Chapter 910

Still Lily

—-

Lily felt like she’d been slapped with something unpleasant. It was as if someone had distilled the essence of the forest, then the sea, into a pill. Ground that up into a fine powder before throwing it all into mud from a swamp and then hurling it at her face. It was just too much. Her brain was having trouble processing all the conflicted sense and it was causing havoc with just... well everything. It all just appeared suddenly as well. Lily had taken a few steps onto the yard and then the smell had just appeared.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Groaning, she managed to barely drag herself into the shadow of the nearby bushes and flopped down in the dirt as the scents continued to assault her nose. Her mind wasn’t really un any better shape. It was struggling horribly to keep up with all the inputs. This was a nearly unprecedented occurrence. Lily’s mind and soul were actually relatively weak when compared to her new body and they were really feeling it now.

Lily’s improved brain and magical capacity had been completely offsetting this issue until now, but this sort of scent-based confusion was just not something humans ever had to deal with. Lily would eventually be able to just ignore or, if practiced, pick out the individual scents in this horrendous cocktail but she just wasn’t anywhere close that this stage. It wasn’t that the smell was potent, the swamp would have done her in that way. It was because this was an alchemist laboratory.

They took potent ingredients, turned them into even more potent ingredients, or simply changed them into a different set of potent ingredients and then finally into finished products. All of which left scents around and regularly tried to cling to things. The thing about alchemy, was that all the fancy ingredients, especially the fancy ones, were Qi infused by necessary and tended to embody one or more concepts. Those sorts of things didn’t just go away. Even if they were weak, too weak to really do anything with they clung to thing. The beakers, the tables, the floors. The clothes the alchemists wore. Mostly importantly they built up in the air.

Therein lied the problem of many an amateur alchemist. Ventilation. See, at first you just send it outside. Then the neighbours complain so you do nothing. Then they complain to the inscriptions’ master who agrees and puts up scent containing wards. What those inscription masters don’t know, is alchemy. So they just ward up the scent and leave it to stew in a box. The alchemist doesn’t care, he or she is sending it all outside so it’s fine right? Well the wards happen to be 3D. With a roof, or they’re just spheres. So the smell builds up. The alchemist gets used to it of course, and everyone else has to deal with it. Lily was now having to deal with it.

.....

Kat was sort of freaking out on the other end of the link. Sure she could feel that Lily wasn’t terrified or being tortured... but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience. Unlike normal, where thoughts and emotions were able to flow freely down the link each way, it was a lot more like Lily’s mind wasn’t able to contain all her thoughts and they were awkwardly, and jaggedly, being shoved into Kat’s mind. Now, the link wasn’t really blocked. It had theoretically infinite space... but Kat couldn’t really send back reassuring thoughts despite that because Lily’s mind was certainly NOT up to dealing with any additional inputs no matter how nice they may be.

Which left Kat a little confused as to what she should... do with all this junk she seemed to be getting. If her mind was a library, and most things went on the shelves, the important things went onto glass displays, the annoying things were hidden in the back rooms and the day-to-day stuff that sort of blended together went to the stacks... well the new stuff from Lily was like someone had kicked down a wall and then hurled garbage in.

Kat... Kat didn’t know what to do with... well any of it. Should she be packing it away somewhere? Trying to destroy it? Assuming that was possible of course. Was it better to try and make some sense of it and then slowly feed it back to Lily? Were these actually Lily’s memories or just her mind overloading and producing the equivalent of error text? Even if it was the latter... was that still important? Kat just didn’t know.

Looking at it all mentally was a lot like trying to determine if these large pieces of broken stained glass pieces were just off-cuts or if someone had dumped a wonderful piece of art after it had fallen apart. Kat decided maybe dealing with it, in this odd sort of imaginative way she was currently attempting was unproductive and ducked into meditation instead. That... well it simplified things but really didn’t give any hints as to the correct way of going about things.

Kat’s normal pond now had a river... or stream? In meditation space things could be a little weird and there wasn’t anything else to compare the second water source to. It was starting to poor into Kat’s own pool... but it all seemed to be just... water in the end. It was the same colour even. Sure it was rushing in and causing ripples but it seemed it posed no threat to Kat herself. Which, really wasn’t the damned point.

Kat couldn’t help bit be rather annoyed with her meditation. Sure ‘not a problem, keep trucking on Kat’ was a nice thing to see. The water wasn’t even changing the waterline in her main pool... but Kat really didn’t care if it was causing problems for her mind so much as if it was causing problems for LILY’S mind. Kat didn’t even know who to ask about this sort of thing.

So instead she had to just sit there and worry. There was nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything Kat could punch or properly direct her anger at. It was all just... smells. So Kat had to just let that irritation simmer inside her. Kat stayed in her meditation trying to get a handle on that and maybe find something she missed that would help Lily. Perhaps if she could track back the stream maybe? It seemed to come from nowhere but that obviously wasn’t the case.

Kat pondered the possibility for about half a second before throwing that idea out the window completely. Sure it Kat could stop the flow. It wouldn’t even be hard. It just WASN’T THE PROBLEM. It couldn’t possibly help Lily. None of the ‘water’ was making its way back to Lily’s end of things. So obviously that wouldn’t help. Kat’s mind and soul were much more robust, they could simply deal with the junk. Kat might not have cared, but in truth, it was just that. Junk. Her mind would remove it. Even with a perfect memory, these weren’t even memories so much as failed attempts at identification. It was a lot closer to putting in a request for information and getting back gibberish then a true memory. So all the overflow reaching Kat just sort of ended.

On the outside though, a few people in the camp were giving Kat the side-eye. The air around her was getting colder, and every breath Kat took was accompanied by a small puff of flame. It was... fine... technically... for now at least. The main bonfire was still more than bright enough to offset the small flashes of purple from Kat but only for so someone not paying all that much attention. They didn’t want to interrupt her though in case something important was happening.

On Lily’s end... things were slowly starting to make sense. Well, not ‘make sense’ so much as she could comprehend the possibility of thoughts more complex then ‘Ugh’ which was great. Lily could also sort of tell something was helping to relieve that pressure. She wasn’t in anywhere close to a state that could even generously be called ‘her right mind’ so she just sort of shoved it all away towards that area. Kat would soon receive a flood of nonsense and Lily... well it actually worked.

When recounting this story later to Nira and the other doctors, the demons would be collectively stumped. That is NOT how the link is supposed to work at all. The stuff normally pushed down it is never removed, it’s just a sharing of impressions. Also, while Kat and Lily’s minds are connected. They should still be distinctly different entities. This sort of... offloading should have done nothing but potential clog up Kat’s own mind had it been weaker. Instead...

Lily was just fine. Well, no, it still smelled horrible and Lily felt like her mind had been through an industrial press but compared to just moments ago things were practically fantastic. The crazy pair didn’t even think they’d done anything strange. Crazy ass demons that weren’t always demons. Always breaking things.