“Very well. This has been shorter than I intended, but if the hearing is the crux of your abilities then I think I may have a more practical course of action than conversation. Particularly if my theory is correct.” Brookstone nodded, more to himself, and continued, “I will be in contact with you. You may leave.”

Bird nodded and left, giving only enough courtesy that his exit was unremarkable. It wasn’t until he was alone in the elevator that Bird let his face fall into a snarl. A lot of effort went into fixing it before he got to the next floor.

***

“Sounds like a bit of a prick.” Clyde offered a raised glass in condolence, drinking with Bird at that.

“You really shouldn’t be speaking ill of the Assembly.” Grace chastised, though she had taken a drink as well.

“I don’t intend to make a habit of it.” Bird was almost more frustrated that he hadn’t been able to explain it to the three of them; his story about the meeting with Brookstone had been altered slightly to explain his frustration afterwards. He had spun it to be more related to a general aura of dickishness than racism. Which, to be fair, had been a contributing factor.

“You really shouldn’t; they’re not all bad.” Bead patted him lightly on the shoulder, trying to offer an optimistic smile. “I meet with Researcher Vestalta from time to time; she’s a nice woman.”

“I think it depends on who anyone’s talking to.” Bird kicked himself, shaking his head, “No, you’re right. I shouldn’t let one person paint everyone else.”

“There you go!” Clyde cheer, taking another drink like he had toasted again. “Gotta go day by day or you go through yer life without really lookin’ at folks. You’d probably miss a lot.”

Bird failed to hold in the laugh. It forced a smile to his lips as it snickered out.

“Gods, you sound like…” He steered away from saying Mono before the name slipped out. People in Goldwind didn’t have names like that and he didn’t want to stretch the story more than he had to. Everything had been more of an omission than a lie so far, and he liked it that way. “Ah, doesn’t matter. You’re right though, cheers.”

Bird tapped his glass to Clyde’s, watching the man down another portion of his tankard. He couldn’t help but match the pace, though he was a little perturbed by how little it would affect him. Either the resilience Weirds had to some potions translated to alcohol, or the drinks up here were weak and no one had any tolerance.

He heard a chastising sigh from his left as Grace watched the display, shuffling a bit of her hair behind her ear.

“Should you two really be drinking that fast? Didn’t you say you had to finish that golem by the morning Clyde?” Bird smirked at the ginger as he paled, the spectre of responsibility clearly dawning upon him. The grin faltered when Grace turned to him. “And you, aren’t you due for other lectures today?”

“Just one, not for another couple of hours.” Bird muttered into his glass. He didn’t know how to articulate his tolerance for Goldwind’s alcohol without raising questions, but he doubted the response sounded concerned. “As long as my notes are legible, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

“The legible part is the trick.” Bead laughed, turning to reach into the bag slung across the back of her chair.

“I… ah hell, I should go get to work.” Clyde resigned himself to the task, eyeing the bottom half of his glass with longing.

“Just do it. Life is short.” Bird offered it with a smile, and Clyde shot him a smile with a finger gun. He downed the glass as Grace choked out a noise of protest. Bird felt like an agent of chaos as Clyde slammed the tankard down and maintained taunting eye contact with Grace as he backed out of the Tavern.

“I am going to stab that man one day, right after he stabs himself.” Grace groaned, throwing a glare to Bird for encouraging him. She turned to Bead. “Why are we friends with him again?”

“Clyde?” Bead’s answer came without a lot of attention as she continued to fish for something in her bag. “I think it’s because you were failing golemancy classes and found out you could bribe Clyde for his expertise with alcohol. Then we found out he’s fun to drink with.”

“Thank you for the most academic answer I’ve ever heard.” Grace slumped in her chair, rubbing her temples.

“Either that or you like the challenge; he’s the only man you’ve ever flirted with that’s too dense to realize you were doing it.”

Bird watched Grace’s cheeks doing their best impression of her hair. She shot half a glance at Bird to check his reaction before turning her full attention to Bead and cuffing her on the shoulder.

“Could you not say that?” She spoke quietly, likely only loud enough for Bead to hear her. Bird didn’t have the heart to elucidate how sensitive his hearing was, and let the chastising continue.

“Sorry, sorry.” Bead’s repentant expression lasted for only a moment before her face lit up. She pulled her prize from the bag, setting a beaten and worn journal on the table. “Here we go, the sacred texts of illegible notes.”

“I’m sorry, what?” That had Bird’s attention for curiosity’s sake if nothing else. He turned to face Bead a bit more fully as she scooted her chair closer and opened her book. “I’m sorry, what?”

He had to repeat the line out of reflex when he realized he couldn’t even begin to process what was on the page. It was formulas, maybe? Bead started to flip through the pages, brushing off his confusion until she found whatever eldritch page she was looking for.

“Here we go.” she said triumphantly, pointing at a page that somehow managed to confuse Bird even more than the others. “This is why you don’t try to drink and do chemistry. You will not understand your notations the next day and you will skip writing steps.”

It was line and lines of something, Bird was sure of it. He just wasn’t so sure if it was supposed to be alchemy or some kind of abstract art.

The other pages had been gibberish to him and alien at best, but it had been legible enough for him to see letters, numbers, and consistent symbols. This page looked like something that would undo reality if read backwards, provided you knew whatever eldritch script it was written in.

“Gods, Bead I have no idea what any of this is.” Bird sipped at his drink, staring into the abyss of the page and trying desperately to understand. Chemistry wasn’t his strong suit by any stretch, but this was insane.

“Don’t worry, I don’t know what half this page is either. I mean, I see a reference to blending of an incense with peacepetal and onycha, which is fine but I notated it in parts that clearly differ in size between this section and this one.” Bird watched her point out parts of the page like they made clear sense.

“No, Bead, I mean I don’t understand any of this.” Bird took the book to a random page that was more legible and gesture wildly to the page. “What the hell is this?”

“What? You mean the formulas?” Bead blinked a few times, a little surprised by the question. “Have you done much chemistry? Potion brewing, incense crafting? Anything?”

“I tried a few times, but it didn’t look anything like this.” Bird knew his problem with this field of alchemy was keeping the properties of reagents straight, or at least that’s what he had thought. Looking at these formulas made him a little uncertain of if that was the actual issue or if he was just doing it outright wrong before.

“Oh, well here.” Bead produced a pen from her robes, flipping to a page that had enough space in the margins to write. She put the pen to paper and wrote half a character before she froze for a second. “Sorry, I don’t mean to- I mean, this will get covered in some of your lectures if you want to wait for a real teacher.”

“No, no this is fine.” Bird moved a bit closer to see what she was going to write. If the page was anything to go off, Bead was clearly confident with alchemy like this. “I think you know what you’re doing here.”

He missed the color that came to Bead’s cheeks as he finished that thought. She wasn’t great with compliments, but it was still nice to hear.

“I’ll leave you two to it. Spellwork is my area of preference; this is boring to a fault for me.” Grace tapped the table as she stood, taking her glass and surveying the room. Apparently she found something of interest, because after a moment her eyes locked onto someone and she made a beeline that way with a wave.

“Don’t mind her, it’s really not that bad.” Bead assured him. Bird just shrugged it off, used to more flippant exits in Lowmyre.

“Don’t worry, you’ve got my full attention.” He laughed after that, turning his attention back to the book, “Maybe you can make this make sense for me. Careful though, I’m a talented idiot.”

There was a soft laugh under her breath that Bird doubted anyone else heard over the din of the Tavern. She leaned forward and started to point to different parts of the formula she had chosen, starting in the middle for some reason.

As she went on, Bird realized why. The sections between chunks of the formula dictated how different ingredients and reagents were supposed to be treated or combined, and contained instructions for exactly how to do that. A lot of it was Bead’s own shorthand, which took some explaining. Bird wrote his notes specifically for others to be able to understand, but Bead had clearly written this for her own use. He commended her for the methodology though; if she had written out every note and process fully, this book would have been nearly five times the length.

Going through the initial parts of the formula led Bead to realize that Bird needed a more bare-bones explanation. The process and structure needed to be laid out before she started going through an actual example. She picked out a simple incense recipe that she knew, something used to heighten focus and alertness like a cup of tea or coffee.

“So, the process that I use is a listing of the ingredients in the order they appear in the recipe with notes on amount and if that amount needs to be separated for any reason. By the end, I make a quick ledger for the total amount of each reagent organized from greatest to least. It’s extra work, but it means I can have two sets of information if I need it.” She spoke with some pride, clearly a fan of her own methodology. “It’s not always the most efficient, but one of the greatest tricks for chemistry is making sure that you write the notes and formulas in ways that you understand.”

Bird was enthralled as she went on. Lowmyre’s chemistry didn’t have things laid out like this; most of it was just specific recipes made through trial and error. He could see the root connection between that and Bead’s notes, but if you didn’t know where to look it would have looked like two completely unrelated disciplines.

Listening to Bead explain this actually made sense. Bird hadn’t expected to learn much based on how chemistry had eluded him before, but this was actually clicking. He didn’t have a good frame of reference for her skill level, but the explanation made sense and Bead was clearly passionate about her craft. There were still points where the topics rocketed out of Bird’s grasp, and in the interim it was fun to just listen to Bead ramble on a particularly complex formula.

By the end, Bead had gone through several of her formulas for incense, potions, and even a few minor cosmetics that she made for local shops. There was still a lot in the details that was beyond him, but it was the best explanation of basic chemical processes that he had ever gotten.

“I didn’t mean to just keep rambling like that, sorry.” Bead closed the book a bit sheepishly. She raised her cup and vocalized a bit of sadness at how little was left; her throat was dry after all of that.

“Don’t worry about it.” Bird waved it off. He leaned back to stretch and try to crack his neck after being hunched over reading for so long. His back was happy to sound out a few satisfying pops, but his neck just wouldn’t quite crack. That was going to bother him for a while, no doubt. “I’m not saying I’ll be able to go out and just brew stuff now, but I can definitely say that was more coherent than anything I’ve tried to read on my own.”

“I’m sure you would have gotten there eventually. It’s not that hard once you have the basics.”

“But I assure you that it’s very hard when you can’t grasp the basics. The, uh, books I was reading must have been really old.” Bird eyed his cup, guessing there probably wasn’t much in his either. “Either way, this was a lot closer to practical experience than I’ve been since I got here. Which is a welcome switch, trust me.”

“I know it’s cold comfort in the early days, but the boring lectures thin out once you stop being in that early apprentice-ish sphere of membership. It’s good to know the basics but practically speaking I don’t think much of it gets used.” Bead laughed as Bird groaned and palmed his forehead as a realization dawned on him, jostling his headband as he dragged the hand back. “Don’t worry, some of it turns out to be helpful in strange ways.”

“No, the lecture part. What time is it?” Bird dreaded looking at the clock on the wall. Lowmyre ran on a pretty loose timetable compared to Goldwind, but the Academy had a strange way of being persnickety about time. Clocks were everywhere, and tasks seemed scheduled into blocks throughout the day. Great for planning, not so great for freeform people like Bird.

“Oh shit!” Bead whirled to the clock and winced when she saw it. Bird was almost surprised to hear her curse, and even Bead seemed a bit flustered that it came out. “Gods, I am so sorry; I didn’t know it was taking that long. Is your lecture…?”

“Probably over by now. How much trouble do you think I’m in?” He hadn’t missed any lectures yet. The fleeting moment of liberation from his schedule was over quickly, overpowered by a crushing concern about consequence.

“Depends on the lecturer.” Bead hid her face. She knew she could ramble, but for the conversation about her notes to have lasted several hours was embarrassing.

Bird made a face, not thrilled with the uncertainty of the answer. Professor Vedda had been relatively encouraging when it came to his questions, but he didn’t like the thought of falling out of her good graces because of his absence. Too many people had seen him in the morning for a story of illness to be viable.

“Well, can’t do much now.” Bird tossed back the last few drops of his drink, more for punctuation than the ale itself.

“I feel terrible. You were saying the other day you hadn’t missed any lectures yet.”