Eldritch Guidance

Side story 2 - The Whispers In The Wall

Content warning - Lots of gore and body horror

-Twenty years ago in the east end of Graheel on Eld Street.-

A skinny man with messy brown hair wearing a dirty white lab coat with a pair of thick glasses was sitting at a table, going through a bunch of handwritten notes. This man was known as Leroi. He was an alchemist running a shop selling supplies for potion making on Eld Street in the east end of Graheel.

Some might think it's unusual to run an alchemist shop in an area where the majority of people can't use aether, but they would be wrong. The art of alchemy was one of the few arcane practices anyone could learn and use. It didn't require aether, only time and effort.

However, the tools for alchemy were expensive. The real problem of running an alchemist shop here is the people living near Leroi's shop, The Bubbling Beaker, were not exactly the most wealthy. So the number of people that came to his shop was very limited, but that was fine for Leroi. He didn't open this store to actually provide supplies to the locals. The shop only existed to get supplies for himself.

Leroi required large amounts of materials for the alchemical experiments he was conducting. So large in fact, many suppliers would reject his orders from the time before he opened this store. The quantity of chemicals he requested made suppliers nervous. They were worried that the chemicals they were sending him were being used for some sort of illicit activity. Not wanting to risk culpability, they would not send him the things he requested.

This frustrated Leroi at the time and he couldn't convince the suppliers to give him the materials he needed. The suppliers wanted a reasonable explanation for why he was ordering so much, which he didn't have because he was using those materials for illegal alchemy experiments. So there was a brief moment in time when he couldn't get the supplies he needed. That's why "The Bubbling Beaker" existed. A store ordering large amounts of alchemy supplies looks less suspicious on paper than when Leroi was doing it as an individual. As long as no one bothered to look at where his store was located, no one would find anything strange about it.

He was sitting at the front desk going over his research and notes about his last experiments. He was trying to look for a clear solution to a fundamental problem in one of his experiments. Leroi knew that if he could solve this problem, he would become famous. It would revolutionize alchemy and the alchemist community would even overlook past ethical violations if he was successful.

The sound of the front door of his store rang out. Leroi looked from his research notes to see someone he hadn't seen before, which caused him to quietly groan in annoyance. This store wasn't actually made to sell products to people, but he had to have a storefront for his fake business, and sometimes a local would wander in here because of it.

There were a handful of regular 'customers' that would come by every once in a while. Those people didn't ask any questions and just took their chemicals and quietly left. Leroi was sure that the people regularly visiting his store were just buying supplies to make illegal substances themselves, which suited him just fine. It wasn't his problem, and actually having records of selling chemicals made his store seem less suspicious.

Leroi didn't like seeing new faces enter his store, it meant there was a risk they would stop and try to talk to him. He hoped that this man would quickly look around, buy something, and leave without really talking to him. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to be the case as the man walked straight towards Leroi.

The disgruntled alchemist put his note down to more closely examine the figure approaching him. The man had black hair and red eyes, a physical feature that Leroi assumed was a mutation since a lot of mutants lived around here. What was most surprising was that the man appeared very well dressed, more so than what one would expect living on the east end of Graheel. He wore an expensive looking black sateen dress shirt and a pair of matching pants.