Naya could remember a time when everything was full of colour and she was very small. She would sit on a stool and watch as her father mixed together liquids of different colours. He always tried to explain what each ingredient was and how it would effect the final potion he was working towards. Her childish brain didn’t understand most of the words he said, but still she listened. She could tell that it was all very interesting.

  The table would be covered in many different vials full of liquids of all different colours. She thought they were pretty. There were also several devices that he would use to transfer the liquids into a much larger bottle or to carefully combine the liquids from multiple bottles through a careful arrangement of glass tubes. Whenever he opened one of the small bottles she would get a whiff of whatever was inside. She could vaguely remember the smells now. There were smells of flowers and trees, rotting leaves, mildew, baking bread, rain. She would smell everything and then she would react accordingly to how her young nose took it. Some were gross and some were sweet and she would never know which it would be until the topper of the bottle was removed.

  “This one is a mixture of mugwort and lake magic.” He had explained to her once while holding a bottle that held a softly glowing purple liquid within. “I had to go all the way to the coast of Crest Lake to combine them.”

  Her eyes widened. “Can’t you just pick it up and carry it over here?” She didn’t know exactly how far the lake was at the time, but her mother had taken her there sometime before that and it felt like the trip had taken forever within the magic powered carriage. She couldn’t imagine anyone going all that way just to mix it with some mushrooms.

  “Unfortunately not.” He shook his head, chuckling to himself. “Well technically you can, you just need to infuse the magic into something, that means you have to put the magic into something else. Now the problem is that once you put magic into something it becomes a lot harder to pull it back out and when you do it’s been changed too much by the material it was put in. That’s why I need to infuse it into an ingredient for potions, that way the magic stays the same during the entire process and it will be useful when I’m done with it.”

  This description was a bit too complicated for her young brain to handle. Naya tried very hard to understand it, but it was not to be. Her father had used way too many big words and all her attempts to think around them brought a frown to her face.

  He smiled softly. “When you take a bath are you different when you go in than when you come out?”

  She nodded. “I go from being dirty to being clean.”

  “Magic is the same way, but also a little different. When you put magic into an object, the stuff it’s made of influences that magic. It changes that magic. Depending on what you want to use that magic for you could say it either makes the magic dirty or it makes it clean. Because everything you put the magic into is going to change it, if you want magic that’s closer to its original type you need to put it in as few objects as possible. I also wanted to make sure it was done right so I did it myself. Other potion makers will hire people to do the early steps.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She looked amazed. Magic was really an amazing thing. She would have likely followed in her fathers footsteps had she been able to. She would have gone to some school and studied the different types of magic and how different materials influenced those types of magic. She would have learned about how to make magical devices of all sorts. She wondered if she would have gone into potion making like her father, or found her own passion to follow. It was so magical to think about it in hindsight.

  Of course now there was nothing magical here aside from her memories. The crisis happened about thirty years before and now she was scrounging around an old potions lab just like the one her father worked in within their house. This one was a bit bigger than his had been with a few different desks arranged around the edges. Somehow it also felt bigger to her and she thought back to those happy childhood memories.

  Naya hurried. There was a feeling of melancholy growing within her from the memory. She didn’t know if she was going to cry, but she needed to get to work before it got much worse. She didn’t want her tears to ruin anything that she could collect to be sold.

  Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. It was unclear if anyone had entered this place since the crisis, but if she had to guess she would say a few people had entered but not for over a decade. There were a couple of bookshelves in this room and they had long since been emptied. Now all she was left with was everything that would have been useless to take. All of the vials and bottles and alembics and tubing. Everything that would have been used in the process of potion crafting. The books were gone because they would have either worked as tinder or as a representation of how things used to be. It was good that they were gone. They would have rotted away. Those shelves looked moldy where she brushed away some of the dust on one of them with a gloved hand. She was glad she was wearing the classic device collector face mask to protect herself.

  Her attention turned to the glassware. A lot of potion making tools and ingredient vials were too small or too weirdly shaped for people to find much use from shortly after the crisis happened. They were too small to carry water with and with no magic they had no other use. They had mostly been abandoned where they lay, though there were old labs like this one where a lot of the glass had been smashed either on purpose out of frustration or by accident. She had seen many floors covered in glass.

  She was lucky she had found a place so untouched. It had been sealed behind a wall in the cellar of a house that was set to be demolished soon. As she entered she saw all of the glass vials which now mostly held brown liquids of various shades. She remembered, but she also saw coins. She would get so much money if she could get this set out safely. Some she could sell to people who wanted to display it in a museum somewhere. She could sell it to someone who was trying to learn more of the world without magic. There were people out there who were using tools just like these for experiments. If she was really desperate she could even sell it to someone who could reshape the glass with fire. They had yet to figure out how to make glass without the use of a magical device so it was valuable.

  Naya left the lab and grabbed her two large cases. She opened them up, revealing two large pads in each which would fit snugly around whatever object she placed inside. One by one she placed the vials and instruments inside. She would have poured the liquids out, but she decided that she would be better off doing this outside in the fresh air. She would take them home with her to prepare for sale.

  Once she was done packing up the set she left the lab behind and hurried out of the building. It was time to make some money.