D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad - Chapter 2092 Bottling Magic Part 1

Chapter 2092: Chapter 2092 Bottling Magic Part 1

— Kat —

Kat watched as Appoline got to work swapping the laboratory tent around. She even… requested that Tweedle acquire a few more things to help with the setup. Tweedle took this as if she was ordered by a direct superior and immediately went off to work. When Fred was prompted to help move a table so that Appoline could leave everything on it, he simply brushed her request off. “You know, even if I don’t NEED your help because Kat is here, it would’ve been nice,” commented Appoline.

“Yeah? Well it would’ve been nice not to have some poison obsessed mad woman come in and take over my work, or have some deranged fangirl hanging around while I do,” retorted Fred.

“You do realise you’re deliberately antagonising the best poison alchemist in the city with this attitude right?” Appoline stated, but Kat felt she wasn’t really mad about this, if anything, Kat was guessing Appoline found it amusing.

Fred shrugged, “You’ll always be the first suspect,”

“Not if I make it look like you made a mistake brewing something above your level. It seems rather in character for you…” sniped Appoline.

“Touche,” admitted Fred with a shrug. He still didn’t help move the table though, instead Kat had to help with that, but for a demon of her strength it didn’t weigh anything at all. In fact, she was able to lift the entire thing herself using her tail to keep everything steady.

“So why are you moving this stuff around?” asked Kat.

“Some of its simply preference but the main reason is that I’m trying to get a proper cauldron setup in here and we’ll need the space for that. Tweedle is off getting it. The tent has been fine so far for simpler things and testing but if we’re actually brewing I’d want a better place. That’s the second task I gave her, to see if we can get a larger tent or simply remove this one, even temporarily,” explained Appoline.

Tweedle came back a few moments later, carrying a giant cauldron in her hands, and a cauldron stand on her back. “We can take down the tent if we want. It was to help keep people bothering us, or the wind carrying in something that contaminates the potion,”

“Hmm… a good point if the seal on the poison isn’t perfect,” commented Appoline. “No word on a larger tent?”

“There aren’t any available at the moment. One of the commander tents would need to be taking down… and they need those to keep the documents from going flying. Honestly we sort of need them for that reason as well, but our are at least somewhat bound, already,” explained Tweedle.

[Book binding? Did someone say book binding?]

*Not quite but close enough.* “Lily can sort that out,” explained Kat as Lily leapt from her shoulder onto the table and started to cast spells to bind the piles of papers together. \

Tweedle set the cauldron stand up and then looked at Lily with great confusion. “Is… is that cat using paper magic?”

“Yes,” stated Appoline, causing Tweedle to nod in response as if just the fact that Appoline had confirmed her thoughts suddenly meant that everything once again made sense in the world. That nothing weird was going on. Fred looked like he might have wanted to comment on that fact but eventually just looked away.

With Lily taking care of the loose paper, Kat got to work taking down the tent, with Hedera helping out. She’d just been hanging around outside messing with her arrows while waiting for something important to happen and apparently taking down the tent was important enough to get her moving. Kat didn’t even need to ask.

Once the tent was packed away it didn’t take too long for Steel to show back up with crates of ingredients. It seems they were rushed over… but considering the situation that made a lot of sense. Appoline made a few inquiries as to what box held which ingredients and then got to work.

Unlike the potions she’d made when teaching Lily the basics this was something completely different. First Appoline grabbed a bunch of ingredients and spread them out across one of the mostly empty tables. The one that used to contain the notes that Lily had bound and stacked on the edges. The plants were a mixture of normal looking and completely strange.

The big pumpkin thing went first. It looked like someone had tangled up a bunch of vines and then shaped them into a pumpkin, or perhaps it was more like a pumpkin shaped rubber band ball. It was all the same rough colour and there was no clear way to unwind them. Appoline seemed to have an idea though.

Several needles appeared from seemingly nowhere and she stabbed them through the fruit all at the same time. Some went straight through until the table while others seemed to simply be pressed partway through. Appoline had jabbed all of them in at the same time and even that still caused a quivering from the fruit. After a few moments, Appoline nodded and then grabbed one of the needles with purpose.

As she was holding it, she pulled out a knife and ripped the needle out at the same time as the knife came down. The whole thing shuddered and looked to be about to unravel… but somehow the needles kept it all in place. Even the floating edges around the cut that really felt like they should be curling up in on themselves seemed to remain in place.

Tweedle seemed to be taking notes, and when Appoline noticed this she commented. “The needles keep the fruit from breaking apart completely. You can’t place them in exactly the same spot every time either because the slight differences in the structure of the plant mean the right place in one is incorrect in another. I’m essentially tricking the fruit into thinking that its still attached to the rest of the plant and it’s not time to explode yet.

“The damage is, currently, superficial as far as the fruit is concerned and when I take this second slice…” Appoline twisted three needles, shifted the position of a fourth and pulled a fifth completely free as she sliced down with the knife once again. She jabbed the fifth needle into a completely different spot once the knife was removed.

The piece fell backwards, wriggling a bit before Appoline swiftly pulled it away from the rest and stabbed two more needles into it, keeping the pulsating vines, that on the inside were riddled with thick sacks presumably containing seeds, or perhaps they were the seeds? Kat didn’t know. Kat did notice that not one of them had been pierced by the needles, not any that she could see at any rate.

“Alright so that’s mostly stable. Not entirely so, but I’m not planning to store it long term so its better to leave it as it is right now and get started on the potion. When we’re adding it to the potion we have to be careful,” Appoline carefully moved the whole thing, needles included over to the boiling cauldron.

“Now we want to add it all to the pot at once without it exploding, but we can’t add the needles. This is the hardest part and you need to make sure that you’ve got mana pumping through it. Won’t stop it from eventually exploding but if you’re quick enough that won’t matter. That means you need a layer of magic around the outside to keep it from moving and the internal mixture to break it down. Doing both at the same time is really difficult,”

Appoline carefully lowered it into the cauldron in segments, making sure to remove the needles as she went, never letting them touch but also removing them at the last possible moment before they’d enter the water. Once it was in the pot, Appoline moved fast. She grabbed a handful of other ingredients while keeping a hand on the pot.

“Seeing as the entire point of this potion is to gather things, we need to START with the core. That makes it a bit of a pain because you can’t leave the cauldron completely unattended from that point on. You need to constantly be adding more to the core, but also leaving gaps, openings, you want to coax it to reach out for more ingredients itself.

“This is one of the few potions where, instead of forcefully shoving the ingredients together, or delicately weaving them into the core, you have to leave obvious gaps that NEED to be filled by something to help keep the essence of it as a grasping thing. This introduces issues, because if we get to an ingredient that we need as part of the core but doesn’t get integrated without us forcing the matter? Probably won’t work.

“We also need to ensure that we do get everything. Leaving something out will likely cause it to gather something, poison in this case, and then explode afterwards, potentially making more, or more potent, poison in the process. For obvious reasons we do not want this, but ensuring things are perfect is a delicate balancing act. Especially when I can’t stop feeding mana to the potion, another limitation that would ensure weaker brewers fail.

“The next step that you’ve seen me already start is…”