omgericzimmermann:

yukieakasaka:

lush employee: hello, how can I–

me: hello, potion seller. I am going into battle and I need your strongest potions.

It starts, as these things always do, with a mistaken identity. It’s only her second day at work, and despite the rigorous training, she’s still not entirely convinced of what everything is. It’s sort of like when you sit an exam and even though you’ve revised over and over again the night before, and the weeks leading up to, as soon as you open the test booklet, all of your knowledge vanishes in a wisp of smoke.

So when the customer asks her for “the special” she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“I’m sorry, sir, which special? Was there a cut out or an advert that you saw?” she asks, hoping for some kind of clarification.

The man just rolls his eyes, looking like he’s tired of her shit. She doesn’t know what shit she’s supposed to have given him.

“The special, come on kid, you’re the one, aren’t you? I was told the manager here is–”

“Oh gosh, so sorry, no I’m not the manager,” she interrupts. “Let me get him for you.”

She runs off to get the manager, who instantly whisks the customer behind the curtain to the break room. This is odd, as far as she knows, and when she ducks behind the curtain herself to grab a drink of her water bottle, neither of them are there.

She decides that whatever’s going on is far above her pay grade, and so she lets it go.

At least, until it happens again.

It’s a different customer. It’s a different special. It’s the same manager who takes them into the break room and vanishes for half an hour. She starts going through what might be happening, what might have come of the customers who never returned, and what could possibly be in these “specials.”

It’s a few months later that she finds out.

She and the manager are alone in the store, and it’s late. They’re the only store still open in this area of town, and there hasn’t been a customer in two hours. She’s hoping that maybe, just maybe, this means they’ll get to close early and she can go home and revise for her O-Chem exam the next week. But that doesn’t happen, because the door opens and a woman she recognizes as having asked for a special earlier in the month bursts into the store clutching a gaping wound in her side. But it’s not a proper wound. There’s blood, sure, but the edges are purple and sparking.

“Help,” she says, and then she collapses on the floor.

They’re a cosmetics shop. They sell soaps, and shampoos, and mustache wax, and sure their product is nice in quality compared to other comparable brands, but they are not, as far as she knows, equipped to handle sparking purple wounds.

The manager sighs like he’s seen this all before and heads over to the door to lock it. She watches this happen in shock.

“Grab her arm for me, would you?” the manager requests, picking up the woman’s other arm. She helps the manager pick up the woman, and together they steer her into the break room.

The manager leans the injured woman against her side and reaches over to the staff cubbies. He fiddles with something in his own cubby, and then with a hissing sound, the entire shelving unit sinks into the floor. She watches in awe as it turns into a narrow set of stairs leading down into…something.

She and the manager help the woman down the stairs and it turns out to be some kind of den, some alchemist’s workstation straight from the sixteenth century. There’s a still, there’s a different set of pigeonhole shelves full of…things…that she doesn’t want to think about too hard. There’s a decorative globe of the moon that seems to be lit to the appropriate phase of the lunar cycle. And there’s a chaise lounge that might have come directly from Bohemian Paris circa 1899. It is to this lounge that they manoeuver the woman. She groans as they put her down.

“Would you go get me – yes, you stop looking like you just got cursed – would you get me the yellow bottle from that shelf?” the manager requests.

She looks for the shelf, spies the yellow bottle, and lunges for it. She hands it to the manager who applies the equally yellow substance inside – which seems to be smoking – to the woman’s wound. Before her eyes, the wound turns red instead of purple, and knits itself shut.

“You’re some kind of alchemist?” she demands of her manager while the woman groans.

“Yeah,” he says, mostly ignoring her.

“And all these people who keep asking you for ‘the special’ are looking for potions?” she asks. She can hear her voice getting shrill.

“Yes, and I’d appreciate if you would keep that to yourself,” he says.

“Keep it to myself? What the shit that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard!” she exclaims. The manager eyes her warily. “Can you teach me?”

“Are you asking to be my apprentice?” the manager asks, now looking just a little amused.

There’s no hesitation when she says, “Hell yes.”

The manager sighs, but agrees, and turns back to his – their – patient. The woman is waking up, seeming nonplussed by the hole in her seriously badass leather jacket. At least there’s not a hole in her side anymore.

“You fixed me up, huh?” the woman asks, eyeing the manager. “Knew I could count on you.”

She bounds forward, peering over the manager’s shoulder to better observe this woman. The woman is younger than she thought, her hair a true metallic silver rather than grey. The woman is…kinda cute.

“My…apprentice…helped,” the manager says, acknowledging her with a slight nod.

The woman eyes her, and she’s vain enough to think it might be curiously.

“Well let us hope both you and your apprentice will be around for a long while,” the woman says, and then the woman vanishes, leaving her and the manager alone together in the den. She looks at the manager and beams, and although he just sighs in resignation, she thinks that this is gonna be awesome.