Work Text:
Albedo carefully measured out 3.7 grams of whopperflower nectar, added it to the beaker, and then swirled the mixture over the low flame. The solution turned a bright fuschia, and small bubbles formed. Good, that hadn’t happened last time. Albedo made a note in his notebook that increasing the amount of nectar relative to the mist flower extract, following a constant mass ratio instead of a constant volume ratio, appeared to be key to allowing the reaction to proceed. He reached for the tin of chalk dust, and began adding spoonfuls to the beaker.
Halfway through the third spoonful, the water kettle to his right began to whistle, and he set down the spoon. “Lumine, your tea will be ready shortly,” he said, removing the kettle from the heat, and carefully pouring the hot water into her waiting teacup.
Lumine sighed happily and sank deeper into her chair. “Thank you, Albedo,” she murmured. She and Paimon had just returned from a commission–a particularly tough Ruin Hunter had been spotted uncomfortably close to Springvale. It had been no match for her, obviously, but the fight (and the trek back up Dragonspine) had winded her, and she had seemed all too happy to take a tea break while Albedo worked. Paimon was off on the other side of the cave, poking around the rows of glass jars and ingredient boxes on Albedo’s shelves. He had warned her not to break anything; while most of the dry ingredients in the boxes and jars were harmless enough on their own, some of the solvents could react in unpleasant and/or explosive ways if exposed to the air for too long.
Having poured her tea, Albedo returned to his experiment. The solution, left on the flame, had turned a deep mahogany. That was….not expected. Hmmm. Might as well continue. Let’s see, which spoon was he on….drat. He’d lost count. He seemed to recall moving the spoon from the beaker four times? So only one more spoonful of chalk dust. Albedo measured out the spoonful of chalk, added it to the solution, and swirled the beaker. In a flash of steam, the solution suddenly crystallized into an opaque gray, crumbly solid, and the beaker shattered.
Albedo sighed. Another failure. He made a note in his lab notebook, and reached for a new beaker. He stopped with his hand halfway to the beaker at a shrill outburst behind him.
“Albedo!” Paimon whined. “What kind of sick joke is this!?” Albedo turned, and saw Paimon angrily waving a bar of coal-black chocolate at him. “What kinda monster has chocolate but makes it taste this bad?” she demanded. She slammed it down heavily on the table behind her, and placed her hands heavily on her hips, floating angrily a meter above the ground.
“Paimon, that’s not for eating!” Albedo warned.
“Chocolate that’s not for EATING?” Paimon shrieked. “That’s even WORSE!” Behind her, Lumine took an exploratory nibble, pulled a face, quietly put the bar down, and put her own hands on her hips, mirroring Paimon.
Albedo sighed. “No, Paimon,” he said, “that’s alchemical chocolate. It doesn’t taste good on its own. But with a little bit of alchemy, it can make the best brownies you’ve ever had.”
Paimon turned and gave the chocolate a skeptical look. “You mean that–” she pointed–”makes brownies? I dunno what kinda brownies you eat, Albedo….”
Albedo chuckled. “Here. I’ll make some, and then you can see for yourself.”
“Well….okay….so long as Paimon gets to eat brownies!” Paimon said.
“Yes, I’d like brownies too,” Lumine said, smiling brightly at Albedo.
Albedo gave a small bow. “My experiment failed, so my alchemy stand is conveniently free. I’ll get right to work.”
Paimon cheered and Lumine clapped lightly in excitement. Albedo retrieved a small pot from his pantry, and filled it with water from the water barrel. He set the pot over the flame, and then brought the chocolate to his preparation table. Selecting a large, slightly blunt knife, he began chopping the chocolate into small, rough chunks.
“The first step,” he said aloud, “is nigredo . Darkness, blackness, chaos. The untenable bitterness of the chocolate, that which we must transmute into culinary gold.” He transferred the chocolate into a metal bowl. “I learned this recipe from an alchemist in Fontaine, a fellow named Alphonse–it was his magnum opus , his greatest work.”
“Someone really spent their whole career trying to make brownies?” Lumine asked, incredulously.
“No, he spent his entire career trying to turn iron ore into cor lapis,” Albedo replied. “He didn’t succeed, of course. No, alchemical brownies were the greatest work he ever completed.”
“Aww, that’s so sad!” Paimon exclaimed.
“It’s really not,” Albedo said, mildly. “The brownies are a truly monumental accomplishment.”
Albedo walked over to the icebox at the cave entrance, and selected a block of butter. He brought it back to the preparation table, and began cutting it into pieces. “The second step,” he continued, “is albedo –the whitening, bringing brightness and purity to the mixture. Equal parts, dark and light, combined.” He added the butter to the bowl. Over at the flame, the pot of water had begun to simmer. Albedo placed the bowl in a crucible stand, and moved it over to the flame so that the bowl was just above the top of the pot.
Steam billowed up around the bowl, and the butter and chocolate at the base of the bowl began to soften and glisten. “Next is purification through dissolution ,” Albedo said, and began stirring with a wooden spoon. As the heat from the steam suffused the contents of the bowl, the chocolate and the butter began to blend together. Albedo stirred at a steady, moderate pace, ensuring to maneuver the larger chunks into the smoother parts of the mixture. With a few turns of his mixing spoon, all of the butter had been coated in a thin layer of chocolate, dark as burnt oak.
Albedo began stirring in the opposite direction, and the mixture went through a phase change–suddenly, instead of dark chunks in a thin, molten glaze, the contents of the bowl had become a deep, fully-liquid mahogany. Chocolate fumes rose into the air, filling the cave with a rich smell. Paimon moaned quietly in anticipation.
“The fourth step: rubedo , reddening. The chocolate assumes the beginning of its final form, and the transmutation has begun,” Albedo said. He removed the bowl from the stand, and placed it on the alchemical crafting table. He selected a jar of reddish powder from the shelf, and tossed a dash of the powder into the bowl. “It also adds a bit of pep, a bit of life,” he noted with a wink to Lumine. He took his chalk, drew a circle around the bowl, and began inscribing runes along the circle.
Albedo finished the final rune, and the transmutation circle blazed to life. White, black, and red lights swirled through the hot mixture in the bowl, and Lumine and Paimon gasped appreciatively. Albedo measured out a cup of sugar and added it to the bowl, followed by a pinch of sea salt, and stirred vigorously. The bowl cooled rapidly, a layer of frost forming on the outer rim.
“Uh, shouldn’t it stay warm….?” Lumine asked.
“Don’t worry,” Albedo replied, “we have only moved some of the heat around–the bowl is a conduit between the chocolate and the air. We have borrowed the freshness of sweet flowers and the depths of the sea to effect the transfer. The bowl merely cooled more than the chocolate did. The mixture is still plenty warm, but for this next step, it needs to not be so hot.”
“Oooh, what’s the next step?” Paimon asked, hovering at Albedo’s elbow.
“The next step is citrinitas –yellowing, awakening the mixture, so that it can pass through the transmutation,” he said, and drew four eggs from a basket in the corner. One by one, he cracked the eggs and added their contents to the mixture, stirring all the while. As he stirred, the mixture began to slowly bubble and breathe. As the fourth and final egg dissolved into the mixture, the red, white, and black swirls faded away, and were replaced with shimmering sparkles of light, rising and falling in the deep mahogany chocolate.
“ Sublimation and exuberation ,” Albedo whispered. He added a spoonful of flour to the mixture, and placed his hands on the two runes nearest him. He found the spark of Khemia within him, and channeled it into the chalk, and then into the bowl. The circle flashed with opalescent light, and the sparkles of light in the chocolatey mixture rose up out of the bowl, swirled into a tight, pulsing ball of light, and then shot outwards, passing through the three of them and out through the walls of the cave. As they dissipated, the chalk circle around the bowl faded away into nothingness.
“What was that ?” Paimon breathed.
“The genius of this recipe, which is why this was Alphonse’s greatest work,” Albedo explained, “was the realization that to make the perfect brownies, you must not only transmute the ingredients, but also the world itself. You must create a world in which the perfect brownies can exist. I have just cast a very minor transmutation on the entire world–to allow these brownies to exist within it, for as long as we want to enjoy them.”
“Wooooow,” Paimon and Lumine said in unison.
“And now,” Albedo said, picking up the bowl and walking it over to the oven, “the final steps: fermentation, fixation, multiplication, and calcination. The ingredients are transformed through the crucible of heat into their final forms, using the processes of transmutation inherent to life itself, and which are found already in the ingredients we added–and then solidified into the final product. Brownies.”
“Ooohhhh, I can’t wait!” Paimon said, wiggling in the air and rubbing her hands together.
Albedo selected a muffin tin, and began spooning the batter into the muffin cups. “You’ll have to wait a while longer,” he said. “About twenty-five minutes. And then perhaps five minutes after that for them to cool.”
“Hmph!” Paimon huffed.
Albedo carefully slid the tray into the stone oven, then added a log to the fire beneath it. “I’ll tend the fire and make sure they don’t burn or cook unevenly,” he said, “you two just relax.”
Lumine nodded and returned to her seat with her cup of tea.
“Ooohh!” Paimon groaned, straining with impatience. She huffed again, and flew over to the shelf of ingredients she had been exploring when she found the chocolate, making a valiant effort to appear interested in its contents. Albedo knew she would be counting the seconds, however, as the smell of warm chocolate filled the air. He settled down to watch the fire, and carefully set an hourglass timer.
Finally, a reasonable time later, though Paimon had insisted twice that it was interminable, the hourglass ran out. Albedo took a small wooden pin, and poked it into the nearest brownie. It emerged clean, glistening gently with moisture.
“They’re ready,” he said softly, and donning a pair of oven mitts, removed the tray from the oven. A dozen dark brown domes filled the muffin tin, shining mahogany surfaces that suggested ever so softly the nearly-molten crumbly interiors beneath.
Albedo’s hair blew softly forward with a puff of hot breath–Paimon had appeared at his shoulder, breathing heavily, her wings flapping in slow, heavy beats.
“Five more minutes, Paimon. Just to let them cool and set a bit,” Albedo urged.
“Hrrnnngghhh,” Paimon strained, “you are inco–incorri–incog–sometimes I can’t stand you, Albedo!” she huffed, and flew away to a corner. Albedo looked over–Lumine was watching with a bemused expression, and Albedo caught her eye. He grinned, and they both burst into laughter.
“Soon, Paimon,” he urged.
Five absolutely eternal, irredeemable minutes later, Albedo carefully lifted the brownies out of the tin, and onto a small plate. He presented the plate to Paimon and Lumine. Paimon fluttered anxiously, rubbed her hands together, and seized the brownie nearest her, while Lumine gingerly lifted hers off the plate.
Paimon shimmied with excitement, took a small nibble, and then shoved the entire brownie into her mouth. “Mmmm! Mmmm!! Mmmmm!” she exclaimed through her full mouth as she vibrated with glee and began flying in small delighted circles.
Lumine examined her brownie carefully. “They’re beautiful, Albedo,” she said, looking up and locking eyes with him. “Thank you,” she said, and gave him a peck on the cheek. Albedo smiled and felt himself blush. He sat at the table opposite her, and gestured to the brownie. She took a generous bite of her brownie, and began to chew. Her eyes went wide, and then even wider as they unfocused, as the waves of flavor visibly rolled over her.
“ Oh, ” she murmured. She placed a hand on the table to steady herself as she finished chewing and swallowed, and quickly finished the brownie with a second large bite. “ Ohh, ” she moaned again.
“I take it they turned out well?” Albedo asked, grinning.
Lumine looked back to Albedo, her eyes focusing once more. “ You, ” she exclaimed, and lunged at him across the table, bearing him to the cave floor behind him. She kissed him deeply and hungrily, her mouth hot on his, her fingers grasping at his hair. “ You should have warned me they were that good, ” she whispered.
“I did say they were perfect,” Albedo replied, suppressing a giggle.
“Hey, what–mmf–’re you two doingmf?” Paimon asked, her voice muffled through a mouthful of brownie. A loud gulp followed, and she continued, “Anyway, uhh, Albedo, any chance you could make more of these?”
Albedo extricated himself from Lumine, and lifted himself up to table-height. The muffin tin was empty, Paimon’s mouth was smeared with chocolate, and she was rubbing her belly happily.
“Oh, Paimon,” he said, laughing.
“What? Hey!” she exclaimed. “Are you laughing at Paimon?”
“I think maybe you should teach me how to make those,” Lumine said, laughing.