Astrid Was Supposed to Be the Alchemist

Not everyone at the celebration was celebrating.

Astrid Ironhoof had expected to become the field alchemist for the new Centrum. That was not a small expectation. It meant expertise, access, responsibility, and a place inside the machinery now being advertised across VQU as the next heroic order.

Instead, she had been displaced without follow-through.

The replacement mattered almost as much as the insult. Astrid was furious about being pushed aside by a necrocrat, and anger made her sharp instead of careless. She could see the thing the festival wanted people to miss: the older Centrum-era potions carried true void resonance, while the newer Boost-related work felt watered down, altered, or wrong.

That difference was a clue.

If the New Centrum was built partly on alchemy, resurrection-adjacent work, Boost, or void-derived research, then Astrid's exclusion was not only a personnel grievance. It made her an outside expert with enough knowledge to notice what the official story hid, mishandled, or misunderstood.

For the party, Astrid became a possible door.

Not a friendly one by default. A furious one. But fury can still open labs if it knows where the keys are kept.

The celebration gave VQU a polished face.

Astrid pointed toward the work under the paint.