Tristan Gets To Work

It had been an hour, Tristan spending his downtime while everything processed looking at his vault in the sump pit of his parents basement.

At regular intervals bikers would pass through town, Tristan would swap saddle bags and his efforts would be paid for, his product taken to the biggest city in the area.

Except this week there was no swap. Only a threat. Tristan examined the carefully bagged tablets in the plastic organizers and sighed.

The bikers said their distribution was stalled, who they sold to wasn’t buying, but their market wasn’t showing any higher demand. So it was suspected someone else was supplying.

Tristan frowned. He didn’t think he was going to get paid for his last batch of tablets, knowing full well the bikers didn’t just hold onto them. Hearing Steve and Barry smack talk in the next room Tristan shook his head and checked his cash supply.

He had one grand left, barely enough for making another batch of tablets.

Putting the stuff away on the shelf beneath the basement floor in the pit he sealed it up.

Standing up and looking at his lab he dropped his jaw.

The centrifuge looked done, turning it off he gazed at the test tubes in amazement at how the substance had seemingly changed already.

Screening the contents Tristan felt somewhat disturbed by the lack of need to experiment in refining the strange viscous liquid. It was almost as if it wasn’t just simply idiot-proof, but as if it wanted to crystalize into granules.

The first of which seemed to easily accrue on the filter.

Sinking his mind into the mystery Tristan failed to notice how the time flew by, engrossed by experimenting on more of the bottle's content as his first pills finished setting after compression.

“Sweet, new shit.” It wasn’t unusual for Crystal to come over at night, she and Tristan went way back with their undefined relationship. Crystal was the person who first got Tristan to experiment with making ****, proudly declaring herself his first test bunny.

“SHIT! YOU DIDN’T!” Tristan exclaimed as Crystal slowly nodded her slightly pudgy cheeked face, assorted colour highlights draping across the shoulder-length hair chaotically framing her face.

“Oh yes, I did. I’m your test bunny, I try all your shit first.” Crystal replied all confident and cavalier, not able to understand Tristan's suddenly tight wad attitude.

“This isn’t my shit! I have no idea what's in it, or what it’ll do!” Tristan remarked as he scrambled around suddenly unable to recall where he stashed his overdose kit. Would it even work on this? He then wondered.

“What evs. I can say right now, I’m still feeling less shitty than being home.” Crystal replied shrugging and stepping out into the basement rec room where Steve was putting a pounding in on Barry.

Scrambling to shut everything down and clean up what was in use Tristan flipped open his cookbook, quickly starting a new page of notes about what he had learned so far, and prepare to learn from his first human trial in a while.

Cursing as he heard…