Research
Cordelia steps into the Seahaven library, a place she has come to love well in her time in the city. Never had she seen so many books in her life, and at first there were too many options and she’d drift willy-nilly from shelf to shelf, distracted by any old title. Back home they’d only had one book, and she’d learned to read by brute intellectual force alone. But suddenly she was overwhelmed by texts, and would stop by early in the morning with a particular question on her mind only to stumble out of the place to find the city already dark.
After the first few days, though, Cordelia felt she’d shed enough of her farm-bred ignorance to focus on more specific topics. Primarily those related to the strange and interesting persons she’d run into. Finding her superstitions regarding magic a tad inadequate, she delved into magical topics to gain a greater understanding of channellers, making mental notes to ask Viscount Aanson Doraster about, later. Meticulous plans were forming, by which she planned to surprise and impress him with regard to her sudden depth of knowledge on a subject she’d previously known nothing about.
And then there was the matter of the Vek. She’d found the lack of concrete information on them rather frustrating.
But today her purpose is purely… recreational? Vocational? She wasn’t quite sure. Ever since she’d started thinking about the alchemical arts, she’d wanted to understand them better. She’d always enjoyed cooking, combining this and that and whatever was on hand to make something delicious. And she’d always been rather good at it; she had a head for recipes and flavours. Now she was wondering if that same talent might be applied to medicinal and pharmacological purposes.
So as she makes herself comfortable by the southern nook and pulls out a few treatises and books of general theory, she takes down notes and diagrams. But her mind is hardly on her page, so much as all the good alchemy was doing in the city– that the plague had been cured, that medicine could be distributed and salves applied to burns. How a spoonful of laudanum calms even the most distressed mind.
And yet there were so many commoners as yet uncured, so many people without the money to afford medicine. There has to be a way to make alchemical drugs more available to the population at large, she thinks to herself.
And, of course, she is wondering if this is the path down which her future lies. Her parents had thought she was bound for more intellectual pursuits, but parents are supposed to believe in their children. It was her new friends in Seahaven she believed, when they told her she was bright and capable.
Later on, she wakes up in a start, having dozed off at her studies, her dreams full of alchemical formulae and natural disasters.
