Soju – the name of a mirror mana boss in Mana Khemia 2. Because Roxis and Theofratus have an amazing amount in common, even in the areas where their actions and worldviews seem most opposed to each other.
Regarding character development: Arlin and Ash both have a lot of anger and discipline, at the same time. Arlin still feels young in some ways, and there's certainly the fact that he doesn't expect to live very long, so there's no reason to spend time learning about the world and dealing with people when he could be training to kill Mull. Ash, on the other hand, has that whole, 'been there, done this, you guys are a bunch of clueless idiots and it's frustrating because it means people will die,' thing going on.
Also, technology marches on: in AI2, which is the first chronologically, Viese couldn't make items, not even with a cauldron, without a pact with the corresponding mana. By the time of AI1… Well. In Mana Khemia, they don't have synthesis using elements but it's not necessary to have a mana in order to perform cauldron synthesis. The games show different types of alchemy, and Klein's style is not like Felt's or Viese's (who don't do the same kind of alchemy despite being foster siblings). While in Al Revis' time, they've lost the elemental synthesis techniques, there must have been some breakthrough allowing alchemists to synthesize without mana after AT2. Tony, for example. That's about the only way to explain Veola, even if she is from a village of magicians.
Arlin, who Iris and Crowley were still calling Ash (Mister Ash, in Iris' case) a little more than half the time, held up his hand to stop Roxis from speaking. "If you're discussing something you don't want that creature to know, I can't be here for this." Obviously. "I'll tell you what I can," if it was any of their business, "but unlike… Jess, I wasn't built to incorporate a ruby prism. I have some defenses, but they've already proven that they weren't enough once."
"I'm sorry," Luplus said, appearing beside Arlin. "If I'd been there…"
Arlin looked at him and shook his head. "It wasn't your fault, it was mine for failing to protect you."
Isolde was surprised to hear something so much like what Roxis would say to Vayne from the ancient. The difference was that when Roxis said it he was scolding Vayne for blaming himself. Arlin wasn't scolding Luplus, he simply felt guilty for not protecting his mana partner. But then, an ancient alchemist was certainly able to do more in the way of protection than a student.
Then again, Roxis had rescued Vayne from her and then Thorn from this evil, while Arlin hadn't even been able to rescue himself.
"There was nothing you could have done," Luplus told him. "There were too many of it."
"Too many of… That monster beat you and took Luplus?" As some monster must have defeated Iris' parents and taken Zeilia.
"It snuck up on me. No, I knew something was following me, but there was nothing but shadows. I was looking for what cast them, I didn't realize that it had hidden itself in them. At first it didn't seem that difficult, and I thought I could force it to tell me who had sent it after me, since it knew about Luplus. Then it started splitting into several enemies, and when I defeated one it would just make another. They weren't illusions or puppets, all of them were real." Otherwise it would have been simple, he'd dealt with enemies using those techniques before. "I needed to kill it faster than it could make more of itself, so I made the mistake of summoning Luplus to slow them down." He met each of their eyes. "That was when it trapped him. Don't call your mana, they have to manifest for it to catch them."
"Can you describe the item or technique?" Isolde asked, leaning forward.
"The same item Mull used to use." Arlin's eyes grew dark. "The same one I used to use, to seal them in statues and crystals." At Mull's orders.
He'd done it? Roxis leaned forward, the aspect of the crisis he'd come about momentarily forgotten. "Do you know how to release them?"
Arlin looked surprised. "It's not difficult. Just focus the power of alchemy where they're trapped and call them out."
"Focus the power of alchemy?" Isolde prompted him.
"It's very similar to performing elemental extraction, except instead of converting the object into raw elemental power it's simply calling out what's already there."
"Elemental extraction is a lost technique here," Roxis was sorry to inform him.
"I'll show it to you," Iris promised him. "It's simple, really even if you don't know how it's supposed to work. I remembered watching my father use it, so when I started raiding I did what he did, but I thought it was just for disrupting the elements of monsters, not absorbing them." A killing technique that broke their bodies apart, scattering the elements that made them up, not one that pulled their component elements into the alchemist. "Uroboros told me that I was supposed to summon them into me, so that I could use them to synthesize items, and once I knew that was how it was supposed to work, it was simple." Pulling them into herself instead of sending them out into the world.
"Disrupting the component elements of the target?" Roxis sounded fascinated. "You would have to have a very advanced understanding of alchemy for that." To be able to comprehend the elements a living creature, as opposed to an ingredient, was made up of and control them like that.
"There are two kinds of synthesis: synthesis from ingredients and synthesis from raw elements," Arlin explained. "It's only possible to synthesize from raw elements with the help of a mana capable of interacting with that element, but researchers in Avenberry discovered how to synthesize with ingredients without the help of a mana. Any mana." The alchemist, or shopkeeper in Veola's case, had to be the one to understand the true nature of the ingredients. "No one who doesn't have a pact to at least one mana can use elemental extraction."
"Really?" Iris looked surprised. She'd used elemental extraction before she'd found Plua and made a pact with her, but then again she hadn't been doing it right. Maybe her old technique, 'elemental disruption' didn't require a mana but actually taking in the elements, real elemental extraction, did.
Arlin gave her a measuring look. "Normally."
"Normally?" Roxis repeated the word. "Are you referring to the lineage of Iris?" Perhaps Iris might not need a mana to use the technique because she had the ability herself?
Arlin looked surprised. "How did you know about that?"
"Wasn't Klein a member of it? Apparently I'm a descendant of his."
"He was, but he didn't know what it meant. No one did, not even Mull, or he wouldn't have let Klein's grandmother just leave like that." And Arlin didn't want to think about what Mull would have done to Klein if he'd known that the alchemist was a human with the power of a mana instead of just some amateur, commoner. Mere background noise who was no threat to his plans other than as a distraction, so paying attention to a mere distraction would obviously have been counterproductive.
"Klein's grandmother?"
"She and Mull were partners," Arlin explained. "They both studied under her mother, and then went to Avenberry in search of knowledge and recipes. They found Zedalia's village on the way." Investigating an odd glyph, they'd discovered how to open the gate to the village of sorcerers that Mull had destroyed decades later when they refused to serve him. "Eventually, they argued over the means he intended to use to restore alchemy to the world, and the other two abandoned alchemy. Or that's what he told me."
"Klein's grandmother taught him alchemy," Jess chimed in. She'd been standing over the cauldron as their small group conferred in the loft, and Roxis and Vayne were so used to having her tinkering in the background that they'd almost forgotten she was there. Normally she was dead to the world when she was experimenting: a bomb could go off right next to her and as long as it wasn't one of hers she wouldn't notice or care, not compared to the synthesis she was focusing on. "He came to Avenberry to search for alchemical items, since she wanted him to discover them, and mana, on his own. It was kind of the opposite of Al Revis: Klein knew how to synthesize from elements but he wasn't very good with a cauldron and ingredients. He needed Veola to make armor and weapons for us." Pouring something into a bottle, she added. "Norman, he was a bartender, really knew more about the alchemy Al Revis teaches than Klein did, huh. So much for alchemy dying out in Kavoc. I think that it was just that it was so normal there that no one really considered it alchemy. Alchemy was the stuff with mana and elements, not mixing ingredients."
"You really are Lita," Arlin said, sounding almost amazed. "Regardless," he said, trying to get back on track, "If that family had known they were part mana, Mull's… Mull would have been told. He didn't know. So how do you know?"
Roxis was confused. Didn't Arlin know that the alchemists were still in existence? He had somehow gotten the impression that… Well, no, if they were still in contact with Arlin he would have had their help getting Luplus back. Was there some reason they weren't keeping in touch, was there some secret? He dismissed the idea that they were only allowed to speak of such things to him because he was destined to create the ruby prism or something like that. If they were helping Jess, even if Jess hadn't remembered until now, surely they would have at least let their friend, who did remember them and would have mourned, know that they were still alive.
"Klein must have told him," Luplus suggested to Arlin.
"As in personally?" Arlin looked at Roxis thoughtfully. "Klein didn't discover what that meant until… afterwards."
"Zedalia thought it didn't mean anything besides that he could pact to multiple mana," Jess explained. "Klein didn't even know he was a member when he came, I don't think his grandmother told him. Actually, I don't think she told him much of anything. He didn't know who Mull was until Zedalia told him, either." The woman who raised him couldn't have told him much about her youth, if she'd left her own pilgrimage out. "Anyway, Roxis, Vayne's right." She left the cauldron to come closer to the loft and meet his eyes. "There are lots of ways to do alchemy. Klein was really good with what he did, just like you're good with medicines and desserts, and he made the ruby prism." Jess had heard Vayne arguing with Roxis as they came in.
"Yeah. Honestly?" Nikki stretched her legs and tail. "You're really worse than Vayne ever was."
"What?" Roxis leaned over the edge of the loft. A few months ago, he would have been horribly insulted. But Nikki wouldn't have said something like that to be insulting, and Jess might treat terrible things lightly but she wasn't like Pamela or Flay, she wouldn't say something like this just for the sake of his reaction.
"Seriously, Roxis… Ow!" Nikki hit her head on the table before crawling out from under it, rubbing her forehead and further messing up her crazy hair. "You're really good at alchemy, so when you say that you're terrible at it, then what does that mean for everyone else who's not as good as you?" It meant that they were really terrible. "Remember how you felt because Vayne didn't think that what he could do wasn't anything special? You thought that he was looking down on you because if his skills were insignificant, then you really weren't any good at all? I know you don't mean it any more than Vayne did, but, honestly? You really act like a jerk sometimes. Half our class thinks you're looking down on them." Well, more like all of them except the ones who knew Roxis, and he was kind of prickly so that was hard.
"Well, I am, they don't have any work ethic. It's near the end of second year and they arrived months before I did, how could anyone not know…" Roxis waved his arm, Nikki and Jess knew the kind of stupid questions some of the other students asked. "It's because of the ones who won't apply themselves that the rest of us have to waste half of every class session on review! I can't stand people who have the talent and just waste it!" Waste what he'd worked so hard to approximate!
"Talent?" Isolde snorted. "You're just using that as an excuse to look down on everyone. The kind of pride that comes from pushing others down instead of improving yourself? It's despicable. You, the underdog? Throw away your illusions!" she ordered, imperiously and contemptuously.
Roxis whirled to glare at her.
Professor Isolde wasn't impressed with teenaged dramatics. "You grew up comparing yourself to past glories and adult alchemists: of course you weren't as good as they were. Then you failed the entrance exam because you came to it with an entirely different understanding of alchemy theory: I went through your file, you were practically correcting the questions." Convinced some of them were trick questions, because it just didn't work that way.
"The only kinds of 'talent' that matter are the ability to grasp concepts and the ability to work hard. People who have the first without the second are doomed to fail, because if it's easy for them and they don't know how to deal with it when it doesn't? However, by working at it, people can learn what would otherwise be hard for them to grasp, and they can learn how to learn. Talent? Talent without discipline is worse than useless. Look at Renee, she could have been my successor but she doesn't care enough about alchemy theory to work at it when she could be fighting. Look at Tony: alchemy comes absurdly naturally to him but he was failing his classes until he started putting the work into it because of his little rivalry with Flay. He didn't get a mana because of his talent, she decided to pact to him because he 'has spirit,' which as far as I can tell means she picked him because he's overly emotional and undisciplined."
Far too easily provoked. Although, to be fair, Isolde had gotten the impression that the concern for Nell he had showed and how he had expressed it had been an important part of it. "You can look at ingredients and know their properties instantly: that's not talent, that's skill. Knowing what needs to be done without having to think about it, and knowing where to look to find what you don't know? That's what makes an alchemist. What makes an expert. If this was the old days and you were my apprentice, I'd have sent you to found your own workshop already. You're a master comparing yourself to apprentices. Don't you feel proud of yourself?" Isolde wondered archly.
"Let me tell you one thing you obviously don't know: everyone judges normal by themselves. Vayne didn't think his powers were anything strange because they were how he always had been, am I right? Not until they were pointed out to him. And if an artificial mana can think he's normal, than someone who clearly would have gotten Fs in all my classes if he hadn't done enough work to compensate for lack of understanding of the material can think that he's below average and practically everyone else is incompetent by comparison." Isolde was frankly disgusted with herself. This was forcing her to admit that Ernentraud had been right. How had she let anyone in her workshop labor under such ignorance? Roxis and his education had technically been her responsibility, and even if she'd given up on alchemy she should have owed it to herself to enlighten the boy. For the sake of making him annoy her less, if nothing else. "Congratulations: you're a great alchemist, if a terrible predictologist. Now pat yourself on the back and get over yourself."
Theofratus had been arrogant for the same reason, thinking himself surrounded by fools, and then he'd realized that the fools were the normal ones and become so full of himself. At least Theofratus had done his best to ignore the foolishness of others instead of constantly pointing it out in the first stage. Roxis managed to be as arrogant in his humility as Theofratus ever had been in his god complex.
Theofratus… Her hands clutched around her fur muff and the small treasure it contained.
