Both Alex and Parker were taken aback by the sudden change in tune.

“You leave for two weeks, and you’ve already gotten into such strange trouble!” Dr. Quinn said in a jovial tone.

He gave Alex a friendly slap to the back, which almost sent him shooting off the table.

“I wouldn’t expect anything else from the likes of you!”

This was… Not the reaction Alex expected.

“What’s with that face? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

After a brief stunned silence, Alex picked the pencil back up and started writing. He wrote bigger this time, accounting for Dr. Quinn’s worsening vision.

“You’re not upset?”

“Upset? Why would I be upset? You’re on one hell of a first adventure, much more interesting than mine! So, what did you in? Piss off the wrong wizard? You better not have drunk a potion you found lying around, now that would make me upset.”

Alex had never seen Dr. Quinn talk like that before. In class, he was the sternest and strictest person he’d ever met, and here he was acting like they’d been friends for years. More importantly, he had no idea his old professor used to be an adventurer.

“You were an adventurer?”

“I’m the one asking questions here. Now, tell me what happened.”

“Some creature called a Whiddsoul. Posed as an innkeeper, took my body while I slept. Woke up like this in random cave. Hunting me down. Came here to make potion to change back”

“Whiddsoul, you say? I’m surprised I’ve never heard of them before. I’m a little disappointed it wasn’t a wizard. How exactly do you plan on making this potion? I expect you know the risks, even if you have all the right ingredients. I hope you weren’t expecting your buddy here to make it for you, lest you end up a writhing mass.”

“Hey, come on now. That wasn’t necessary,” Parker sulked.

Alex hadn’t really thought of that part. With his current lack of maneuverable fingers, using the lab equipment would be nearly impossible. Maybe he could’ve written the instructions down, but remembering the incident in their time together in class. That was before the noblestone counters, and he wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason they were installed.

It would probably be a better idea to get killed by the Whiddsoul than drink any potion Parker made. At least then he could be sure his death wouldn’t be in agony. Luckily, Parker wasn’t the only person willing to help anymore.

“Can you make it?”

Dr. Quinn looked at Alex and raised an eyebrow.

“Not only do you want to use my equipment and ingredients, you also expect me to make it for you?”

Alex nodded, before scrawling “Please?” on the paper and giving a toothy grin..

Dr. Quinn crossed his arms and furrowed his brows, glaring down at Alex.

“Don’t make that face at me.”

That was the tone he was used to.

“I’ll help you. Just one thing first, though. Before you take that potion, let me pry some of those scales off you. No one’s seen a baby dragon in over 20 years, and those scales of yours are a valuable commodity.”

“How much are they worth?” Parker asked.

“I didn’t ask you that.” Dr. Quinn growled back.

“Right, sorry…” Parker squealed.

Dr. Quinn turned back to Alex.

“So, as long as you can part with a few scales, that’ll make up for the cost of the potion’s ingredients.”

For a minute there he was worried it would be something difficult. He could part with a few scales off his back. They were flush to his body and none of them had come off before, but it probably wouldn’t be much harder than removing a fish scale. It would probably hurt like yanking out a hair or something.

“OK!” Alex wrote.

Alex had no way of knowing just how wrong he was. After a few hard tugs from a pair of pliers, stifled cries, and plenty of tears, Dr. Quinn was able to dislodge one single scale from Alex’s back. It was nothing like pulling a hair! If anything, it was more like pulling a tooth!

The man, however, seemed completely blind to his plight. He lifted the scale up to the light of the overhead window, inspecting it thoroughly. The scale was a flat oval, black outside of direct light, but once exposed to the sun, it shone an iridescent deep blueish-purple.

“Beautiful. You know, these things can be put in a potion to make the user completely immune to lightning for a long while. But that would be like tossing a gold nugget into soup for looks. No, their real use comes from enchanting. Baby dragon scales are the perfect vessel for magic, taken before the dragon molts, the scales are still slightly flexible,”

Dr. Quinn demonstrated by bending the removed scale.

“Similarly, the type of enchantment put into the scale is flexible. If the dragon is too old, their scales will already be saturated with magic, leaving no room for an enchantment, and if the dragon molts, the scales won’t absorb any. Ready for me to take another?”

Alex didn’t care how much his scales were worth. He was never doing that again.

“NEVER AGAIN”

Dr. Quinn looked disappointed.

“I thought so much. It was really in there, probably hurt to pull out. One is enough for me, anyway.”

Dr. Quinn turned to Parker and outstretched his palm.

“You mentioned those fingers? I’m assuming they’re from the doppelganger. I’ll need those.”

“Right, yeah. You need the ingredients. For the potion. Yeah.” Parker fretted as he dug through his pockets.

Parker quivered for a moment and slowly removed the fingers from his pocket, placing them in the man’s palm.

“Give me a minute. I need to gather the rest of the ingredients.

On the counter before Dr. Quinn laid a white octopus tentacle, crow’s throat, a blue rose, and an opalescent fungus shaped like an oyster mushroom, called a “pleomagus ostreatus”, more commonly known as the brewer’s chip, since it was such a common ingredient in potions.

Dr. Quinn wasted no time in pulverizing the mushroom and blue rose together with a mortar and pestle. Once the small amount of liquid in the flower petals combined with the dry powder from the mushroom, it began melting, filling the mortar with a thick blue paste.

He set the mortar aside and took the tentacle and crow’s throat, chopped them into small pieces, and placed them into a pot to boil.

While they boiled, he scooped the paste from the mortar into a bowl and mixed it with equal parts water. Once the paste had mixed in with the water and became less viscous, he poured it into a distilling apparatus and lit the flame underneath.

In the meantime, the water had sufficiently extracted the essence of the crow’s throat and the tentacle. He strained out the chunks of meat and set them aside.

The distiller had separated a blue liquid in the second bottle, leaving behind a milky white substance in the original. He poured the blue liquid into a bowl and dropped in the chunks of throat and tentacle. The liquid gravitated towards the chunks, combining with them to form transparent blue crystals.

In a noblestone bowl, he placed the two fingers in and poured the milky substance over them. It poured out like honey, and when it touched the fingers, they sizzled away, burning up in the highly corrosive liquid. Once the fingers had fully dissolved, he took the crystals and sprinkled them into the mixture. Wherever the crystals touched, the liquid became transparent.

Surprising Alex, Dr. Quinn opened a cabinet, took out a container of a fine white powder, took a heaping spoonful, and mixed it with some water before pouring it over the potion.

Alex chirped to get the man’s attention and wrote,

“What’s the white stuff for? Potion was finished”

“It’s sugar.”

That made much more sense. If the fingers tasted that bad when he bit them off, he couldn’t imagine how bad a potion made with their essence would be.

Dr. Quinn poured the potion into a pot and boiled it down to a powder, scratched it off the bottom of the pot, and scooped it into a glass vial before corking it off.

“Take all of this when you want to transform. Make sure to use it wisely, it won’t last very long.”

“Wait, it won’t last? Then what was the point of all this?” Parker asked.

“I won’t need long. Just need a few minutes to kill the imposter and take back my body”

Parker faced away and looked at the door.

“I just hope you’re right. Looks like you only have one shot, and I don’t think it’ll take too kindly to me betraying it.”

Dr. Quinn reached over to hand the vial to Parker, before snapping his hand back.

“Tell me I can trust you not to ruin this potion like the rest you handled.”

Parker took a deep breath and sputtered, “YoucantrustmenottoruinthispotionliketherestIhandled,” before reaching out with a sweaty hand.

Dr. Quinn stared Parker in the eyes while dropping the vial into his hand.

“Alex, make sure this isn’t your last adventure, too. I don’t want to have wasted all that time I spent teaching you. Now get going! I have students coming in for a lab soon!”