Flash of Inspiration

Why was Dorothy in Crossroads and why did she save me?

Who knows?

She was the high Priestest. Surely she would have sensed Bellowym’s ****, and it was just as sure she would want to punish me for my failures.

Of the two women I could hardly choose who I was more scared of.

I ran from the shop prepared to skip town and start over in a new land. Crossroads was cursed.

That’s when a hand latched onto my shoulder and dragged me back to the store at inhuman speed.

Noooooooo!

It was Dorothy…

Noooooooo!

She dragged me back into the shop, past the masturbating clerk, and up stairs where Celeste lay gently moaning on the floor. “She’s still alive?” I gasp.

“I can’t break her skin, and she’s immune to poison.” She growls. “We’ll drown her in acid if we have to, but I’ve been poisoned.” She looked to me her yellow eyes commanding. “You’ll need to cure me before we proceed.”

“How ironic.” I cross my arms. “You send me here to die, but it’s you who will die here.”

She held her hand up, high to the sky. Her glistening armpit looking so lickable. “I’ll kill you first if you’re worried I’ll suffer an ironic ****.”

I glare at her, chin raised. “You killed my grandmother.” I tell her slowly. “I loved my grandmother.”

Dorothy scoffed. “She was a piss drinking slut. A demon’s whore.” High praise indeed. “But she was also a traitor, and a weak one at that.” She spat on me. “And she spawned weakness as well. You will cure me or you will not. You will obey the will of the goddess who died for you or you will not. You will at long last redeem your treacherous matriarch, or you will not. I will not beg you to do your duty.”

Damn her.

Damn her!

“What are your symptoms? What information do you have on the poison? Color, taste, smell?”

She smirked slightly, welcoming home her old friends of victory and submission. “She indicated I have fifteen minutes before my organs shut down. It was a smoke, black and sweet in taste and smell. Sunflowers, it smelled like sunflowers, or how they used to smell 300 years ago. It came from a star as well, and was upgraded enough to overcome my poison resistance.”

“It came from a star.” I shook my head, hopelessness overtaking me. “I can’t stop that.”

“You must!” She growled. “The goddess gave me a job. I’ll not fail her, saving you!”

“What about a restoration potion?” I ran over to a shelf by the still **** Daliah. “These can get rid of poison.”

She slapped it away, and let the precious liquid soak into the floor. “If it’s too potent for my immunity, it’ll be too potent for a simple potion.”

I rack my brain. “We could let it destroy your organs, then use a restoration potion. No.” I shake my head. “The poison would still be sitting there. We’d need a way to drain you.”

Fuck!

Finally a chance to show my skills and I was against one of the most talented alchemists in the country.

“She wouldn’t carry a poison without a cure.” I looked around.

Dorothy started looking through bottles as well. “The star might have a cure option, or she might have a cure on another star. We can’t know without knowing her stars.”

“Look for a book,” I tell her. “If she’s an alchemist, she’ll have worked all kinds of experiments on her stars. We may get info there.”

I didn’t wait to see if she obeyed, I had to trust she valued her own life enough to listen to advice.

I ran down stairs where the clerk was weakly shooting ropes of jizz on the floor. “You’re doing great!” I tell him and start to climb the ladder of the potion wall.

“It’s getting raw.” He complains.

I grab a healing potion, uncork it, and pour it on him from above. He greatfully lubes his dick up with the stuff and continues with a new vigor.

Heh, I remembered turning eighteen and smelling Dorothy for the first time…

I shook my head and continued to climb. I was looking for a little cerulean bottle, corked stylishly with a glass peg in the shape of a book. “Flash of insight.” I read aloud, as I held the potion. To my identity as an alchemist this potion was as holy to me as the cauldron of corruption. I remembered seeing it on my first trip into the store and knowing that the master here was someone whose secrets needed to be my own.

It was a potion that increased your mental abilities for while, allowing for great bursts of genius. There’s tale of a king who devised a strategy to defend his land from an opposing army three times his own, and revolutionized his country’s metallurgical practices while he was at it. The downside is it burns your brain up using it at that capacity. Multiple uses are not recommended and some have strokes on their first try.

I slid down the ladder rather heroically and ran back upstairs.

All the ladies were where I left them. Except for Dorothy who had a book waiting for me. “It’s coded.” She said throwing it to me.

“I’ll see what I can do.” I slapped the book open, downed the potion and prayed for a miracle.

The first thing I noticed was the world vibrate to a halt. Everything around me vanished until it was just me and the book.

Unknowable symbols inked across the page before me. I realized the type of tree, the age of the paper and the mill that pulped it, off handily. As well as the sea creature used for the ink. A recipe that I’d never tried came to mind.

While I was thinking of that the cipher unfurled before me. The first rule of a cipher is you always try to find e, but there was no symbol that appeared with the right frequency or area to be e. However there were two symbols when combined that fit the bill. Boom, the rule was simple. Each letter has two symbols which alternate use. It was a fun puzzle, consonants shared a symbol with their adjoining consonant, which kept the count of letters deflated, further hiding the key. Still once cracked, it was cracked, and the first page was mine. Some thoughts on philosophy.

I sleep, next.

It was agony waiting for my hand to turn the next page. It was moving in slow motion. I had the next two pages deciphered before my hand could even reach for the next page.

This was too inefficient.

This book was written by Celeste, I was in congress with her.

The book was gone. My body was still slowly paging through it, the cipher was solved. My mind could run the equations necessary to solve the other pages, and absorb the info in the background.

It was much more fruitful to focus on what I’m good at.

Celeste stood before me, a simulacrum of her in my mind.

Keep up.

It grew smarter and more realized as I tore through the book.

“Let’s talk alchemist.” I say, mentally spreading my arms out. “Dorothy is poisoned, how do we fix that?”

“I won’t tell you.” She says, perfectly imperious.

“Does that mean the book doesn’t contain the secret? You’re a creation of my mind, you’ll help me if you can.”

She smirked. “I am a recreation of the book. The book is resident to share its secrets as well.”

“Of course.” That made sense. "But do away with the clothes."

With a puff of smoke she was naked, standing there in her weird grey splendor.

"Much better." I smirk.

"Let's hone on in this poison thing." I crack my knuckles, and approach her so I can run my imaginary hands along her stomach. "You created it with a star. What are the details of that? Is it a poison of it's own, or are we recreating a poison found in nature."

She thinks about it, or rather I think about her thinking about it. "If it were a naturally appearing poison, then I wouldn't have so many diagrams trying to disect the nature of it." She nods, as she thinks it through. "No. Instead I list symptoms, the process of the poison, and relate it to other compounds. No." She shakes her head, putting her hand on mine to guide it about her body. "It's a poison onto itself. Yes." She smiles.

"Have you found an antidote to it? A cure?"

She looks about the void the two of us exist on. The cognitive realm. It's me looking about the room. Gathering more information to feed myself. This potion was a trip. "A cure, no but a process perhaps. Hmmm." She rests her head on mine, she's so much taller than me, and begins to pet my hair. "The star... rank three, two ranks of potency to it. Most would die instantly upon exposure. Dorothy will live long enough to suffer. No use in creating a cure to that, but..." She kisses my head. "There is something... ah yes. A delay. The particles sit in the lungs, swaddled in a seed of magic that slowly dissolves. Enough time to fix a mistake."

"Or get out unseen."

She tuts. "Come now, you're smarter than that. For a few more seconds. I'd use other means of poison if I wanted to slip out unseen."

True enough. "So the poison is in her lungs, decaying until it's loose and it kills her. It works too fast to treat, and is too potent to prevent against. Yet you found a way to treat it."

"Indeed I did." She smiles, knowingly.

Does she know? If she knew I would know, and I...

"Ah." I smile back. "Yes I think that would work."

With that the problem was solved for, but I was still stuck in my mind. Or rather I was still stuck in my dreadfully slow body as it slugged through the world. “What should I do with you?” I ask the clone and lowered my hand down to her pussy.

“You’ll have to kill me.” She says, spreading her legs for me.

“Really?” That’s disappointing. “You don’t think I could corrupt you? I have Dorothy with me now.”

“Too dangerouss.” She sighs and lets me inside. “Besides, you don’t trust Dorothy.”

No I don’t. “That’s a shame.” I meant it. To lose a mind like hers, for my own survival. What a waste.

---

After a small eternity with my simulacrum of Celeste I come to, my brain aching, on fire, and practically leaking out my ears. I have jizz in my pants from a few round with the imaginary celeste as we waited for the potion to wear off. The lab is a mess, and Dorothy squints at me looking almost frightened. I'm panting, vomit is dripping from my lips, and in my hand I have a vial of writhing slime.

I look at her gravely. "You're going to have to breath this in." I croak and stumble towards her. My body had been hard at work in the lab once I figured it all out. With Cleste's notes and advice from earlier I was able to make a suitible proto slime. It wouldn't impress anyone, but it didn't need too. All it needed to do was stick to the poison in Dorothy's lungs, and suck it out.

She noded gamely. It's so nice to have a companion who doesn't question everything I say.

She laid down and gestured for me to begin. "This is going to be unpleasant." I warned her.

She sniffed. "I haven't heard many pleasant things about **** by poison either."

I cupped her mouth and began to pour the slime down her nose.

I'd spent my entire life beings scared and hoplessly aroused by Dorothy, but this is the moment beat them all... as far as fear goes. She did not flinch, or gasp, cough or shudder as I poured the contents of the jar into her lungs. She wanted to, Bellowyn knows she did, but she didn't. Her eyes were of **** focus, they burrowed into mine. It was incredible. Complete mastery over her body. She allowed the creature into her, down her throat, into her lungs. There it expanded and filled her, reaching out to the depths of the organs for those precious poisonous particles.

We waited, and waited.

She started to turn blue.

With a prayer I grabbed hold of the strand of slime spilling from her nostils and began to pull. And pull, and yank. I had to prey the creature would hold together and not break off in her lungs. Ropes of the stuff pulled free from her, stretching and trying to slide back into the chasm in her chest. I looked to my side...

and saw Celeste begin to stir.

I yanked harder, more rapidily. I could almost feel the slime peeling from the inside her lungs. I'm sure Dorothy could feel it. Her nails scrapped against the floor, making mean divots in the wood. "Come on! Come on!" I roar, and yank, and prayed.

"Ugh." Celeste moans, propping herself up on one arm. "What happened?”

Dorothy shoved me off of her. I watched horrified as she stuck her hand in her mouth, unhinged her jaw with a horrid pop, and grabbed a fistful of slime gurgling at the back of her throat. With a wretch and slow tug she pulled it free from her mouth, from her throat, from her lungs, and tossed the slime onto the ground. She gulped and gasped for air.

"Good work." Celeste nodded at me, and got to her feet. Dorothy was still on the ground, now coughing still gasping for air. "That was a clever solution."

"Can't there be peace between us?" I ask her, stepping back. My head feels like it's going to explode. My mind is trying to find away to survive, but it stalls. My thoughts go a million different ways, but none get far. That potion burnt me out. “Now that I know what you are I’ll never challenge you again. I’ll leave Crossroads.”

“No. It’s clear to me that you mean to do harm. I’m not one for law enforcement, but now that I know about you, and can stop you it’s my moral duty to do so. And on a more personal matter, you sought to betray my trust.”

“Would you consider a different moral framework?”

"The reason I chose this potion." She says slowly. Her body is trembling, exhausted from the conflict. "Is because even if you survive it once." I see her chest begin to inflate, soft curls of black gas curl from her mouth and nose. "You can still die to it the second time!"

Dorothy's hand shot out into my chest, and propelled me out the window, and into the street below.

She pushed off of the ground, shot out at Daliah, and went out a second window all in the time it took for the room to fill completely with that deadly smoke.

It didn't dare come into the street. The wards around her shop were good, and the citizens of Crossroads were safe from the **** that billowed inside, **** to escape into the free air, into their lungs and bodies.

Before I could get to my feet, Dorothy had me slung under her arm, and Daliah under the other. She sprinted down the street, and out of town. Too fast for most to get a good look at us.

The look didn't matter, and I knew this.

We'd escaped. But our scent was going to lead her right back to us.

Our conflict with the alchemist was far from over.