INOADAR
7th of Spring, 514
He had to admit, the medic at the Healing Hand made it look easy. But the man had given him a chance to try, and Inoadar had found that sawing through a skull was not such a simple task as he'd thought. It rolled out from his grip endlessly and it seemed as if he never found the same track two times in a row. Then there was the problem presented by the natural seams of bone that never failed to direct the saw in the wrong direction.
The poisoner damn near cut two of his own fingers off trying to hold the skull in place, so he could saw it. And all this without the press of blood normally present. For this was a Nuit brain. The medic had used acid to burn away a wide strip of flesh to allow the saw to bite into the bone immediately. Inoadar had told him he was only after the fluid present in the brain of a cadaverous body newly abandoned by an inhabiting Nuit.
He did not, in fact, know for sure that such a fluid existed. But he'd seen evidence in the form of stained fragments of bone and brain where a Nuit had been savagely mutilated by a mob of Sunberth's traditional anti-magic vigilantes. At the time he'd thought nothing of it, other than the usual superstitious nonsense ingrained into the anti-authoritarian minds of the citizenry. It was treated as some kind of proof of all magic user's inhuman corruption. He, like a few others, didn't buy into this absurdity, but like them, he knew better than to voice this "heresy" where agitated mob members might overhear.
Even now, it was only because he was working with "Dark Reaving" poison that this old memory had resurfaced. He'd been honor bound to find an antidote to this toxin, and all his research and testing had led him to conclude that it was something borne of Nuit habitation that generated the pertinent component he needed. His memory of this bluish stain on the torn and crushed "gray" matter littering the street where the Nuit had been torn apart led his research to this next step.
It had not turned out to be any obstacle whatsoever to gain a Nuit's cast off body in exchange for providing him a new one to move into. As a poisoner, he frequently had reliable insight into where a newly dead body was likely to be procured. He'd stood guard over a Nuit transference in exchange for the old body. Next time, he thought he might see if there was someone who would pay him MORE to...see to it...that the transference "failed". After all, he'd have the abandoned body in either event.
At any rate, he felt vindicated when the medic had squeezed a fair amount of blueish dribblings from the fleshy remains of the brain. The medic himself had been fascinated by the state of the brain itself. It was not so much rotted or mummified as it was fried. The fluid reminded Inoadar of the drippings that formed when you cooked a piece of meat. He had no idea of this was the actual process which generated it. It was just an impression, although his imagination began running through a step-by-step scenario involving dozens of Nuits "volunteering" their brains after steadily increasing durations of habitation, to see at what point this change began to take place.
Someday, maybe...But for now, he was just glad to return to his shop and begin working on this fluid to see if he could perfect a production formula to make an antidote to "Dark Reaving" poison. It seemed like this project had been taunting him forever.
