"Ah, no. He helped with the shipping stuff, but I'm the guy whose been trying to turn alchemy into an actual science."
"Ah…"
Don't 'Well, ackchewelly...' him, OL, you know perfectly well
what he means.
"You know what I mean, Oh El. And until Atlantis finishes that Dream research, this…" He gestures around to the screens covered in arcane lore. "This is probably the most complete guide to alchemy on Earth."
Artemis looks surprised and a little impressed. "Really? And you've been doing this..? Two years?"
Ultimately... What's a college degree gonna matter when you're the one
making the science you'd be getting a degree in?
"Not just me, but… Yeah. Most alchemists I've spoken to are mostly interested in… Basically, they do it like it's a ritual. Follow the exact steps, maybe learn from other alchemists… But they don't try and work out why any of it works in a structured kinda way. But between the records I've gotten hold of and Kord Industries' chem lab… I don't know everything, but I know a lot."
Not bad for a kid who started out by making the Garrick formula in his bedroom with a child's chemistry set.
"Okay. Blow our minds."
"Ooooookay. So, firstly, I had to eliminate chemical effects. So if there's a chemical in a… Ah, 'potion', that actually has something to do with whatever the potion's doing, I gotta try and eliminate that. Because if the potion… If it's supposed to make something burn really well and one of the ingredients is eucalyptus sap…"
And given what OL reported about Tim's brain, it's a safe bet it's not entirely chemical,
but...
"Yeah."
Artemis raises her right forefinger. "English major. What's wrong with eucalyptus sap?"
You know how people joke about everything in Australia trying to kill you, even the plants?
"Highly flammable. The eucalyptus tree's lifecycle involves growing quickly, having fire-resistant seeds, and then burning everything around it to death. So if you ever wonder why Californian wildfires are so bad, imported eucalyptus tree are about fifty percent of the reason."
...
This is
why.
"Right." She nods. "If it's gunna burn anyway, it's not magical fire."
"But it might be magic enhanced fire. Turns out a lot of potions are mostly just enhancing things a couple of the ingredients do. I actually-." He gestures to a cabinet. "Found a way to make myself go faster. Doesn't last all that long…"
Which reminds me a lot of classic D&D Spell
Components. All the way back to the first editions, many of them were subtly humorous but also somehow logical. You might know obvious ones like Bat Guano and brimstone (equalling gunpowder) for
Fireball, but consider
Detect Thoughts, which uses a copper coin i.e. a
penny.
"Not found a way to make yourself go full Flash speed yet?"
"Eh." He sighs dejectedly. "Its probably easier to just purge myself and then take the full formula. Unfortunately, nullifying a change like this that's been in place for years is actually kinda hard. Like, really hard."
"My offer to clone you a replacement body and transplant your brain is still available."
OL,
no. That's the kind of idea that leads to a Reverse Kid Flash running around or something, because you know the old body would
somehow get revived...
"That's actually worse. If you did that, my brain would still be super fast but the rest of my wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to run, and if I tried taking the Garrick Formula again… It would probably work on my body, but my brain would be trying to go at three different speeds at the same time. And ah… Uncle Barry made me clear out the mouse cages after I tested that. And the back wall. Had to really scrub."
...
Ew.
I grin. "What was the mouse called?"
He gives me a flat look. "Dude."
"Funny name for a mouse." But seriously, the idea of supersonic projectile mice is just...
Ew.
"We could try it anyway. I'm pretty sure my soul transfer technique would for-."
"No!" Artemis slaps me on the arm, triggering my kinetic barrier. "No exploding brains!" She points assertively at Wallace. "No exploding brains."
She'd quite prefer his brain remain
right where it is, very much
not exploding.
"Believe me, the mouse was plenty. Look, the point is, once the lab techs finished the mass spectroscopy on the emotion potions and we knew what chemicals were in it, I could compare the effects with all the things I knew could cause those effects and had those elements in them."
A workable method, but given that he has no outright arcane training, a logical way of doing it.
"So you know how they work?"
"Ah, yeah?"
"Could you make them yourself?"
That depends on how they're made, though. If they function on, say, soul energy leached away somehow from young children or something... Just
no.
"Ah." He looks around the laboratory. "Not with what I've got here, but, yeah? Why?"
"It's not patented."
You guys barely understand what they're doing and how they did it. That's not really patentable... Is it?
"Sure, but I clearly didn't invent it. Even if the guy who did goes to prison, they're still gunna be the legal inventor."
"Unless they were working off alchemical tomes more than twenty years old. Because if that's happened, they're going to be too busy to set up a generic medicines company and no one else has the know-how."
OL, not everyone can just set up a pharmaceutical company like that <snaps fingers.>And sometimes they don't have the inclination do. Does someone have to dig up that Sauron picture
again?
Wallace looks at me uncomfortably. "I don't really wanna start out being a drug dealer, Oh El."
I'm sure that my eyes are glowing as I open my mouth-.
OL, stop. You're starting to larfleeze it,
Enlightenment or not. I don't think the world wants emotion-modifying alchemy
just yet.
"Yeah, I get everything about what the pharmaceutical industry does from Jay, but can we focus?"
"Sure, sure."
Ugh, he's acting like 'well,
someone doesn't want to become fabulously rich' up in here.
"Anyway, there's only so many ways to force people to feel emotions, and outside of a couple of things they just don't last. But once you add in the correspondence effect that you found on that Tim guy, I worked out what they were actually doing."
Artemis nods. "Are they like, sucking the emotion out of one person and putting it in another one?"
Oh god, don't tell me it
is made using the souls of forsaken children?
"No, if they were doing that there's have been emotionally burned out people turning up by now. Far as I can work out? They're finding people who are already feeling that emotion, dosing them with something to make the correspondence ritual work, and then the potion the people at the other end get mostly just connects the two together. There isn't actually all that much difference between the content of the different doses."
I would hope there's something involved to amplify the shared emotions, otherwise
someone's getting the short end of the stick.
He gestures at the table where the samples are set up-.
"Why's the one-?" / "How come-?"
Artemis and I stop, both of us having noticed that one of the vials has changed colour quite significantly.
...Let's hope that's good, not something about to explosively self-destruct.
Wallace follows our gazes, nodding. "If we're lucky, that just means that the potion has passed through their system, or they're not feeling the right emotion any more. If we're not, then it probably means that they're dead."
"Can we track the link?"
Ideally to the maker or the place of production. Though locating the source of the emotions
would be helpful?
"We can't. You need someone who can actually cast spells for that, and it's possible that they've warded their home base. Or that the people they're getting the emotions from don't even know they're getting dosed. But like I said, there's only so many ways to make this stuff, and the League's got records of just about everything going into the United States."
So... Call in Zatanna?
Wallace looks at me-.
"It's me, isn't it? Cadbury Logistics. Someone's using the portals."
I guess there's not a lot of security checks of things going through, like parcels. Probably only about as much as a regular customs inspection. And shipping bottles of 'perfume' or 'juice' wouldn't attract much attention.
"Well, it's not shipping and it's probably not air freight." He leads us over to one of the holoscreens, showing the links made by a particular group of portals. "Someone working in or around one of these portals would have easiest access to everything they need. I don't know which one or exactly where they're doing it, and since I don't know exactly how much of this stuff is getting made I don't know if they're hand-carrying it or they're bringing in truckloads of reagent, but that's where we need to start looking."
Given the patch methods they were deploying it through, someone could casually carry a box with
thousands of dose through a portal.
"I own the company, but I'm an absentee manager. Might be better to ask Mister Queen to have a chat with the local managers. Ah. have you told Batman yet?"
Wallace gestures to the computers. "He already has access to all this. And so does Mister Atom. I haven't sent a report yet. Why?"
"Given how he's behaving, I worry about things that might make it worse." I sigh. "Alright. Who do we know with a heavy goods vehicle license?"
Especially if he decides to go in
heavy, by sending in squads of OMACs...
