The alchemy track workspace was bigger than Lucas had expected, with high ceilings to handle the fumes from various experiments.
Long wooden tables lined the room, each set up with burners, glassware, and neatly organized ingredient stations.
The place smelled of herbs, sulfur, and something kind of sweet that was probably not safe to inhale.
Several students were scattered throughout the space and most of them were absorbed in their work.
Lucas walked up to the nearest student, a girl with short black hair who was carefully measuring powder into a beaker.
"Excuse me," he said politely. "I'm looking for Raymond James. Do you know where I can find him?"
The girl looked up. "Raymond? He's usually in the back corner. Brown hair, glasses, looks very cautious and timid."
"Thanks," Lucas said, before leaving.
He found Raymond exactly where the girl had said.
He was tucked away in the far corner of the room, hunched over a complicated setup of glass tubes and beakers.
Raymond was a skinny kid with messy brown hair that looked like it hadn't seen a comb in days.
His glasses kept sliding down his nose as he worked, and he pushed them back up with his wrist to avoid messing up his gloved hands.
Lucas recognized the timid posture immediately from the game.
His shoulders were slightly hunched and his body language showed he was someone who was used to trying to make himself as small and invisible as possible.
Raymond was super focused on his work, carefully adding drops of a pale blue liquid to a bubbling mixture. His tongue stuck out slightly as he concentrated and counted under his breath.
"Three... four... five..."
Lucas waited patiently, not wanting to interrupt at a critical moment. Celeste stood beside him and thankfully seemed to know that now wasn't the time for talk.
In fact, it seemed that she was somehow having fun watching Raymond perform alchemy, much to Lucas' surprise.
After a few more minutes, Raymond carefully set down his dropper and made a note in a old leather journal. Only then did Lucas clear his throat softly.
"Excuse me, are you Raymond James?"
Raymond jumped slightly, nearly knocking over a flask. He spun around, his eyes wide with alarm behind his glasses.
"Y-yes? Can I help you with something?" His voice was higher than Lucas had expected.
"I'm Lucas Estellan," Lucas said, giving what he hoped was a friendly smile. "I was hoping we could talk for a sec."
Raymond's face went pale. "Estellan? As in... the Marquis family?"
"That's right."
Raymond took a step back and raised his hands to cover his head.
"I-I haven't done anything wrong! If this is about the thing with the sulfur shipment last month, that wasn't my fault. The supplier mixed up the orders and—"
"It's nothing like that," Lucas said quickly.
He realized that Raymond thought he was about to get bullied or blamed for something.
"I actually wanted to ask you about your work. I'm interested in alchemy."
Raymond stared at him suspiciously, clearly not buying this explanation.
"Why would a high-ranking noble like you care about what I'm doing? Are you here to make fun of me? Because if you are, I'd appreciate if you'd just get it over with so I can get back to my work."
Lucas shook his head inside.
Raymond's wariness made sense because in the game's backstory, he'd been bullied regularly by other nobles who looked down on his merchant family background.
Building up trust wasn't gonna be easy.
"I'm not here to make fun of you," Lucas said. "I really do find alchemy interesting, and I heard you were one of the best students in the second-year track."
"Who told you that?" Raymond asked.
Lucas blurted out what he thought was a believable answer.
"I... overheard some of the professors talking. They mentioned your name."
Raymond's face was still skeptical, but he at least didn't tell Lucas to leave.
Taking this as permission to continue, Lucas glanced at Raymond's current experiment setup.
The arrangement of equipment and the specific ingredients visible on his workstation triggered memories from the game.
This was a standard stabilization experiment. It seemed Raymond was trying to create a potion base that could hold magical properties without breaking down
"Is that a mana-retention stabilization test?" Lucas asked, pointing to the bubbling mixture.
A look of surprise came up on Raymond's face.
"You... you know what this is?"
"The ratio of Silverleaf extract to distilled water, the use of crystal powder as a catalyst, and the graduated heating process makes it obvious. You're trying to extend the shelf life of mana-infused potions, aren't you?"
"That's... exactly what I'm doing. How did you know that?" Raymond said.
It was time for Lucas to use what he remembered from the game.
"The technique was developed about fifty years ago by Master Alchemist Terrence Vesse, but the original formula had stability issues. You're using a modified approach with the crystal powder addition, which should theoretically cut degradation by about thirty percent."
"Forty percent, actually," Raymond corrected, then caught himself. "I mean... yes, that's the theory. But I'm having trouble with the temperature control. The mixture keeps getting too volatile around the fifteen-minute mark."
Lucas thought about it for a moment for a moment, then remembered a detail from one of the game's side quest dialogues.
"Have you tried pre-heating the Silverleaf extract before adding it to the water? The temperature difference might be causing micro-crystallization that messes up the solution."
Raymond's eyes widened behind his glasses.
"Pre-heating the extract... I hadn't thought of that. The conventional method says to add everything at room temperature, but if the thermal shock is causing crystallization..."
He trailed off because he had already turned back to his notes and was scribbling like crazy.
"You'd need to be careful with the heating," Lucas continued. "Too hot and you'll wreck the active compounds in the Silverleaf. I'd suggest no more than forty degrees, just enough to match the water temperature."
"Forty degrees," Raymond muttered, still writing. "That should work. And if I tweak the crystal powder ratio to compensate for the increased molecular activity..."
He looked up at Lucas with a suspicious look.
"Where did you learn all this? This isn't standard curriculum, even for the advanced alchemy track."
"I read a lot," Lucas said simply.
He was technically telling the truth if you counted video game lore documents as reading.
Raymond looked at him him for a bit, trying to figure out if he was telling the truth.
After a moment, he seemed to come to the decision that Lucas wasn't lying.
His defensive posture was gone like the wind and all that was left was a friendly smile.
"Have you studied the principles of elemental infusion?" he asked, already pulling out more journals and reference materials from god knows where.
"Because I've been working on a theory that most alchemists are doing it completely wrong. They try to force the elemental properties into the base solution, but I think the key is creating a molecular structure that naturally attracts specific elemental affinities..."
For the next thirty minutes, Lucas found himself in an increasingly technical conversation about alchemy theory.
Raymond had completely lost his initial wariness and was giving Lucas explanations of his various experiments and theories that he could barely keep up with.
If Lucas had trouble swimming in Raymond's sea of knowledge then poor Celeste had already sunk to the bottom.
She stood to the side and watched as the two youths talked with visible confusion.
Her head swiveled back and forth between Lucas and Raymond as they discussed stuff like "mana conductivity ratios" and "crystalline matrix formations" with obvious bewilderment.
"...and that's why traditional healing potions lose effectiveness after three months," Raymond was saying.
"But if we can stabilize the base using the modified Vesse technique with your pre-heating adjustment, we could potentially extend that to six months or even longer. Do you realize what that would mean for military stuff? For emergency medical supplies?"
Lucas did realize, actually.
In the game's late stages, potion supplies had been critical for the resistance forces.
Raymond's father's company had been one of the few sources of reliable healing potions, which was why his death had been so damage to the war effort and why Lucas would do everything in his power to prevent it from happening.
Before Lucas could respond, the bell tower chimed, signaling the end of lunch period.