Slowly, a page at a time came back together. The thousand individual people he knew slowly reformed chapters called friends and enemies, respectively, though there were some people that were in both. After that, food became meals, and pces became cities and maps that connected other vilges and cities together. Slowly, he remembered that he was an alchemist who also happened to be a drug dealer and the false cousin of the beautiful Danaria Parin. He also happened to be in love with her, as it turned out, which was something he hadn't even suspected before now.

  It was like coming out of anesthesia, and he was as surprised as anyone as each piece fell into pce. He was dead, but that wasn’t the first time he’d died. He’d been poisoned, but it wasn’t the first time for that, either. Lucas, which turned out to be his name, had led a very interesting life, and the twists and turns kept him on the edge of his seat as he slowly recongealed from a cloud of reted facts to the outline of a character to something resembling himself again.

  “A thousand pardons, my dy,” the God of Alchemy said as he hastily pulled Lucas back together. “I was just too excited by the sequence of events you described, and I simply sought to find the relevant information. No harm has been done. Once I’ve finished my examination, he’ll be as good as new!”

  “He’d better be,” the woman answered with an imperious note. “He’s going to go on to discover great things. I can feel it.” Part of him knew that she was saying it that way to provoke the God of Alchemy, but he was still too blurry to understand what she hoped to achieve with that.

  Lucas wasn’t sure that was true. He was close enough to himself again to be pissed off at the way he’d almost been dispersed into nothingness by accident, but even if all the parts that made him who he was had been reincorporated, he still felt pretty off his game. Well, most of him had been put back together, he corrected himself.

  As his body became solid enough that he could move again, he saw that a few literal pages that were meant to be pieces of him were still missing because they were floating in front of Thrzaelwick while he browsed pieces of Lucas’s mind at his leisure.

  “Hmmm, I see,” the gnome said to himself, lost in thought, as he reviewed a rge scroll that seemed to make up the sum total of Luca’s knowledge of alchemy. He was pretty fuzzy on what that was until the gnome finally released it, and it vanished, refilling Lucas’s mind with all the information that he’d lost.

  “I have found the problem,” the gnome expined triumphantly. “His talent is broken. It turns out that your Mister Sharpe’s soul isn’t even from our world, so it is the wrong shape to fit the alchemy talent that his body was born with.”

  “I agree,” Lwyn answered. “So I was rather hoping that—”

  “So all we need to do is take out this science stuff and bend a few things and…” as the gnome talked, Lucas could feel himself starting to bend out of shape. Without any warning, whole sections of knowledge about the world he’d lived in before and the way he was used to thinking about things started to wink out.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing? I—” Lucas protested, but weakly. It was hard to do more than that when his mind was being turned inside out.

  Both of them were stopped cold when Lwyn yelled, “Thrzaelwick! Put his soul back just the way you found it right this instant!”

  “But it’s not trouble at all,” the Alchemy God insisted. “Just a few little changes and—”

  “Now!” Her voice was raised, but she was not screaming. Still, it sounded like the peel of thunder more than any human voice he’d ever heard.

  “As you wish, my darling,” the gnome said, not entirely able to keep his annoyance out of his voice this time. Thrzaelwick snapped his fingers, and suddenly, just like that, Lucas was himself again, and he was pissed.

  “What in the fuck is the big idea, buddy?” Lucas snarled. At that moment, he didn’t care if he got turned into a toad or lobotomized. He was still going to kill this tiny wire-haired bastard. “That’s my brain, and those are my memories. You can’t just—”

  “The lovely Lwyn asked me to make sure her recipe was not stolen by any cretin that could guess what to mix together enough times,” the Gnomish God shot back defensively. “It would be a simple thing to turn you into a proper alchemist, and your life would be better off for it!”

  “She said no such thing!” Lucas spat, giving real thought to drop-kicking the little bastard. “She told you that I had done the impossible, so you…”

  “Sought to undo it, that’s correct,” the gnome agreed. “Impossible things are impossible for a reason. It should be impossible to guess the ingredients of forbidden recipes, to distill multiple batches of Celestial Solvent in a single night, and to make more than eight different kinds of healing potions!”

  The gnome seemed ready to throw down and would almost certainly have smote Lucas to nothing were it not for Lwyn’s timely intervention. “Actually,” the goddess told the gnome, “I want just the opposite. I want to create a… a b rat, you might say.”

  “A b rat?!” Lucas and Thrzaelwick both of them said together as they turned to face her.

  “Indeed,” she smiled, winsomely. “If you think about it, Thrzaelwick, it would be doing you a favor. All those recipes you always want to try, but never have the time to perfect? Mister Sharpe here could provide you endless inspiration, giving you more time to focus on refinement…”

  “He could,” the gnome agreed grudgingly. “But this science and chemistry of his is nothing but an inferior form of alchemy. He’d be diluting the very meaning of the word!”

  Now I see what she meant when she said that the boon wasn’t hers to give, Lucas thought to himself as he watched the conversation unwind before him.

  Lucas saw what it was she was doing, and decided to stay well out of this. The Gnomish God and the Elvish Goddess clearly had a Hephaestus-Aphrodite thing going on here, and if she wanted to leverage that to help him get what he wanted, then more power to her.

  “It is, I agree wholeheartedly,” she said with a very serious expression. “But it’s also the opportunity for a unique experiment. When is the next time we are likely to get another science user in our world? I’m not suggesting that you adopt his inferior, what did you call it? Chemistry? Wholeheartedly, but if you optimized his talent so it worked with the soul he had, then he might lead your endless research in new directions.”

  “I see,” the gnome answered bitterly. “It is an experiment that could be easily done, true, but what if it causes more harm than good? It certainly seems to have so far.”

  “Uhmmm, if I may, Your, aaah, Illustriousness,” Lucas finally interjected. “I think if you look at the numbers, you’ll see my off-brand healing potions have saved far more lives than my Blue has taken. I’m not sure if it’s actually—”

  “There have been seventeen overdoses as a result of your unauthorized and poisonous concoctions,” the gnome procimed. “That doesn’t include all the other deaths reted to crime, vendetta, and—”

  “How many lives have his potions saved?” Lwyn asked. “I’m curious.”

  “178,” the gnome said sourly.

  “On bance, that seems quite positive to me,” she responded with a smile, making the gnome’s frown deepen further until it seemed like it was carved into his cheeks.

  “You, or at least the body you inhabit, have been given a talent by the Gods themselves,” he said, turning to face Lucas. “You understand that, don’t you? Do have any evidence whatsoever that if I gave into my dear Lwyn, sincere, selfless request, that you would do more than make more powerful drugs with it?”

  “I’m actually trying to get out of the drug business,” Lucas said. “It’s a long story with the Prince and a Dragon, but if you—”

  “I will not accept protestations of innocence!” Thrzaelwick. “I require real tangible proof that doing this thing has a chance of making the world a better pce.”

  “Well,” Lucas responded after a moment. “What about the healing potions I’ve distributed to the poor and the cosmetics I’m—”

  “Cosmetics?!” the gnome interrupted. “Pah! I—”

  For a moment, Lucas thought he was cooked. God reacted almost exactly as Heisenburgle might have. Fortunately, the elven Goddess intervened again. “Now, Thrzaelwick, are you saying that beauty does no good in the world? The right dress or the right perfume can do just as much as a fertility potion in many cases. Is it really your pce to judge how he uses his gifts to help others, so long as he helps them?”

  Thrzaelwick was obviously conflicted as he stood there, hopelessly at odds with himself. On the one hand, it was clear he didn’t want to help Lucas. On the other, though, it was obvious that he felt a desperate need to say yes to everything that the beautiful Goddess asked of him.”

  “Very well,” he said finally. “We will consider this an experiment in the merits of your chaotic science magic and my alchemy.”

  Lucas felt his soul starting to twist again as the God of Alchemy waggled a few of his fingers. This time, though, Lucas didn’t feel like parts of himself were slipping away. He felt like his world was expanding. It was like this whole time. He’d been wearing an outfit that was a bit too tight. He didn’t realize how uncomfortable he was in his own skin until the gnome let it out a few inches. Suddenly, he could breathe, and more than that, the damn system he’d been having such trouble with suddenly made sense on an almost intuitive level.

  He still had questions, of course. He had loads of questions. He’d probably have to spend days looking through all the damn screens to find what he was looking for, but this was a start. Now, he knew why the alchemy of the world was so backward: it had been designed that way by a single person with very particur tastes. Now that his Alchemy setup resembled Chemistry more than anything he’d been forced to deal with up to this point as his knowledge was wired up directly to his magic as it always should have been.

  “Wow,” was all he could manage to say.

  Lucas wanted to thank the gnome. He really was grateful for this, but he was too stunned by how different everything felt now that his soul fit into the world the right way.

  The gnome started to lecture him about the changes he should expect, and Lwyn descended from her throne to thank the gnome. As she did so, the tension in the room changed. Guards that had been standing still this whole time were suddenly moving, and Lucas wasn’t sure why.

  That was when the angels strolled into the room. Lucas immediately recognized one of them as that asshole, Darius, and for the first time, he saw a look of surprise and concern flit across Lwyn’s lovely features. They were gone in an instant, though, as she turned toward her guests.

  “Gentlemen, I’m right in the midst of something,” she decred as the guards around her throne suddenly dropped into a guarded stance at some unspoken signal and moved to surround the three of them. “SO I am afraid you will have to wait until I’ve finished returning Mister Sharpe to his own body. Once that’s done, we can—”

  “Impossible!” The second angel yelled, spreading his wings wider as he spoke. “That soul does not belong to your world. He must return to us at once!”