Asher was enjoying his second life. That was how he started thinking about his time at the Speedwell. His life here was so different from what he lived in the structure that he kept thinking he was going to wake up.

  “Asher,” Engineer Whitman called. “How is everything going?” Asher was just returning his dishes to the automated washer after dinner. The dining room was mostly empty. Asher tended to eat his meal late, after the students.

  “Good,” Asher responded.

  “I’ve put some items together for your structure chemistry. Can you come out to the structure and look them over?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Asher replied. He finally gave in to Grandmother’s request to teach her structure chemistry. Although he was still frightened by the memory of the explosion that shattered his first life, he decided he would do his best to teach her how to do it. He owed her for this chance at a second life. “Let me pick up my gear.” Todd and Ed drilled it into all the students and instructors that no one was to enter the structure without carrying a minimal set of survival gear and a means to defend themselves.

  “Great,” Grandmother replied. “Meet us down at the cart garage.”

  Us turned out to be Grandmother, Sarah and Ellen. The four of them took a smaller maintenance cart down to the structure entrance. The little furry animal that lived in the tree roots came running out to greet Grandmother. It ran up her staff and arm to dive into one of her pockets.

  “Did you miss me, Squirrel?” Grandmother asked. The animal emerged with a chunk of travel bar in its mouth, which it proceeded to eat while sitting on her shoulder.

  “I’ve never seen it approach someone before,” Asher commented. “Usually the students can’t get anywhere near it. It is just too quick.”

  “Has she been showing herself to the students?” Grandmother asked. “I thought she was going to give me up for Todd or Companion when we came back from Londontown. She really loved one of their plants.” The squirrel jumped off Grandmother’s shoulder and retreated to the back of the sofa when she moved. “They collected the plants for chemistry. You mentioned you could make some elixirs from plants, so Todd picked up a random assortment.”

  Grandmother led the way over to where a couple dozen small planters were sitting around the larger plants that separated two of the sitting areas. Asher knelt down to see if he recognized any of them.

  “Where do you want to set up? In here or the joint workshop?” Ellen asked.

  “The joint workshop,” Grandmother responded. “We don’t really have any unique tool for chemistry. I’m hoping if we set up in the workshop it will tell Control we don’t just want another kitchen and one of our mystery icons will activate. I’ll go get my bags out of secure storage and meet you there.” Grandmother headed off to get her bags, leaving Ellen, Sarah and Asher with the plants.

  “Do you recognize any of them?” Sarah asked Asher about the plants.

  “Yes, several,” Asher replied. “That is obviously tubers,” he said, pointing to the planter in question. Tubers were one of their main food sources in the structure. Only the youngest of children wouldn’t recognize them. “Arrowroot, violets, morning trumpet and dew grass,” Asher went on, identifying several more of the plants.

  “So that is violets?” Ellen responded. “Todd will be happy. This one here is berry avocado,” she told Asher. Todd was with Harry, going over the security arrangements for the academy inside the structure. Ellen expected to see them here in the annex at some point. “It looks like Grandmother’s Squirrel has eaten all the fruit off of it. I guess we shouldn’t have left it in her reach.”

  “Berry avocado?” Asher said. “I am not familiar with that name.”

  “It’s a high fat fruit. The selkie love them,” Sarah explained. “Shall we take all these plants back to the workroom?” They each picked up four plants and hauled them back. It took them two trips. On their second trip they arrived to find Grandmother assembling a workbench with a heavy ceramic top.

  “This is nice,” Asher commented, running his hand across the surface.

  “I have two of them,” Grandmother said. “They are in high demand.” They set up the workbenches in the fourth corner of the workshop. The other three corners hosted pottery, glass and stone sculpting setups. Once they were in place Grandmother began unloading an incredible amount of glass bottles.

  “We need shelves,” Sarah declared. “Do you think we can put some together from what is left in the storage room?”

  “The scavenger class has been bringing in more components. Let’s see what we can put together,” Ellen replied. The two women left while Grandmother continued to unpack.

  “I don’t understand the lids,” Asher admitted, when Grandmother started setting them on top of each bottle.

  “They are the same as the chemical bottles in the ruined cleaning closets.” She switched over to a different bag and pulled out a familiar bottle full of speed solution. She carefully set it on a protected corner of the work bench and flipped open the cap. A couple quick squeezes, twists and pulls and the cap and bottle separated from the metal cage and gasket. “See,” she said, handing the cap from the salvaged bottle over to Asher, “it's the same.” They were the same, Asher realized.

  “I have leather rings to try using for the gasket and I ordered wood. We just need to make more of these wire hinge things,” Grandmother explained. She exchanged the wire for the lid in Asher’s hand. She put the gasket back on and carefully set it on the full bottle. She went back to setting out bottles from the first bag.

  “Where did you get the bottles?” Asher asked, as he examined the wire cage. He found broken and empty bottles in the ruins, but they were rare. He couldn’t remember if they included hinge tops or not, but he thought most of them did. He didn’t understand how she found so many empty bottles without the hinges.

  “The glass crafter in Home Square made them,” Grandmother announced. “I wanted to find someone to make those wire cages too, but the day got away from me. I thought that you are a metal worker, maybe you could make them.” The bottles coming out of the bag were getting smaller and smaller. Asher picked up one of the smallest of them, as Grandmother fished out a stack of leather rings out of the bottom of the bag.

  Asher knew the set up just behind him was for glass crafting. He just didn’t think about crafting bottles. In his mind he tied the setup to Todd’s glass shield.

  “This is about the right size for a fire bomb, but it is far too nice to just blow up,” Asher commented. “What it would be perfect for is the elixirs. You could have a single dose of agility or stamina ready to go.” Asher looked up to find Grandmother was unpacking bowls. “I could have made the bowls,” Asher volunteered.

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  “When I ordered the bowls I was thinking of you as a chemist,” Grandmother confessed. “Home Square’s blacksmith was happy to do it. Although he charged me a fortune, it honestly wasn’t enough.”

  “What metal is this?” Asher found himself asking as Grandmother produced four bowls of a silvery metal he didn’t recognize, although it reminded him of Companion for some reason.

  “Aluminum,” Grandmother responded. “It comes from tier five space in the south. You have to use four based skills instead of five to smelt it. Here,” she said, handing a different bag to Asher, “this is all the non-chemicals found in storage rooms. Sort through it and see if there are any of your put together containers in there. Make sure you open the bag away from yourself. It will expel its contents.”

  Expel was not the right word. Asher suffered through a flashback of the explosion that cost him his fingers. He counted all his fingers and touched both his ears, before he started sorting through the pile.

  Sarah and Ellen returned just in time for Grandmother to unload the rest of her chemicals directly onto the shelving they brought with them. They put the shelves against the wall and the workbenches in front of them. The chemicals were set on the lower shelves. The bowls, vent forks and glassware were set above, where they could be reached without crawling under the workbench. The plants were left on the floor, pushing their way into the space set aside for pottery.

  Along with the parts to his containers, Asher found a bunch of crafting tools, including two portable stoves in the contents of the bag. He formed as many containers as he could, in three different sizes and added them to the upper shelves. The extra container halves that didn’t have mates he stored on the lower shelves next to the chemicals. He went through the pile one more time, picking out any other pieces that could be useful.

  When he squeezed them in beside the closed containers he discovered Grandmother setting out a pile of rat claws, next to a stone bowl with a handle sticking out of it. Asher thought this must be her mortar and pestle.

  Asher put both portable stoves on the left workbench and looked over everything they collected so far. He was impressed. It was far better than any set up he worked with before and that included his aunt’s who taught him what he knew. It resembled the chemistry laboratory in the Speedwell in more ways than the porcelain topped workbenches. It was only possible because of the wealth of Home Square. The items were the result of the skill and diversity of the square’s crafters and scavengers.

  “I could show you how to make the stop bleeding powder,” Asher said, “if we had some dried tubers. Or I could show you the stamina elixir.” He deliberately didn’t mention that there were plenty of the ingredients for fire bombs. He wasn’t quite over his recent flashback to his last attempt to make them.

  “I have some dried tubers,” Ellen said. She started digging through her backpack.

  “Let me show you both, since one is a powder and the other is an elixir,” Asher said, reaching up to pull down one of the steel bowls. “First I’ll go over how to determine an ingredient's color.”

  All three women were attentive students. They took notes and asked intelligent questions as Asher went through the process. It was quick, since they didn’t try to learn any of the spells or steps themselves.

  “So the ingredients are like symbols,” Sarah said, when Asher finished his demonstration.

  “I remember you told me you tapped all your fingers on the exploding elixir before you threw it,” Ellen said. “That’s another symbol. Do any of the other products require you to tap them before use?”

  “Some,” Asher replied. He thought about it for a moment. “The ones that you drink or apply don’t,” he responded. “It’s the ones that you throw that do. Before my accident I always thought it was a safety mechanism. Without the final tap you can accidentally drop a finished fire bomb and it doesn’t go off.”

  “Is it always all your fingers?” Sarah asked.

  “No, I know a potion that slows animals down. To activate it you only tap three fingers,” Asher responded.

  “There is also the bowl and stirring rod materials. You said they affect quality,” Grandmother observed.

  “I think so,” Asher said. “It’s one of those things that is hard to judge. You have to use different ingredients for the higher tier products. If you use those higher tier ingredients on a lower recipe you get a higher quality product, but it’s still the lower tier.”

  “So quality isn’t tier?” Grandmother asked. “I was assuming it was.”

  “No, quality is how much you have to consume to get the effect. If you use enough, you get the effect, but if you consume more it doesn’t make the effect stronger or last longer. For things you consume, if you eat more before the first one wears off it has no effect,” Asher explained. “If I filled one of those large bottles with fire solution and threw it, I would get the same size explosion as throwing one of the small bottles, as long as the small bottles are enough. Usually if you mess up you end up with something that doesn’t work, but I’m uncertain if it really doesn’t work or if it is just so low quality that you need to use more than the batch to get the effect.”

  “You used a steel bowl for these two preparations,” Sarah said. “Does that produce the best quality?”

  “I made the choice by habit,” Asher admitted. “I always used a steel bowl.” Suddenly he remembered a detail about his accident. That flashback he experienced earlier refreshed his memory. “Except for the last time. My steel bowl developed a crack and I was in a rush, so I used an iron bowl I happened to have. I wonder if that is what went wrong.”

  “What tier is your fire solution?” Ellen asked.

  “One,” Asher replied.

  “The blacksmith told me it only takes tier zero spells to make an iron bowl, but you need a tier one spell to make a steel bowl,” Grandmother commented.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Asher responded. “My aunt knew a few tier two mixtures, but I was never able to make any of them work. I should try them again using bronze. It takes a tier two spell to make a bronze bowl.”

  “I think this is more complicated than enchanting,” Sarah said. “We have the ingredients, the method of preparation, the materials used in the tools and the last symbol tapped on it.”

  “We just aren’t familiar with it,” Grandmother countered. “Enchanting has the font used, the size and quantity of the symbols and color. I’ve seen styluses that look like they are made out of different materials. Maybe you should be paying attention to that too.”

  “The hot rock that Enchanter made for Betty is turned on with a five tap,” Ellen added. “I’ve been thinking of it as the rock is a new tool or fixture. The five tap is the utility spell used to control the finished product. Since a three tap turns it off, it is similar to a sink.”

  “Actually it is closer to a sink than you realize,” Sarah said. “The taps don’t actually turn it off and on, they raise and lower its temperature. It is not so much a hot rock as a temperature rock.”

  “So the last symbol tapped on it isn’t part of the chemistry,” Grandmother observed. “It is the control spell for the final product which is a fire bomb. There might be different spell hints for each part. How did you get the recipes?” Grandmother asked Asher.

  “My aunt taught them all to me. She said most of them she learned from her teacher. She figured out a couple from inscriptions. She claimed she adapted one from a wizard's spell, using the color system. That’s why I showed it to you, even though you don’t use it much when you are making something you know.” Asher replied. “Since I started taking the chemistry classes I’ve been thinking of the families on a periodic table as the colors while the series are tier. That falls apart a bit when you get to the higher atomic numbers,” Asher commented.

  “You should make up a periodic table for structure chemistry. Most of your ingredients are plant based, while some are animal based and a few are found chemicals. That might relate to the metal, metalloid and nonmetal designations in elements, or it might not. Maybe metal-nonmetal is a solid-liquid distinction. It will be interesting to see,” Grandmother responded.