18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The mandrake got promoted in public and the laboratory stopped pretending it was about science.
That was the exact moment it went bad.
Before that, Forbidden Alchemy had only been expensive-looking. Green fire in glass. Gold coins drifting around the room like loose funding. Shelves full of bottles with the posture of things that had definitely been subpoenaed once before. The man in the goggles standing in the artwork beneath that bright poisonous halo overhead, one hand up, one hand out, like he had either just discovered infinite wealth or knocked over the wrong beaker and decided to call it research.
I had gone in at €1.00 because the whole place already looked too impressed with itself.
For a while the slot behaved like a lecture by someone unstable but credentialed. Small line hit on letters. Then nothing. A coral line paid enough to count and not enough to change my face. A skull appeared once on reel three and did absolutely no work, which somehow made it more sinister. Above the reels, those jars sat there with their tiny multipliers inside, dim and waiting, five little laboratory managers pretending not to monitor the floor.
I did not like the mandrake from the start.
That thing looked like a root somebody had pulled out of the ground during a legal dispute. It sat there on the reels in that curled-up, overqualified way, like it knew it was one committee meeting away from becoming a problem. Coral was at least flamboyant about it. Skulls had the decency to announce themselves. The mandrake had middle-management energy. Quiet. Ambitious. Moist.
The first transformation of the session had been minor enough to ignore if I’d had proper life skills.
A claw turned Wild.
One jar above one reel brightened.
The win came in at €7 and change.
The room glowed as if a major theorem had been proven.
Nothing of consequence followed.
That should have taught me what scale this lab preferred: huge ceremony, medium return, everyone still acting as if history had happened.
Instead I stayed.
Not because I expected riches. Because I had become interested in the selection process. The slot never explained itself cleanly, which is one of the few things it did right. Premium symbols just sat there across the board — coral, mandrake, claw, skull — and then, on certain spins, the laboratory suddenly developed opinions. A flare. A little hum. One or more symbol types selected at the top. Everything matching them below transmuted into Wilds. The jars above the reels stepped upward. The board paid. Then the room went back to its candles and academic misconduct.
That is enough to ruin a person’s relationship with cause and effect.
I stopped seeing symbols. I started seeing candidates.
Two claws on the board? That wasn’t a pattern. That was a shortlist.
Skull on reel five? External hire.
Mandrake on reels two and four? Internal lobbying.
Coral near the middle? Decorative fraud, but still in the running.
The session drifted like that for a while, not dead, not alive, just funded. A hit on Ks. Then a little line through a Wild. Two Scatters once, which would have mattered in a better relationship. Another transformation that chose coral and paid with exaggerated sincerity. €11.40. The sort of number a man receives while a laboratory ceiling is visibly trying to become folklore.
And then the mandrake got its moment.
The spin landed with two mandrakes, one on reel two and one on reel four. A skull sat on reel three. One claw in the far right. Letters everywhere else like bored interns filling out the lower half of the grant application.
The flare came.
The jars above reels two and four lit up first, a sickly green-gold. I remember that exactly because for one second the lab looked proud of itself. Not excited. Proud. Like it had finally found the right paperwork to justify lunacy.
The mandrakes changed.
Not gracefully. Not mystically. They were promoted. That was the feeling. Same board, same room, same night, but now those two root-creatures had been given authority and matching jackets. They became Wilds, one on each reel, and the jars above them ticked up. x2 over reel two. x3 over reel four. Tiny numbers. Smug numbers. Numbers that looked like they had recently attended a leadership retreat.
The line connected across them.
Then another did.
Then a third little follow-through involving a line that had absolutely no business becoming relevant except that the newly promoted mandrakes now occupied the room with the confidence of men who say “let’s circle back” while standing too close to your chair.
The total hit €26.80.
Not a fortune.
Worse.
Proof.
That changed the room. Not the payout. The room. Once the lab had shown me that kind of transmutation — targeted, mean, procedural — every premium symbol afterward started arriving with résumé energy. I was no longer spinning for wins. I was watching office politics in occult agriculture.
That is not a healthy sentence. Still true.
I kept the stake at €1.00 because increasing it would have meant I respected the institution. Lowering it would have meant the institution had beaten me. I refused both outcomes and became a very small, stubborn man in a glowing laboratory.
The next spins were vile in a much more administrative way.
Three skulls landed. The transformation triggered. It chose claw instead. One claw. Reel five. Converted it. Paid €4.
A reel full of premium symbols appeared with no transformation at all, which felt like attending an awards ceremony where the envelope had been lost. Two Scatters came and left. A coral line paid enough to keep me seated and not enough to improve my worldview.
Then the slot started doing something worse than paying badly.
It almost triggered free spins with dignity.
Two Scatters.
Then three on the next spin, but never the right three at the right time.
One held just long enough for me to glance at the others and begin constructing a future.
Gone.
That’s the particular discourtesy of Forbidden Alchemy. It doesn’t always deny you through absence. Sometimes it lets possibility dress itself first.
I would have preferred a cold run. A cold run lets a man leave. This was all half-lit opportunity and theatrical mismanagement. Every spin looked as though a committee of candles had voted to continue.
Then came the best hit of the session, and it came from complete indecency.
Four premium symbols landed at once: skull, claw, mandrake, coral. The full faculty was present. The laboratory dimmed. The jars overhead woke up all across the top in patches. For one magnificent second it looked like the room had lost containment and all five reels were about to enter a new tax bracket.
It chose skull and claw.
That was already too much authority for a single spin.
All skulls turned.
All claws turned.
Wilds opened across the board in enough places that the line structure stopped looking like lines and started looking like a city plan approved during a storm. The jars above the selected reels stepped up one after another — x2, then another, then another — until the top of the screen looked like a row of excited specimen jars trying not to shout.
Everything connected.
Then connected again.
Then one more thin little tail of a line formed at the bottom, the kind of thing that only matters when a laboratory has already made the bad decision of becoming effective.
The count rolled up and landed at €91.20.
That was the number.
A proper number. The kind that made the room suddenly seem less decorative and more complicit. Enough to put posture back into my spine. Enough to make the alchemist in the art look less like a man doing nonsense and more like a man whose nonsense had recently made payroll.
And still I did not leave.
Because of course the next spin brought two Scatters and a mandrake.
That was the poison. Not greed. Continuity. The lab had just produced one clean success, and now it immediately laid out enough visual nonsense to imply one more. The mandrake on reel three looked deeply employable. The Scatters carried that faint end-of-night invitation tone. The jars above the reels sat there emptied back down, waiting for the next promotion cycle.
I spun again.
Nothing useful. No transformation. No third Scatter. Just a line of letters with the morale of underfunded clerks.
I spun again.
A claw on reel two.
A skull on reel four.
No flare.
I spun a third time because apparently the phrase “one more” had acquired legal force in the building.
Two Scatters again.
Middle reels full of premium symbols.
The jars at the top looking like they knew something.
No trigger.
That was when I left.
Not on the €91.20.
Not on a bonus.
Not on wisdom.
I left because the mandrake had started to look promotable again, and I did not trust the laboratory to remain merely theoretical while I was still in the room.
Medusa’s Mystic Reels Megaways acts like every line hit is sarcastic.