[Emissary] Chapter 16 - Alchemy (Patreon)

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Chapter 16 - Alchemy

Previous chapter

However, Kara and Harry were lying in each other’s arms, exchanging loving kisses and sweet caresses with no care in the world. And they would have continued to do just that for hours to come if not for Kara’s employee, who suddenly knocked on the doors of the office and called out her name:

“Ms Starr! Your Uber Eats has arrived!”

⁂

At the sound of her subordinate’s voice, Kara broke the kiss and rested her forehead against Harry’s with her eyes closed, not saying anything for a few moments. 

“Thanks, Simon. I’ll wrap it up in a few minutes. You can go have your lunch break with the others.”

She let out a long sigh as she left his arms and stood up. But then she smiled as she took another look at Harry and noticed his dishevelled hair and bruised lips. The four fortifying spells that he had cast on himself had not been enough to fully protect him from her loving abuse. 

“We have to get up… Could you fix the room with your magic?” she asked when she realised the terrible state that her office was in after their activities. 

Standing up to his feet, Harry clothed himself with a simple wave of his wand and then stretched his back and rolled his shoulders for a bit. 

“I don’t know. I think it would be hilarious to watch you try to explain to your start-struck little subordinate, Simon, what happened here.”

“It’s only our first day, and you’re already teasing me. Is that what you’re going to be like from now on?” Kara asked, crossing her arms under her breasts. 

A smirk of superiority crept up on her face when she saw the way his eyes involuntarily dropped to her naked breasts for a second. 

“I could help you out… but it’s up to you to find a way to convince me,” he said, grinning shamelessly despite knowing that she noticed his eyes straying away from her face. 

She laughed at his words as she came to him and pecked him softly on the lips. 

“I’m sure I’ll think of a way to reward you tonight.”

Her insinuating words and seductive smile made him wrap his hands around her waist and kiss her again. It was a slow, wet, and deep kiss that had Kara curling her toes and embracing him for all he was worth. 

“We… we really have to stop,” she said, breaking their kiss with a gasp, her face flushed with desire. 

At first, she had been bummed out to find out that he had been married twice before, but how could she still be annoyed at that when he was capable of evoking such a reaction from her body with a mere kiss?

They had been intimate for nearly two hours but she was already craving more. 

“Okay,” he said, and he stole one last kiss before letting go of her. 

Taking out his Elder Wand, Harry cast a Scouring Charm on Power Girl, making her shiver a bit at the unexpected sensation. Then, a sphere of white light appeared in his hands as he chanted:

[Lost Magic: Arc of Time]

The sphere of white light grew to engulf the entire room, rewinding its time to roughly two hours before the present. The obliterated oak desk was returned to its brand-new appearance; the paintings on the walls were restored as well; and the holes in the walls and the cracks in the floor disappeared too. 

“You fixed my clothes too!” Kara was pleasantly surprised when she saw the hole in her pantyhose was repaired and that the wrinkles on her clothes vanished; even the smell of sweat and sex disappeared too after he rewound the time of her clothes by two hours. 

Having been married for a long time, Harry knew what was most likely going through Power Girl’s head at that moment, so he conjured a full-body mirror for her. He also conjured a brush for her to fix her hair.

“Are you, by chance, reading my mind, mister?” she asked with her hands on her waist.

Her surprise made him chuckle. 

“I don’t invade other people’s thoughts unless I have no other choice,” he said with a smile. 

“Keep being this sweet and attentive with me, and I might actually fall in love with you.”

“Wait, you mean you haven’t already?”

She laughed softly as she brushed her hair. Fortunately for Power Girl, her short, bob-cut hair was easy to take care of so it didn’t take her a long time to make herself presentable again. 

“I don’t suppose you could magic into existence some foundation and a make-up brush too?”

“You don’t need any of that stuff,” he said as he came behind her and pecked her on the cheek. 

By the time Kara was done making herself presentable again, she only had 10 minutes left from her lunch break. 

“When do you get off work?” asked Harry. 

“Normally, I should work from 8:30 to 5, but there’s almost always something that holds me overtime. Being the CEO of a company isn’t as easy as most people think. Today is especially bad; I’ll probably have to work three or four hours overtime. We’re going to test carbon nanotubes' ability to generate electricity by absorbing energy from their surroundings. It’s for the sake of developing a new source of renewable energy,” she explained, knowing that he wasn’t well-versed in technology. 

“I see… Then, how does 9 o’clock sound?”

“Make it 10, just to be sure. Oh, right, before you go, let me call Wonder Woman. She asked me to help her get in contact with you.”

⁂

One hour later, Harry found himself sitting on a bench on a wooden patio in a public park in the capital of Belgium, Brussels. As befitting of an old man, he lost his sense of time as he sat and watched the passersby going about their lives. 

But he was woken up from his reverie when the sunny sky suddenly turned dark as a blanket of dark clouds came seemingly out of nowhere. In typical fashion characteristic of Western Europe’s climate, a sudden downpour had everyone on the street start running for cover under trees and patios to hide from the rain. 

His peaceful alone time was interrupted as more than eight people, of whom three were children, came running to the patio he was on to take cover from the rain. 

Luckily, he wasn’t forced to bear with the children’s loud and rapid chatter for much longer because the people he had been waiting for made their appearance a few minutes later. 

A very tall and strong-looking woman wearing a black skirt, elegant black shoes, and a dark blue blazer was holding an umbrella in her hand as she accompanied a much shorter woman who was dressed in a formal white suit. Unlike the tall woman, who was wearing her long black hair in a tight bun, the shorter woman’s blonde hair was falling freely to the middle of her back. 

The two were Wonder Woman and Audrey, the new Queen of Kasnia, recently widowed after Vandal Savage’s execution. Three tall and burly men wearing black suits were walking behind them; they were Queen Audrey’s bodyguards. 

“Emissary? Is that you?” Wonder Woman asked unsure because Harry’s appearance was completely different than usual. He had curly brown hair, dark skin, a big, Greek nose, and a short beard, and his eyes were blue now. 

“Yes, it’s me. Wonder Woman, Queen Audrey, it’s good to see you,” he greeted them with a slight bow.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Audrey said. “Wonder Woman said that you could help my father, is that true?” 

It was unlike someone of her pedigree and education to cut straight to the subject like that, but that only spoke of her desperation. Nonetheless, Harry didn’t mind her direct approach. He preferred it that way.

Once Harry confirmed through the phone to Wonder Woman that he might have a way to help Audrey’s father, the queen dropped all her plans for that day. Currently, she was coming back from an International Peace Congress held in Brussels, and she was supposed to be with other state dignitaries in another diplomatic meeting, but she had postponed it, all for the sake of meeting Emissary. 

“I won’t know for sure until I check his condition,” Harry said before she got her hopes up too much. 

“Then, when is it the soonest that you can travel to Kasnia to see him?”

“We could even go now if you wanted. The sooner, the better.”

Queen Audrey smiled in relief.

“Thank you. I shall arrange for my private jet to depart in one hour.”

Considering the fact that Harry had never been to Kasnia before, he couldn’t Apparate or Portkey there, so he agreed with her plans.

⁂

The flight from Brussels, Belgium, to Kasnia’s royal castle took nearly three hours, so there was plenty of time for Wonder Woman and Queen Audrey to fill Harry in about what had transpired when Wonder Woman had entrusted New York’s protection to him and made a trip to Europe. 

Audrey married Vandal Savage out of duty, not love; it was an arranged marriage. And Vandal Savage used that marriage as a means to gain power. In order to speed up the date of their marriage, Vandal poisoned the King. With the King falling into a coma, Princess Audrey was forced to step up into her father’s role. She and Vandal Savage married hurriedly, and she became the new Queen of Kasnia. 

However, once Vandal Savage ascended to the throne, he revealed his true colours. Queen Audrey was imprisoned in her own quarters by her own soldiers, while Vandal ordered the railgun attack on New York and made several outrageous demands to the United Nations. 

Once the queen left them alone in order to pick up an important diplomatic call (Kasnia was still suffering the consequences of Vandal Savage nearly starting World War III by killing over a million American people), Diana asked Harry:

“What’s with the new appearance?”

“I may have trusted the Justice League with my real appearance, but I have no reason to trust her. I don’t even know if trusting you, people, was the right thing at all. I didn’t expect Batman to harbour that sort of dark thoughts about me.”

“We’re not all like that… We-” Diana began to say, but when she recalled how everyone was talking about ways to capture Emissary during their trip to the moon, she realised that she couldn’t be sure of anyone’s thoughts anymore.

“It’s fine. You don’t need to excuse yourself,” Harry said, closing the subject. “In regards to Queen Audrey’s father, I think I may be able to help. Normally, I would need various magical ingredients to brew potions, but if it’s poison, there’s a simple method to cure it. It’s not 100% guaranteed, but there’s a high chance it’ll work. Could you give me a pen and paper?”

Once Diana returned with a pen and a notebook, Harry started writing a list of things he needed. 

“Please tell the queen to prepare for me:

• a healthy, living goat, 
  

• a copper cauldron and a copper stirring spoon, 
  

• a set of chemistry tools, 
  

• a workbench, 
  

• leather gloves and a leather apron, 
  

• butcher tools.
  

• 50 grammes of mistletoe berries
  

• 100 grammes of dandelion stems
  

• 50 grammes of Aloe Vera leaves”
  

“That’s a strange assortment of things,” she remarked. “But I’m sure she’ll do anything for the sake of curing her father.”

“That's great. Well then, I’ll try to get some rest until we get there. I’m exhausted,” Harry said, conjuring a sleeping mask and casting a nonverbal silencing charm. 

Wonder Woman would have liked for him to continue keeping her company, but she could see on his face that he truly appeared to be tired. She wondered what could have drained him of all his energy like that… but Harry put on his sleeping mask and fell asleep in a matter of seconds. 

⁂

Harry was a very light sleeper, but he was so tired that it took Wonder Woman shaking him for nearly half a minute before he finally woke up. Nonetheless, by the time he disembarked the queen’s private plane and arrived at the castle, he had gathered his wits. 

Audrey led him to the inner courtyard of the castle, where her servants had already prepared everything that he had requested. 

“Do you mind if we stood and watched?” Wonder Woman asked curiously. 

“Suit yourselves,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. It wasn’t as if it was some tightly guarded secret that he was not supposed to reveal to anyone. “Not like anyone would be able to repeat what I’m about to do unless they’re magicians themselves too and skilled in Alchemy.”

Five hundred years was a very long time. Harry had picked up all sorts of skills and knowledge over the course of his life, and alchemy was one of them too. He wasn’t at the level where he could synthesise a Philosopher’s Stone but he was no novice either. He considered himself adept in the art of Alchemy. 

Once he cast a Diagnosis Charm on the goat to make sure that it was healthy, he killed it with a Gouging Charm to the head, giving it a swift death. 

Audrey felt bile rising in her throat as she watched Emissary kill the goat before grabbing a butcher knife and starting to cut it open. His hand was steady, and his movement was quick and precise, a clear sign that he had done that more than a few times before. 

In a matter of minutes, Harry finished gutting the goat open and taking out its stomach. Once he cleaned it of blood, he cut the stomach open too and manually removed all of its contents before washing it with clean water again. 

Once he put the stomach into the copper cauldron, Harry went back to the goat and took out its intestines. Unlike the stomach, he didn’t need the intestines themselves but their contents. Once he took out their contents and put them into the cauldron, he threw the intestines away. 

Finally done with obtaining the ingredients from the goat, Harry washed his hands and Vanished the goat’s remains. 

He poured water into the cauldron until it was half-full and started a fire under it. While waiting for the water to begin boiling, Harry cut the dandelion stems vertically with impressive speed and dexterity before putting them into the cauldron and waving the Elder Wand over the cauldron in a clockwise motion. 

[...]

The brewing process lasted nearly an hour before it was finished. By the end of it, the goat’s stomach, the plants, the water, and the contents of the intestines had all been melted down into a rather disgusting-looking homogenous paste. The smell was terrible and pungent too, but Harry smiled, pleased with the results. 

Levitating the cauldron to his side, he went to the table with the chemistry set and started pouring the contents of the cauldron into conical flasks, filling nearly 10 of them. 

Next, he Vanished the cauldron and focused on the chemistry set. It took another half an hour of distilling the paste and using magical fire to burn its impurities before the first conical flask yielded three globes of something the size of ping-pong balls. They were bezoars. 

⁂

Holding the dirty-looking brown bezoar in her hand, Audrey hesitated when she arrived at her father’s bedroom. Frankly speaking, the thing in her hand looked like a globe of horse manure. It even smelled a bit like it. If she hadn’t witnessed the entire process through which the bezoar was produced, she would have thought that Emissary was playing a nasty joke on her and thrown him into the dungeons. 

In truth, due to Harry not having the magical ingredients he needed, the bezoar he created with non-magical plants wasn’t as pure as it could have been, a fact that was shown in the bezoar’s appearance and smell. Bezoars were supposed to be light grey or white and odourless. 

Nonetheless, as the saying goes, that wasn’t his first rodeo. It wasn’t the first time he had had to create a bezoar without having all the ingredients, so he knew that although it would be less effective, it would still work. 

That being said, in spite of her hesitation, Audrey decided to trust Wonder Woman, who had guaranteed for Emissary’s integrity. She opened her father’s mouth and forced the bezoar down his throat. It wasn’t easy to make an unconscious person swallow something the size of a ping-pong ball, but she managed to do it in the end. 

Less than half a minute after the king swallowed the bezoar, his eyes started rolling behind his closed eyelids, and the machines monitoring his state showed a spike in his brain activity levels and heart rate. 

Audrey let out a choked gasp and covered her mouth with her hands when the king opened his eyes. 

“Audrey?” the old man said in a weak voice when he saw his daughter.

“Father!” she cried out, tears falling down her cheeks like a river as she sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand in hers. 

Despite his tiredness, Harry smiled as he looked at the father and daughter’s touching reunion. Even after living for such a long time, saving a person in need never failed to give him a sense of fulfilment and contentment. 

“Thank you for helping me with this, Harry,” Wonder Woman said in a quiet voice. “I will not forget this favour.”

Wonder Woman had not spent a long time together with Audrey, but the girl had grown on her. Watching their reunion touched her too.

“Think nothing of it,” Harry said simply. “Friends don’t keep count of favours, do they?”

“You’re right. Still, I am grateful. If you ever find yourself in a tight spot, you can count on me.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” he smiled. “It’s time for me to go back home. Before I leave, is there any place you’d like me to teleport you to?”

Diana shook her head. 

“No. I’ll stay a bit longer to speak with Audrey, and then I’ll fly back home by myself. I’m going back to Themyscira.”

“Ah…you were serious about quitting the Justice League?” Harry asked. 

“I wouldn't joke about something like that,” Wonder Woman said seriously. “I’m not leaving for good, but I need some time off.”

“I understand. Well, if anything comes up and you need my help, you can always contact Kara.”

Diana turned to look at him in curiosity.

“Forgive me if I’m being nosy, but are the two of you together now?”

“As if I had any choice in the matter,” Harry said in chagrin, pretending to be exasperated. 

“I know what you mean. Power Girl is-” Diana said, trailing off as she started laughing. 

“Stubborn? Headstrong? Relentless? Unreasonable? Yeah. But I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he completed her words before he started to chuckle too. 

⁂

Portkeying himself to France, to the bunker that he dubbed as his home, Harry didn’t even change his clothes before letting himself fall onto his bed. Setting up a modified version of the Caterwauling Charm to wake him up in 3 hours, he closed his eyes and fell asleep. 

But while Harry was sleeping like a baby in the safety of the fortified bunker that he built 2 kilometres beneath the hills of Provence, things weren’t quite as peaceful on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the second-most populous city in the United States. 

With Batman not having made an appearance in Gotham City for more than a week, the villains sensed that something wasn’t right. Most of them decided to take a wait-and-see approach for another week or two, but not all of them were that cautious and patient.

At the forefront of those impatient criminals was none other than the Joker. Although he was a psychopath, or maybe that was all the more reason why, his intuition was bordering on the transcendent. 

Despite being imprisoned in the Arkham Asylum, the Joker had his ways of gathering information from the outside world. The fact that nobody had seen a shade or trace of Batman in over a week tipped him off that something was wrong. After all, there was nobody in the entire world who knew Batman as well as he did. He had known Batman for years and the Dark Knight had never been away from Gotham City for such a long time. 

“Batsie, Batsie, where are you?” the Joker sang and laughed like a loon as he used a makeshift knife from a plastic tray to repeatedly stab one of the dozens of wardens that stormed into the canteen after a large-scale brawl broke out of nowhere among the prisoners. 

The moment that the wardens rushed inside the canteen, the prisoners all stopped fighting amongst themselves and turned against the wardens. 

The Joker, Two-Face, and Bane took advantage of the chaos to slip away undetected. Although the prison door had been shut down after the wardens came into the canteen, Bane needed to kick it less than five times to smash it open. 

Not having expected Bane to have such monstrous physical strength, the wardens were too late to react by the time the three villains broke out and rushed at them. 

With Bane acting as a juggernaut, smashing all the bars and metallic doors standing in their way, and the Joker and Two-Face providing cover fire from behind with guns stolen from the wardens, they reached the exit of the prison in no time, leaving a macabre trail of bodies in their wake. 

“At last! Freedom!” Bane exclaimed in glee and took in a deep breath as he stepped out of the building and into the courtyard. 

But his joy and celebrations were short-lived because, in the next moment, a muscular man wearing a blue suit and a red cape landed ahead of them. He was merely standing in front of them with his arms crossed at his chest but the three of them became frozen like statues. 

“Aww, maaaan! What are you doing here?” the Joker complained and stomped his foot like a petulant child as he threw his gun to the ground in annoyance. 

“What shit luck!” Two-Face also cussed and put the gun slowly on the ground to show that he had no intention to fight back. 

But while the two of them gave up right away, Bane didn’t accept that their escape attempt was going to be over just like that. He let out a scream of anger as he ran at the caped hero and threw an overhand right with all his strength. 

One slap was all it took for Bane to be sent flying like a cannonball, smashing through two walls, right back into the building, before stopping upon colliding with the third wall and falling unconscious. 

The hero’s rough actions made the two villains look at him strangely. That’s because the hero was none other than Superman. While Batman was totally the type to beat villains to an inch of their lives and leave them hospitalised for weeks or months, Superman was above such brutality. The Man of Steel rarely ever used more force than necessary to subdue the criminals. 

Superman’s eyes were stern as he glanced at them. 

“Are you going to go back to your cells by yourselves, or do you want me to send you there flying?” asked Superman coldly.

The Joker’s eyes glimmered as he glanced at Superman, filled with curiosity. Batman’s disappearance of over one week, Superman’s unexpected presence in Gotham City, and his out-of-character, heavy-handed approach earlier made the cogs in his deranged brain start spinning furiously. 

“We’ll go by ourselves, no worries,” the Joker said with a shrug of his shoulders before turning on his heels and starting to walk back inside the building. 

However, once he turned around, a large grin split his face. 

⁂

Once he was done quelling the prisoners’ uprising at Arkham Asylum, Superman flew slowly above the city as if to let everyone know that he was there. It served both as a way to comfort the people and to warn the criminals not to act up. 

 

‘How did Batman do it?’ he wondered as he glanced at the dreary and gloomy city below. Gotham was less than 60 miles away from Metropolis, but the two cities could not be any more different. 

 

Thinking about Batman, Superman’s mind went back to the scene of Batman’s death and the subsequent events. 

‘I haven’t heard anything from Diana and J’onn in over a week…’

Flash was still upset at him, while Shayera and Green Lantern were in the hospital. All of a sudden, Superman had become the only active member of the Justice League. In truth, he was more than powerful enough to contend with pretty much anything that the villains threw at him but he was still just one man. He couldn’t be in 10 places at once. 

‘Just keep it up for a day or two more. GL and Hawkgirl should be discharged from the hospital soon. I’m sure Flash and Diana will come around too.’

He wasn’t sure how to get a hold of the Martian, but he assumed that he wouldn’t stay hidden forever. 

‘Once John and Shaeyra come out from the hospital, we’ll have to deal with those other-dimension guys.’

Superwoman and her three Made Men were still imprisoned at the Watchtower. Superman checked up on them multiple times every day to make sure that they had not escaped, but he couldn’t keep on doing that forever. They needed to find a way to deal with them, or at least send them back to their dimension. 

Inadvertently, that line of thought eventually led him to Emissary. It was something that happened constantly over the past week. 

‘We need to find a way to deal with Emissary too,’ he thought. ‘Before Batman died, he said he found evidence that Emissary was not to be trusted… I’ll have to find some trustworthy hackers to go through his computer. Maybe the answer I'm looking for is there.’

Superman hadn’t forgotten that Emissary had saved his and his friends’ lives, but he could simply not accept the fact that someone had killed Batman and walked away scot-free. Emissary’s seemingly unbothered and unphased attitude as he explained the reason why Batman died rubbed him the wrong way too. 

‘Did he actually kill Batman intentionally? Or is he so used to seeing people die that he doesn’t even feel anything about it anymore?’

He didn’t know what to think. Regardless of the reason, it didn't paint a good image.

‘I won’t take any action against Emissary for now,’ Superman decided.

Nevertheless, once he cracked Batman’s computer and found the evidence that Batman was talking about, he was not going to rest until he brought Harry Potter to justice. It was the least that he could do for his departed best friend.