As Dorian heard the plan—over the course of three long minutes of excited babbling, no less—his expression underwent a series of metamorphoses. First a cock of the brow, a smirk of mild amusement. And then up went the second, around the minute mark. If Sun noticed she didn’t stop chattering. Around two minutes he was fully gaping at her. By the time she finished up nearing minute three, every fiber of his face was taut with incredulity.

“So what do you think?” said Sun, quite unnecessarily.

“That is the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard.”

“Well that’s not very nice.”

“How many things have to go right for this to work?!” He was struggling to conceive of them all.

“Hm.” Sun puffed out her cheeks in thought. “Nine? I think?”

“And it’ll take, what, a week just to set up?”

“Six days! Plus a half-day to observe the guards’ shift patterns. So six-and-a-half, counting today.”

He turned it all over in his mind, scrutinizing each step like a blacksmith inspects a chainmail, testing if it’ll hold. He frowned. Then frowned harder. Strange—strung together, it all seemed quite flimsy. But each individual link seemed plausible enough…

Strange indeed, since the more he turned it over the more he was warming to it.

Then he’d zoom out again, behold the picture in full, and the ridiculousness of it all snapped back in place.

“Are all your plans like this?”

“Like what?”

“This… messy?”

“Most of them are moreso! But I usually have more to work with…” Sun paused. “Aren’t your plans like this?”

“Of course not!”

“…Please don’t tell me you always barge in and make shit up as you go. Like with the Swamp.”

“There’s more to it than that.” Dorian frowned. “The best approach is most often the simplest. And the most flexible. My plans don’t take longer than a few hours, runt. Make chaos, come out on top. This… there’s so many points of failure.”

“But fewer risks!” Sun replied. “C’mon, give it a chance! Please? At worst we’ll lose a week, right?”

“At worst we get the Dread Lord Kal-Il treatment.”

“I mean…yeah…” She winced at that, then at the boulder, still marked by the demon’s claw-marks. He saw the instant the fear pricked her again. Her hands ate at each other as she swallowed. She seemed like a popped balloon, drifting slowly to earth.

“Those were some huge goddamn hands, weren’t they?”

“Probably Empyrean Wraiths.”

“Sheesh. For a waste chute?”

“If you thought this is bad, wait ‘till you see the auctions.” It wasn’t that he was trying to discourage her. He was simply applying a little pressure to the chainmail. If a plan was to be solid its maker had to have conviction in it.

For a moment she was silent. He let her stew. He saw her forcing it down, the way an alcoholic might force down the urge to vomit. She firmed her mouth. “I still think it’s the best idea we’ve got.”

What do you know?

He turned it over in his mind a third time, then shrugged, smirked.

“…Alright. We’ll give it a shot.”

She beamed.

He didn’t really expect it to work. But it would be quite funny if it did, which to him was a point in its favor.

***

Step one was the easiest. Retrieve Kal-Il’s arm. The same that had made that futile effort clinging to the boulder, the same that wraith had chopped off. Now it lay grasping in the dirt.

But on that arm was a hand, and on that hand was an Interspatial Ring.

A quick jaunt with a cloak, and it was in their hands. Silver inlaid with gold. Open it up, and all there was was gold.

As Sun had suspected. These weren’t merchants. These fellows were like he and Sun; they wanted to sneak in as customers. Which meant they’d bring with them some hefty purchasing power.

In this case it was a little less than they’d hoped for. Fifty mid-grade Spirit Stones. Scarcely middle class among the buyers of Ur, but it would serve just fine for their purposes.

***

Step two was the least risky. Wait and observe. This took the rest of the half-day. The guards weren’t to stand here forever, of course; they came and went in shifts. At the Witching hour, two more guards came down from within the tunnel to relieve them. Sun gave him specific instructions. With his eyes the dark tunnel might as well have been lit by torches. He was to take note of the array formations in the tunnel itself as the guard came through.

There were two, far as he could tell. One at the mouth of the tunnel. One in the middle. Both generated nearly translucent blue wards. It seemed these were timed. Only at a certain point in the day—at the changing of the guards—the wards changed color, went from blue to white. The guards would wait for it to go white, then hold out a badge, which gave out a certain matching aura. The wards would let them through. And vice versa, as the relieved guards went back.

Sun chewed thoughtfully on another carrot. “The wards are timed, too? I’ll make a few small tweaks….we’ll need to be just a little more careful than I thought…”

***

Step three was the most far-fetched.

“There’s mail into and out of Ur, right?”

“Of course. You can transport packages. But nothing living—not unless you subject yourself to a battery of extra screenings.”

“Can you send mail to a guild? Say, the Alchemists?”

“Yes. That much is easy. Couriers go in and out all the time. We can pay one to ship a letter.” He saw where she was going, and frowned. “But there’s not a shot in Hell we can convince someone on the inside to let us in. Even if we had a big enough bribe—which we don’t—they couldn’t if they tried to. And besides, all mail is screened.”

“It’s nothing so drastic,” she said hastily. “Or… obviously illegal! Just weird.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

***

“That’s weird,” said Minthus, junior Alchemist at the Alchemist Guild. He was frowning down at the oddest commission. It was unsigned, scrawled, and terse.

Ten mid-grade Spirit Stones to make a barrel of Rotflower’s Brew. If done to standard, second larger order to follow shortly.

A nearly useless low-grade elixir. Horrible-smelling and gunky, its only purpose was to cure a trivially weak disease. And it produced a mind-boggling amount of toxic byproduct as a result. Usually nobody ordered more than a flask. A barrel of the stuff?

But then Minthus’s eyes gravitated toward the glimmering Spirit Stones sealed with the letter. Ten crystals, splitting the light of his one sputtering oil lamp and throwing the ghostly splinters over his hobble-legged desk, his stool which always seemed to creak when he shifted his weight the slightest bit, over his moth-eaten coat hung on the rickety doorframe. A coat he was meaning to replace every month, it felt like—yet every month the prices kept shooting up. What madness had possessed him to call a city comprised entirely of hagglers his home?

He wasn’t paid to question the customer, he decided.

The only hassle was the byproduct. That much toxic waste… he’d need an Interspatial Ring to store all of it. And with how corrosive it was it’d rot through the pocket dimension in a day! A trip to the waste chutes, then.

For ten mid-grade Spirit Stones? He’d happily make a dozen trips. With a grunt, he got to work.

***

Step five was waiting—and prepping.

Sun heated up her pan and set to work. Sun cooked for pleasure, sure, but cooking was a close cousin of Alchemy. Prepare the right ingredients the right way and you could squeeze some latent powers out of them—gathered in a plate rather than a flask. Here, a few Ba Serpent poisons, mixed with its flesh, would do.

Not the best antidote, but any better was outside their price range. They wouldn’t be in the toxic flow long anyways.

***

Step six.

This one wasn’t hard in theory. Only it was rather a bore, and it took Dorian the best part of a day.

This wasn’t the only lava lake in the mountains. Far from it. They were all connected in vast underground networks. And in these networks lived all manner of nasty beasts. One in particular Dorian knew intimately.

The Lava Whale.

Fat and thick and dense and heavy, even as a demigod. He took a full day off and went whaling.

Dove into a few lakes. Picked off a few stragglers, gored them right through with his Javelin. And then, crucially, collected their corpses in an Interspatial Ring. All in all, he got a good two dozen of them. Just about enough to—if placed just right, and packed tight enough—clog up the flow of a lake. For a few hours, at least…

***

“Shit. It actually came through!” Sun pointed to the chute, which was dumped nearly twice the flow of toxic waste now into the lava lake. The flow went on for a good ten minutes or so before it subsided, so viscous and pitch-black that—should two nefarious snorkelers swim quickly up it—they might not be noticed, even with their cloaking done away with.

“Huh.” Dorian would’ve given a coin flip’s odds that the Alchemist’s Guild would actually deliver.

“And now, the finishing touch…” Sun scribbled scribbled on a piece of parchment.

Thirty mid-grade Spirit Stones to make a barrel of Rotflower’s Brew. Dispose of the waste ten minutes past twilight PRECISELY. If done to standard, more orders to follow shortly.

“I’ll get this to the courier!” said Sun. “Then we’ll get in position, yeah?”

Dorian watched her scamper off with mixed feelings.

On the one hand he was pleasantly surprised she’d gotten this far. He was nearly proud, even.

On the other…

He’d begun this plan really as a curiosity, an idle indulgence. And then—as things so often do, when you set them in motion—it kept going. He kept expecting the Multiverse to call it off. For Fate to put a stop to this silliness.

Am I really about to place my fate in the hands of this excitable runt?

It seemed rather nuts, all of a sudden.

She was well-meaning, and puffed full of cheery confidence. That much was certain. What was considerably less certain was just how well this plan would actually hold up. A good attitude did not a good plan make.

He scratched his head. What exactly had he gotten himself into?