The Alchemist of Middlesbrooke, still available now on Smashwords.
Copyright
J.B. Norman
Roland is, without a doubt, the strangest alchemist Lucia has ever met. He’s big enough that a family of four could probably live comfortably in him. His muscles have muscles on their muscles.
With the notable exception of a brain.
And yet, despite the clear and obvious fact that he’s otherwise dumb as a bag of bags of hammers, he actually does seem to know his stuff here alchemy is concerned. It’s all a bunch of nonsense to her, but Lucia has watched the big musclehead chatting happily away with Apolline about potions and distillations and extractions and bunch of other ways to turn things into other things.
She hates to admit it, but he might actually be a good addition to their group.
Lucia watches Roland turns to Petra and stares thoughtfully at the Half-Troll.
“No offence,” he ventures, all but guaranteeing he’s about to say something stupid, “but, uh, why are you blue? I’ve never seen a blue Amazon before.”
Luckily, the perpetually, ineffably unflappable Petra takes the idiocy in stride. “Because my father was a Troll,” she explains.
“So, like, you’re a… Trollazon?” Roland asks.
Petra actually cracks a faint smile. “Yes. I suppose you could say that.”
Since now seems to be the time for everyone to ask indelicate questions, Lucia decides to take the opportunity to ask one of her own.
“You said Alda’s your sister, right? But you two don’t really look alike,” Lucia notes.
“Well, yeah. She’s really my sister,” Roland explains, “but she might not actually be my sister, you know?”
“No,” Lucia answers.
“We grew up on the streets,” Roland continues. “I don’t really remember my parents, or even having parents. And I can’t remember if me and Alda have the same parents. All I remember is that it’s been me and Alda since forever. So, she might not be my sister, but she’s still the only family I’ve ever had.”
“And how does a street kid end up learning so much about alchemy?” she asks.
“That’s all thanks to Uncle Chuck,” Roland answers. “He took us in and adopted us. He got all kinds of tutors and instructors for us. Most of it was boooo-ring, but alchemy ended up being a lot of fun.”
“Roland had a crush on our teacher!” Alda exclaims.
Roland blushes and turns bashful. “Well, yeah,” he admits quietly. “She was gorgeous.”
“Wait,” Apolline interjects. “Uncle Chuck? As in Charles?”
Roland nods.
“As in Duke Charles?”
Roland nods again.
“As in the Duke?”
“Yeah,” Roland says. “Is there more than one Duke of Middlesbrooke?”
Lucia’s jaw drops to the ground. “You’re royalty? You?”
Roland shakes his head. “Technically, we’re just his wards. I mean, I’m not going to be the next Duke, or anything. But he’s still family, basically the only family me and Alda have.” He shrugs. “And that’s enough for us.”
Lucia nods. “Yeah. I get it.”
Maybe, just maybe, Roland’s not nearly as dumb as she thought.
She glances over at Apolline and Petra. She never had sisters growing up back in Natalis. It was just her, her parents and acres of waterlemon fields. But Apolline and Petra have become as good as family now.
“Hey,” Roland continues, “you ever wonder why they’re called bullfrogs? I mean, they don’t even have horns!”
“Ugh,” Lucia groans.
Moment killed.
Along with most of Lucia’s burgeoning respect for the musclebound alchemist.
The rest of my writing exercises are here. This scene was originally published in October 2021.
Follow me here:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
