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“Ugh,” said Elizabeth down the phone, “She's been at it all day.”
“Ha,” Sebastian said the word approximating to a laugh, but didn't actually laugh. He was only mostly listening, just about holding the phone to his ear with one hand while stirring the dubious-looking substance in the cast-iron cauldron in his garage with an icicle. His hand was freezing, but the ice was necessary. He had found that using wooden ladles or metal rods added parts of whatever their constituent materials were made of to the brew. While it wouldn't spoil a batch, the tainting remained factual. Ice, though, was just water, and water, he had found over the years, tended to be a neutral base, “She's been at it all her life.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Don't worry. She's just excited in her own way. Anyway, Elizabeth, I really have to go. I'll see you later. Tschau.”

He hung up, not before time. Where he had spare time, he was more than willing to devote some of it to the girl, but spare time was currently in short supply. Customers will still drifting in and out to collect his orders, Gloria was giving him grief as well, and, on top of that, as a brewer, he couldn't miss the opportunity the Emergence provided. A potion made under the full moon was a different beast to one made under a new moon; he could only imagine what a difference the appearance of the stars made, they whose light vanished for twenty years at a time. There were people (he thought vaguely of the Flamels) that could weave their own chemical magic like scientists. Sebastian was no scientist. What he did was an art. 

The cauldron was jet black, and about the size of a reasonable arm-chair. Theoretically, one could climb in and bathe. Thinking about it, it did look something like a jacuzzi, with hot bubbles streaming to the top. Then again, jacuzzi bubbles weren't normally a sick-looking green colour. At least they, in a surprisingly turn of events, smelled vaguely of strawberries. To finish, he dropped the icicle altogether and gently rubbed his hands together to get the feeling back in them – even through the protective gloves, they got chilly, to say the least. He had long since learned not to warm his hands in the hot vapours of the cauldron. To say it would be a bad idea would be to do a disservice to the notion of stupidity.

When the feeling returned to his fingers, with the slight burning of nerve endings that sometimes comes with that sensation, he held his hands out in the direction of the small conifer he could see out of the window. His wrists together, he reached out to it, even fifteen metres away. He could feel it; not physically, perhaps, but its presence. There it was. He had tried to think of a term for the feeling that wasn't 'life force', but no such term existed in his vocabulary. Gently, he coaxed it toward him; the tree's very essence was flowing like water or a current of wind. Sebastian pulled at it gently and then pushed it past the brim of the cauldron and into the murky brew, where it remained. This was the trick. This was why the Jung brand (regardless of whether the nom de plume du jour was Stamm, Goethe, or Brecht) of potions was popular. They brimmed, quite literally, with life. He glanced again at the tree outside. Its forest-green pines had browned slightly. It would return to form in a couple of day. It always did.

Things to do. Things to do. He put the lid on the cauldron – it looked like an enormous saucepan, misplaced in an enormous garage connected through to the kitchen of Sebastian's little house. He would have lived with the Andersons, but for Gloria's rule about magic on the property. Something about being impartial. He lifted the safety goggles off his head and placed them with his gloves on a rickety shelf on the wall, which was there for exactly that purpose. His normal glasses would have replaced them, but he had barely removed them from the breast pocket of his coveralls and pushed them up the bridge of his nose before removing them to chew the ends. He thought of Elizabeth and Gloria. The ball to celebrate the emergent witches was tonight, of course. In theory, it didn't really affect him. Not really. As an honorary member of the Anderson family, he was no doubt expected to attend, but his only other task was to, as usual, check up on the young witches from the university, but that was basically the day job anyway. Of course, the little darlings would have emerged by now – hopefully. He dug his mobile phone out of his pocket and got to work.

East Wellsburg was always full of surprises. He made the rounds by phone. Normally, he would speak to the young witches in his care personally, but in the interest larger, inter-family events, it was usually a good sign to try to speak to somebody near the top of the hierarchy. Mostly he was met with something ranging from mild interest or mild lack thereof. The university's bespoke pastoral care, also known as Sebastian Jung, was considered, at best, only a mild help or, at worst, a mildly annoying busybody. Either way, each conversation, largely the same as the last ran for about a cool five minutes – except one, notable only by its absence. The Liggens, a family of, amusingly, just three were possibly his favourite to deal with. The young witch, Matthew, was a sweet kid. A bit wet, maybe, but a decent enough guy, and his grandparents (it was grandparents, wasn't it?) were charming enough, too. They were polite and they were interested – unlike the other families, with their back-biting and psychopaths to be – and were among the few groups to never have caused him undue administration. It was unusual, then, that they would be the ones to fail to answer the telephone; he got through to the answerphone, of course, and left a brief message;

[i]Hello Mr and Mrs Friel, Sebastian Jung from the university here. I hope you're enjoying your Emergence – and Matthew, of course. Clearly you're quite busy this evening! Anyway, hopefully everything has gone okay, and hopefully I'll see you at the ball later this evening. It'll be a great opportunity for all the families to get to know one another and really integrate Matthew and his peers into our community. On behalf of the Andersons, I'd like to remind you that we prefer guests[/i] not[i] to use magic on our premises in order to preserve the house's neutrality. I'm sure I'll see you later but if there's anything I can do to help in meantime, please give me a call – and, of course, the Andersons would also appreciate it if you could delete this message once you've listened to it. Prying ears and all that. Thanks, and see you later.[/i]