Chapter 51.2: Mixing cont.

Prytaneum

Mixing​

Welf raised an eyebrow.

"That many?" He asked.

"Yeah," I said. "And all kinds, too. I've seen so many that I'm honestly not sure where to begin. Pandora's jar-box? The Golden Fleece? I had a friend who had a shield that was made to look so horrifying, people would run screaming from it. I was once given a container that held the four winds, had to steal back a sword that could remove souls, and nearly got killed because someone else stole some important stuff. Uh…I never wore them, but I've seen some flying shoes, and I wore a lion skin that everything just bounced off of, and I ate some multivitamins that saved me after I got turned into a animal by an evil witch."

"…What?" Welf asked, looking bemused, but I was on a roll now.

"Mrs. O'Leary's previous owner, Daedalus, gave me fake wings that let me fly," I said. "And he turned himself into a robot or something. He made lots of robots, honestly; when the city got attacked, we activated them and what seemed like half the statues in the city came alive. And—"

"I get it," Welf said, raising a hand to stop me. "You've seen a lot—enough that we're kind of back to this being unhelpful. Why don't we narrow things down a bit more? Did your father have anything?"

"My dad had a trident that could cause earthquakes if it struck the land," I said, grimacing slightly. "And tidal waves if it struck the sea. And turn things into fish or melt them with a blast or who knows what else. I don't think I could ever make something like that, though, and even if I could, I'd be worried as hell about it. Can you imagine? I stumble once—zap, you're a puddle. I accidently drop it? The whole city comes tumbling down."

"Maybe start with something less horrifically destructive?" Welf suggested, shaking his head. "But damn, Percy. Your dad sounds like a pretty big deal."

I nodded and looked down at my hands. I would say nothing came to mind, but I could definitely say I had about zero confidence in myself when it came to arts and crafts. Sure, I'd managed the Undine Silk alright, but I'd basically cheated and let it do all the work, while Nectar seemed more like a lucky break—I'd opened a fridge, grabbed all the taste stuff I could find, and mixed what seemed to fit. I didn't really have a recipe in my head, much less a list of instructions; I'd just thought that certain things seemed to go well together. Now that I wasn't sure what to make, though, nothing was coming to mind. It was probably my ADHD acting up, but nothing really caught my focus the way they seemed to for Welf and I had no idea where to even start, so what ideas I did have seemed empty. Sure, having a set of Chameleon Armor might be nice, but how was I supposed to make something like that? And something like the Golden Fleece or the Nemean Lion's Pelt might come in handy, but I didn't see any magical lions and rams waiting for me to do something.

Saying 'I'll make a hat that turns people invisible' or 'I'll make bronze wings that can fly' or something like that was all well and good, but where do you begin with something like that?

"We're going about this the wrong way," Welf declared after a long minute of silence. "We're trying to start with ideas, when neither of us has any idea what will work and what won't. We should start from the other end."

Saying that, Welf walked over to what looked like closets, set into the back wall. Opening them, he revealed wide shelves, stretching from the top to the bottom to make seven rows set deep into the wall. At the bottom were various metals, some of which I recognized—iron, steel, silver, and so on. Others, I couldn't determine at a glance. They were crammed into the bottom row in everything from blocks to bars, though there were signs that stuff had been taken from several. Above them, the other rows where filled with an assortment of items, many of them drops we'd collected the rest must have been things Welf had bought, because I didn't recognize any of the creatures they belonged to. Those rows were much less packed, but they held a far greater variety.

After that, Welf opened a short but wide box that ran underneath one of his work benches, opening it briefly to show me what was inside—more monster parts, mainly, but the types that might spoil.

"Sometimes, it's less about what you want to make and more about what you can make," He said. "About seeing the pieces and making them fit. It might narrow down your options, thinking about things that way, but if all you have are three colors to paint with, it might give you a better idea of what to try. Sometimes, I stand in front of these and look around until I get inspiration. Maybe it'll help."

I pursed my lips once and nodded firmly, standing up and walking over to the shelves, looking them over. I focused first on the things I didn't recognize, hoping I might draw something from the weird assortment of monster parts. Instead, I just still didn't recognize them, so I turned towards what I knew. War Shadow Claws, Killer Ant Mandibles or Carapace, Needle Rabbit Horns, Orc Hides, Hard Armored Shells, Silverback Skin, Hellhound Fangs, Minotaur Horns, and Lygerfang Fur…I was pretty damn familiar with all of them, having slain so many of them, and I remembered the fights that led us to them.

"Hm," I mused, frowning as I looked between the materials and the metals down below.

"You think of something?" Welf asked.

"Maybe," I said with a frown. "But I'm not sure if I can make it. It's like…the pieces don't quite fit or something, like I'm missing something. And I mean, nobody made the original, it was just a thing."

"You made Nectar, didn't you?" He asked and I conceded that with a nod, hand rising to my hip. Beside the batch I'd given Miach, I kept everything I had on me, because it was too dangerous to just leave around. "And you said you made that 'Greek Fire' stuff or whatever, right? Why don't you give it a try; you might surprise yourself—and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. You think my first sword was worth a damn?"

I exhaled slowly and nodded. Like I told Welf, we could always just get more of this stuff later if I screwed up and it's not like what I was thinking of doing would make it explode. It definitely, probably, maybe, hopefully wouldn't make it explode.

"Okay," I said, before taking the Lygerfang Fur down from the shelf. The Lygerfangs had been a tiger-like monster we'd encountered on the seventeenth; not as strong as the Minotaur, but far faster and more agile, and with a pretty ferocious bite. It wasn't exactly like the picture in my head, but it was as close as I could get, so I put it on the work bench and then took two of the bottles of Nectar I'd brought with me. Setting one aside, I uncorked the other and tipped it slightly, drizzling a thin stream onto the skin. I moved the bottle back and forth, trying to cover as much of the skin as I could before I ran out, and then moving onto the other. Once I was done with that, I rubbed the fur with my hands, trying to spread the golden Nectar over as much of the fur as possible, trying to soak it.

But then I stopped, because it was missing something. The next step wouldn't work with just this.

"This was easier with water," I said with a scowl. "I didn't have to think about anything, it just worked. Making Undine Silk was so easy, I didn't even have to think about it."

"Maybe because of your connection to water?" Welf suggested. "It was basically in your blood. But…I don't know if it'll help, but maybe thinking of it like how I said—like you're giving skills to what you're making, like you're making a Falna. For me, each strike of my hammer had meaning, until I was somewhere between making a sword and saying a prayer."

I tilted my head, something in that sticking. Water was in my blood, of course; I knew that already. But the other thing, about it being like making a Falna…

Silently, I drew Riptide and extended it into a blade before carefully sliding the index and middle finger of my right hand along the edge, cutting my fingers slightly before pressing them to the Nectar-soaked fur. When my fingers connected, the monster skin seemed to hum, as if it had suddenly developed a heartbeat, and the Nectar on it seemed to sizzle and glow, burning painfully against my fingers. My blood began to pop and hiss as it touched the cloth, first blackening and then giving way to hints of gold. Touching the hide directly like this, I had an idea of a half-seen image, like a room viewed through thin cloth.

The hide felt dead. If there was anything to draw out of it, I couldn't feel it—and I doubted I could do the whole Falna thing anyway, when my blood was only half-ichor. The Nectar was…well, literally burning out the mortal parts in my blood, leaving behind traces of ichor that I could feel, but I if there was anything waiting to be written, I couldn't feel it. So instead, I just used it as an ink, tracing patterns in the wet hide with my fingers. It was almost like I was writing something, but it wasn't anything in Greek or English; wasn't anything at all, just nonsense. If it had any meaning, it was only in what I thought it should have, and my own ideas were vague.

But this was enough and after I finished, I dipped my fingers in the water bucket Welf kept nearby, wiggling them around for a moment as the cuts quickly closed. What I was left with was nothing but a bunch of icky, wet fur, covered in gold and black stains.

"Can I borrow your forge, Welf?" I asked my friend, who was watching my work intently, even though he seemed confused by it. He stepped aside and fiddled with something, making the flames of his forge rise, and I promptly chucked the fur into the center of the flames.

"…A no-go, huh?" Welf asked, scratching his chin.

"We'll see," I said, watching the flames. Welf glanced away from the forge to look at me before doing a double take and squinting into them, seeing the truth—the fur wasn't burning in the flames, but something like golden steam was rising from it slowly. Too slowly. "Can you make it hotter?"

Welf frowned but nodded, reaching around to activate the Inferno Stone he used to melt special things, causing the flames to roar higher, the fur still at their center. The gold steam began to rise faster and it seemed to shake, as if something within it was boiling, but whatever a part of me was expecting, it wasn't happening.

I took a deep breath and sighed.

"You mind if I try something?" I asked Welf as I took my shield of my back and strapped it to my arm, where the symbols of Thetis began to form. "If anything goes wrong, I'll pay for it."

"What are you going to do?" He asked, brows furrowing before rising in surprise as I lifted another vial. "Is that…that Greek Fire stuff you mentioned before? Didn't you say that was dangerous?"

"Yeah. Honestly, I'll be glad not to be carrying it around for a while," I said. "Remind me not to make the next batch until we're ready to go into the Dungeon."

Welf grimaced but then sighed.

"Well…whatever," He said, raking a hand through his hair. "Worst case scenario, I have to rebuild the forge. I'll just make you create magic stuff until I can afford it."

I nodded and then tossed the vial into the flames.

Remember what I thought about it definitely, probably, maybe, hopefully not exploding? Yeah, this was why. The green flames exploded into a bonfire in the center of Welf's forge, spreading through the rest of the flames to surround the fur and roaring so high, they nearly touched the ceiling which would have been, you know, bad-ish. Not impossible to manage—I'd dealt with my fair share of Greek Fire outbreaks—but a huge pain. Instead of setting fire to the whole thing, though, the flames calmed when I held out my hand, the golden-stained tiger hide shining with my ichor and consuming the flames even as they consumed it.

Now that I thought about it, I sort of remembered a myth about someone who'd been anointed in Nectar and then burned to become immortal or something. This was sort of like that. The Nectar and my blood was protecting it from the flames, but the Greek Fire burned away at it anyway, searing away anything that couldn't last even as it was absorbed.

"…I think you left out some details when you described Greek Fire, Percy!" Welf said, looking at the swirling, almost liquid flames that not filled the center of his forge. Wearing Undine Silk, both of us were sheltered from the heat, but several metal items Welf had left near the forge had already melted, the flames were so hot.

"Don't worry about it," I said through grit teeth, calling the water in my blood to swallow the magical flames. The Lygerfang fur slowly turned black, before cracks began to appear, like an outer shell was breaking and chipping away. I kept my hand extended as the process continued, watching pieces fall away to reveal the red-gold of the animal hide beneath, now devoid of any fur. It looked almost like tanned leather, in fact—and when it was completely revealed, the flames around it abruptly died, vanishing entirely just for lines of green in the shapes of the symbols I'd written that soon faded away.

Then, there was just us and an odd hide in the center of a now dark forge.

"I think I'm getting the hang of this," I decided, dropping my hand and breathing heavily. Thetis was still shining on the surface of my shield, ready to defend us if anything happened, but it seemed the vague idea I'd had in mind had actually worked. "Dunno what I was so worried about. That was hardly catastrophic at all."

Welf sighed slowly.

"Maybe I should have thought about this partner thing a bit more carefully," He murmured. I noticed that he had the blue magic sword clutched in one of his hands, as well. "When I said it was okay to blow up my forge, I didn't mean it, you know."

"Fires no joke, Welf," I said. "Only you can…I don't remember the rest of that, so I'll stop."

"What is it?" He asked, ignoring my bad attempt at PSA humor and stepping around to look at the hide warily.

"It's…not really a Nemean Lion Pelt, but not sure what else to call it," I said. "It's what I had in mind, sort of, but it's not the same thing?"

"Are you asking me?" Welf asked after looking around. "I don't even know what a Nemean Lion is, much less what this is supposed to do."

I walked over to the pelt and picked it up, feeling its warmth against my fingers.

"It's sort of like Undine Silk," I said after a moment. "Kind of. The original was pretty much everything-proof, but this thing…it's not any harder or any tougher, per se, but I think it's got the same sort of protection as Undine Silk does. Except, instead of water, its stuff like blades. Protection against being cut up, I suppose. It won't stop anyone from punching you or something, but I think it'll work on swords and claws and stuff."

"I've never heard of such a thing," Welf said, blinking as he took to offered pelt. He looked it over before folding it and bending it, before taking a nearby knife off a rack and running the blade along it. "It certainly doesn't feel any different. But I can't cut it."

"It doesn't cut easily," I corrected. "I don't think I can make something that can't be cut, period. Especially not with Lygerfang Fur. I might be able to do something more if I had something better to work with or a higher rank in Mystery or…something. But right now, it's just—"

"It's great," Welf said, speaking over me excitedly. "Light weight, strong, protective—and small enough to wear armor over. I could add it to just about anything, as an extra layer of protection, and it could work especially well to cover joints and parts that need to be less armored, without need to make heavy armor. And this…Nemean Lion Pelt—"

"No lions were actually hurt in the making of it, so…I guess I'll just call it a Nemean Pelt?" I said.

"Nemean Pelt," He corrected. "No one else has made something like this that I know of. I don't think most people can give a spirit's blessing, even with Mystery, and this…I don't even know what this is supposed to be. But I bet it's worth a lot of money—and I can definitely make something from it."

"Really?" I asked.

"Really," He said. "Things like Salamander Wool and Undine Silk are valuable against the right opponents, but way more monsters try to cut people apart than burn them alive. If this protects against that, even if the cloth itself is no stronger, it'll sell in a heartbeat."

"Cool," I said. "Because…I think I have a few other ideas, too."