Title: Perfection
Author: S J Smith
Rating: Teen
Disclaimer: Just playing in Arakawa's sandbox.
Summary: It's going to be a long night for Shou Tucker.
Your stomach is tied in knots. It feels like your gut is going to leap up your throat and out of your mouth and explode onto the floor. You've vomited your lunch, and then the tea you made, and then bile, and now your stomach is empty and you don't want to eat.
But your daughter needs food, and you make her soup, because soup is easy, and what's easier is being able to slip some medicine into it, just enough to make her sleep. Later, you'll dose her dog with the same thing, but you'll wait to do that. Alexander weighs considerably more than Nina and you don't want to carry him down the stairs and into the basement, where you work on your experiments.
You understand now, what the problem was before, why your first chimera didn't work properly. For the blending of animal and human to work, you need to use malleable subjects. An adult is too set in his – her – ways; too self-aware of the world. But a child is like clay, waiting to be formed.
Tomorrow morning, you'll be able to show everyone what you can accomplish. Everyone will see, and your alchemic license will be reinstated. Your time scrabbling and testing, and making these monsters, will all be vindicated.
You'll show them all that you're an alchemist to be reckoned with, better even than that child prodigy. Your chimera will be perfect. Amazing. Able to talk. A true blend of human and animal.
Seamless.
