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Nico makes a lot of checklists. He is not, by nature, the kind of guy who stays on task, and for an alchemist that can be a real health hazard. Some parts of the practice can be done with just intuition and verve -- Nico paints the best Tarot decks in the world, just to pick one example, and he does it with twenty partial cards laid out at once, switching between them as the mood strikes. But a lot of alchemy is about doing exactly the right things, in exactly the right order, for exactly the right amount of time, with some pretty bad consequences if you mess up. So, checklists.
It's a kind of self-refinement through the incorporation of opposites, and that's a lot of what alchemy is all about, when you get right down to it.
Lately Nico's checklists have been pretty weird even by his standards, with entries like "scatter a pint of blood into Lake Winnipesaukee", "attend a Magic: the Gathering tournament in Boston but don't actually play", and "buy the crappiest possible Tarot deck using only silver dollars". It's been a busy, stressful month, mostly setting up contingencies he probably won't even need, but you can never tell: the Lake Winnipesaukee thing saved his life an hour ago. But he's almost done now: he just checked off "kill the occult master of New Hampshire", leaving only four items undone.
The next one reads, "On holy Saturday, declare my intentions in the heart of my enemy's power". That would probably work OK anywhere in New Hampshire, but why stop at "OK"? The best place would be his enemy's actual house. Was the dead alchemist carrying a driver's license, by any chance?
