Completed Beginning with Vines (Wrenmae)

[Inoadar]

19th of Summer, 513

"It's very simple, actually, Wrenmae. You merely blow in it..." He took his thin rubber glove and inflated it with a bit of extra pressure, making a semi-balloon of the thing. "And then, check for leaks...just like this," he plunged it in the bucket of water he refreshed every morning just for such purposes as this.

He squeezed it slightly with the other hand while keeping the opening tightly shut. "No bubbles...no leaks...no getting poison on your hand while working." He looked up with a respectful grin. "That was a good question, though. it shows you are already thinking in terms of caution. Too many people think this work is not dangerous until the product is finished. What they don't realize is that maximum toxicity may have already been achieved, and the only work being done is simply to alter its natural state for the purpose of changing the delivery method."

He had no idea how the gloves were made to be so sheer, they stretched slightly to fit like a second skin. All he knew was that a half dozen pairs came with his poisoner's lab. Supposedly, the grander, "elaborate" lab came with a couple dozen. He didn't use them all the time, by any means. In fact, he rarely used them anymore. A fact Wrenmae no doubt observed. But again, to his credit, his new assistant made no protest. He knew he lacked the experience to tell when they were truly required, and when their use was more hindrance than help.

Inoadar dismissed this line of thought, it was irrelevant. He went to a back room and returned with a length of vine. "This is 'Noose' vine. It is used to make "Lost Tongue" poison. Now this is not necessarily the quickest and simplest poison to make, but its one of the safest. This is mostly because the effect only causes your tongue to swell to the point you can't speak. So even if you completely make a toxic mess of things, the worst that can happen is that you will be unable to argue back while I scold your ass for clumsiness." he winked as he finished.

"Now what we want to do is set up the wringer to put about 20 to 40 thousandths of an inch of squeeze on this as we run it through. This should only crack the outer husk without rupturing the central core. Do not worry about the knots and twists, the core is inert at those points anyway. Now you've seen me do this before, but you just place the vine across the lowest roller. Then you add 'bearers'...Oh, those are the washers of various thicknesses." he explained, then continued.

"Anyway, you add the bearers to the side poles to determine how far the top roller will drop. Once you have it so the top roller just touches the vine, you remove enough bearer thickness to account for the amount of desired squeeze and then tighten the clamp to lower and secure the top roller. Be sure you have the exact same amount of thickness borne on each side. This will greatly help keep the vine centralized on the roller as it passes through, as there will be no 'path of less resistance' for it to seek." He paused a moment, satisfied.

One last thing occurred to him. "Oh yes, there will probably be some liquid that will escape when the husk is cracked. Don't worry about it, it won't hurt you. But it will neutralize the liquid in the core. That's why we don't just squeeze the vine flat to begin with." he looked around to see if anything triggered any last comments. There were none. "Very well then, proceed."

[Wrenmae]

By Vayt...

Wrenmae crossed his arms as he listened. The poisoner was adept at his craft, or at least skilled enough to seem an expert in it. Taking the vine necessary for the craft, he laid it on the table before pointing out its various properties. Wren remembered the Zeltivan classroom and the glyphing lessons he had to endure. So calm and collected his teacher had been, but with an edge of cruelty. There was none of that in Inoadar...not so overtly anyways. He joked a little, made fun with his instructions. In him, Wren saw much of the spirit the Zeltivan University stood for.

Granted, he doubted they would so willingly offer classes on the art of poison, but still...apart from the nature of their craft, one might see this as a harmless and interactive lesson.

He waited till Inoadar had finished, finally testing the device himself. He laid the vine across the bottom roller and added in the bearers, perhaps a bit too thick, making sure that if he overcompensated rather than flat failed.

The top roller fell a good distance above the vine and Wren quickly pulled it up and replaced the current rollers with ones of less thickness. In this way he approximated, measured, and carefully lowered till the top roller pressed against the stock of the vine itself.

He ran a finger along its warped and twisted frame, finally laying a hand on the crank and pushing the vine through.

There was a muted crack as the vine moved through and when it fell on the other side, the outer shell was cracked.

Since Wren didn't know what he was looking for, he simply searched for success or failure in Inoadar's face.

"What's the most dangerous poison you've made?" He asked offhandedly as he waited for the next set of instructions.

[Inoadar]

Inoadar watched as Wrenmae ran the vine through the wringer. The light-press bearers were sufficient to just break the outer husk. He listened for the tell-tale crunching of the inner core. It was not a perfect science, as vines tended to vary in thickness to at least a small degree. Occasionally, there was a secondary crunch, usually accompanied by a hitch in the rolling process. Inoadar would stripe the husk with a quill to mark the spot where this occurred.

When the full length of the sample had been pressed, Inoadar took an odd blade from his desk. For the most part it looked like nothing but a hilt, with no blade in it. He took a screwdriver and loosened a wide bolt on the side. This done, he carefully thumbed a slide on the handle and slowly slid the tiniest portion of a blade from within the handle. He held it against the end of the vine at the point where the husk was pooched out from being pressed. The forward tip of the handle had a wide flat flange on it that would serve as a glide block to prevent the blade from cutting any deeper.

He took out a long polished metal tray as long as the section of vine they were working with. It would have been a logical guess to figure that the sections of vine had been cut to this length for just this purpose. He aligned the blade with the ridge in the husk, formed when the wringer squeezed it to form this crease. He smoothly slid the blade along the ridge, cutting the full length of the vine cleanly. He worked his way along the vine, opening the husk out inch by inch along the cut. He gently slipped the core free, letting the fluid collect in the tray.

He described what he was doing as he went, pausing to let Wrenmae observe, explaining that the fluid could be used to make an antitoxin, but was so foul-tasting, so topical in application and so easily washed away as to be a poor business venture. Nonetheless, it cost them nothing so it was worth collecting. He invited Wrenmae to run a second vine through the wringer and to follow up with a try at stripping the husk. It occurred to him that the man had asked him something about what dangerous poisons he had made.

"Hmm? Most dangerous? That I've made myself? Well, given what a personal judgement call that is, I will assume we are only referring to my own assessment of what defines "dangerous". The one I get the most use out of myself is simple 'Bloodroot'. It's quite effective against djed crafters as it causes confusion. Those that cause unconsciousness or muting do not act fast enough to stop that first crafting from incinerating you or sucking you into the void, or whatever." he waved dismissively, his response somewhat distracted as he watched Wrenmae.

"I've made both 'Coral Blade', a semi paralytic, and 'Blackened Breath', a general debilitator, with some permanent residuals, while I was living in Sunberth. Those are both popular and potent, but I haven't had much access to those materials here in Ravok, so it's been a while. 'Dark Reaving' is a powerful weakener, but I can't truly claim to "make it" here. To be honest, I'm not sure what's in it. I only perform the final stage to convert it to delivery form."

He handed Wrenmae another vine, then simply lifted the whole bundle up onto the table, with a grin. "Practice makes perfect." He started thinking again. "I make 'Blue Whinnis' and 'Intellect Mist', though that is actually beneficial to you, so I couldn't call it dangerous. I've got a lead on 'Silk Streak' and hope to be making that here soon. That's a nasty one, and can jump to secondary victims as well. Ask me again in a season or two and THAT will be my answer."

[Wrenmae]

Wren watched with rapt attention as Inoadar repeated the movement with the blade, removed the core, and poured the liquid into the small silver pan. There was something to be said for the art of poisoning...if it could truly be called art. His god thought well of it at least, and although he'd known the Shroud to usually be those who practiced poison as a craft, he had never delved into the subject till now.

So then, why had he been chosen?

Inoadar handed the process off to Wren and the fledgling poisoner quickly began work on the process. He set the vines, made the small incisions, and ran through the strainer. The first three were met with unsatisfying snaps as the core was burst, ruining the whole vine. Each time, Wren grimaced, tasting the failure on his lips and trying again. After the third, however, pressing his small knife against the bulge of the vine, slowly plucking the core, and depositing the antidote in the silver tray, he fell into the groove of production.

Quietly he went from vine to vine, till the last lay used and discarded in a small pile on the table. Holding up both small bowls, one with a little over an inch of antipoison and the other with several cores he allowed himself a small grin of triumph, putting them down on the table and sitting back.

"Are you a praying man, Inoadar?" he asked the poisoner after a moment, "Do you owe your allegiance to anyone besides Rhysol?"

[Inoadar]

Inoadar nodded approvingly. "There you go, that wasn't too bad. Honestly, I expected that once you got that first one right, you'd get too eager and wring them too fast. That's often enough to cause a core rupture. Now, another reason I selected "Lost Tongue" is that there's no real time frame for this next step. It's an inhalation toxin, so if the sap dries, we dry cook it for smoke, if it's still liquid, we boil it and let the steam pass though a condensation screen and just collect the fumes"

It was a little odd to have a reason to be explaining all this, but he felt a strange pride in being more knowledgeable than Wrenmae in anything. He went on, "There are actually some pros and cons to weigh when you decide which approach you're going to take. AND if you are forced by circumstance to let the fluid dry, you can always add water to it to regain the liquid consistency."

He was gathering up the anti-toxin fluid in the metal tray, undecided whether he would bother with processing it. But he decided it would be good practice for Wrenmae. It was primarily because this was one of the rare concoctions where the process for the antidote was virtually identical to the making of the toxin. So he decided he would let Wrenmae watch him make the toxin, and then let him repeat the process with the neutralizer.

But first, the last remaining residue of the neutralizer needed to be expunged from the secondary husk surrounding the core. "The next thing we need to do is wipe off these cores to remove the last of the outer fluid. We could get by without doing this, but it would weaken the final product a little bit. You don't need to wipe it with much force, but at the same time, don't worry overmuch about breaking the core now. In the first place, the wringer has much more crushing power than we do, so it's not very likely. And second, even if you DO crush it to the point of spilling fluid, it would only cause that slight weakening since the bulk of neutralizer fluid has been removed. Still, try not to rupture them." he said with a grin.

As Wrenmae set this task, Inoadar also removed the rollers from the wringer, including them in the group of items to wiped clean of neutralizer. He then contemplated Wrenmae's last question. "Other than the Celestials in Nyka, I have no overt contempt for any of the gods. I speak casual oaths to emphasize frustration or surprise, but I've found that those oaths tend to be insulting only to those pantheons that are at odds with my Lord Rhysol. Like...oh...'What in Priskil's Perjury are you doing?' or 'Stick it up your Opal Orifice'. But I have one that may seem disrespectful, but in my heart I know I don't mean it that way. It may even offend you, and I apologize if so. But when I'm angry and am cursing at an annoyance, I may say 'Vayt's Teeth!', but I mean it in the sense that 'I hope Vayt bites your ass!"

He didn't wait to see Wrenmae's reaction to this, but spoke plainly, "...But I'd have to say that, other than Rhysol, I have felt no cause for allegiance to anyone. I would, of course, stand up for Vayt, but in all honesty, it is more motivated by his association with Rhysol than anything else."

As Wrenmae worked to clean the vine segments, He took each finished one and cut a half inch from each end, explaining that the initial cutting of lengths would cause the ends to be neutralized. But with no more outer fluid, cutting them would do no damage, but the ends still needed to be discarded. He then instructed Wrenmae to take another 20 thousandths out of the wringer, replace the rollers and run all the vine segments through again. He grabbed another metal tray and set it beneath the rollers, giving a wave of the hand to Wrenmae to proceed.

[Wrenmae]

The hypnotist nodded faintly with the instructions, finding that the process of coaxing poison from the humble plant far less intriguing than he had hoped it would be. Why on Mizahar did Vayt choose him anyways? He hadn't the patience for the craft that Inoadar had, nor did he have the gift. Granted, he did not harbor the same zealotry for Rhysol, but there was a resonance of appreciation from the chaon mark on his neck that agreed with Inoadar's reasoning.

Rhysol was a benevolent lord, at least in his own right. He was really no different than the other gods. They required blood as payment, a sacrifice of health and livelihood for tasks the gods somehow could not do themselves. It was puzzling, in its own way. The gods were beings of such enormous power, and yet they deigned to trifle with mortals. What worth did a mortal have to the might of an omnipotent being?

Perhaps the mortals were fuel of some kind...perhaps they were the gods favorite plaything...there was, ultimately, not enough information to go on. So rather than speculate aloud, Wren remained quiet, adjusting the rollers and then running the vines through one by one. With each crank he remembered the darkness beneath Sunberth...proffered voices asking for forgiveness, for life, for death, for absolution.

But torture was all they received, agony for their time.

Until Rhysol.

Rolling the last of the vines through, Wren gently placed them to the side of the table and looked up at Inoadar for more instructions.

"I don't know much about you," he said at last, testing the waters, "The information I gathered suggested you were not always here...and so your dedication to Rhysol is a subject of interest."

He took the bowl from under the ringer and placed it with the others, crossing his arms, "Where do you come from, poisoner? And why come to Ravok?"

[Inoadar]

Were he not subject to the effect of Wrenmae's hypnotic pull, Inoadar would have never given even the first tidbit of personal information. But he was still operating under the impression that the Maledictor was a representative of Rhysol himself and he would withhold nothing. "The only times I'm not here are when my work requires me to do errands. These can take days if I'm collecting natural toxin sources. Well, there is also my room at Tarsin's. I'm there often as well."

He'd been hooking up an attachment to a large chamber as he spoke, and looked up to see Wrenmae with the sort of pained expression indicating that he meant something else. "OHH. You mean I haven't always been HERE...in RAVOK!" He attached a pump with a valve that allowed outflow, but hindered return flow, to the top of the chamber as he collected his memories. "No indeed, I am originally from Nyka, the 'Seat of Celestial Strife'. A town divided into quarters, all vying against the ambitions of the others. The gods there...if you want to call them that...are oblivious to their people, leaving the administration of the city to their monks, who fight and discredit each other relentlessly."

He set out a box full of bulbous rubber bladders, each about two thirds the size of his fist. Each had a tapering protrusion that was sealed at the end. He changed the subject briefly, "These are the inhalation devices we will be collecting the fumes in. Its still in sap form, so we don't have to bother with the condensation process. We just heat it up and gather the smoke in cotton wads that are already inside the bulbs."

He set the pan over the heat and watched, waiting for it to begin to smoke. The pan itself had a valve that allowed air in, but it was capped by a funneled lid that led to the pump chamber. Inoadar showed Wrenmae how to attach the bladder to the tube extension, by pulling aside the spring-hinged stopper. "I applied myself to the furthest extent anyone in the Second Edict had ever achieved. But the only appreciation I got was that I was treated as a reason for everyone else to settle for second...or less. And when I tried to get them to try harder, or even applied my own..."methods"...to motivate them, I was called out and reprimanded."

His eyes flashed with remembered disgust. "ReprImanded!...Punished!...for doing the very thing those...GODS...supposedly stood for." Inoadar was a decent actor, but no method on Mizahar could have veiled the loathing in his voice. "I was the best, no boast intended. Truly, not even those who came to despise me would ever try to deny it. And I wished nothing more than to serve as an example of loyal and dedicated servitude to a god that would recognize the effort. But all "they" wanted was for me to stay out of sight and quit showing them up. By "they" I do not mean the Celestials diectly, but rather the Elders of the faction, who were themselves chosen BY the Celestials. Worms and dogs...all of them...god and man alike! they all deserved each other."

His anger quickened the pace of his hand on the pump, and he had filled three bladders by the time he realized he had not even explained the process to Wrenmae. "Well, to make a long story short. I killed the elder as a gesture of my disdain and left Nyka for good. They occasionally send bounty hunters after me." he smiled maliciously, "I feed them to the lake. When I first got here, I still held contempt for gods...ALL gods. I do not fear saying this, Rhysol already knows this. This is largely why I revere him. I was a thorn in his side, a traitor and rebel. Yet, when my activities finally cornered me, he did not have me executed. He allowed me to embrace his rule!"

"I can not truly speak for him, of course, but I feel that we understand each other. He recognizes strength, willingness and resourcefulness. The time it took for his guards to finally catch me must have impressed him, so I have been told by Black Hand agents, anyway. The loss of a few guards was not held against me. I was finally able to have my efforts to do my best recognized, and he allowed them to overshadow the technical crimes I had committed. He gave me another chance, to serve a god I can truly worship. And I have never been so glad."

Again, he caught himself ignoring the lab lesson he was trying to impart. He explained his doings as he stretched the opening in another bulb over the end of the tube, and began working the pump to pressurize the smokey fumes, releasing them into the bladder and then pulling it off and slipping a cap over the now exposed opening. He let Wrenmae see that the spring-hinged stopper closed the end of the tube automatically. He handed a bulb to Wrenmae, "Here, you try it now."

[Wrenmae]

Taking the bulb, the hypnotist moved beside Inoadar to the tube. He worked the edge of it with the tips of his fingers, teasing the smaller hole larger as he fit it over the glass. All the while he simply considered the man before him. Inoadar was a man scorned by Nykan divinity, who had found solace within the company of Rhysol.

A man saved from drowning will kiss the land he might have once cursed...conscription through mercy, not exactly a concept he imagined was near and dear to Rhysol's own heart....provided the god had one.

He withdrew the stopper with a little pressure and reached up to the bulbous lump, pumping it between his fingers and palm with rapid succession. Inoadar tutted quietly, the only criticism needed for Wren to slow his process. Little by little, the gaseous poison escaped up from the bottom of the tube to vanish within the bulb. Frustratingly, there was never any clear indication of when the bulb was filled to capacity and Wren had to rely on the clicking tongue of his teacher to reprimand failure and encourage success.

Finally he took the filled bulb and popped in a cap to keep the precious gas from leaking out. Placing it on the table he took another and repeated the process, all the while silent, thinking.

"Rhysol found a purpose for you, did he?" He said it almost to himself, flexing to draw the fumes up into the bulb. "Well, never let it be said that the god doesn't know where to find capable recruits." He looked Inoadar up and down. The man had not been marked by Rhysol...indeed he was more Vayt than the chaos god...but then, Rhysol was much of everything and nothing at once, perpetually mercurial.

"I've been to Nyka a few times," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "I found it a bit too stifling for my brand of work. Hard to convince the merchant he needs protection when all the monks offer it for free..." he trailed off, "Sometimes anyways."

Placing the second bulb by the first he took the last of them and repeated the process, "Your talents were wasted for them...you obviously have quite the talent for poison. Tell me, what are your ambitions? Do they all serve the will of Rhysol, or do you have personal goals and dreams for your industry?"

[Inoadar]

Inoadar felt another surge of pride at the comment about Rhysol's purpose, offhand though it had been. 'A capable recruit I am indeed.' he repeated to himself. He began disassembling the apparatus he'd used to make the inhalation toxin and looked around for what to demonstrate next. 'Perhaps I'll use the spinner to separate some catalyzed resin.'

At the mention of Nyka, he stopped and scowled, nodding at the word "stifling". He didn't quite follow the remark about protection for free. The way he remembered it, the monks were too busy undermining each other to protect anyone else. He had thought of it as chaotic back then. But at the mention of Rhysol's will, he realized it was not how he saw it any longer.

He slowly continued dismantling the pump array, cleaning the components he would not be continuing to use. "It's a difficult concept to explain. They called Him the God of Chaos. Yet a stranger to Ravok, coming for the first time, finds an orderly city. I suppose most shrug and say that even order can be one element of a random nature. That being contradictory is as much a random thing as consistent chaos, so flashes of order are also chaotic. They justify the long standing of an orderly city as chaotic on the grounds that such a length of time is just a moment in the life span of a god."

He handed the pump sections to Wrenmae along with a wet cloth. "Well you may as well learn to clean the chamber without breaking it." He lifted out a small box full of oddly bent lengths of metal rods and pipes, demonstrating over which ones the cloth was fit to access difficult niches and connections for cleaning. He left a coiled metal rod lying on the table top. "That's for later." he said as he pulled out an equally coiled glass tube and started attaching it where he had just disconnected the drip funnel on a small alembic base.

He returned to his philosophizing. "I don't see it that way really, though I suppose there could be some truth in it. Some may think Nyka is chaotic because of how the monks of each quarter vie against each other quarter. But it is not chaos, it is contention. True chaos is going to be randomly harmonic as often as it is explosive. Their motive and level of contention is identical in nature. Regardless of which quarter they represent, they all behave the same, they all believe the same, they all have the same goal. They are not chaotic, they are simply ill used and stupid."

He started pacing as he watched Wrenmae. "And our Lord's seeming order here does not reflect on his sense of chaos. If you take four random powers and wall them in, the smart thing for them to do is work on the same wall at once, in order to be free to once again pursue their random courses. So cultivating a will to work together is not going against his domain. It is those who impose order on a world that was born in chaos that are defying the nature of existence. By what right do they decide that all must adhere to their concept? They consider themselves "good", but they would bully the entire world into their way of thinking without batting an eye."

He set up the distillation coil and set a burner beneath it. He dusted the glass coil with a powder, which he called a thermal catalyst. He then took a separate burner and set a beaker over it. There was water filled to a specific line on the glass. He scraped some gooey resin into the water as he continued his speech. "He protects and shields us from the tyranny of the order fanatics so that, when we free the world, there will be those of us that will know what it takes to keep it free of such intolerance. For myself I wish to become the greatest worker of chemical effects Mizahar has ever known. I want to know the working of all the systems of the body, and how all things affect them. This aim is entirely selfish and does not concern or align itself with any other. Not by design anyway. And I see this as being, conveniently enough, completely in line with my Lord Rhysol's will. So my faith is entirely selfish and, in being so, entirely devoted. Is that not chaotic perfection?" he laughed.

[Nemesis]

Inoadar

Knowledge :

Skills

Skill	XP
Cleaning	+1
Observation	+2
Philosophy	+3
Poison	+3
Rhetoric	+2
Socialisation	+2
Teaching	+4

Lores

*Pride in Knowing More than Wrenmae
*Teaching Wrenmae

Micellaneous :

Injuries

*None

Loot/Expenses

*None

Wrenmae

Knowledge :

Skills

Skill	XP
Investigation	+3
Observation	+2
Philosophy	+1
Poison	+3
Socialisation	+2

Lores

*Poisoncrafting:A Dangerous Process
*Poison: Lost Tongue
*The Beliefs of Inoadar

Micellaneous :

Injuries

*None

Loot/Expenses

*None

____________________________________________

Notes

*A nice thread - shame it wasn't finished.
*At one point, Inoadar, you speak of being under the influence of Hypnotism, but I couldn't see where this was referenced in Wrenmae's post(s)... if I missed it, let me know...

Feel free to PM me with questions, comments, or concerns, if you have any.
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Thank ye!