“Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.”

  — Adam Sandler

  One Year Ago

  Earth’s night sky was an endless stretch of stars and swirls of purple and blue. It was the only glimpse of heaven Arz could ever hope to get.

  “What do you think is up there?”

  His daughter’s question whispered in the depths of his mind.

  “Our ancestors, I think,” he had answered. “Living on some other planet.”

  “I want to see other planets,” Alorala had said.

  Arz Kurana walked up a slope, stopping at the top where he could see all of the beautiful city of Bralincote. He had conducted more than enough experiments within the city, which is why he knew that his current attempt could result in the destruction of a hefty chunk of the city, if he messed up. Of course, he wouldn’t mess up. Why would that happen? It would go fine.

  When he had accepted a job as an alchemist for the Guild of Wizards, he had told them one thing.

  “I want to make it incredibly clear that magic isn’t real.”

  They hadn’t taken that well. It had earned him a healthy amount of contempt.

  Five years later, he was about to become their main enemy. Arz raised a hand, waving. A squad of city guards was rushing to him. Perhaps if they weren’t weighed down by armor, they would make it.

  The captain yelled, waved his musket, and even tried to aim the unwieldy weapon, as if any of that would stop Arz.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Arz shouted, making sure his voice carried down the hill to the decorated guards of Bralincote.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he whispered to himself. It was all unprecedented, and when things hadn’t been done before, one just had to wing it a bit.

  Arz had gathered otherworldly ingredients, along with a set of high quality matches. He had crushed space rock and meteorite metal suspended in a bottle of red oil, which he had stolen from the Guild.

  It wasn’t really stealing when he had been the one to originally acquire the red oil from Mount Parikus. Now, with the silverwater he had just harvested from the mountains north of Bralincote, he could, hopefully, see one of those new worlds for the first time.

  For Alorala.

  “Stop!” Higgrion shouted. The captain of the guard ran as fast as he could manage.

  Arz struck a match and let the flames illuminate his grin as he lit the red oil bottle. The ingredients swirled and thrummed. As the bottle began to violently shake, Arz dropped it and poured the fresh silverwater on top. When the sparkling water touched the mixture, a portal ripped through the air in front of him.

  Arz let out a single, haughty laugh before he was pulled off his feet and tossed into the swirling, screaming void.

  Present Day

  Colors moved through the air, billowing as if in a rainbow storm following the flowing form of a jellyfish made of shadows. Never before would Arz have considered himself afraid of a jellyfish. Something so simple and so easily avoidable, but this, as it flew through the air, was entirely different. Arz watched the colors move through the air, colliding and spiraling, like rainbows in a whirlpool. There was plenty of beauty to watch, but Arz couldn't wait around.

  The jellyfish was rushing toward him, which was likely dangerous. Arz watched for as long as he could before turning and continuing to run. His running needed work as he was thoroughly aware, but what he could do was trip over the rocks and fall just in time to avoid the dangerous shadow jellyfish. The trip wasn't intentional, though it was helpful.

  The jellyfish slammed into the ground in front of Arz, giving him time to scramble to his feet and fish through the items in his belt pocket. After only a moment, Arz withdrew a small vial of whirling purple liquid. The jellyfish rose from the ground shaking itself out, letting shadows billow off of it as if it was dripping the darkness itself. A stream of rainbows descended underneath the jellyfish as the shadows dissipated.

  Arz held up the liquid, looking through it while holding it close to his eye. In his other hand he held an orange rock that glowed softly. The rock tingled in his hand, slightly burning his skin. Not enough to truly bother him. A smirk slowly curled Arz’s lips as he lifted the rock into the air. The shadow jellyfish had no eyes with which to look at Arz but if it had, he knew it would be staring straight at him, glaring a hole through his forehead. The jellyfish knew what he was going to do.

  Arz smashed the rock on the ground, throwing a burst of sparks into the air. At the same time he popped the cork off the purple vial and poured the shimmering liquid onto the sparks. The substances interacted and spiraled out of control, ripping a hole right through the air. The portal blocked the shadow jellyfish from Arz and gave Arz an opening to return to the realm from which he came. Arz could have simply walked through the portal and returned home, but instead he waited a moment.

  He waited until he knew the shadow jellyfish could hear him and then he said, “Not this time, lad.”

  It was at that moment he realized that was not the thing to say. There were so many better things, so many more heroic things that could have been said. But it was too late. The jellyfish had heard how uncool Arz was. It was over. It was unrecoverable. Arz stepped through the portal, leaving the shadow jellyfish and the inhospitable world behind to return to the comfort of his somewhat luxurious home.

  Arz took a deep breath as soon as he stepped into the soft, crackling glow of his study. A long green-brown eel swam in a tank nearby, crackling with electricity. It swam to the edge of the tank, practically pushing its face against the glass as it spotted Arz.

  The portal was loud as it whirled behind him, sounding like a distant tornado. It shrunk until it vanished, leaving the study in a peaceful silence.

  Arz took a few steps, shedding dust with each minute movement. He sat himself in a rickety chair beside the eel tank and heaved a sigh.

  “Sal,” Arz said, “that was close.”

  The eel continued staring at him. Arz nodded, as if he was listening to Sal respond.

  “I know, Sal. Reckless.”

  It was the middle of the night back on Earth. That was fine with Arz, as he was usually awake at odd hours. Who needed sunlight?

  His study was high in a tower. It was really a small apartment, but a study made it sound far more suitable for his endeavors. Most of the room was filled with contraptions anyway. There was a single mattress stuffed into a corner with a thin blanket on top. Sleep was a waste of time, and the one thing Arz never felt he had enough of was time.

  He shed off his dusty clothes and dressed in a new blue suede jacket with a bright green tie.

  Sal had returned to swimming around the tank, doing his normal eel things. A series of tubes connected the main tank to small containers that Sal hardly fit in, now that he was fully grown. These containers were placed beneath huge contraptions for mixing and storing different components.

  Arz looked at himself in the mirror and frowned. The colors didn’t seem like quite the right combination, but no matter how many times his wife had explained matching, he still didn’t understand. What went with what? He shrugged and left his small dressing area behind.

  Arz didn’t need to look at himself. It wouldn’t matter if he matched or not. Instead, he walked to a lectern and flipped a massive tome to the next page. It was a blank, crisp sheet of paper.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “Sal,” Arz said without looking at the eel. He filled a pen with ink, careful not to get even a single extra drop on the blank page in front of him. “Do you know what I’ve discovered?”

  The eel swam through one of the tubes until he reached the tank underneath the lectern. The open-topped container filled the whole space of the lectern, being much taller than it was wide. Most of Sal remained in the tube leading back to his main tank.

  “I can sense your overwhelming curiosity.” Arz put the pen to the page and wrote ‘Ebdovo’ in large letters. “This newest discovery was not really worth my time. It was, though, colorful. Can you see colors, Sal?”

  Arz bent down, putting his face near Sal’s, which hovered right at the top of the water. The eel stared back at him.

  “I will assume you can. You would like the colors. Alorala would have liked the colors and the jellyfish, though it wasn’t much different from visiting a zoo. A zoo where you might be hunted, I guess. An odd idea. I hope that doesn’t exist in some realm.” Arz leaned back over his paper and wrote every detail he could about the newest realm, which he had decided to call Ebdovo. Was that its real name? It didn’t matter. There had been nobody there to argue with him. Nobody, except for the shadow jellyfish that seemed fully intent on killing him.

  The problem with such aggressive creatures was the lack of knowledge. Was that the only jellyfish on Ebdovo? Was it even from that realm? There was no way to know, so Arz had to make his best assumptions. Ebdovo was currently marked as ‘Somewhat Dangerous.’ Perhaps he would go back in the future, but for now, he had to mark it off limits since he had no means to protect himself.

  After a short paragraph describing the adventure, Arz wrote the word ‘Recipe’ in the best handwriting he could muster. It was legible, and that was the best he could say about it.

  “You see Sal, without you, this recipe wouldn’t have worked. Should I write that you put me in danger?”

  The eel looked blankly at him, as it always did.

  “Fine, I will say it was bad luck.” Arz leaned to the side, looking around the lectern at a long table in the center of his study. It was big enough to have a council meeting with the Guild of Wizards, but nobody visited Arz. Nobody he wanted to see, at least.

  Random ingredients were spread across the tabletop, sitting in piles or sealed in jars and vials. One jar had only a thin layer of purple paste left in it. Some hardened, crusty remains of paste stuck to the inside of the jar, showing that it had once been full.

  “You can’t be a real alchemist without paste, Sal. I think we’ll need to make a trip back to the Storm Land soon.” Even saying that name shook Arz. He saw the stormy skies of that land every time he slept. His dreams weren’t on Earth anymore.

  Arz finished writing about Ebdovo. Sal followed him as he moved around the study, making his way to an alchemical workshop beside a massive window. The room was cramped because of everything he had fit inside, but the ceilings were high, giving the study a roomy feel.

  The night sky was dark and cloudy without even a single star visible. But below, the city of Bralincote was lit by gas lamps. People traveled through the night, going to jobs or returning home from long days of work. Everyone in Bralincote worked long hours. Everyone but the Guild of Wizards.

  Arz’s study was hundreds of feet above the street below. The other rooms in the fortress were occupied primarily by foreign emissaries and people of great wealth. They never interacted with Arz. Probably because of his smell. He lifted an arm and took a sniff of his own armpit.

  Arz cleared his throat loudly as Sal popped his head out of a small tank nearby. The eel tended to follow Arz all around the study. He was likely just waiting for food, but Arz liked the company.

  “All right, Sal. We need to explore somewhere new. Preferably without a flying jellyfish that wants to eat my skull. I’m not really finding anything helpful so far. What’s a jellyfish need my help with? Nothing, apart from maybe getting some food. But I don’t want to be that food.” Arz grabbed the jar of purple paste. “Can’t have alchemy without paste. That’s what I always say, isn’t it?”

  He looked at Sal, who still decided not to respond.

  “Yeah, it is what I always say.” Arz grabbed a spatula and scooped some paste from the bottom of the jar, scraping the sides to get some of the crusted remains on the edge. He smeared it on a marble tablet on the workstation in front of him. The tank by the alchemy station was higher, so Sal stayed underwater, watching what Arz did on the tabletop.

  The paste smelled of blackberries on the verge of spoiling. It was, of course, not even from Earth and shouldn’t share any properties with blackberries. But perhaps it did. Either way, it was an integral component to his experiment.

  Arz turned back to the long table in the center of his room. An important part of the experimentation process of alchemy was combining things that had previously not been combined. That was becoming difficult without having a chance to collect samples in the new realms he traveled to.

  Arz ground some black pepper onto the purple paste and leaned close. He put a pair of spectacles on that magnified his vision. There was no reaction between the two.

  “Ah. Scrap that idea, Sal. Perhaps with something else. I need to stop trying to use black pepper for anything or I won’t have any for my dinner.”

  Arz grabbed a cinnamon stick. He poked it into the purple paste and immediately a thin wisp of smoke drifted into the air. The cinnamon stick was blackened, burnt on the very end.

  Arz poked his own finger into the paste. It wasn’t the first time he had touched it, but he wanted to make sure it wasn’t hot. When it felt normal, he looked closer at the cinnamon. No further burning occurred once the connection to the paste was severed.

  “This is an opportunity, Sal.” Arz smiled at the eel and grabbed a knife that was stuck in a block to the side of the work station. He chopped the cinnamon into chunks, then used the edge of the blade to smash them into even smaller chunks.

  Arz dumped all of the cinnamon onto the smear of purple paste. Smoke immediately billowed out as the cinnamon burned and blackened, curling into even smaller pieces. The air smelled both sweet and bitter as the smoke wafted over his face.

  “You know, I had a recipe partially prepared before.” Arz looked behind him, where he had emerged not long before. “I guess it was incomplete. That moonstone ore didn’t react quite the way it was intended.”

  A solid knock at the door almost made Arz drop the knife on his own bare feet. Instead, he gripped the knife tighter.

  “Come in,” he shouted.

  The door creaked open slowly. An older man with heavy shadows under his eyes walked into the room. His cheeks sagged, almost like jowls on a dog. The guard captain looked more tired every time Arz saw him.

  “Higgrion, you look exhausted,” Arz said. He put the knife back in the block, regretting it as soon as he realized he hadn’t cleaned it. Now the whole block would need to be cleaned.

  There was nothing Arz hated more than cleaning. He corrected the thought in his head. There were only two things he hated more than cleaning.

  Higgrion sighed heavily. “Arz Kurana, you are under arrest for disobeying the laws set forth by the Guild of Wizards.”

  “Oh, that can’t be right.” Arz grabbed a chunk of stone that looked like a little shining star. The white crystal was bright and grabbed Higgrion’s eye.

  “What is that, Arz?”

  “What is what?” While still looking at the guard captain, Arz set the moonstone ore on the workstation and grabbed a small metal hammer.

  “Arz,” Higgrion said, watching Arz’s hand instead of his eyes.

  Arz grinned and smashed the stone. Bits of moonstone flew all around, but enough of the dust stayed on the workstation. Arz quickly dropped the hammer on the ground, letting it land heavily on the wooden floor. He hated the idea of leaving a hammer-shaped dent in the wood, but he had to act quickly if he wanted to keep away from the guard and the Guild.

  Arz pulled a leather glove over one hand and shoved the dust into his palm. He dropped it on top of the mixture and rolled the purple paste, shining moonstone ore, black pepper, and cinnamon mixture together. It formed a little purple log that continued spewing smoke.

  “Arz, how many times have we done this?” Higgrion took a few steps forward, adjusting his grip on his musket as if he was inspecting it.

  “Uh.” Arz looked back at his tome. “I know I wrote it down.”

  Higgrion held a musket that was already loaded and ready to fire. The barrel pointed to the high ceilings of Arz’s study, so Arz wasn’t worried about the guard firing on him. At least, not yet.

  Sal swam through the tubes until he arrived closest to the door. Higgrion spared a moment to watch the eel, then turned his attention back to Arz. “Can we get this over with?”

  “Who sent you this time?”

  “Jaralath.” Higgrion let the musket fall into a more comfortable position in his hands. The barrel pointed at the ground. Arz kept looking at it. He had had enough bad run-ins with less experienced guards who scared themselves with misfires.

  Arz casually lifted the log of ingredients and sniffed. It smelled rancid even with the smell of cinnamon. “Jaralath has to grow bored of this at some point, right?” He took a long step over to the ingredients table.

  “I doubt it, Arz. Your bounty will only go up if you run again. Just come with me.”

  Arz stared right at Higgrion as he reached across the table and grabbed two small vials of shimmering purple liquid. He slid them into his suede jacket pocket, then grabbed another vile of brown-orange dust.

  “Arz,” Higgrion said, bringing the gun up. “Stop. Don’t do this again. I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Jaralath and the Guild of Wizards can call themselves whatever they want. You do realize there is no such thing as magic. Does magic exist?”

  Higgrion aimed the musket at Arz. “Don’t.”

  “You know it doesn’t,” Arz said as he took a step back to his work station. “It was a rhetorical question, so thank you for not answering. See, alchemy isn’t all that difficult. It is mostly an experiment. But even those “Wizards” as you call them can’t complete the most basic alchemical formula. Meanwhile, I just found another recipe to open a portal.”

  “Arz,” Higgrion said more seriously. His eyes seemed to focus and his face hardened as he took aim with the musket.

  “You see, it was shining moonstone ore that I needed. Although, regular moonstone ore still did take me somewhere. Just, uh, jellyfish aren’t my thing.”

  Sal swam back through the tubes, ending up at the open-topped container beside the workstation.

  Behind his back, Arz popped the cap off the vial filled with orange-brown dust. The storm dust was valuable, but necessary. He reached out and poured the entire vial onto the purple paste. The smoke drifting off screamed.

  “Sal,” Arz said. “Go ahead.”

  The eel stuck his head out and shocked the smoke. The screaming grew even louder as it ripped a hole through the air.

  “Bye, Higgrion,” Arz said as he stepped through the portal.

  “Dammit, Arz. Stop running!”

  The guard’s voice drifted away as the portal closed behind him, leaving Arz in a new, unfamiliar realm.