”Are you fucking kidding me?!" My enraged screams echoed throughout the basement laboratory. Had anything else survived the blast, they would have had their mangy, flea-bit tails tucked squarely between their legs and took shelter under the splintered remains of the nearest table.

To say everything hurt was... mildly inaccurate.

It felt like I had been ran over by a train and dragged halfway across Salvar, all the while being repeatedly bitten by dire ants until we finally reached our destination, where I was promptly removed by a group of harpies who decided the best way to tend my wounds was to strip away what flesh remained with their talons before disposing of my corpse in the nearest active volcano.

I tore away a chunk of blood-stained glass that embedded itself in my right eyes, carefully examining it with the two that still worked. It came from the beaker that I had dumped some of my alchemical reagents in roughly three seconds before I found myself unceremoniously thrown into (and nearly through) the far wall. Reaching up to see if I had any more errant pieces of equipment sticking out of me, I discovered that I could not feel anything at all--for my right hand decided that it would rather dangle from my wrist by a couple vines.

Me being me, I decided to drop a few more choice F-bombs, but that's when the jolt of pain in my face pushed through the fog in my mind. White hot fire seared my nerves as I grimaced, which made things even worse. I felt around with my left hand for a minute--one side of my mug was perfectly fine, but the other half had been burned clean off by the reaction, leaving behind blackened ends of writhing vines and charred jaw and cheek bones.

I would discover later on that my nice mythril face mask had been blown clean off my face during the incident and was embedded into the stonework of the basement wall.

I shifted around on the floor for a minute, completely ignoring the lingering flames of my failed experiment on the table and the smoke that swirled around on the ceiling. The explosion blew out the windows, so the smoke at least had somewhere to go. As for the fire.... fuck it, eventually it'll run out of splintered wood and chemicals to burn through.

The sand bucket was right over there, maybe five feet away from me, somehow not overturned in the fiasco. I could just put the damn thing out right now, but I would not grant the experiment a noble death. For all I fucking cared, it could wither away to nothingness like it damn well deserved.

I moved to stand up. I got to my knees just fine, but when I rose to my feet, there was a loud snap! as my left shin completely snapped, the bloody shard of bone sticking out through the vines of my leg as I crashed into the grimy laboratory floor.

Oh, isn't this just the best day ever.