A dim shelf of strange bottles, each containing tiny things frozen in time: storms, sounds, moments, people.
"Of course," she says, her back to you as she picks up a random bottle on the shelf, blue with a light wooden cork, "they always say you should start small, but how does that get you anywhere? My motto has always been to start big."
She tosses you the vial - not much bigger than two of your fingers put together, really - and gestures for you to unstopper it. You struggle for a moment, and then pure distilled sunlight pours out, liquid gold on your palm and fingers. You try not to let it drip, and catch the scent of cut grass and a warm summer breeze. The reflection of the room in your palm looks almost like a butterfly... she takes the vial and stoppers it again, leaving you with sticky fingers. Your clothes glow where you wipe them off.
"A summer's day, taken whole. Kid's stuff, really, the work of an amateur, but it emboldened me." She replaces the vial and picks up a storm-grey flask, its contents swirling quicksilver. She attaches it to a machine on her bench, which rumbles, extracting a single drop of sparkling grey. She lets it fall, and the workbench is awhirl with wind, save for a single spot in the dead center.
A lightning bolt makes you jump, to her delight. "You took a tornado?" you cry, incredulously.
She shakes her head, smiling. "I took a hurricane." she replaces the flask, and pulls open a cabinet to show several more. "And a few more, just in case. Wondrously useful, hurricanes, when," she glances at you, smirking, "properly controlled."
You gulp. "So," you say, trying to cover your emotions, "you steal the weather?"
She raises an eyebrow. "I take what I choose. I started with weather. It taught me many things." She pats a machine in the corner, a large cylindrical tank with various pipes leaning in and out of it. "Bottled things can be distilled, you see. You take a hurricane, and it can be separated, sluiced out. The thunder's crack torn from the lightning's power. The wind and water divided and partitioned. But that is only an apprentice's magic." She rolls a ladder across the room and skitters up it, throwing wide a door to showcase an entire rainbow of potions. "The journeyman's magic is in these, elements of the world formed and purified. Here," she tosses you a bottle, glowing cyan and electric to the touch, "try some liquid Motion. Or perhaps," she tosses you another, and you fumble for a moment to catch the bottle of red ooze that tries to drag your hand to the floor, "some Solidity? Or," she tosses a third bottle, orange and flickering, and you frantically attempt to juggle all three before they all fall to the ground, shattering open with a thunderclap. You try to shield yourself from the shards and liquid, but after you flinch you realize that it's all formed into a single muddy ball of glass and magic at the tip of her finger. "Breaking my vials, dear? That might cost you," she says, stroking your chin with her other hand.
Sweat beads on your forehead as your chin is lifted upwards, tilted towards her. "What- I didn't-" She's trying to bait you. You can see it in her eyes, in her devilish grin. You crush your eyes shut for a moment, trying to reorient yourself, but her touch on your face is driving all rational thought from your head. You stumble towards anything to say. "What," you breathe, almost unheard, "what about the Master's magic?"
She withdraws her touch, and you follow her forward half a step. Your eyes open to see her half-smiling still, her eyes aglow with the question. "I worked long and hard for mastery of my craft," she murmurs, her eyes locked with yours, "and it will forever amuse me that I started so large only to end so small."
She pushes you, gently, and you stumble backwards into a chair you hadn't realized was there. Had it been there, before? She spins it, raises it up, and you realize it has several instruments, needles, sharp things arranged around it - and restraints, which she closes efficiently. You try moving your arm, and feel the soft leather gently bite into your wrist.
She twirls in front of you, skirt flaring out, to yet another cabinet of bottles and strange machinery. "The master's magic," she declares, "is in the invisible, the undefinable - personhood, humanity, intelligence, kindness, cruelty." She picks an ampoule off the shelf, a tiny thing filled with viscous cloudy liquid, and dangles it in front of your face. "Each person is comprised of a thousand thousand parts; emotions, desires, memories. I can take a human and break it down into its most basic elements, or make a brand new one from distilled parts. Fill someone up, or empty them out like a dried husk." She restores the ampoule to its rightful spot, among the hundred identical ones that sit on she shelf. Her fingers trace up your arm, and she whispers in your ear.
"But that's why you came to me, isn't it?"
You feel a sting at your neck, and the room begins to go dark as the instruments and her smile descend on you.
