Chapter 793 The Right Number of Cooks

There was no fucking.

There was a lot of baking, though.

Jay watched with delighted amusement as Hans and Oats worked together to prepare enough biscuits and meat pies to feed the compound during the afternoon meal break. The two made for a highly productive team, especially so considering the Demon’s newly transformed body. Normally, a few of the others like Vera or Gerta would join Hans in the kitchen to assist with lunch and dinner preparations due to how many people needed to be fed, but with Oats there to help, no one else was needed. Also, Jadis just wanted to give the two some space to be together without a bunch of curious observers.

Other than herself, of course.

Oats used her four center tentacles to stand while the other eight were kept off the floor and away from anything that could dirty them. Alex had instilled a sense of cleanliness in Oats and the other Demons, a habit that was certainly encouraged by Hans. With the long reach of her tentacle limbs, Oats didn’t need to move around much, the long limbs giving her the ability to grab ingredients and knead multiple piles of dough while never stirring from one spot. A very convenient capability considering the Demon’s insistence on staying glued to Hans’ side.

Hans had not had a particularly energetic reaction to Oats when she had walked through the kitchen door. A widening of the eyes, a grunted noise, and an acceptance of the bone-creaking hug that Oats had given him was about the extent of it all. Jadis had not been surprised. Hans was a taciturn man under almost any circumstance or condition. In fact, she was fairly certain that she had never even heard him raise his voice or utter a cross word. The muted reaction might have been interpreted by some as disinterest, but Jadis knew better, and more importantly, so did Oats.

As the red-eyed Demon mixed several different ingredients together to form what would eventually be a loaf of sourdough, Hans reached into the bowl she was using and adjusted the way she was mixing the flour with the liquids. No hesitation was given at all at the physical contact. Instead, once he was satisfied with the way Oats was moving, his fingers lingered on hers, interlaced in a comfortable and intimate embrace turned sticky by the half-formed bread dough. Jay could see Oats squeeze the man’s hand in return, her shoulder rubbing against his, before the two released their grasp and both returned to their tasks.

“Gods, that’s so sweet I think I might throw up,” Kerr muttered. “Oats has hands now! Is she not even going to try and grope him?”

“Not everyone is as obsessed with sex as you are,” Syd shook her head at her frustrated therion lover.

“That’s a laugh coming from you,” the archer pushed her shoulder.

“True enough,” Syd winked while going for a grope of her own. “I’m just saying that Hans and Oats are happy doing their thing.”

“Fine,” Kerr sighed. “Just keep doing that thing with your hand and I’ll be happy, too.”

While Syd kept Kerr and several of the others entertained by describing the wholesome scene transpiring in the kitchen, Dys addressed the more important and practical conversation. Namely, what came next?

“How many more doses of that potion do you have?” Dys asked quietly.

“Six,” Amarantha replied while holding up a large glass container that had a wide leather strap wrapped around it several times. “That’s the absolute furthest I can stretch this amount. It’s really more like five doses, but I can take it to six with one of my skills.”

“What would it take to make more?” Aila asked, a ledger in her hand and a quill already scratching numbers on the open page. “Aside from Jadis and Maeve’s contributions.”

Both of those contributions were easy to get, since one was just Jadis’ seed while the other was a bit of Maeve’s blood. Technically, they were both some of the rarest ingredients for an alchemist to source on the planet, but since Ammy had ready and welcome access to a Nephilim and a Fetch, the potion making witch didn’t really need to worry about getting a hold of those two items.

“A lot of things,” Ammy sighed as she tilted her head back in thought, staring blankly up at the ceiling. “I can get most of it from the markets here in Eldingholt, like rosewart and quicksilver, but there are a few things I can’t easily get. Antimony butter for one. True alkahest for another.”

“Alkahest can be bought from most alchemical suppliers in the city,” Severina stated in a serious tone, her mood all business. When Dys gave her a curious glance, she quickly replied, “Alkahest is sometimes used when cleaning armor and swords due to its dissolving properties.”

“Yeah, and that’s not true alkahest,” Ammy shook her head. “That’s the stuff that alchemists make and sell to housewives who can’t get the dog shit stains off their floors. True Alkahest is a different story entirely. You need fourteen different rare alchemical components and a master alchemist to brew it, and even then it has a high chance of failure because even the position of the moon can foul up the final result with this stuff. It is expensive, and that’s assuming you can even find an alchemist willing to sell it. Most who make true alkahest want to use it for their own potions.”

“How did you get it then?”

“I made it,” Ammy scoffed at Aurea’s question. “Naturally.”

“Then make it again,” Noll stated gruffly, arms cross as he stood next to the blonde high priestess.

“I don’t have the time for that,” the catgirl shook her head. “Jadis has to take me back to Rubaline tonight and making alkahest takes weeks.”

“Okay, so we’ll have to source the true alkahest from someone else,” Dys frowned but pushed on past the obstacle. “At least for now. What else do you need? Anything else going to be difficult to get?”

“Dragon scales,” Ammy pointed at Dys. “Except, I guess not all that hard to get considering you. So, the only other really rare thing I need is azoth.”

“You used azoth in this potion?” Aurea stared at the jug in the Lares’ hands with a newfound look of respect. “Where did you manage to find azoth?”

“Places I’m not allowed to go to anymore,” Ammy said crossly. “At least not without Willy giving me an earful.”

“Is this azoth stuff that hard to get?” Dys asked, her gaze drifting between Ammy and Aurea.

“Azoth is made from the distillation of the venom of the ouroboros,” Aurea replied before the catgirl could. “The ouroboros is an exceedingly dangerous sea serpent that is rarely encountered.”

“There’s stuff out there sold by shady merchants that claims to be azoth,” Ammy jumped in before Aurea could continue, “but it’s not really. It’s actually distilled from amphisbaena venom, which is on its own a powerful reagent in alchemy, but it’s not the same. Usually, the only way you’re getting real azoth is from some ship getting lucky enough to find a dead ouroboros before it’s rotted too bad to be useful.”

Dys let out a heavy breath as she considered the problem. When Ammy had said that she had used rare ingredients to make her transformation potion, Jadis had severely underestimated just how rare those ingredients truly were. If alkahest was so difficult to make and azoth was so incredibly rare, then the idea of mass producing the potion for Demons everywhere was dead in the water. Then again, Jadis wasn’t ready to give up on the possibility. The two ingredients were currently hard to get, but that didn’t mean that new means of production couldn’t be found, or that replacements couldn’t be invented. Ammy’s potion of transformation wasn’t necessarily the only option they would ever have.

However, the expensive potion was the only option they had currently, which meant that for the moment, they would need to work with what was available to them.

“Alright,” Dys firmed her lips as she focused on moving forward. “Noll, the azoth stuff sounds like its going to involve tracking down deadly monsters. That’s your department.”

“I’ll let you know,” the old therion said with a grunt before tossing Aurea a look. “Be back soon.”

As Noll departed, Dys turned to the high priestess.

“We’re going to need to find a high CLR alchemist for the true alkahest. Would you please check with the temples and see if anyone knows one or knows where we can find one? Or if they have any alkahest available for purchase.”

“I will speak with all of the high priests when I give them my report on the wonder that has occurred here today,” the beautiful woman smiled brightly. “Once they are informed of the benefits that I believe are self-evident with Oats’ transformation, I should think that they will be more than happy to aid you in your quest.”

“Great,” Dys smiled before turning to the waiting catgirl. “Ammy, I need you to give a full list of every ingredient to Aila. For all the stuff that isn’t easy to get, give her the details on where you got the ingredients in the past and we’ll see if we can get them that way. Otherwise, we’re going to have to start sending out feelers on where we can get some of these resources elsewhere.”

“Definitely need to send people to the independent city states,” Ammy commented. “That’s where I got a lot of my stash. “Some of them are a lot more ‘permissive’ when it comes to hunting magic beasts than the empire. Especially Dunnottar. Oh, and the western continent, I got my azoth from a trader who claimed he got it from Kandaria. Maybe they will be a better source.”

“Good, just make sure you get all of the specifics to Aila,” Dys nodded before turning her eyes away from Ammy. “Once we know we can secure the ingredients, we can hopefully make a lot more of this potion and get it to the Demons who need it. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime,” Aila closed her ledger and turned her gaze to where Dys’ had moved. “Who do we use the remaining six doses on?”

“Good question,” Ammy said as she turned around so that she, too, could look at the four Demons who were energetically communicating with Alex. “Because I’m pretty sure that all of them are going to want some of this stuff, and if we use what I’ve got on those four, that leaves two doses leftover for the other eighty something Demons you’ve got waiting in the mountains.”

“Right,” Dys drawled as the thoughts turned slowly in her head. “Though I guess we should start with that assumption. We need to find out how many Demons are actually interested in getting new bodies like this and how many don’t want to. From there, we’re going to have to make some potentially hard decisions.”

As it turned out, at least one Demon wasn’t in the market for a new body.

Despite the explanation and the offer made, Cobbler turned down the option of getting a “more Nephilim” like body the way Oats had. As Cobbler put it, she already had a body that enabled her to do all the things that she wanted to do. Namely, fix shoes. Jadis wondered if maybe Cobbler might change her mind on that account in the future, but if she was happy with herself as is, Jadis certainly wasn’t going to argue that she shouldn’t be. In any case, with Cobbler out of the running, that left Grape, Lapis, and Sunny still on the list. After a quick discussion with them, it was decided that all three wanted to try the potion and that all three would get their chance. The only debate was, just how experimental should they go with the transformations?

At the moment, their only two points of reference for what the potion was capable of were Ammy and Oats, and Ammy wasn’t the same category as the Demons. At one time, Jadis had wondered if what Ammy had transformed into was what a Nephilim and a Lares crossbreed species was supposed to look like. Ammy was pregnant with three Nephilim babies and one Nekomata. The Nekomata had to be a crossbreed in the same vein as a Valravn was a crossbreed of a Seraphim and a Valbjorn, but no one really knew anything about it. There were no records in the university library of the combination, and the only reference that Lyssandria’s High Temple had was the word Nekomata used in a fragment of an ancient poem from over two thousand years before. The poem didn’t give any info on the word, though, and for all the priests knew, it was a coincidental word and wasn’t even referencing a crossbreed species. The point was, with nothing else to go on, the prevailing opinion had been that Ammy had taken on the form of what a Nephilim and Lares hybrid would be.

That theory was on tenuous ground thanks to Oats.

Hope did not have tentacles. She had two eyes, a nose, lips, and overall just looked like a very large, gray-skinned human baby with tiny little eleria horns sticking out of her head. She did have those holes running down her back parallel to her spine, but no tentacles had sprouted from them yet and Jadis didn’t think any would. She was instead fairly confident that those would be where her Succubus wings would come from once she got old enough, similar to Jadis’ own energy tendril wings. All of that was to say, there wasn’t much physically in common between Hope and Oats.

It was possible that the reason why Oats didn’t look anything like a baby Succubus was because as she grew, Hope’s legs would fall off, and she’d grow a dozen tentacles in their place. What was more likely, though, was that the potion Ammy had created didn’t turn the consumer into a hybrid species, but instead just transformed their bodies into a physical appearance that was as close as possible to a Nephilim. That meant that Ammy wasn’t what a Nekomata looked like, but instead she just had a very tiny, fire-haired Nephilim form. It was also possible that Oats’ possession class was impacting the result. The class had transformed her body. Not by much, but it had been affected. That was why Oats was physically so much bigger than the other Demons. When she had selected her class, she had grown. If her class was interfering with the potion’s effects, that could potentially mean that a Demon who had not yet selected a class would change into a different body. On the other hand, it was also possible that the class made no difference at all and the potion superseded any changes that a class made to a Demon’s physical form. There was simply no way of knowing without doing some tests.

Fortunately, they had three willing volunteers with just enough variety between them that at least a few of their questions would be answered.

“Is the smoke always going to be this bad?” Syd coughed as she waved the cloud of dark and sparkly fumes out of her face.

“I guess so,” Ammy shrugged. “It doesn’t do this when I transform. Might be a side effect specific to Demons.”

“Hey, Lapis,” Dys called out as she reached into the cloud. “Take my hand.”

“Is she alright?” Eir asked with concern.

“Oh, she’s definitely alright,” Dys responded as she pulled the Demon out of the smoke.

The long, extremely dark blue tentacle wrapped around her arm was accompanied by a delicate hand of the same color. Lapis was, at a glance, significantly smaller than Oats. Jadis estimated the newly transformed Demon would average out to somewhere around five feet and a handful of inches, with a far slimmer build. Thin and petite, Lapis’ build was most similar to Ammy, though she was certainly taller than the catgirl.

Aside from being obviously smaller than Oats, Lapis had almost exactly the same form as the other Demon. The two biggest differences were her color and her tentacles. Lapis’ slick skin was midnight blue as opposed to Oats’ dark cherry red. And while her tentacles were almost as long as Oats’ were, they were much narrower in breadth. More strikingly, Lapis only had six tentacles while Oats had twelve. Less immediately noticeable was her eye, which was on the left side of her face rather than the right, and her hair, which was almost all blue on the inside and all black on the outside instead of just the tips being red like with Oats. The cause for that difference was unknown, as was whether or not her form was the one all Demons would take or just those who were possession Demons. However, they at least had two points on the graph and could say that the chances of the form being completely random were practically speaking ruled out. There was some consistency, even if there were relatively minor differences.

While Alex helped Lapis adjust to her knew body and Meli raided Jadis’ wardrobe for more spare shirts, the testing moved on to the next Demon: Sunny.

The golden-eyed Demon had not selected a class after hatching. While she had been offered Dead Head and Divine Corruptor of Flesh, she had not selected either class, operating on faith that Alex and Jadis would come up with a better option for her. Jadis still wasn’t sure that a transformation would solve all of Sunny’s problems, but at the very least she’d be better able to interact with broader society.

“Woah,” Dys muttered under her breath as the smoke cleared from the third transformation of the day. “That’s… different.”

Sunny’s form had followed a nearly identical pattern to Oats and Lapis, though the differences on display were even more significant. Unlike the other two, who had nearly black skin with undertones of shades that matched their eye colors, Sunny’s skin was a pale gold. The squid-like smoothness of her flesh was dotted with tiny freckles of iridescent colors that shimmered in the light as she moved, though otherwise her coloration was uniformly bright. She also had only four tentacles, even less than Lapis, and they had a sort of natural webbing between them, at least for the first twelve or so inches. More significantly, Sunny’s face was far more human, with two deep golden eyes in the expected locations, and a less mask-like countenance in general. In essence, her expressions were much closer to Alex than to Oats. Interestingly, her hair was white instead of black, but she also had golden tips in the same pattern as Oats.

“You know, it kind of looks like they’re wearing dresses.”

“You think so?” Sabina responded to Sorcha’s observation as she tilted her head one way and then the other. “Actually, you’re right, I think they do kind of look like they’re wearing skirts or something, don’t they? I mean, not the very bottom, since you see the ends of the tentacles and no feet, but from knee to waist? Yeah, very much like a dress!”

“Still need to get them skirts to wear, though,” Sorcha cleared her throat. “Every time Sunny lifts one of those limbs of hers too high, I can, uh, see things that I don’t think the rest of you can.”

“Oh, really?” Sabina crouched down to get her head on the same level as Sorcha’s as she stared at the oblivious Demon that was talking to Alex. “Does she have a vagina like Jadis thought she might?”

“Yes, yes she does you ninny!” Sorcha tugged on the smith’s ear and pulled her away. “Stop being so, so, so bloody eccentric for five minutes, would you!?”

Jadis had not noticed the anatomical feature that Sorcha had, but her heads were a lot higher up than the Goblin’s was, so she didn’t have the same viewpoint. Regardless, she did agree with both the opinion that Lapis and Sunny looked like they were wearing dresses when their tentacles were close together, and also that they both needed some skirts that fit them. Oats might be able to get away with not wearing anything for her lower body since she had twelve tentacles to obscure whatever was going on down below, but the other two didn’t have that same level of natural coverage.

“Now we just need to test this on Grape,” Dys commented from where she stood with Ammy and Aila. “I feel like we’ve got enough indication that the whole tentacle legs thing is the default with these Demon transformations, even if there are some differences that are possibly related to class choices. The question is, should Grape use the potion first and then accept her Demonic Botanist class, or should she take the class first and then use the potion?”

“Either way we would be learning something new,” Ammy said as she poured out a little of what remained of the concoction from her large glass jug into a smaller vial. “But whether or not there will be any change, positive or negative, is a mystery to me.”

“In the worst-case scenario, if we use the potion on Grape either before or after she accepts her class, the class overrides the transformation and she becomes what she would have changed into when she accepted the class regardless of the potion’s existence,” Aila said absently as she continued to write down her observations on the new Demon forms. “Not a terrible loss.”

“No, in the worst-case, if she takes the potion first, ends up looking like Sunny does, then takes her class option and the potion transformation fucks with her class transformation, she ends up with some kind of deformed body,” Dys frowned at the possibility. “What if it causes her permanent physical harm?”

“I’d like to say that I don’t think the system would design a class interaction like that,” Aila replied slowly with her own frown on her face. “However, we are treading onto unknown grounds. We have no way of knowing for sure.”

“We better explain the risks to Grape before anything else,” Dys said. “I know they’ve all been warned a couple of times now, but still.”

Putting action to word, Dys walked over to Alex and the other Demons. Lapis and Sunny were gathered before her, their tentacles intertwined with hers while they wordlessly held a conversation. Grape rested in one pair of Alex’s hands, her own little tentacles waving in contribution as the larger Demons talked in what Jadis interpreted as an excited tone.

“Hey, Alex?” Dys started as she came to a stop before the four Demons. “Can you interpret for me again? I need to talk to Grape. I want to make sure she understands the risks again and also discuss whether she wants to transform before or after selecting her class.”

“Yes… I will…” Alex spoke with a bright shine in her neon blue eyes. “But first… I must… Tell you… Something… Important…”

As Dys listened to Alex’s quiet explanation, Syd let out a curse under her breath.

“What’s w—wrong?” Thea asked, her kind brown eyes focused on Syd.

Grimacing, Syd looked at her, then around at the rest of her lovers who had been listening to her description of the lovey-dovey behavior going on in the kitchen.

“Alex just informed me that Sunny got a third class option offered to her after she transformed,” Syd whispered so that Aurea on the other side of the room would not be able to overhear. “It’s called Acolyte of Demon Lord Alex. Oh, and Hans just kissed the back of Oats’ hand, so there’s that.”