Alchemical Magic

Chapter 5-1

5

After I left the class, I suddenly found myself with four hours of unclaimed time. And I would spend it on myself. Something nice to do for me.

I couldn't go see Jack, since he was still at work, and being at the police waiting room is not my idea of fun. But I could dedicate this time to my first, most important love: alchemy.

All my troubles started last year, when I was looking for an internship, and wasn't finding anything despite my great resume. Discrimination against dark arall, pure and simple.

I had to take a government job in a government alchemical research facility. But for secrecy reasons, it was officially just a collaboration about my minor thesis.

I finished my minor thesis, wrote about alchemy in different legal systems (with Grandpa as my supervisor), and presented it at the end of the fourth year. Even the chapter about alchemy and dark magic, used by a technologically superior civilization, was declassified and presented to the interested public (just a bunch of eggheads from the yard) in an effort to convince those who murdered my boss and almost killed me to stop.

What it achieved was to provoke them into action, and their Ashford network got arrested. I heard it made some waves in the academic community, although it hasn't made the news yet (who cares what a bunch of eggheads get excited about?).

The Ashford cell of the Society of Learning (the name of the Inquisition before it was officially formed) was dismantled, although the Major still complained that they weren't able to find anybody at the top of the organizations.

Whatever. I'll deal with them later. Right now, I have too many things on my plate to care for.

Like how to carve out more time to dedicate to alchemy. Whenever I tried to go to the lab to tinker with my project, Grandpa pointed out that my project was finished, all but submitted. Prof. Fran, my alchemy supervisor, knew Grandpa and told him that. That traitor.

The two geezers seemed to think alchemy was but a quaint hobby of an eccentric lady and that what I should really do is magic. So they stuffed every free second of the day with more classes of magic, more books I had to read, reports I had to write, on a subject that didn't interest me at all.

I had to figure out how to carve out time for alchemy without telling them to go to hell.

That would be too risky. But tempting.