of groceries into the kitchen, along with a binder. Batman also turned to watch as the man began refilling the fridge and marking down notes on a pad of paper.
Upon noticing them, Alchemist didn't say anything. He just sent them a short wave, grabbed another bag that was marked as coming from... Legacy Firearms and Coins? And then he walked back out.
And Tiffany got up and followed after him, showing more initiative that she had for literally anybody else.
Robin shared a look with Batman, then got up and followed Player One, who was following Alchemist, who had apparently headed for the hangar.
They finally caught up with each other after reaching the hangar. Which now had the trucks of four semi-trucks all lined up along one wall and M'gann's bioship had begun to wiggle happily in its egg form.
Alchemist, meanwhile, had a folded, metal card table in his hands and looked just a touch confused.
"...Hi?" he offered upon seeing them after Batman closed the door. "If this is about the expense reports? I can get those taken care of before I leave for the day."
"No, I..." Tiffany spoke up, preempting both Robin and Batman. "I got a notification from my System and I wanted to ask if you knew what it meant."
"Oh, sure. What'd it say?" Alchemist asked as he began to unfold the metal table next to an outlet.
Robin stepped closer with Batman as the wizard set down his bag of materials and then began digging around in his inventory.
"It said I had a corrupted update, then it said it had to pull up an older version. Now it's 'reinstalling' and it doesn't know how long it's going to take." Tiffany's voice was pleading, Robin could tell that the girl was desperate.
"Well, that's pretty self explanatory." Robin felt a little concerned when Alchemist extracted a propane tank from his inventory, then began to hook it up to a hose that led to a small burner he placed on the table. "The system is rolling back to a prior version that worked while Terra figures out what happened to her current one."
"...And what, precisely, happened to her current one?" Batman asked, finally cutting into the conversation.
"The short answer is that I don't know," Alchemist admitted as he set several dark gray bars on the table and extracted a strange block that was split into two pieces. Each the half of a very, very large bullet. A... die? "The long answer is just a suspicion based on Player One's new information."
"What is it?" Player One asked, a note of hysteria in her voice. The girl had walked up to the card table that Alchemist was setting up and grabbed on to the edge, her knuckles turning white with the force of her grip and the metal visibly deforming under her hands. "What did Tiamat do to my powers?!"
"I think she sent a bad update at your System and it crashed the whole thing," Alchemist explained as he began to set tools down on the table, like a ladle with a spout coming out the side and a set of tongs. "Happened a handful of times in my old world to a few online services. Hackers throwing a hissy fit over something or other."
"So... your powers are vulnerable to outside interference?" Robin asked. He wasn't some absolutely amazing super-hacker but he knew how to break into the typical security systems used by most government or corporate servers.
What Alchemist had described would be a lot, lot more involved than what Robin knew how to do.
"Weld a chain between Diana's bracers, take away a Green Lantern's ring, throw some green rocks at Superman... Most powers are vulnerable to something from the outside doing something." Robin turned to look at Batman, trying to gauge the man's reaction. He'd known about Kryptonite and the ring vulnerability was simple enough to deduce but he had no idea about Wonder Woman's bracers. "Point is, it's a learning opportunity. Take the lesson for what it is and figure out workarounds. Or don't, I guess."
"...I'm so glad that Tiamat isn't in this reality," Player One moaned, releasing her grip on Alchemist's table. The girl had actually left fingerprints in the metal where she'd been gripping it.
So, Robin observed, the changes from her powers remained even if she couldn't access the whole thing. Like he'd suspected.
"Of course she is," Alchemist said, drawing one pair of panicked eyes and two other sets that were incredibly wary. "Or, well, a fraction of her. You'd have to find a Chaos Lord who isn't a festering asshole for some real information but I know she's sealed somewhere on Earth."
"...And were you intending on informing us about this in a reasonable fashion?" Batman asked as he raised a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose.
"Sure, be really helpful for me to go 'Oh, hey, just so you know. There's this sealed magical goddess of chaos out there who's been asleep for countless thousands of years. Not sure when she'll wake up, don't know where she is, don't know what all her powers are. But hey, this is all really helpful, right?' It's not actionable, at all." The sarcasm in Alchemist's voice was thick enough to cut with a knife and Robin did, sort of, see where the man was coming from.
It was basically a whole lot of nothing. Like a dossier made of question marks.
"And it's still more than the League was aware of prior to your mentioning it," Batman explained.
Tiffany just looked lost, like someone had just told her that, no, Santa Claus wasn't real.
"Pick a god, any god. Hell, pick a mythological figure. They're all real and most of them are unrepentant assholes. Kali? You've met Boston Brand. She's the one responsible for him lingering after dying. Amaterasu? Kind of a shut-in, doesn't do much these days. Santa Claus? Actually a badass."
Wait... what?
Did he just say Santa is real?!
"You can't seriously expect us to believe that Santa Claus is real, Alchemist." And Batman's tone was getting increasingly tired.
"Of course he is." But Alchemist was sticking to his guns. Even as he was working on his guns. "Go ask Superman. They've met."
Robin looked up to his mentor, confusion clear in his body language.
Batman was just completely still. Robin knew that he was processing, trying to slot the new information into place.
"Okay, that's cool and all..." And Tiffany seemed to be trying to move on. Or get back to the point. "But what about my System? Do you have any idea when it will come back?"
"I don't know, Player One. I'm sorry," Alchemist said as he placed a wide-mouthed crucible over the still-inactive burner and wedged a bar of lead into it. "I don't know how big the files are or how strong your connection is."
"And I can't believe that you guys have a power that looks like a computer system's user interface," Robin couldn't help but toss in.
It just... didn't make any sense to him. At all.
"Well, it was made to look like something a reasonably intelligent individual would be able to interface with," Alchemist explained, ignoring the snark and sarcasm. "Whether or not it actually has anything in common with a videogame is really up to interpretation beyond the surface level."
"...Aren't you just the least bit curious?" Robin asked. He certainly wouldn't be content to just let something be, not if it impacted him the way their powers did.
"I am not a god, Robin," Alchemist rebuked him, gently. "I cannot comprehend all of reality in the way that they can. I do my best, at least within the sphere that I can see, hear and touch but we are all so very limited in comparison. Striving to do more than what we can is all well and good but the mortal mind is simply not built to comprehend the vastness of infinity."
"...Didn't you say that you recall where you were after you died?" Robin remembered something like that. He couldn't recall the exact details, it had been back when Alchemist was using Leslie's body, but the conversation had ended abruptly with Alchemist practically running away in the midst of a meltdown.
"I do, in fact, remember that," the mage agreed as he turned a knob on the burner and a loud hiss filled the air.
"And didn't you say that the mortal mind isn't supposed to remember that, too?"
"I did say that, yes."
Robin turned to look up at Batman, unsure of what all it was supposed to mean.
There was a quiet click and the hiss turned into a subtle roar as the propane burner was ignited.
Quietly, the dynamic duo began to back away as Alchemist began to hum a tune that sounded... foreign. The rhythm was off but the words were in English.
Robin felt a little bad about leaving Player One behind with the mage as he and Batman left the room. There had been something distinctly odd about the whole encounter and he couldn't quite place it.
They were halfway back to the Zeta Terminal when Robin figured out one of the things that had been bothering him about the meeting.
"...Alchemist didn't use any magic, did he?" Discounting the Inventory, and Robin was pretty sure that wasn't magic.
"No," Batman agreed. "No he did not."
-----
Alchemist worked in relative silence as Player One fidgeted around the room.
The poor girl was anxious, left feeling vulnerable without unfettered access to her power. He got that. He'd asked the devil to fondle his soul bits to avoid being stuck in a similar position.
He didn't know how much he would actually lose just by having his System disconnected but he now knew it would be far, far less than any opponent would be expecting.
It wasn't a concern for normal foes but there was no shortage of gods who could manipulate reality on a local level. Or demons that could do the same given that they were often on par with those gods.
"...Has M'gann ever shown you how to feed the bioship?" Alchemist asked as Tiffany paced around behind him, clearly anxious.
"...No?" the girl asked, pausing in her pacing.
Alchemist turned down the heat of the burner and stood up. He needed to make the various parts to a bullet, then convert the pieces into the proper materials, load 'em, press 'em and label them in a magazine but the process could wait for a few minutes.
He definitely needed to re-familiarize himself with the process before he got around to making tank ammunition.
"Come on," he told the girl as he began to head for the door. "It's not too hard. The ship can go a while between feedings but I'm pretty sure it enjoys the extra care."
To the side, the giant egg-shaped living ship wiggled in place like it was getting ready to hatch. It was... cute.
And Alchemist was very glad that the ship didn't take on the form of an aeromorph any more to try and hug him. He had no idea why M'gann had given the ship the idea to try that and he could certainly do without an explanation.
Whatever the girl got up to was on her.
Tiffany's silence as she trailed behind the mage was... uncomfortable. The girl was usually confident, which could be grating, but now she was practically a shadow of herself.
"...I understand you've been going to Meridian," Alchemist asked, trying to be at least a little bit personable. "How's that been treating you?"
"...Fine," was the girl's short answer.
Alchemist simply shrugged and kept moving. He couldn't make a stone ta-
...Well, actually he could, in fact, make a stone talk.
"I like her," Alchemist continued, filling the silence for the both of them. "No-nonsense, serious, actually gives a damn about her patients. Most doctors that work with metas without being metas themselves are usually looking to make a paper out of it, or else trying to find a way to give themselves powers."
"...Yeah," Tiffany mumbled from behind him. "Doctor Quinzel talked about writing a paper back when I first started seeing her. I... guess that didn't really work out."
"Harleen Quinzel?" Alchemist asked as they entered the kitchen/rec room and he opened the cabinet under the sink.
Dropping a large bucket into the sink, he turned towards another cabinet to start hunting down the instant breakfast powder.
The bioship liked the strawberry flavored stuff, oddly enough.
"Yeah," Tiffany answered.
Facing away from her as he dug through the cabinets for some vitamin supplements, the girl couldn't see Alchemist pursing his lips.
"Any idea what she's doing now?" he asked as he lined the dry ingredients up along the counter and then went to the fridge for a gallon of whole milk.
"I heard she went to Arkham," Tiffany explained, unaware that she was listing out the steps that would send the brilliant but ambitious psychologist to her demise. "I think she wants to try and study the patients there."
"Well, that's good of her." It really wasn't.
It would put her within reach of the Joker. The soulless bastard that had a penchant for manipulating and killing children.
Alchemist had been willing to leave that problem alone, leave it for Batman. But Quinzel represented a fairly direct line to Player One, it made her an absolutely massive liability.
The wizard kept his features carefully schooled as he poured the milk into the bucket, followed by the various dry ingredients before he grabbed a hand mixer from its own spot on the countertop.
"The thing you need to remember for the bioship, Player One, is that it's incredibly large and is actually going through its own version of puberty," Alchemist explained over the sound of the electric motor, forcibly changing the subject.
He wasn't sure about how to deal with Quinzel. He had options, quite a few of them, but most of them weren't things he was willing to do to someone for something they weren't yet guilty of.
So, turning the woman into a toad, petrifying her and then using her as a garden decoration was definitely out.
And just trying to explain the risks the woman was putting herself under wasn't going to work. Harleen was a strong, independent woman and didn't need no man telling her what to do.
Violence wasn't warranted. And he didn't trust his own skills at diplomacy.
What was left?
"So, what's that mean?" Tiffany asked, pulling Alchemist out of his thoughts. "Does the ship need a lot of nutrients or something?"
"Yes, actually." Alchemist was glad the girl had picked that up pretty quickly. "And a lot of vitamins and minerals. I believe M'gann mentioned it normally having a diet rich in proteins and iron but I've noticed that it seems to enjoy having a lot of calcium in its food."
"...Do you think it can shapeshift stuff that's inside of it?" Tiffany asked as Alchemist finished mixing up the pink slurry. "Like, turn fats and stuff into calcium for bones?"
"I... have no idea," the wizard admitted as he turned on the water, thinning the slurry and rinsing off the beaters of the mixer at the same time. "It shouldn't be able to, but I won't say that it actually can't. J'onn might know, though."
That wasn't something science could really accomplish, back in his old world. He could do it with Convert, but that was magic. Which was cheating and telling physics and chemistry where they could go stuff their laws and rules.
"Anyway, just take this bucket and head on back. Go ahead and put it in front of the ship and step back, it'll do the rest."
"Alright," Tiffany said as she lifted the half-full nineteen liter bucket with one hand. She sent him a curious look and he waved a hand over the counter, indicating the mess and various things that needed to be put away.
Alchemist waited until she'd left before he exhaled and relaxed, his form expanding back into a dragon. Now with jeans and a shirt on.
And wedged uncomfortably between the sink and the island in the middle of the kitchen.
Awkwardly, the mage began to put the different vitamin bottles away and let his thoughts drift a bit. He needed to get back to the molten lead soon, absolutely...
But he also really needed to figure out a way of dealing with Harleen. And preferably soon.
Or... he just really needed more time.
The dragon briefly paused in the process of putting an empty bottle of children's multi-vitamins in the garbage as he considered that.
He did have something in mind. Not so much a project as it was basically a side-quest. He couldn't do it himself, not at the moment, but...
Jinx should be close to leveling Limited Wish up to Wish. And both she and Kary knew the Gate spell.
That, the man decided as he braced himself and cast the spell to change his form back into that of a human.
That was certainly an avenue he could explore...
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
Could Alchemist defeat any Lantern of any color in one move simply by using Steal to grab their ring? Because those things are some of the most powerful tools/weapons in the universe, and if Al can negate any lantern in a fraction of a second, that's a pretty big deal.
Also, it's clear that Al knows everyone's weaknesses. Is Batman going to start pumping him for information on that for his own contingencies?
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It's not like Alchemist would be the first to disable a Green Lantern by making off with their McGuffin.
Most of what Al could tell Batman, he already knows. Though, the dark knight could certainly use another noggin to bounce a few ideas off of. Like throwing in some false contingencies in case the bad guys make off with his notes...
Save that for later but that definitely needs addressed. Hoo, can't believe I hadn't thought about that until now.
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
"He's actually Superman's cousin, No-El."
Ethan Eldritch
Multi-Dimensional Eldritch Tree
- Location
- The Void between
- Pronouns
- Tree
I love you! And your awesome quality writing!!!!
clonezero
Is it a bad thing if my t read list keeps growing?
Maybe Tiffany needs a pet/companion? Something smart enough and durable enough to keep up with her even after she gets her system back.
It feels like everything and everyone around her has this distance that hardly anybody is putting effort into crossing. It feels like the system and her hero gig has been nothing but an escape. Too bad her BF is in an even worse state.
It feels like everything and everyone around her has this distance that hardly anybody is putting effort into crossing. It feels like the system and her hero gig has been nothing but an escape. Too bad her BF is in an even worse state.
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Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
At least to Alchemist, she hasn't treated him well at all. She even tried to kill him at one point over basically nothing.
And according to Robin in this most recent chapter, she's been constantly borderline-hostile to everyone.
It's no wonder people don't want to get close to her if she treats everyone like she treats Al, or even close to that.
Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
- Pronouns
- Something
Well, he could just talk with her, tell her he is a mage and saw her future, tell her that Joker will mess with her and stuff.
Maybe show her some of the dumb outfits he would make her wear.
Look I dont like tiffany but keep in mind she is just a kid, kids are dumb, kids going through trauma tend to be dumber at times.
Maybe show her some of the dumb outfits he would make her wear.
Look I dont like tiffany but keep in mind she is just a kid, kids are dumb, kids going through trauma tend to be dumber at times.
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
He's got spells that can inflict dreams on the target. Give her horrid nightmares about what "Mistah J" is going to do to her, along with some things that will happen in the next few days, then orchestrate those exact things happening to tell her it's a "prophetic dream." Make the "future" so terrible that it's likely to drive her away; maybe she sees herself tied up on his asylum cot with her guts spilling out, with The Joker standing over her with a bloody knife and laughing.
Glad he finally learned about what she's up to and I'm curious what you'll do with her.
- Location
- The State of Denial
Every year, around the end of December, Apokolips girds itself for war. AA emplacements are activated, Parademons start flying around like someone kicked the beehive, New Gods polish their armor and gear. It avails them not. For Santa Claus knows who is naughty, and who is nice. And Darkseid WILL GET HIS COAL. It's an actual thing in the comics.
I think he should have pushed Santa trolling Darkseid every year for Christmas with his single coal delivery. Also glad you toned down the depression. I enjoy the story but you use depressing situations to beat us over the head a lot. I get that DC is dark and brooding, especially with him being actual friends with Batman, but damn, please ease up on the depression and just give us light brooding.
In theory. In a similar way if Lantern is aware of the danger they can just say "No" to the attempt to Steal the ring.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
… turning her into a Rogue/ranger hybrid might actually fit well with her, and the companion will help her mentally quite a lot.
Well.
As long as it's not a cat.
Except maybe a cheeta? They're pretty social and pack oriented for cat species.
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
Many big cats are quite social. Cheetahs, however, are also very fragile. Lions are also very social and are tough as nails, as well. Tigers can be social and occasionally do form friendships with humans and other animals they come into contact with (even prey animals, sometimes), while also being one of the toughest predatory megafauna on Earth.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Okay, that's fair enough, so they could work. … maybe give her a panther and let her cosplay as Drizzt? She has the two swords already.
Half troll cheetah. With a ring of protection from fire.
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
And acid, poisons, disintegration, negative energy effects, temporal effects, space-warping effects, etc. Also the ability for her to teleport it to her from anywhere.
It's...really not terribly difficult to take out something with regeneration, although it's better to have it and not need it...