Judy called for a stop once the sun had sunk below the crumbling ruins of the Outer Wall on the horizon, the fading light of day making their shadows stretch strangely across the blasted landscape. Although she hadn't quite spent an entire day traveling with Nick, as she had reached the Middle Wall close to mid-morning, she was utterly exhausted. Judy had traveled through the night the previous day to arrive so early, and being tired just seemed to make her pack grow heavier and heavier with each step.
It was, therefore, mildly irritating that her companion didn't seem especially bothered by the much larger and significantly heavier looking pack that he carried; quite the contrary, he had grown cheerier as the day wore on. Upon hearing the places she had gone in the city center during her training, he had clutched at his chest in mock despair, gently chiding her for her almost perfectly single-minded focus on joining the City Guard. Judy knew that he was, without a doubt, teasing her, but she couldn't deny that she had wished to see the sites he described. She had only ever passed the Royal Palace once, and that at night, so while the building's exterior had been lit up with the silvery glow of alchemical torches she hadn't been able to see anything of the grounds. The moat that surrounded the palace, and the vast gardens that surrounded the moat, were said to have representative examples of landscaping and plant life from each of the districts that made up the city-state, from lush rain forest to barren desert, and Nick had a talent for describing what she had missed.
It was pleasant to imagine the grandeur of the city center of which she had seen so little, particularly because the wastelands didn't offer much in the way of interesting sights once the Cozamalotl Bridge was behind their backs. The path had started curving towards the remains of the Outer Wall, but otherwise what surrounded them remained little more than the occasional strange glass-filled crater or pool of water surrounded by withered plants. It gave Judy the unpleasant impression that they had traveled no distance at all, that if she looked behind herself (and more than once, she had fought an irrational dread when she did so) the Middle Wall would be no more than a hundred or so feet away. It was receding, though, the War Gate's austere opening on the far side of the wall fading gradually in sharpness and detail until it was a gray smudge no more remarkable than the much more elaborately carved opening was when viewed from her family's estate.
As they set up their camp, Judy reflected that it was perhaps that similarity that made the wastelands so eerie. When she looked ahead to horizon and saw dozens of miles of bleak, dead, and pock-marked flatness between her and the remains of the Outer Wall, it was like a nightmare in which the comfort and safety of the lushly green Tochtli Barony and the seemingly impenetrable wall that ran around it had been stripped away. It was visceral proof that the same thing might happen to her home and everyone she loved if the city-state descended into the madness of an apocalyptic civil war once more.
Judy shook the thought away, touching the familiar smooth metal of her torc as she did so. It had been centuries since the last true civil war, and even if it hadn't been, torcs made any such fight impossible. If Nick hadn't been beyond the Middle Wall he wouldn't have even been able to take his own torc off, and the magic of the torcs worked just as well against someone who wasn't wearing one as someone who was. No threat, whether it came from inside the city's walls or beyond them, could possibly hope to succeed in conquering Zootopia, and Judy told herself it was silly to dwell on such gloomy thoughts. The entire time she had spent in training for the City Guard mammals had said that rabbits were too emotional, too weak in constitution and body, and the absolute last thing she would ever do was give anyone an opportunity to say she was proof of it. She had pushed herself hard, harder than any of the other cadets, and when she stood back to take in her perfectly erected tent it was one such example of how seriously she had taken her training.
While she had been thinking to herself and putting up her small tent, Nick had been assembling one himself, although not quite as quickly. As he finished, Judy couldn't help but ask, "Couldn't you just make yourself something with alchemy?"
Nick chuckled as he turned away from his completed tent, a half-smile across his face. "I could," he said.
"Why don't you?" Judy asked.
He paused a moment before answering. There wasn't anything that would burn around their campsite, and it wasn't particularly cold, so rather than trying to build a fire Judy had simply set up an alchemical torch, which lit up the surrounding area with a dreamy quality almost like moonlight but much brighter. In the steady and silvery glow Nick looked almost as though he was made out of something as intangible as a spider's web, his fur rippling in the occasional breeze. "You have a quauhxicalli to make you as fast as a cheetah," he said, "Why aren't we just running all the way to Phoenix?"
Judy's answer was almost immediate. "Quauhxicallis are too expensive to waste," she said, and it was one of the points the academy had drilled into all of the cadets over and over again.
Even the cheapest quauhxicalli was worth more than she earned in a week, and some of the more expensive ones—which as an ensign she had not been entrusted with—were worth more than she earned in a year. "Besides," she added, "Even a cheetah couldn't run all the way to Phoenix without stopping."
Nick's smile broadened a degree. "Here's a little secret the Alchemist Guild wouldn't want you to know," he said, and his tone was conspiratorial, just barely above a whisper.
Judy found herself, despite her sensitive hearing, edging a little closer. "Alchemy's tiring," Nick said, "If I made a nice little hut with a soft bed—and you'd probably want one for yourself, I'm sure—you wouldn't be able to get me up in the morning."
He laughed as he settled back, resting one palm against the ground as he examined the claws on his other paw. "Of course, if you want to see what alchemy being performed is like..." he said, trailing off.
Although the look of good humor hadn't left his face, his green eyes sparkling in the light of the alchemical torch, Judy knew that he had seen completely through her. On the rare occasions when she had seen alchemists in the city-state's center, they hadn't actually performed any acts of alchemy; she had spotted one leaving a used book store and another entering a restaurant that looked so expensive even an entire garrison of the City Guard pooling their wages couldn't have afforded a single meal.
When Nick looked up from his claws, there was a slyly shrewd look on his face. "Maybe you think I can't perform alchemy?"
Judy could feel her ears burning as he, once again, seemed to see exactly what she had been thinking. It had occurred to her—and she had insisted to herself that it wasn't simply because he was a fox—that perhaps Nick wasn't actually an alchemist. He didn't dress like one and the torc he had tucked away into his coat didn't have any kind of guild symbol on it. He had as much as admitted that he wasn't a member of the Alchemist Guild, and Judy had never heard of any mammal, other than ones who had lived centuries ago, who had performed alchemy and wasn't a member. And, if it was taken into account that he was a fox—only as a relevant point in that he couldn't have been a member of the Alchemist Guild at some point before getting kicked out—wasn't it far more likely that he would have learned blood magic if he knew any kind of magic at all? Every single famous alchemist Judy had ever heard of had been a prey mammal, and every single famous blood magician—including Oztoyehuatl the Betrayer himself—had been a predator. If Nick was undertaking some sort of elaborate ruse, unlikely though it appeared, it was her duty as a member of the City Guard to put a stop to it.
"No, no, it's not like that at all," Judy blurted, waving her arms frantically, "I'm sure you're really an alchemist; you seem—that is—you are really clever for a... But—but as a fox I'm sure a lot of mammals doubt you, and—and I know what that's... That is..."
He was silently regarding her, his amusement evident, and Judy lamely finished, "I would. But not if it's too tiring for you, or if you don't feel like it—you don't have to prove it to me or anything..."
"Well, how can I let your curiosity go unsatisfied?" Nick asked cheerfully, "It is very impressive, after all. Do you have a copper piece?"
Grateful that he didn't seem to be holding her interest against her, Judy dug into one of the little pouches on her belt next to her little collection of the most basic quauhxicallis. She hadn't brought much money with her for their trip, as she was relying on being able to use the City Guard's garrison in Phoenix for food and shelter once they arrived, but she did have a few silver and copper coins. She dug out one of the fat copper coins, with its side-profile view of Queen Lana III on one side and glowing silvery alchemical marks on the other, and gave it to Nick.
"Perfect," Nick said, palming the coin, "Now here's the boring part."
Despite his words, Judy found herself quite interested in his preparations since she had never seen anyone do anything similar. He didn't seem to be doing anything more than drawing lines in the gritty dust off the path away from their tents and the alchemical torch. With the aid of a string with weights at the end he completed a perfect circle about five feet in diameter and then, with surprising deftness, a square with corners that precisely touched the circle's perimeter. Once the lines were drawn he rummaged through his pack and Judy craned her neck to see what he had packed. She caught a glimpse of the contents of his pack—which seemed to be almost entirely composed of glass vials carefully swaddled in cloth, a couple of which glowed with the same silvery-white light as an alchemical torch—before he produced a candle and a rather mundane looking vial full of what looked like water. The vial of water he placed on one of the intersections between the square and the circle, and the candle on another. Rather disappointingly, since Judy had been anticipating some demonstration of his own magical powers, he lit the candle with what looked like an ordinary match that glowed briefly as he snapped it and the alchemy that imbued it engaged. At one of the remaining corners he carefully placed a pawful of dirt, and then he positioned the coin at the center of the circle and sat beside it with his paws on either side of it.
He sat silent a moment, his eyes closed, and a gentle breeze blew across the wasteland, bringing with it the smell of some rotting plant, just as Judy was about to ask what he was waiting for. She didn't know enough about alchemy to know what he was doing, but at the instant the breeze blew past the very quality of the air itself seemed to change. Judy could feel her fur standing on end, the way it had when a severe thunderstorm was about to roll through Tochtli Barony, and the mildly unpleasant smell of dusty grit and sickly plants she had come to associate with the wasteland was overpowered by the same sort of sharpness she associated with a lightning strike. She thought that she could hear something, near the very limits of her hearing, something high-pitched and somehow both distant and near.
Nick was still unmoving, his fingers splayed on either side of the coin, and as she watched the coin changed. The copper grew even duller, but it wasn't as though it was simply getting darker. Rather, even though it was well within the light of the alchemical torch it seemed simply to grow dimmer, blackening as it reflected less and less light until it was so perfectly black that it looked like a fathomless hole. An instant later, however, the coin began burning with its own inner light, and the transition was so sudden that Judy threw a paw over her eyes, which had dazzling spots dancing in front of them. The coin was brighter even than the alchemical torch, throwing Nick's fur into such sharp relief that he seemed to burn as though he was made of fire, and Judy saw that his own eyes were clenched tightly shut.
The sudden light from the coin faded gradually, the pure whiteness dimming as it took on a sort of jaundiced quality that made Nick look sickly in its light, but throughout it all the fox had remained motionless. The yellow light the coin produced turned orange as it faded out, and for a matter of seconds the coin glowed red like an ember before the light went out of it. Judy stared for a second, blinking the spots out of her eyes, and she saw how the coin had changed. It no longer had the dull gleam of a well-worn piece of copper; it was brilliantly and unmistakably made of gold. "Pretty good, wouldn't you say?" Nick asked, moving at last as he opened his eyes and scooped up the coin.
His voice had a certain breathless quality to it, as though he had just sprinted a fair distance, and he walked over to where Judy had stood to watch and dropped the coin into her paw. It was not, she realized, only what the coin was made of that had changed. It was noticeably smaller than it had been, although it seemed to weigh about the same in her paw, and the alchemical marks that had glowed on the back of the coin were now nothing more than engravings. Otherwise, the coin looked exactly as it had, from the profile of Queen Lana III to the dents and scuffs that had been in it before Judy had given it to Nick. "It's amazing!" Judy said, staring down at the coin, and she was awed at the magic that her companion had worked with such seeming casualness.
"You don't have to sound so surprised," Nick said, although he was smiling slightly, "I told you I was an alchemist."
"You're incredible," Judy said as she turned the coin over in her paw, looking at both sides, "You didn't even use a philosopher's stone!"
Nick modestly kicked at the ground. "A philosopher's stone does all the work for you, you know," he said, "It's not much of a demonstration when anyone could transmute any metal just by touching it with a philosopher's stone."
Judy nodded, supposing he was right although she had never seen a demonstration of either a complete or incomplete philosopher's stone for transmuting metals. Complete stones were more valuable than even the most expensive quauhxicalli and she supposed Nick's demonstration indicated why no one bothered using incomplete stones to transmute metal into silver; if an alchemist didn't need a stone to do the transmutation of metals into gold or silver it was a waste to use something that could be better used to help mammals recover from injuries or illnesses. "You know how to make a philosopher's stone?" Judy asked as the implication of what Nick had just said struck her.
She wondered if he had managed to achieve what only the absolute masters of the Alchemist Guild had, and was therefore somewhat disappointed by his response. "Can I make an incomplete philosopher's stone? Yes, yes I can," Nick said, which Judy supposed was still impressive in its own right.
Besides, if he did know the secret to making complete philosopher's stones Judy doubted he'd be spending his time bidding on contracts at the very outskirts of Zootopia; he could have likely leveraged his knowledge into enough money to buy his way into the ranks of the nobility, and Judy turned her focus back to the transmuted coin. From the way that it had glowed at the end she had expected it to be hot, but it was if anything somewhat cold to the touch, as though it had been briefly dipped in ice. When Judy had the coin's reverse facing up, with the now inactive alchemical marks the mint had put on it, Nick added, "I did tell you I wasn't a counterfeiter."
Judy laughed; he was right that the coin would never be mistaken for an actual gold piece, as it was both far too small and of the wrong design. Of course, she realized with a frown, it was now also worthless as a copper piece. "Tell you what, though," Nick added, "Since I've ruined your coin, why don't I turn it into something useful?"
He plucked the coin from her paw and then scratched at his chin. "You have a carrot in that bag of yours, right?" he asked, nodding in the direction of where Judy had left it.
"How did you—" Judy began to ask, but Nick waved the question away.
"I could smell it," he said simply, and she supposed his sense of smell had to be rather impressive.
Judy had, in fact, brought a few carrots along as a treat; when she had been packing her bag she had been unable to resist. Curious as to what Nick would do with it, she brought him one of the carrots, which had a wonderful leafy green top—the best part, in Judy's opinion—and gave it to him. "I promise," Nick said solemnly, "That you'll still be able to eat this when I'm done if you wash it first. Or don't mind some dirt."
Before she could say anything, he tied a loose knot into the stem of the carrot and then placed it near the center of the square he had drawn in the dirt. With his weighted string and a straightedge he divided the square in half and then placed the golden coin in the half not occupied by the carrot. He then drew a complicated series of lines connecting the coin and the carrot, and once more placed his paws against the ground. The items he had placed at the corners of the square were still there, the stub of a candle still burning, and he closed his eyes again.
As before, the very quality of the air seemed to change, and the coin once more went through the same changes in color. The carrot seemed unaffected, however, and the coin didn't just change in color as Nick did whatever it was that alchemists did to change things. At first it was difficult to tell, as the change in the coin's shape seemed to begin just as it started glowing too brightly to look at, but it was no longer a flat disc; it changed itself into a cylindrical shape in a way Judy felt she couldn't adequately describe. It didn't look as though the coin was flowing like molten metal or folding like a piece of paper, but rather was somehow doing both and neither. The spots in Judy's eyes prevented her from seeing what the coin had turned into until Nick had plucked both the former coin and the carrot from the ground and placed them in her paws.
The carrot looked exactly as it had, but the coin had turned into—"A carrot," Nick said, sounding more out of breath than he had after his first transmutation, "Tell me that's not impressive."
It wasn't actually a real carrot, but rather a little golden one that was, Judy realized, a perfect copy at a much smaller scale. The golden carrot had the same irregularities and striations as the real carrot, and its golden leaves were so exquisitely detailed that she could just make out the delicate veins. Nick had, somehow, used the real carrot as a template and turned the gold coin into a miniature copy. He was right that it was impressive; Judy didn't think even the finest rodent craftsmammals would have been able to make a golden carrot so small and so detailed, and it had taken Nick perhaps two or three minutes total. "You can wear it on your torc," Nick said, gesturing at the little loop the knot in the golden carrot's stem formed, "If members of the City Guard are ever off duty, of course."
"Thank you," Judy said, "It's beautiful."
She carefully put the little golden carrot in one of the pouches of her belt. "But did it have to be a carrot?" she asked.
Nick laughed, quirking an eyebrow upwards. "For you, ensign?" he asked, "What else could it be?"
They passed a pleasant dinner together by the light of the alchemical torch, each eating their own rations—Judy didn't know if Nick would have enjoyed her vegetables, but she was sure she wouldn't like his preserved fish—before going their separate ways to their own tents. Nick had claimed to be worn-out by the alchemy he had performed, and it certainly seemed to be true enough; his normally half-lidded eyes had started to droop even more. It was only once Judy was in her own tent, admiring the little golden carrot, that another thought struck her. In Tochtli Barony, a buck would propose to a doe by giving her an ornament for her torc. Of course, that was really only a tradition within her family, and from what she had seen wasn't common at all in either the city-state's more populated center or any of the other baronies. Nick wouldn't have had any way of knowing, but still...
As Judy's eyes grew heavier, she thought she'd have to bring it up somehow and see how embarrassing he found it. His good-natured teasing couldn't go unanswered, after all, and as she fell asleep, tucked into her bedroll with the golden carrot lightly grasped in one paw, a smile had crossed her face.
Author's Notes:
Oztoyehuatl was first mentioned in the first chapter as a fox who lived long before this story started who is famous for being a coward and a traitor, and here we see that he was a blood magician referred to with the epithet "the Betrayer." This chapter's indication that, at least to the best of Judy's knowledge, all alchemists are prey mammals and all blood magicians are predators, also relates to the backstory of this setting, in which an army led by a sheep used alchemy to lay seige to the city and depose a predator emperor. It also highlights how unusual it is for Nick to be an alchemist, although he does demonstrate that he can indeed use alchemy and whatever his motives are he's not lying about that much.
I tried to continue to incorporate some more world-building for the magic of this setting; quauhxicallis are very expensive and certain ones are not given to low-ranking members of the City Guard.
The fact that the coinage of this version of Zootopia has the face of a living ruler on it is, historically speaking, pretty common. British coins have included the face of the current king or queen for many years now, and it was common in older empires to feature the ruler as well. The US is therefore somewhat unusual in that the US mint will not make any coins or bills featuring a person who is still living. It's for this reason that the presidential $1 coin series skips from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan; since Jimmy Carter is still alive he can't be featured on a coin.
In this setting, since alchemy is possible, I figured that it didn't make too much sense for them to be on the gold standard since alchemists could quickly produce vast quantities of it, devaluing the currency. I imagine therefore that this setting uses a fiat currency; the value of coins isn't fixed to anything and it only has value because the government says that it does and the public trusts it. As an anti-counterfeiting measure, coins in this setting have alchemical engravings to make them difficult to copy in much the same way that modern currency features a wide variety of measures from watermarks to holograms. The coins could theoretically be made out of any metal, but gold, silver, and copper have a long history of being used in coinage and I thought it'd make sense to continue it.
I thought it was a somewhat amusing contrast that Judy is clearly unimpressed with a match that would probably be rather impressive for anyone from our world, since it's engaged by a self-activating form of alchemy. I think it's one of the things that can be interesting about a setting with magic—if certain things are common in their world, they simply aren't impressive any more than the average person in the real world would be impressed by, say, a smartphone or a car.
When I plotted out how the system of alchemy worked in this setting, one of the things I wanted to avoid was simply copying the alchemy system from Fullmetal Alchemist. That setting, based on an alternate version of the early 20th century in which alchemy actually works, relies on alchemy arrays which are drawn by an alchemist and then activated by touching it and applying will. In that setting, alchemy generally isn't used to actually transmute materials from one element to another but rather to rearrange the atoms in an object into something else. Even relatively inexperienced alchemists in that setting are capable of manipulating the shape of what they transmute with relative ease, forming barricades, weapons, models, or the like. I'd certainly recommend it, as the series is quite good in my opinion.
Historical alchemists, however, didn't really draw magical circles and try to manipulate matter that way. Symbols such as the squared circle, which represents the creation of the philosopher's stone, were generally understood by alchemists to be metaphorical rather than literal magic; the idea was that the manipulation of matter would generally be done through more mundane methods such as mixing things together. However, it was also common for alchemists to believe that matter was made up of the classical elements as described by Aristotle: earth (which is cold and dry), water (which is cold and wet), air (which is hot and wet), fire (which is hot and dry), and aether (a divine substance outside the categories of warmth and dryness). The thought was that by altering the composition of those five elements within something you could change it. I decided that the way alchemy would work in this story is that the five basic elements would be used to manipulate the balance between warmth and dryness in something to alter its composition, with the alchemist supplying the aether to guide and manipulate the process.
The fire, water, air, and earth used in transmutations are thus really just an aid to the alchemist's focus, as is the circle; simpler transmutations can be performed with very basic circles while more complicated ones are easier with a more fleshed out focus. Very simple transmutations, such as the match, don't require an alchemist at all and can be triggered with an action anyone can do, such as snapping it in the case of a match.
The copper coin goes through the four stages commonly associated with alchemical changes by Western alchemists: blackening, whitening, yellowing, and reddening. This changes were sometimes associated with observable pheonomena; some alchemists believed, for example, that the way living things blacken as they rot suggested a beginning to the cycle they wished to start.
Gold has a density of 19.30 grams per cubic centimeter while copper has a density of 8.96 grams per cubic centimeter. As gold is nearly twice as dense as copper, for two objects—one of gold and the other of copper—to have the same mass, the one made of gold would be noticeably smaller if they were worked into the same general shape and were solid.
Rabbits are, of course, widely associated with carrots, although the root part is too high in sugar to be a healthy part of their diet long-term. They can also eat the leaves of a carrot, although whether they would enjoy that more or less than the root is, I suppose, to the rabbit's preference.
On another note, I tried my hand at creating my own cover art for this story; the results of my attempt can be seen on DeviantArt under the username WANMWAD.
The design is inspired by the squared circle, an alchemical symbol dating to the 17th century consisting of a circle inscribed in a square inscribed in an equilateral triangle inscribed within a circle. The design is said to have symbolized how the four classical elements (air, earth, fire, and water) interplay in the creation of a philosopher's stone. I embellished the design somewhat, but I tried to incorporate elements that alchemists believed in. The center circle was replaced with an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail; the ouroboros was a classic symbol of alchemy representing the cycle of birth and death. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not draw the serpent but used a public domain image from Wikimedia commons. The symbols at the four corners of the square are the four classic elements previously mentioned, while at the points of the triangle are alchemical symbols that represent what the 16th century alchemist Theophrastus von Hohenheim (also known as Paracelsus) believed humans were made of: mind, body, and spirit, which he thought also corresponded to what all matter had: a combustible element (sulphur), a changeable element (mercury), and a solid element (salt).
The text circling the center is "igne natura renovatur integra," which is Latin for "through fire, nature is reborn whole" and was a phrase used by alchemists as an alternative meaning for the acronym INRI (standing for IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM or Jesus, King of the Jews) said to have been put on the crucifix of Jesus Christ. The leftmost text is "a minore ad maius," Latin for "from the smaller to the greater" and the rightmost text is "a maiore ad minus," Latin for "from the greater to the smaller." The bottom most text is "ordo ab chao," Latin for "out of chaos, comes order." I thought the combination of these three phrases was suggestive of the goals of alchemy to break matter down and remake it into the desired form.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought.