“You actually spent it all!?” Yehpweyl snapped at me while I ate some food and tried to ignore her presence. Her agitation drew looks of ire and concern from the other humans in the inn, who immediately assumed that I was the cause of it.

“Yes,” I replied shortly before sipping some water from the mug in front of me. Yehpweyl looked like she wanted to reply but was so flabbergasted by my response that she couldn't find the words to use. Instead, she sank into a chair across from me and stared upwards at the ceiling.

“You've killed me,” she breathed. “The Flowing Wings are going to find me and murder me over this. I don't even have the money I was going to use to convince them to let me pay them back now. You've killed me.” No, you killed yourself when you stole from me, I corrected silently because my mouth was too full of food to speak. I waited for Yehpweyl to keep speaking, but she just got up and went about her normal routine in a strange silence, only speaking a few words when other patrons tried to talk to her. More hostile looks came my way, but I didn't care at all.

“Bring more food,” I called out to her when my plate was empty, and she obliged.

I woke up earlier in the morning than I usually did. The sun had only just risen and the air in the city still carried the hint of freshness that it tended to get at night when the humans went indoors. I let myself out of my room, locked it, and went out to the back of the inn to wash myself off. While I probably could have gone a week without bathing and now had the stench of the average Vehrehr citizen, my experiences with the strange magic-feeding bacterial infections had given me the good sense to clean myself regularly.

When I got finished washing up I went back inside to find a spot to wait for breakfast, and was surprised to see a strangely-dressed human sitting at the table nearest to the door doing the same. She was clearly a fighter of some kind, wearing obvious plate armor across her chest and a sword on her hip, but wore no helmet nor leg protection. Her pants appeared to be made of a fine woven material, dyed blue, and her white-blonde hair was styled into a bun on the back of her head which was kept in place with a rather ornate-looking clasp and pin.

Neither of us said anything, and a few minutes later Yehpweyl walked out of her room and froze in place. Not when she saw me, I noted, she reacted when he saw the woman. Immediately I assumed that this woman was likely someone that Yehpweyl owed money to, possibly a member of the Flowing Wings mercenary group who she had mentioned in the past, but decided not to get involved. Without needing to be prompted, Yehpweyl brought me a bowl of porridge and some water, which I ate before getting up to leave.

“That is some unique equipment you have there, foreigner,” the woman remarked after I passed her by. I looked back and met her eyes, two deep green pits which darted around to scan my body once I was facing their owner. “Tell me, where did you purchase it?”

“Frahmtehn,” I grunted, turning around to leave now that I had examined her. For all that gear, she looks quite thin underneath it, I thought, Unless she has skill with force magic like Yaavtey she's no threat to me.

“I have been to Frahmtehn, and yet I have never seen a spear like that one being sold in any store,” the woman continued. I inhaled, feeling annoyance rise up into my chest. “The only place I've heard of such things being sold is right here in Vehrehr, and only at a single location.” The woman's voice was practically begging me to turn around again and engage her in conversation.

“How interesting,” I remarked without turning around, then I walked out into the street without another word and strode off before the woman had a hope of catching me.

Back outside of Tkaol's residence I noticed a distinct shift in the smell of the air. It was subtle at first, a leafiness like the scent of cut trees joining in with the cacophony of other scents in the air, but became overpowering as I walked up to the door. I had already checked the black market and not seen Tkaol's stall, so I intuited that she must have still been in her home working on the blue leaf extraction. She did tell me it would take around a day, I thought, but with that much vapor maybe she killed herself by accident.

Without knocking, I opened the door, and the smell made me take a step backwards. I held my breath and backed away, waiting for my eyes to start vibrating like they did when I was last doped with a small amount of blue leaf, but no such reaction happened. Cautiously, I stepped into the run-down house and shut the door behind me, making sure to bar it before walking deeper inside. The interior was small, and noise was coming from the lab, so I approached that door and opened it next.

Steam and other vapors gushed out, wetting my face and neck, followed by a scream and the sound of metal scraping along wood. I stepped back again and squinted into the fog of the room, then caught a knife as it was clumsily thrust toward me.

“Get ou-” Tkaol began yelling, her voice muffled.

“I'm here for the poison,” I interrupted. Blood dripped from my sliced palm onto the ground, and I released the knife to let my hand heal up properly. Tkaol, who was wearing a leather mask of dubious construction on her face, rubbed the glass eyeholes so that she could see better and then looked down.

“You got blood on my floor,” she grumbled.

“You got blood on your own floor,” I corrected, “do you attack everyone who enters your home?” Tkaol lifted her mask so that I could see her derisive look, then walked back into the lab with me in tow behind her.

“Only the ones who sneak up on me,” she retorted. “Do people not knock on doors or announce themselves where you're from?” She placed the mask on a table that had been dragged into the center of the room, and held a number of new objects.

The first object was a large metal pot, which sat upon a clay and metal construction that was a burner of some kind. The pot looked like it could hold around twenty liters of water in my estimation, and was the source of the steam in the room and the smell as well. The burner held oil and was providing a powerful and even flame to the base of the pot. Alongside it, several stirring sticks and a net-like scooping tool sat in a neat row, as did a simple scale.

While I watched, Tkaol carefully scooped out something blue and chunky from the boiling pot and put it into a sopping wet bag on another one of the tables, then sat the scooper back down beside the stirring sticks.

“Leaves are waste,” she explained succinctly, “I already got all the poison out. Only thing left to do is dump in some royleyway and solidify it into chunks.” I assumed that the royleyway was some kind of acid, considering what she had told me during our last discussion, and as such her remark made some kind of sense. So it’s an acid-base extraction then, I noted, The acid will cause the poison to precipitate out of the mixture.

“You said you would have it ready in a day,” I told her. Tkaol narrowed her eyes at me.

“Have some patience, it's still morning,” she chastised, “If you want this done faster you can help me out, but it's going to take a few hours no matter what.” I sighed and nodded, causing her to break into a smile. “Alright, get that jar over there that says royleyway on i-” she began.

“Point to the jar,” I said, “also, did you produce the mask I requested?” Tkaol grunted, then pointed to the mask on the table.

“Check if that fits,” she instructed, and so I did. While it was certainly a bit small for my face the mask did make a good seal against my skin and I had adequate visibility through the eyeholes for regular movement. Fighting in the mask would be difficult without removing the eyepieces, but I had no intention of getting into a proper fight.

“It fits,” I confirmed, removing the mask and pocketing it, “which jar?”

“That one,” Tkaol said, pointing to a jar filled with a white powder with I retrieved for her. “Alright now listen, you're going to slowly sprinkle some of that powder into the water, and you're going to stop when I tell you to stop, you hear me?”

“Understood,” I nodded. Tkaol extinguished the burner by cutting its oil supply, then put one of the stirring sticks into the water. The one she chose had a wide paddle on it which had approximately the same curvature as the inside of the pot.

“I will be scraping the sides of this pot while you add the royleyway to get the poison off of them,” she said. “If you see the mixture start to bubble before I do you will stop immediately, understand?”

“Wouldn't it be better to do this when the pot is cool?” I asked. “Heat will only speed up the reaction.” Tkaol gave me a strange look.

“If you want to wait then-” she began, but I held up a hand. Water has a pretty high specific heat, but I can probably cool it down quickly enough, I thought. Placing my left hand on the side of the pot I ignored the sizzling sound of my skin reacting to the extreme heat. Tkaol winced, then looked at me unsurely.

“Stir the pot,” I said before closing my eyes and entering deep concentration. In my mind I created and rotated an imaginary structure, then took a deep breath and began to push magic into it gently.

“You have to tell me how you did that,” Tkaol said after she finished weighing out my half of the poison and inserting it into a leather bag for me. The weights she was using weren't exact, but there was at least a third of a kilogram, perhaps as high as half of one. I need to figure out the exact conversion of their units, I thought, an Uwlz feels like around ninety grams but with weights that light it's hard to be sure. I took the bag and, after making sure it was sealed correctly, put it in my pants pocket.

“I just cooled it down,” I said, “it's the inverse of heating it up.” Tkaol scoffed and shook her head.

“I would call you an idiot, but you can't be that stupid if you came up with a trick like that,” she huffed. “Let me explain this to you so even someone as ignorant as yourself can understand it: I've never even heard of someone being able to cool something with magic, let alone seen it. By conventional logic it's not possible. As the scholars would say, spirits that can take away from the world don't listen to human whims.”

“I see,” I said absentmindedly, looking for something to draw Tkaol's attention away from me. In the back of the room I spotted something that looked a bit like distillation equipment, and I recognized an opportunity to tackle two tasks at once. “That equipment,” I said, pointing over Tkaol's shoulder to the device, “can I purchase it from you?”

“That?” Tkaol asked, looking away and pointing to a different piece of equipment. In a split second, I drew my utility knife and plunged it into the back of her head, right where the upper spine met the skull. Tkaol's body went limp, and after thirty seconds I removed the knife. The wound didn't close. That fixes that problem, I thought, taking the other half of the poison and pocketing it as well, now let's see if I can find a backpack in here to carry the equipment with. Oh, and the money, I should get that.

I was two blocks away from Tkaol's home when I heard the first shouts. Alarmed by the smoke rising from her windows, people began to shout and call out for help and water. With my hood up and a full backpack, I ducked into an alley and started back towards the inn. I had no reason to fear that her body might be linked back to me, because I knew that the oil I had spread around her home before leaving would burn the contents house to cinders before anyone got a chance to see what had happened within.