The Child of Scraps

Chapter 10

"Are you sure that you got it right?"

"Avery, I'm not like you. I don't make mistakes."

Avery rolled her eyes. The darn boy was an insufferable know-it-all, to quote a famous author. Although, she had to admit, he was a quick learner. As she looked at the bubbling gray potion on the kitchen counter, she wondered how Leandro had learnt how to make it so quickly.

"I have an affinity with herbs and read books a lot," he answered when she asked him earlier.

She was so confused about this boy. So he didn't know how to even use a computer -she shuddered just thinking about earlier, when they kept shouting at each other because Leandro would click on something he shouldn't have- but he was able to understand how a potion works in a few hours. Just who was this boy?

They spent the entire afternoon searching for the ingredients, running everywhere and commuting to different markets just to retrieve all of the ingredients. Some of them were rather hard to retrieve -where do you even find ground obsidian like where would you even find that in the Philippines- and yet, Noah was able to find it, somehow. Avery had felt like asking her, but they were too busy searching for ingredients. The sun had set already when they had gathered everything. They all prepared the potion in the kitchen, Leandro dictating whatever they were supposed to do.

And finally, at twelve midnight, the potion was finally ready for use.

"Leandro, how does this work again? How does pouring the thing all over our body make us invisible?"

"It doesn't actually make us invisible, so to say." Leandro lifted the potion up to his eyes, inspecting for any deformities. "It reflects the light in a way that makes it harder for others' eyes to focus on those that have been covered in the potion, so they're more likely to just look away. It's a rather difficult form of light magic, and it took decades before people invented it. And actually, it's not foolproof, because there are those with special magic in their eyes that allows them to ignore the effects of the potion. If it wasn't for the fact that that type of magic was extremely rare, then I'd be wary about using this potion."

"Um, okay." Avery looked over at Noah, who was yawning already. She patted the sleepy girl's head, hoping to make her feel better."Do we use it tomorrow, or the next day?"

"What?" Leandro placed the potion on the counter and looked at Avery with surprised eyes. "Why can't we do it right now? It's the perfect time to sneak in right now! The guards are probably tired, and there's no way a person's going to be out on the streets right now. Also, we need to go find your father as soon as possible, right? We don't have enough money to last forever."

Avery was dumbstruck. If she didn't know that she was infinitely more emotional than Leandro, she'd say that he was being rather hotheaded right now. "Er, shouldn't we plan a bit?"

Leandro thought about it for a moment. "Well, let's not be too ambitious then. Let's just go investigate to see if our plan will work, and then if it does, then we can try going inside. Maybe we can at least see what's inside that factory, and maybe try to do the actual sleuthing next time. I think that should be okay, right?"

Avery nodded, with a bit of hesitation. Surely, this had to go well, right?

They took around ten minutes cleaning everything up and getting ready to go outside. They all hurried to go out and headed towards the factory. Although there were only about one or two vehicles that were going around, they weren't really scared about them since it was so late.

They finally made it to the empty building beside the factory, and Leandro took the potion out of the backpack that he had hid it in. He murmured a short prayer for the success of the trip, and then said, "Avery, you want to go first? I'll finally be able to stop looking at your frizzy hair."