Fragments of Alchemy: The Code Keeper

The Story and The Game

“What should we do now?” Thea asked.

“Tell us a story!” Quentin exclaimed.

“Yeah!” Thea chimed in.

“Please, please, please?” Quentin begged.

“Okay, okay,” Thea’s father said, and Quentin whooped. Thea laughed and cheered too.

Her father looked at Uncle Silvanus. “Should we tell her about our Joint Trial?”

“Oh, that’s a long story,” Uncle Silvanus said.

“Come on, dad,” Quentin begged. “It’s such a good story.”

It struck Thea that her cousin might know more about her father than she did.

“Alright,” Uncle Silvanus said. “But you’ll have to help us tell it.”

Quentin smiled from ear to ear. “My dad and your dad were Paired together. Can you guess who was the Mentor and who was the Protégé?” he asked Thea.

“Hmm …” Thea looked back and forth at her dad and her uncle. “… I think … my dad was the Protégé.”

“How’d you know?” Quentin gaped at Thea as if it hadn’t been a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.

Thea laughed. “Just a hunch. So what did you have to do? For your Trial, I mean.”

“You remember the simple message you received today for your Trial?” her father said.

Retrieve the marble, Thea remembered, but oddly enough, she tried to say the words and almost bit her tongue. “Yeah,” Thea said instead, realizing just how powerful that Alchemical Oath really was.

“Every Trial is like that,” Uncle Silvanus said. “If you’re lucky, you get a long complex sentence, instead of just a few words.”

“Find her!” Quentin said.

Thea eyed her dad with surprise. “That’s it? Just two words? Find her?”

He nodded. “The two of us argued for an entire day about who her was.” Suddenly both her dad and uncle were roaring with laughter.

“And we used some harsh Words when we argued,” Uncle Silvanus said. “Words that can bring you to your knees and turn you green.”

Quentin laughed. “They used to be rivals,” he explained. “Always trying to do things on their own and prove they were stronger. It was a disaster. Pairs are supposed to work together!”

“So how did you figure it out?” Thea asked.

“We stopped arguing long enough to realize the Recreant TVs were all broadcasting the same news announcement. The Norwegian Prime Minister’s daughter had been kidnapped.”

“Oh!” Thea said. “They wanted you to find where the kidnappers were keeping her.”

“Of course, they weren’t about to settle for just finding her,” Quentin said. “They got all big-headed and decided to rescue her, too!”

“Quentin, you ruined the story,” Thea’s father chided.

The smile washed right off Quentin’s face.

“No, he didn’t,” Thea said, sticking up for her cousin. “You obviously succeeded, or else you wouldn’t have passed your Joint Trial. But let’s back up a bit. How did you find her?”

“That’s my part of the story,” her father said. “I studied the Cerulean Fragment, so I knew a lot about Divination. I realized that if we found out where she’d been kidnapped, we could watch it happen with a Divination Conversion.”

“No, this is my part of the story,” Uncle Van said. “After I mastered the Cardinal Fragment, I started studying the Façade Fragment. So I used the Illusion Conversion to put us both in costume, and we strutted down to the Prime Minister’s mansion and tried to get in to find out what we needed to know.”

“That was a disaster,” her father said. “The police officer disguises he picked for us didn’t work. So we staked out the place and finally got new disguises.”

“The butler and the dog!” Quentin said.

Thea laughed. “You disguised yourself as the dog?”

“Of course, I had to be the dog,” Thea’s father said.

“It’s only natural for the Protégé to be the animal,” Uncle Van explained with a chuckle. “Anyways, we got in, but we had a heck of a time getting any information from the family about what had happened. They all acted like we should have already known what happened, so getting them to repeat it wasn’t easy.”

“How did you find out, then?” Thea asked.

“The older sister finally told the dog,” her father said, looking over at Uncle Van.

Thea and Quentin laughed.

“I was pouting outside her sister’s room, and the girl explained it all to me,” Thea’s father said. “I also got a good look at her picture, so we were well on our way.”

“The girl had been kidnapped from school,” Uncle Van said. “We discovered that it happened when school dismissed at the end of the day. So we went to the school, disguised ourselves as the police, and got the girl’s schedule. Then we disguised ourselves as custodians and snuck into the room late at night.”

“That was where I performed the Divination Conversion,” Thea’s father said. “I looked back in time to that day and saw her sitting in her last class of the day. We followed her as she left her class to go down the hallway and into the girl’s bathroom. That’s where she was taken.”

“Who took her?” Thea asked.

“At first we weren’t sure. The Prime Minister’s daughter went into the bathroom and didn’t come out. Finally, I went in the bathroom to look for her, but she was gone. I looked further back in time and figured it out. Another girl came into the bathroom and didn’t come out too. That’s because they both left the bathroom through a Dimension Gate.”

“An Alchemist kidnapped her!” Quentin said.

“How did you figure out where to look then?” Thea asked.

“That was tricky,” Uncle Van explained. “We knew what the kidnapper looked like, so we did some searching and asked about her around school. Turns out, she was using a disguise too. After tons of digging, we found out she disguised herself as her own daughter. Once we knew who she was, we went to her house to see if the kidnappers were holding the Prime Minister’s daughter there.”

“And that’s when you decided you had to rescue her?” Thea finished.

“Uncle Van felt like we hadn’t done enough work,” Thea’s father said. “So he insisted that we had to go in and at least make sure the girl was there before we tried to claim we had completed our Trial. So we got ourselves some new disguises from the henchmen around the area and walked right in.”

“The place was huge,” Uncle Van said. “With a personal artifact, we were able to use a Transmission Conversion to find her.”

“What?” Thea said. “You had something of the girl’s?”

“I took a hair from a brush at her house,” Uncle Van explained. “So we found her, and that’s when the real Trial began. Our Chimaeras fought bravely, we ran and hid a whole bunch, and we somehow got her out.”

“We mostly snuck her out,” Thea’s father confessed. “If we had tried to fight our way out, those Shadows would most certainly have won.”

“Shadows?” Thea asked, feigning ignorance.

“The Code Breaker’s people,” Uncle Van explained with a frown. “The Breaker is the Keeper’s arch nemesis.”

A shiver went up Thea’s back.

“When we reached the yard and tried to make a break for it, a few of them caught us,” Uncle Van said. “We had to fight for our lives then, and Griff and Boomer really came through for us.”

“Is that your Chimaera? Boomer?” Thea asked her father.

He nodded sadly. Thea remembered that her dad had mentioned having a canitris once.

“Did he die?” Thea asked softly.

“Not that night, no,” he said. “I’m afraid that’s a story for some other time.”

“So you rescued the Prime Minister’s daughter when you were only supposed to figure out where she was,” Thea said. “Did you get in trouble?”

“Oh boy, did we ever,” her father said, and Uncle Van laughed.

“Turned out the Prime Minister was an Arch Alchemist, Magister Fiore,” Uncle Van said. “And he was furious that two wet-behind-the-ears Chemists had taken on an impromptu rescue mission for his daughter, Fanella Fiore.”

Thea’s eyes bulged. She looked over at her aunt, who smiled from ear to ear, then at her mom, who began laughing. “That’s how you two met?” Thea blurted out. “The first time you met dad, he was a dog?”

Then everyone burst out laughing.

“Thanks for the story,” Thea said.

“Do you wanna see my room now?” Quentin asked Thea.

“Sure,” Thea said, strangely curious to see what the inside of an Alchemist’s child’s bedroom looked like.

Quentin grabbed one of the wooden boxes and divination globes and hurried across the living room to a hallway. Thea followed him to the end of the hallway, where they turned into a bedroom with dark blue paint on the walls. The ceiling was light blue with puffs of clouds all over. Thea stared and noticed the clouds were blowing around a little, and she gaped in amazement.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Quentin said, noticing Thea’s surprise. “At night, the paint gets black and stars come out.” He smiled with pride, and Thea grinned.

“It’s really cool!” Thea said.

“It’s just an illusion though, so it’s not nearly as cool as the Great Hall, or the Keeper’s ceiling,” Quentin said.

“I know! Isn’t the Keeper’s ceiling amazing?”

Quentin looked strangely at Thea. “I’ve only heard about it. You’ve seen it?”

Thea nodded, suddenly uncomfortable in the awkward silence. “You’ll see it when you become a Hopeful, too.”

“That’s not nearly a good enough reason to get to go into the Keeper’s Chamber,” Quentin said.

Thea decided to change the subject. “What sorts of things do you do all day, Quentin?”

Quentin smiled, the awkward moment completely forgotten. “I have a tutor who comes in the morning to teach me reading and writing and mathematics and science and history, but I get the afternoons to myself.” Quentin tapped a floating globe near the door, and it began to glow with a soft yellow light. He brought Thea across his bedroom to his shelves covered in interesting-looking Alchemical contraptions.

Below, sat a toy box engraved in vines and Symbols, and Quentin opened the lid and pulled out an action figure of a man in thick gray robes with a long white beard. The man looked so real, Thea almost mistook it for a real human, shrunk to the size of a toy. “This is the First Alchemist,” Quentin said as he set the man down on the wooden floor. Thea saw that the tiny man couldn’t move after all. “And I have tons of his Chimaeras in here, too. I almost have them all, which really is a ton.”

Quentin started pulling the miniature Chimaera toys out of his toy chest and setting them upright on the wooden floor. Thea recognized several beasts, including a hippogriff, cockatrice, werewolf, and even a platypus. “I didn’t know a platypus was a Chimaera!” Thea blurted out.

“Platypus?” Quentin said.

Thea suddenly felt incredibly lame as she realized that she didn’t know the names of most of these Chimaeras. Thea silently picked up the little figure that looked like a platypus and shrugged sheepishly.

“That’s a fiberna,” Quentin said very matter-of-factly, but not unkindly. “Half duck, have beaver.”

Thea laughed. “Wow, that makes a lot of sense.”

Quentin laughed too, and somehow Thea didn’t feel like Quentin was making fun of her at all. “Wow, that’s what Recreants call it? A platypus?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s do another one,” Quentin said, and he pointed at his mountain of small Chimaera figurines. “It could be fun.”

Thea grabbed another figurine that looked like a creature she recognized: the okapi, which was an Amazonian herbivore with black and white striped legs and a dark brownish-red body. “Okapi.”

“Centebra,” Quentin said. “Half zebra, half giraffe.”

Thea laughed. She should have guessed that one, because the okapi had zebra stripes and strange horns on its head that looked just like a giraffe’s.

Then Quentin went for the divination globe on the box. “What do Recreants call these ones?”

Thea looked at the three Chimaeras. “The noctos is a Pegasus. The caprequos is called a unicorn. And the vesperta is a dragon.”

“Pegasus … Unicorn … Dragon,” Quentin repeated. “I’ve had lessons about all of those Chimaeras! Pegasus was a famous noctos from a long time ago. Like 700 B.C. I think his Alchemist was Poseidon? Then Unicorn was a caprequos belonging to Giver Maria Prophetissima. And Dragon was Code Breaker Edward Kelly’s Chimaera.”

Thea’s head started spinning. “So … those were the Chimaera’s given names?” she asked, and Quentin nodded. Thea looked through the tiny Chimaeras set up outside the toy chest and she couldn’t help but smile. It amazed her to think that the mythological creatures she knew were all Alchemists’ Chimaeras. With each figurine she could learn the proper name and the given name for a famous Chimaera.

She spotted another one she recognized. “Can you find the hippogriff?” she asked. “It’s on the other Divination globe. It’s part horse like the noctos.”

Quentin stared at his toys. “You mean the falquos?” he asked, grabbing what Thea would call a hippogriff. “Hippogriff was Sir George Ripley’s Chimaera. He was the Giver in the 1500’s.”

“Wow,” Thea said. “Falquos.”

“My turn,” Quentin said. “Can you find the simitris?”

Thea thought about the Chimaera’s name. Her father had started teaching her Latin years ago, so she recognized parts of the words that went together to make the Chimaera names. “Is it part chimpanzee?”

Quentin smiled brightly “Yup!”

Hmm. Thea racked her brain, trying to think of another animal that could fit the letters in simitris. She knew that tris meant three in Latin, but that didn’t help her come up with the other animal. Then suddenly she remembered the lupitris, which was part wolf, part hawk. “Is it a hawk?”

“Yup!” Quentin exclaimed.

Thea looked through the figurines and pointed at a Chimaera that looked sort of like a harpy. “Is this it?” When Quentin nodded again, Thea said, “Recreants call this one a harpy.”

Quentin shuddered. “Harpy was Moros’s Chimaera. I heard he made her with a vulture and a woman.”

“What?” Thea looked at Quentin with a jolt. “You mean, a human?”

He nodded. “It’s forbidden, but he was really evil, so he did it anyway.”

Thea shuddered too and decided not to dwell on it. “Let’s do another one. Can you find the mermaid?”

“Mermaid?” Quentin made a face like that was the strangest thing he had ever heard. He looked at all the figurines and finally shrugged. “I give up. Which one is the mermaid?”

“Maybe you might call it a Siren?” Thea said, wanting to give him a hint before she just told him the answer.

Quentin grinned at Thea. “Siren? She was an Alchemist who used the Imitation Conversion so she could swim in the ocean. She was friends with Ceto. They both had delaena Chimaeras that they used with the Imitation Conversion.” Quentin picked up the mermaid figurine, and Thea realized that some of the figurines must be famous Alchemists too, like how Quentin had a figurine for the First Alchemist.

“Wow, that’s neat. This is a really fun game, Quentin,” Thea said.

“You’re just saying that to be nice,” Quentin said. “I know you don’t really want to play with me, now that you’re a Chemist and can study Alchemy.”

“That’s not true at all!” Thea said. “I’m actually glad to finally know some kids, even if you are younger than me.”

Quentin’s face lit up with a huge grin. “I’m glad too! Will you try the Divination Globe, so I can see?” Quentin asked suddenly.

“I can try,” Thea replied.

Quentin cheered and searched the box for the pouch of white flowers and handed it to Thea. Then he put the stand and globe back on top of the box.

Code Word Divinitas, Thea thought as she poured some flower petals into her hand. She took a big breath and looked for the Ostium on the Insignia carved into the lid of the box below the globe.

“Divinitas,” she said, and her Kundalini swirled around her head. She remembered to focus on the Ostium, and her Kundalini funneled into the Insignia, which began to fill with dark blue light. Then sure enough, the shimmering silver liquid began to change, and Thea saw the living room of Quentin’s apartment inside the globe.

Thea gazed into the Divination Globe and glimpsed a purple scroll in her mother’s hands. It looked familiar, and Thea remembered Aunt Fanella had showed it to her parents back when she arrived on the ranch yesterday. Then her father had been looking at it when she woke from her nap earlier that day. She wanted to know what it said.

“Almost all the events have transpired now,” Thea’s mother was saying as she looked at the scroll.

“Did you see the last one on the list?” Uncle Van asked.

Thea’s father reached out, and her mother handed the scroll over. “That’s positively unacceptable!” he said in a hushed tone of suppressed anger. “I refuse to do that.”

“You cannot go against the Keeper’s orders. It could have serious ramifications,” Uncle Van said.

“Maybe she won’t even ask us,” Thea’s mother said. “You never know.”

“If she does, you must give it to her, or it could have dire consequences,” Aunt Fanella said. She patted Thea’s father on the shoulder. “Have faith in the Keeper.”

Thea’s father hung his head.

Then finally, Aunt Fanella noticed the activated globe on the floor. “It looks like we’ve had some eavesdroppers! How dare you, you two!” she said in a joking tone.

Thea’s father rolled the scroll up and slipped it into one of his pockets.

Aunt Fanella leaned down from her pink chair and waved at the globe, flashing a nice big smile for the two of them.

“Hi mum!” Quentin said into the globe.

“My goodness, you’ve got sound too, and on your first try no less,” Aunt Fanella said, giving the other adults in the room a piercing look. “I’m very impressed Thea. You’re a Spectrum Scholar for a reason, then, aren’t you?”

Thea smiled. “Thanks Aunt Fanella.” In truth, the Conversion had been easy. It had always been very hard to do Alchemy just by thinking about it, the way she had before her birthday. Now that she could learn the Code Words, it seemed that she could activate her Kundalini effortlessly, and the Insignias gave her something to focus on to channel her power. It had been almost too easy, Thea realized. It made her think about how she hadn’t grown up performing Alchemy properly. Because of the Alchemical Oaths her parents had sworn after their Trial of Entry, they hadn’t been able to teach her.

Thea ended the Conversion with just the clap of her hands. The images in the globe slowly faded away.

“That was so cool, Thea,” Quentin said with a smile.

“Thanks.” She smiled back. Thea stood and walked toward the door, and Quentin grabbed the globe and followed her back out to the living room. The adults all looked up at her awkwardly, and she took a deep breath and said, “What were you looking at?”

“Nothing!” Thea’s father insisted.

“Don’t lie. It was a roll of parchment!” Thea retorted. “I want to see it.”

The adults all exchanged wary looks.

“Owen…” Uncle Van said.

“No!” He jumped to his feet and went for the door, but Uncle Van went after him and grabbed his shoulder. He spoke quietly but Thea’s father shook his head. Finally, Uncle Van started wrestling with Thea’s father. Her mother and Aunt Fanella watched helplessly. Thea’s father went to grab something from one of his pockets, but Uncle Van reacted quickly.

“Tempus!” Uncle Van shouted, and Thea’s father suddenly stood frozen in place.

“What did you do to him?” Thea asked.

“Just a Duration Conversion to slow him down for a moment,” Uncle Van explained. He plucked the scroll from her father’s pocket and then waved his hand, and Thea’s father started moving normally again. He punched Uncle Van right in the jaw.

“Owen!” Aunt Fanella exclaimed. She jumped up and hurried over to put her hand on Uncle Van’s shoulder. He shook his head and grabbed his jaw.

Thea’s mother stood and stepped toward Thea’s father. She grabbed his hand and held him firmly.

“I’m sorry, but it’s the right thing to do,” Uncle Van said. Then he stepped up to Thea and handed the purple scroll to her.

Thea looked down at the scroll and then up at everyone. Her father stood by the door, his face red. Thea’s mother looked back at her with tears glistening in her green eyes. Aunt Fanella stood by Uncle Van with her hand on his shoulder. They all watched her warily. Quentin stood near the hallway leading to his room, watching curiously.

Thea stared down at the scroll and wondered what could possibly be written in it that would make everyone this upset.

Finally, she exhaled and unrolled the scroll.