Lucas paid the teamster two bits for the ride and another copper coin to make sure that the older man was as inclined as possible to forget he’d ever seen him with a wink and a nod. In Lucas’s line of work it was never a bad idea to have friends in low places. After that, he wrestled the small barrel that he’d brought with him off of the cart, careful not to drop it. 

There wasn’t anything unusual about that. Men delivered barrels to bars. It was completely normal. Usually they did it with a whole wagon load of giant casks instead of a single pony keg, of course. Tonight, though, he wasn’t bringing beer or ale like all the other delivery men. He had something a lot more potent. 

Brog’s bar probably went through ten barrels of booze a night, but this one little barrel was going to make them both more money than all those other others combined, just like the last one had. It was full of something better than booze. It contained a powerful narcotic elixir that he’d spent the day brewing up with alchemy, and it was taking the city by storm. 

While he was sure the city guards, the merchants and all the other powers that be would love to know who exactly it was that produced all the blue in the city. That was too bad, though, because as far as Lucas was concerned, that was a secret best kept between him and his wholesaler. He produced the brass key he’d been given just for these deliveries. Then, with one last look around, he unlocked the alley entrance of The Chimera’s Chalice and shoved his very heavy and expensive piece of luggage inside before quickly locking the thick oaken door behind him. 

With that done, he quickly looked around the room to make sure he was alone and then sat down on his small cask like a stool for a quick breather. “Making this shit is easy, but lugging it around is awful,” he grumbled. 

He’d been telling himself for weeks that he’d hire some muscle to handle some of this for him as he slowly worked his way up the food chain. There was certainly no shortage of that in the bustling city of Lordanin, but cheap and trustworthy were almost mutually exclusive. Since he didn’t want to have to deal with the inevitable consequences of cheap, he was going to have to hold off for trustworthy until he had a few more deliveries under his belt and another handful of golden dragons tucked away. 

As he sat there, looking around the dim storeroom, he realized that this would be the perfect spot for Brog to ambush him, but Lucas wasn’t too worried. The man seemed too smart to kill the golden goose, and it wasn’t like there was someone else who could brew blue if the dwarf killed him. 

It was a proprietary mixture that he’d invented, and though its ingredients were shockingly close to a low level mana potion he doubted that someone else would stumble across the secret to his little moneymaker without a lot of hard work.

Lucas had been doing shady shit for a long time, and he’d been forced to become a good judge of character. The way he saw it, as long as the dwarf was making good money, Lucas doubted he’d try anything. 

Still, best not to tempt the man, he decided as he stood up and moved the keg underneath a table and behind a few crates. 

There were the best part of a hundred dragons’ worth of blue ready to be doled out, a few drops at a time. It wasn’t quite as compact as plastic baggies filled with kilos of the crystal he used to sell, but even so, that wasn’t the sort of temptation he wanted to leave in plain sight. 

Once that was done, he walked over and inspected the dwarf’s still, noting with a shake of his head that it still wasn’t doing what it should. He’d tried to get the dwarf to pay him to fix the damn condenser, but the cheap bastard insisted the old ways were best. 

Rough Dwarven Spirits (weak): Purifying agent. Remove 50% of the negative effects of a single reagent. 

“At least it's good enough for potions,” he whispered to himself with a quiet chuckle. “That’s why you only get braggarts and bums in here, man. You want the big spenders, you gotta’ make the good shit.”

That was what he was going to do once he’d sold enough blue to poison a whole herd of elephants, he decided as he walked through the backroom and into the common room like he owned the place. He was going to retire young, get himself a nice tavern, and invent the one thing that this fantasy world really lacked: tequila. 

Hell, once he had that worked out he might really try to shoot the moon and invent taco’s too, so that might take longer. He had no idea where he’d get agave in this world, but he was going to make it happen and open a place like this. 

Well, not this exact place, of course. Brog would live at least another hundred years, and there was no way the dwarf would ever sell. 

Still, he could see himself putting the golden dragons he was slowly stacking up and squirreling away into a little construction project. Lucas’s would be nicer, though, and he’d build it at the other end of the waterfront to attract a slightly classier clientele. 

Despite the tense circumstances, he couldn’t help but smile as he walked through the room crowded with both strangers and familiar faces. There were risks to doing such deals so publicly, of course, but getting beaten and left for dead in an alley wasn’t one of them, and Lucas had no desire to suffer that fate again. 

Not that he was the handsome sort, exactly. Another broken nose wouldn’t do him any harm. Hell, it might even help to distract from his pox-scarred face. That definitely would have stood out in any police lineup back home, but here, it wasn’t as uncommon as he would have thought. 

That, of course, led to the annoying habit where half the guys in dives like this were sitting at tables with god-damned hoods and cowls over their faces like they had a secret identity worth protecting. Lucas couldn’t think of anything sillier. 

Instead, he walked through the room, saying hi to everyone he knew. A few of the regulars even gave him fist bumps after he’d explained to them after one too many drinks that it was a traditional and honorable greeting from his homeland. 

“That’s what I’m talkin' about!” Lucas said as he exchanged greetings with the men and then called to Bernadenna, the waitress that was strolling by. “Miss, another tankard of your cheapest ale for my finest friends here. One for me, too, when you get the chance, babe.”

He smiled at her, but she only returned a fanged scowl, which was pretty much par for the course. Instead, she looked at him like he was garbage, and was probably about to tell him as much when one of the drunks behind her reached for her ample orcish ass. 

Lucas winced in pain even as she whirled around and clocked him hard enough to send him straight to the sawdust strewn floor. Bernadenna might be a fine woman, but she was for looking not for touching.

Still, as he walked by the now unconscious man, Lucas decided that the sailor had gotten off lucky. He looked like he was going to be okay when he came to. The last guy, though. He was still eating through a straw. In a world where plastic and blenders were still hundreds or thousands of years in their future, that was even more miserable than it sounded. 

Instead, he kept going until he reached the red-bearded bartender and said, “Let me have a taste of one of your special dwarven brews there, Brog, whaddya say.”

It wasn’t much but it was the secret password that Lucas was supposed to say which meant, ‘hey, I delivered your shit.’ Even though they’d done this exact song and dance twice before, the man still looked at him with some suspicion in his eyes. That would have wounded Lucas very deeply if he gave a crap. 

He didn’t, though. Instead, he just widened his smile a little and waited. 

“Of course, laddie,” the bartender said finally, “but we keep the good stuff in the back room. Oogen will have to go and get it for me.” 

Lucas nodded. That wasn’t a surprise either. Unlike Lucas, Brogan could afford all the loyalty he wanted, and in this case, that meant a soul-branded Minotaur to go check on the stash and make sure that the human had delivered what he said he would. 

So he picked out a table with a few empty seats and sat across from a slant-eared motherfucker that he didn’t recognize, and while he waited, Bernadenna brought him his first drink of the night. 

He tipped her a silver for her trouble. That was real money among the riffraff of the chalice. A skilled tradesman might expect a silver a day for his hard work, while a soldier or a laborer might get half that. Neither of those groups had anything on the gold he planned on leaving with, but it was enough to soften the way she glared at him at least. 

While Lucas waited, he pretended he didn’t have a care in the world, but deep inside his own skull, he was already pacing back and forth. Be cool, man, he told himself as he sipped at the warm, dark beer that had nothing on a Corona with lime as far as he was concerned. 

There wasn’t a problem here. There was never a problem at the Chalice. He’d been working with this dwarf for a few weeks now, and things were going smoother than they’d ever gone with the first gang that Lucas had tried to build a relationship with. 

Just like usual, the only problem here was his paranoia. Lucas  just couldn’t stop sizing people up and looking for exits if shit went down, and if he wasn’t careful, that was going to be enough to make him seem suspicious. 

Still, not even the lizardman playing dice in the corner or the off-duty guards that were here in the city’s livery almost every night were enough to trip his narc detector any more than usual. It really was just another quiet night down by the waterfront, and he was going to do his best to enjoy it for the hour or so he planned on staying before he went back home to squirrel away the gold coins he was about to be paid out in. 

Things are good, he reassured himself. You just gotta be chill and grind it out. Pick herbs, buy berries, make blue, and repeat. It’s so simple, even you can’t fuck it up. You just gotta grind out a few more deliveries, and you can write your own ticket. 

It was easy to get jumpy with the amount of extra guards he was seeing on the streets these days. Lucas had never flinched at the sight of a gun and a badge, but these assholes wore chainmail, and half of them had halberds. He’d much rather get tazed and cuffed than sliced and diced like a Christmas ham. 

“Hey man, having a nice night?” he asked the elf that was sitting across from him, but the elf just ignored Lucas. 

He repeated himself. That was enough to earn another glare and a few words in their musical language that almost certainly meant no Hablo Engles. 

“Yeah, same to you, buddy,” Lucas said dismissively. 

Most of the elves he’d run into were like that, and he could see why most people he knew just called them slants. He wouldn’t have minded the clannishness so much, but the fact that as soon as one of them wanted a hook-up, they suddenly figured out how to speak English… well, common, was just the cherry on top of that bullshit sundae. 

Eventually, as his first tankard was getting down to the dregs, Lucas finally started to feel impatient when the owner himself came around to the table with another smaller pewter mug. “Here ye are, Oogen found just what ye’ were lookin for. Enjoy!”

The subtle clink of gold coins in the small but heavy mug was enough to brighten Lucas’s mood immensely. However, as he looked the dwarf in the face to thank him for the very expensive drink, he saw a nervousness there that he didn’t like. 

Brog had been pretty straight with him up until now, and loyalty usually lasted as long as the profits did, but as the dwarf walked away, Lucas couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to be screwed. He stood up immediately, prepared to leave, but that was the moment that the front door got kicked in. 

Half a dozen guards in the city’s blue and gold coat of arms burst in through the front door, and at the same moment, a few of them burst through the back door, too. Even as both of those groups appeared, several of the guards standing around the room stood up as well. It was impossible to see this as anything but a setup.

Suddenly, Brog had gone full Judas, and Lucas was standing there holding his thirty pieces of silver like an asshole. Only he got paid a lot better. He was holding what should have been twenty golden dragons, which were more like 400 silver kings, but that didn’t matter. 

What he did know was that this was a setup, and he was holding the mark. So, without even thinking, he slid the drink across the table so that by the time anyone was looking for it, he was clean, and as his now least favorite bartender was speaking to the guard captain, everyone else was very carefully staring at the table and minding their own business. 

He didn’t blame them. He would have done exactly the same thing if these toughs were in here looking for someone else. They weren’t, though. They were looking for him, which meant he had to switch it up. Lucas was standing there trying hard to pretend to be clueless as he held his nearly empty wooden tankard. 

“You there!” the guard captain’s scrawny, entitled lieutenant finally yelled at Lucas. “In the name of the King, I order you to come over here at once.”

“Me?” Lucas said, feigning a sudden inebriation. “Whatt are you talkin' about, occifer? I’m just enjoying my booze and enjoyin’ the scenery. I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

As Lucas spoke, he nodded meaningfully at Bernadenna, who wasn’t so far away. He acted like he was trying and failing to be subtle, and that only increased the scorn in her eyes as she glared at him without any real idea of what he was playing at. 

“We have received a complaint that you are a peddler of poison!” the man declared even more loudly. “You and your ill-gotten gains are…”

As the cocky man continued to speak, Lucas made it a point to look confused before he made an even bigger show of upending his tankard to reveal only the dregs of his beer. “What’s are you talkin’ about?” he asked as guards advanced toward him. “I ain’t got no gains, ill or otherwise. I spent my last coppers on this swill.”

“Those simple lies will do you no good, fiend!” the man said, trying to keep control of a crowd that was looking more and more like it was ready to lose the plot. “An unnamed informant for the crown has very clearly identified you—”

“You mean that dwarf? That dwarf narc you got standing behind you,” Lucas shot back before the near guard cuffed him across the mouth with his gauntlet. “He was working with the goddamn slant ear, not me!”

Even as the guards grabbed his right arm, Lucas reached out with his left and knocked the drink in front of the other man on the floor. “They were scheming for an hour before you two showed up. I saw the whole thing!” Lucas shouted, even as the guards started to drag him toward the assembly. 

No one listened to him, of course; he didn’t expect them to. When that pewter tankard sailed through the air and hit the ground, the gold coins it contained went everywhere, and when that gold jingled and scattered, everyone listened to that. 

For a moment, it was so silent in the common room that you could hear the cracking of the fire. This time, the man who broke it was not the annoying lieutenant but the guard captain himself. “Everyone stay where you are. We are here on crown business and investigating the blue scourge that has begun to ravage our fair city. We—”

Those words weren’t enough to put the fear into the crowd, though, and partway through his speech, everyone was up and scrambling for those coins. Lucas felt for the guy on some level. Gold was a big deal everywhere, even on Earth. 

As much as it was going to hurt his own pocket, he’d basically just made it rain Benjamins, and that wasn’t something a working-class stiff could afford to miss out on. A well-paid craftsman might get paid a silver a day, which would make each of those coins nearly a month's wages. A common laborer might not even get half that, and even for a sailor, a dragon could buy drinks for months. 

After that, the room descended into chaos, but that didn’t free him from the grip of the guard that was holding onto him tightly. He needed some way to accomplish that, and he doubted that his knife would get through the man’s chain mail. 

Instead, he looked around for a distraction, and the only one he found was the pretty orc-blooded waitress. So, cringing at what he was about to do, he yelled, “Hey, Bernadenna I’ll be out quick, so you make sure your bed is nice and warm for me, huh?” before blowing her a kiss. 

A comment like Lucas’s was all it took for the waitress to see red. Bernadenna blushed prettily in embarrassment through her green-tinged skin as she glared at him with rage in her eyes. That was the only warning he got before she swung out in a full-fledged haymaker aimed at his face. 

Lucas was ready for it, though. He ducked, letting her clock the guard that was holding on to him with so much force that his metal helmet rang like a bell as the man fell to his knees.  

If that gold hadn’t been enough to start a proper bar fight. Then that first punch certainly did. As Lucas ducked back and weaved toward the windows, blows were being thrown on all sides, and more than a few people were being stabbed. 

This was all his fault, legally speaking, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t the asshole that had dropped the dime.

As he jumped up on a table, he yelled, “This isn’t the last time you’ll see me, Brog! We got business later!”

The dwarf glared at him, but rather than shouting anything back that might further incriminate himself, he turned to his Minotaur and whispered a few words and the eight-foot-tall giant came to life. On any other night, that would have been a death sentence right there, but tonight, even Lucas thought it was a stupid decision. 

The monster leaped over the bar and charged toward him. It was true, but it was also charging toward the guard captain, and those twitchy bastards had no way of knowing whose side it was on. So Lucas wasn’t even a little surprised when the mage that had been lingering in his dark robes at the back of their group whispered a few words of power and turned the thing into hamburger, both literally and metaphorically. 

One second, the loincloth-clad enforcer had been a six hundred-pound linebacker bent on turning Lucas into nothing but a greasy stain on the floor. The next, he froze mid-step and begin to unravel, and some invisible impact deflated him like a balloon and his limbs bent and broken at angles that should have been impossible. The minotaur was unraveling, even as he began to disintegrate. 

It was messy, but Lucas didn’t stick around to watch. After all, he could be next. Instead, he threw himself out the nearest window, covering his face to avoid getting cut too badly. 

Outside, he found more guards covering the front door, but before they could even figure out what was happening, he was up and running for the nearest alley. Finally, Lucas had one advantage over those over armored assholes. He was a hell of a lot faster than them. 

He darted down an alley one street down to dodge the men on horseback that were starting to give chase. Then he did the same thing on the next street until he found a way up onto some rooftops. That was when he finally hunkered down and pulled out the healing potion he always carried and tried to catch his breath. 

He wasn’t hurt bad or anything, but he had half a dozen small cuts on his hand and at least one good one on his scalp. If he wanted to stop sticking out like a sore thumb, he was going to need to fix that so that he could blend right in again. 

First, though, he had to breathe until his legs stopped shaking, which was harder than it should have been. For some reason, despite the fact that he’d lost his whole batch and been betrayed by the man that was supposed to be his distributor, he couldn’t stop smiling like a jackass. 

“Because they got nothing on me,” he crowed to no one in particular before he toasted to the starry sky and drank down half of his potion. 

Tincture of Healing (2 doses): Light healing, euphoria 1, poison 1, endurance +1. 

Technically, it was only a tincture because of how much he’d watered it down, and since he wasn’t trying to sell it, he hadn’t made much of an effort to purify it as much as possible. 1 poison wasn’t enough to even hurt him. 

Lucas lay there in the shade of some poor bastard’s chimney for a few minutes, listening to the sound of guards rushing to and fro on the streets below. There were whistles blowing and boots stomping and a general racket as they searched for him, but they’d never find him up here. 

He supposed that they could probably use that mage to track him down if they really wanted him, but he doubted he’d left enough behind to make that possible. He’d heard that to track someone you needed a piece of them, or at least something important to them.

Could they use the keg? he thought to himself. Nah, I only owned that for like a day. It’s all a dead end. This whole thing will probably bounce back on Brog, and if the guards don’t make that happen, I sure as shit will.

After all, it was the dwarf that had the shit now, so if they wanted someone to blame, they had him. It wasn’t like they knew where his laboratory was or anything. 

“All that bastard knows is when to expect his shipments,” Lucas grumbled to himself as he tried to figure out where he might be vulnerable, but he didn’t think that anyone knew anything else. So, while he’d been burned, it hadn’t been too bad. 

Still, he waited a moment for his most obvious wounds to knit closed, and then he cleaned himself up with a rag and some stagnant rainwater that had collected in a clogged gutter as best he could. It was only after he was well-rested and blood-free that he started looking around to make sure the coast was clear. 

Lucas thought for a moment about ditching his pouch to dump any remaining evidence, but given that the streets were quiet now, he doubted that would be necessary. He just had to act like any other drunk out on the street a little before the first bell, and he’d make it back to his little slice of paradise hidden away in the ghetto just fine. 

Only, that’s not what happened. He made sure the coast was clear. He climbed carefully down the building’s trellis to the stack of crates he’d used earlier as a ladder, but as soon as he turned the corner, he ran right into a pair of guards who had been strolling in the opposite direction. 

For a moment, the two of them just looked at him, and he looked at them like a deer caught in the headlights. He was torn about whether he should act natural or run, but as soon as they grabbed for him, he tried and failed to bolt. 

“You think this is the guy?” the shorter guard asked as they wrestled Lucas into submission, and he tried and failed to slip from their grasp. 

“Does it matter? He’s a skinny, ugly bastard that’s acting squirrelly, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough to keep the Captain off our asses for a week,” the tall one responded. “So we can either take him in or find someone else; what do you—”

“How much would it take to make you forget you ever saw me?” Lucas asked, trying to see if he might find some last-ditch way out of this. 

“How much you got?” the tall guard asked, easing up the pressure for just a moment. 

Lucas opened up his mouth and hesitantly said, “I got a few silver but I could—” 

Before he could finish, that same guard slugged him hard enough with his mailed fist to stun him while they pinned him down and tied his hands behind his back.

“The correct answer was nothin’, shit breath. You ain’t got nothin’, because we’re going to take it all.”

“Yeah,” the shorter guard said, “How you gonna bribe us with our own damn money, huh? Explain that!”