The four of them chatted tensely for a few minutes, and it was only when some of the lights started getting closer that apprehension burst out into full-blown panic. 

“Why do I have to stay here,” Lucas demanded, as he stood there with nothing but his shovel and an expression of disbelief as everyone else started to retreat into the woods.

“We’ve talked about this,” Kar’gandin growled. “Nonhumans in human cities stand out like sore thumbs, and they’re here looking for Adin, so you’re it,” before he took off into the night.

Lucas sighed as he turned back to the approaching lights, feeling entirely alone. The plan made sense. That was why he’d agreed to it before, because, honestly, it would have been even more suspicious to just disappear and leave a halfway rehabbed building or a pile of burning bricks with no one to watch it. Such a thing might be enough to make them sure the Viscount was here and justify a complete search of the overgrown orchard where the rest of his crew were hiding. 

So, he just kept doing what he’d been doing, and covered up the bricks, one shovelfull at a time. By the time the half a dozen guards arrived he was basically left with a sweltering anthill with only a few glowing gaps on the upper parts that hinted at the hellish conditions inside the mound. 

“What do we got here?” one of the guards called out. 

Lucas turned to answer him but his voice caught in his throat for a moment as he recognized the tall guard and the short guard that had arrested him on the night this had all started a couple weeks back. “Don’t mind me officers,” Lucas said finally, just managing to keep his voice from shaking. “Just sweatin to the oldies back here.”

“Sweating to the what…” the short one asked. “What are you making there?”

“Me?” Lucas asked. “Nothing. I’m just here to work the shovel and watch the bricks burn, sir.”

Both of them eyed him suspiciously for a moment, and a couple of other guards spread out and began to look around the cider house. “We've received reports of suspicious activity,” the guard said, trying again. “Word is the Viscount might be hiding out back here and—”

“Who?” Lucas asked, prompting the guard to shove one of the wanted posters into his hand. 

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen the man,” Lucas said after spending a moment studying the images. 

“I don’t get out of the city much, though. This one,” he said pointing at Hura'gh, “I think I’ve seen him before at the drunken donkey before, but not, you know, recent like or anything.”

“The Drunken Donkey, huh?” the short one said, eyeing him suspiciously. “Say, Rob, does this guy look familiar to you? Didn’t we pick up someone like him the other day?”

Lucas cursed himself for using the same bar as he had last time and triggering this guy’s memory. Fortunately, the tall guard was already looking past him and moving toward the cider house. “How in the pits should I know that Sten?” he said, walking past Lucas. “We crack 10 heads a night; if the masonry guild wants to hire drunks or vagrants to tend night fires, why should I give a single goblin crap about that?”

“Yeah, but—” Sten said, still eyeing Lucas. 

Lucas decided to lean into that, though and bowed slightly. “I won’t deny I’ve been on the wrong end of the watch’s baton more than once,” he interrupted. “Shameful though it is to admit, more of my meager wages go to drink than I would like, but I have no one to blame for that but my own self, good sirs. I hold no anger toward the guard for helping to keep me in line, and I’d be happy to help you in whatever way I can before—”

Lucas’s obsequiousness earned him a shove from the shorter guard as he moved past Lucas to rejoin his fellow, but no more than that. “Do you know what the bricks are for or what the lady of the manor plans to do with this building?”

“I can’t say,” Lucas said with a shake of his head. “I think I heard my masters talking about refurbishing this building and clearing up the orchard, so I assume they’d start making cider again, but it's really not my place to speculate.”

The rest of his crew should have cleared out the place, but as he followed the guards inside, he still held his breath. There were still a few crates filled with odds and ends, but nothing too intimidating, and once they verified that the Viscount wasn’t hiding under the bed, they soon lost interest. 

“If you see anyone strange in the woods, you let your masters know,” Rob cautioned him as the group turned to leave. “There might be a good turn in it for you the next time you’ve had a bit too much to drink.”

“I’ll do that,” Lucas promised, even though he had no plans of ever talking to the law again if he could help it. 

Instead, he went back to plugging gaps in his pile of smoldering bricks until none of the ember light escaped. Then, when that was done he watched the torches retreat into the distance. Even once they were gone, though, he stood there sweating until the torches have given up and began moving back to the city. 

“They’re still looking for you, man,” Lucas told Adin when he saw the three silhouettes emerging from the woods. 

“Why? Why are they hounding me and not either of you?” the Viscount said, angrily railing at the half-orc and the dwarf. 

“Who says they aren’t laddie?” Kar’gandin said, sounding tired. “My cousin said they’d visited him and other business associates, too. They’re definitely still looking for all of us.”

“Well, if they’re going to keep looking for us here, then why in the hell are we building an alchemy lab here!” Hura'gh bellowed. 

Honestly, it was a good question. Lucas had assumed that the last search had been kind of a one-time thing. Not that it was a two time thing, though it could just as easily become an every week sort of thing, which could put a real crimp in their plans. 

“Well, as I see it, we’ve really only got two choices,” Lucas told them. “We either keep building here but we make it look like a boring operation that makes nothing but cider or we start over somewhere else before we get too much father along.”

“We could build further back in the orchard,” Adin volunteered. “If we chopped down the middle part of the grove, we wouldn’t be visible from the road or the house. We could start over and—”

“Nah, laddie’; I think the better choice is to stay right here but be a bit more subtle.” the dwarf said, stroking his beard. 

“What?” the half-orc bellowed, sounding almost as surprised as Lucas was by the statement. “Why? Do you want us to get caught?”

“Sometimes, when you’re being searched on a regular basis, the best place to hide is in plain sight,” the dwarf said, walking over to an unsplit log before sitting down so that he could begin to load his pipe. “If they’re going to keep coming back, they’ll eventually search that orchard too, and anything they find there will be instantly suspicious. Here, at least, we can make everything look like it might have another purpose.”

He reached over and stabbed a twinge into the mound of burning bricks and then used the burning tip to light it, taking a couple puffs before he continued speaking. “The Parins have an orchard and a cider house - no reason in the world why they might not use it to make cider. We could even import it into the city and pay taxes for the stamp and everything. If we pack it right, the gate guards ain’t gonna open it up to look for potions they don’t know about. We’d be able to get a better price from my cousin, too.”

“A better price?” Lucas asked. “Why? Would that get us a better price?”

“You don’t think he’s getting paid a smuggling fee?” Kar’gandin laughed. “You want him to sell our goods, that costs. You want him to smuggle it in to Lordanin and tell people that it was made by guild alchemists, that costs too. Everything costs, including hiding from the guards, but I think we can manage it with a little work.”

Wait, that mean's he's probablly getting a cut too, Lucas thought to himself as he mulled the situation over. 

It was an annoying realization, and Lucas vowed to explore exactly how much the dwarf's connections were costing them, but for now, he didn't bring it up. Instead, they debated it for a while longer, but in the end, that’s what they did. They ordered some barrels and set the cider presses back up just like they were waiting for the fall harvest and made some clever hiding places for the most incriminating things behind a bookshelf and under some beds. 

All of that took time, but they had nothing but time right now. Sure, the changing of the seasons would eventually screw him over and bring everything to a halt, but for now, as long as Lucas kept finding ingredients to brew into something worth selling, the money kept going in, and over the next few weeks he built up quite a respectable lab set up, complete with a wide fireplace, a copper still, and a number of beakers and boiling flasks. 

He took solace in those little vials as everything else moved on around him. Light blue concoctions of iron will, brick-red potions of strength, and other colorful tonics and elixirs briefly passed through his lab before being bottled into little glass vials, packed into straw-filled barrels, and whisked away to the city for sale. 

Even the failed potions cheered him up. This was the part that Lucas loved: experimenting. The muck weed mixed with the rust fern and the yellow lichen didn’t quite mix into the antidote potion he thought it would be, but the resulting foul smoke that billowed out when he combined the three negative poison ingredients was enough to clear everyone out of their shack until it had been properly aired out. 

That had earned him the ire of everyone for an afternoon, but even days later, Lucas couldn’t think about the moment without chuckling softly to himself. That shit was hilarious. 

Alchemical Mixture (10 doses): Poison -3, endurance 1, strength 1, incompatible mixture: noxious fumes 

Through all that, he put off making hard drugs and focused on other smaller projects until the sour dwarf berries arrived. It was only then that he was ready to start making blue. Well, he was ready to grab some goblin bile, at least. That was the only ingredient he was missing before he could start really making some money, but for that, he and Hura'gh were going to have to go on a little hunting trip.