“You’ve seen the ruins, Amber, you’ve seen our bones.”

“Yes, I have, we’ve been through this!”

“Survive for us. Survive in our stead.”

“Doing my best at it, but if we could just take a second and-”

“Find the [Legend Stone] and carry our will.”

“Okay I was just about to ask about that, I checked the secret vault and I-”

"Now... it is time for you to wake up."

“Like hell it is!”

---

My eyes snap open as the dream ends and a peel of thunder shakes the dust from the rafters. I sit up as the dull full body ache of chronic insomnia seeps back into focus alongside the rest of the world.

“Same speech every damn time... fucking dream ghosts.”

Checking my phone, I can see that a total of forty minutes have elapsed since I laid down - the most sleep I’ve been able to manage for a week. At first I thought it was the thunder, which admittedly isn’t helping the situation… but now I realize that it’s some sort of ghost haunting bullshit.

It took me a while before I was lucid in the dreams, but now I can at least shout obscenities at them before they force me to wake up.

Every time I close my eyes or nod off, I see them, or see through their eyes - the old priest, the field worker, the seamstress, the hunter… just so many fucking people coming to me in my dreams telling me to find that fucking rock.

I’ve checked the secret vault behind the statue and it did have some kind of rock in it, but apparently not the [Legend Stone] they want me to find - instead there was something called an [Alexandria Slate]. 

I think it’s supposed to be a repository of knowledge, if you ask a question while holding it a bunch of text appears on it, unfortunately… it’s not in fucking English. 

Might’ve been helpful if it were, at least I could figure out what the fuck is going on to some degree, but its just not in the cards.

I’m still not extremely clear on what actually happened to the people who lived here; any time one of the dreams addresses it - everything is a confusing mess of terror, pain, and sadness that defies verbal expression.

So… that’s not been great for my mental health.

Thunder rumbles and shakes the building, making a piece of masonry slip free of it’s tenuous place in the vaulted ceiling and slam into the floor.

“Great…”

Right, forgot to mention, the bird is still out there and it is pissed.

All hours of the goddamn night and day screeching, throwing lightning, slamming into the barrier like a fucking pigeon ramming a windshield.

In summary, it’s been eight days since I ran for my life from the fuckoff huge lightning turkey - my dreams are now literally haunted and I’m going fucking stir crazy because I can’t leave due to the TYPHOON outside and the bird directing it.

Fortunately I’ve made good use of the extra time by experimenting with some of the skills and abilities I’ve neglected and using those stat boosting items.

I’m saving my points for the time being, I can tell that as I am now, my decision making abilities are… a little faulty. I was a little concerned about getting [Lesser Madness Resistance], but thinking about it, that still means I’m resisting it.

I can only assume [Endocrine Modulation] is what keeps me relatively lucid even under current conditions I doubt I’d be sane without it, or my new companion.

Right, about that.

Following 10 simple steps in the [Basic Formula Book]¹³Rarity: Rare 
Quality: A+ 
Type: Misc 
Description: A book of simple and easy to follow instructions for a number of useful potions and admixtures.  I’ve created life.

[Lesser Homunculus] Lv 23

He stands about 70cm tall with a misshaped body made of clay, unsettlingly large thumbs for hands, and an uncannily human face. 

I’m 99% sure he’s a sin against nature and a crime in at least one country around here, but he’s the only company I’ve got right now.

I’ve named him Gregory.

“FUUK! BURD! FUC FUK!”

He’s picked up a few bad habits from me, but I am proud of him for learning words… even if it’s only the two of them.

“That's right little buddy, fuck that bird.”

The process of making a homunculus is stupidly easy to do; just mix together clay, wood ash, blood, some stamina, mana, and health potions, and shape it into a sort of doll that you breathe into the mouth of.

Unfortunately, its stupidly hard to do well; if you get the ratios wrong at any point the result won’t exactly be ideal - the shape warps and the homunculus becomes… unstable.

This is technically Gregory the 11th.

Gregories number 1-7 just sort of... broke down after about an hour, number 8 was just a human foot with an eyeball where the ankle would meet the leg that judgmentally stared at me, number 9 is at large somewhere in the rafters, and number 10 spontaneously detonated.

High hopes for him, he’s lasted for forty-eight hours so far.

“Alright! I’ve had at least twenty minutes of sleep, that should be enough, right?”

“FUK! GOST!”

“Yep! Fuck them too, but more importantly, we need to keep working on the bird problem!”

I’m not sure how well he understands me, but I’d like to hope these conversations aren’t completely one sided.

“Good! Shall we go over what we know now?”

“FUK!”

“That’s right, the ass-smelling incense does nothing… throwing rocks and yelling does nothing, though it was pretty cathartic. I feel our answer lies in the same power that brought you about my adorable little abomination.”

“GOST?”

“No, Gregory, not ghosts… alchemy!”

Conveniently there’s a flash of lighting and a clap of thunder to go with my dramatic proclamation, one of the few upsides to the constant storm that’s raging just outside.

“Come Gregory! There is work to be done!”

Gregory yelps a wordless affirmative and toddles over, climbing up onto the table before sitting down with his weirdly uneven little legs crossed, listening attentively.

“I’ve figured out a bit about alchemy, it seems to be the bastard child of magic, medicine, and chemistry; its half-symbolic-half-literal pseudoscience.”

My little crime against nature tilts his head as I speak and I can’t help giving him a pat; I know he doesn’t understand what I’m saying in detail, but it feels nice to talk to someone about it.

“The basics it seems are drawing out, refining, amplifying, and then applying the underlying nature of things - healing potions use plants with styptic, pain relieving, and regenerative properties that have a sort of inherent “healingness” that is extracted and concentrated to get the final product.”

I hold out a fairly sub-standard healing potion I made as an experiment on day three of bird-watch for him to play with and he accepts it with relish, taking it in his weird little thumb-hands and shaking it vigorously while gibbering in excitement.

“Yes, it is pretty exciting that I managed to make that, but the quality is in the pits and I’m still just figuring out why and trying to work out how I can make it better.”

Gregory seems fairly preoccupied chasing a beetle that his wild jostling drove out of hiding, ignoring the sound of clattering glassware I continue talking; It’s all tempered glass anyway, so it probably won’t break.

“Potions and bombs by extension are themselves fairly simple affairs to make, perhaps simpler than homunculi like you in some ways - you can make a potion out of water, but it won’t do much. The hard part is picking the right ingredients, of course I have the right tool for the job.”

Shoving aside my stack of notes on crudely cut sheets of brown paper¹⁴Conveniently provided by the lootboxes and bonus packs I opened a few days ago and nudging Gregory out of the way while he is busy crunching on the beetle, I grab the [Multi-spectrum Goggles]¹⁵Rarity: Very Rare
Quality: S
Type: Accessory
Description: A set of multi-lens goggles to allow more accurate perception of the finer immaterial essences. and slip them on before turning my attention to the gathered ingredients - pickings are slim with my limited harvest range and the present state of the weather outside, but I have quite the selection regardless.

Though Gregory does seem to be eating some of them…

Ah well he is a growing boy… for certain definitions of “growing” and “boy” - I think it should be fine...

“As you can see, I have a broad selection of potential potion ingredients and at first glance, they just look like any old plants - some might have medicinal uses… but Alchemical uses and medicinal uses are two different things!”

“FUK!”

“That’s right! Alchemy doesn’t give two shits about actual chemical composition as far as I can tell, it’s about the uses and effects of the chemicals involved - so theoretically I could use that belladonna you’re eating to make a beauty cream with alchemy and it wouldn’t be poisonous!”

“BURD!”

“You’re right, that was a tangent, I was going to explain how the [Multi-spectrum Goggles] help - when I put these on I can fiddle with the layered lenses to filter for specific wavelengths of mana!”

Satisfied with his snack and somewhat enraptured by my voice, Gregory tilts his head in confusion before losing his balance and taking an impromptu prone position on the table.

“You’re quite correct Gregory, this is just my supposition; all I’m really sure of is that when I put them on without any lenses toggled, everything glows and by flipping down lenses things stop glowing. The stuff that glows under the same lenses tends to have something in common and I’m working on deciphering what it all means… but I can confidently say I’ve identified a few different categories!”

“All of these plants for example glow under the same combination of lenses - actually, not just these, all plants in general do. From this I can infer that they have an intrinsic sort of ‘plantiness’ that the goggles pick up on; I’ve also found the combinations for things made of rock, things that are red, things that are flammable, and things that smell bad!”

From there, the pair of us set to work, basically mixing together random shit and seeing what happens and then writing it down; I'm told this qualifies as science. I'm not as confident as I sound when I talk to Gregory, but he likes it when I act excited.

Really it's all shots in the dark as far as specific procedure goes, grind this, boil that, light the other on fire and mix it all up - the only confirmation that I've actually succeeding in doing anything is when my mana goes down and whatever weird thing I end up with registers with [Alchemical Analysis]¹⁶Rarity: Very Rare
Status: Active, Related
Associated Classes: [Combat Alchemist]
Description: An ability that allows for the analysis of alchemical admixtures and potions - useful in replicating production methods or mimicking the effects of a final product..

Even with the mania induced by sleepless experimentation, I can feel my excitement fading as failures mount; every time I think I've got a handle on it, some working theory about this nonsense field of pseudoscience, it all blows up in my face.

Literally.

I can't help but face the fact that I’ve basically just been trying to keep busy while telling myself the research could help me out of this situation when in reality the resources I have on hand are minimal and dwindling and my only references to pull from are fucking picture books.

Tears start welling up as hopelessness rears its ugly head, but I’m snapped out of my minor downward spiral by a sudden weight in my lap and an awkward digit rubbing my cheek.

Gregory is there, smearing my face with one of my many charcoal scribbled note pages… his big misaligned doe-like eyes looking up at me as he tries to hold back his own tears and failing.

“Oh, no no no… it’s okay Greggy, it’s okay, everything is going to be okay.”

Gently I take the notes from his grasp and wipe his face with the clean side, paying special attention to clear up his snotty nose - I’d forgotten just how much he can pick up on my emotions.

“Come on little buddy… you wanna watch another movie on my phone?”

Shushing him gently, I heft him up and make my way back over to the hearth and set him down next to Gregory The 8th nestled into his sock.¹⁷He looked cold, okay.  

With his tears dried and the sour mood slowly lifting, we settle in against my pile of gym clothes and flick through our movie options before at last deciding on Power Rangers - it’s the third time we’ve watched it together, but it makes him happy, so I figure it’s alright.

Really, I suppose I do have Gregory to thank for my continued tenuous grasp on sanity… it’s very easy to forget that even if I can’t sleep, I still need to rest.