"Yes?" Kori replied tentatively, still unsure why Imelda was making that scrunched up face or what the off-pitch tone in her voice was indicating.

It took the older woman several moments to make any additional reply, or seemingly even breath, the silence becoming a little awkward as Kori waited for her to say something else.

Her brain still not quite caught up to the reality of the situation, Imelda stuttered out "I… that shouldn't… but…" She quickly downed the remainder of her cup of tea in an attempt to clear her throat and draw her focus from the sheer improbability of the young kobold's statement. "It can't be that simple… did you use water from a specific spring or some special tools made out of a rare mineral when preparing it or something?"

"Nope." Kori shook her head, "Just water from a rune and a mortar and pestle. Worked just as well in stone as it does Bolst's fancy porcelain ones. Well, a little better in the fancy one, but it was a lot harder to use…"

After a sigh and a few moments massaging the bridge of her nose between her fingers, Imelda shook her head and refocused her attention, "Okay, I have no idea how or why that works but I guess I'll just have to see it for myself." Rising from her seat she waved for the youngling to follow her before making her way towards the room in the rear of the building.

Following along, Kori got her first glimpse of the space that Har had apparently arranged for her to make use of for the next few days. The room was nearly as large as Bolst's lab had been, but more sparsely furnished. Though she supposed that from a human perspective that might not have been the case.

For the first time since she came to the surface, the proportions of her surroundings impressed upon her a diminutive feeling she hadn't felt since her earliest memories in the nursery. Everything was sized for a larger being, tabletops sitting at eye level, stools she would have to climb onto at nearly shoulder height, even the pestle large and unwieldy compared to her hands.

Whether she hadn't noticed, or hadn't considered, the difficulties that working in such an outsized space may entail, Imelda offhandedly commented for her to familiarize herself with things while she fetched the moss. Left on her own, Kori tried to make the best of the situation, only for her host to return to the sounds of both a stool and kobold colliding with the wooden floor. Turns out neither had the stability for her attempted ascension.

"Are you okay?" The woman asked concernedly.

Brushing herself off after disentangling herself, Kori embarrassingly responded in the positive while awkwardly righting herself and the stool. She could see the error of her assumption dawning on Imelda's face as she finally noted the kobolds height in comparison to the furniture.

"Oh my, I'm so sorry Kori. I didn't even think about the stool. Do you need a hand… or maybe a box to help you up?" Seeing Kori's grimace at the offer of a hand, something she'd seen from plenty of gnomes in the past when confronted with similar offers, she quickly busied herself trying to find an appropriately sized crate or other means of assisting her onto the proffered seating.

The herbalist returned shortly with a small cask, comparatively small at least, and still up past Kori's waist, but it was at least a good intermediary to reach a seated position on the stool. With a better vantage point to examine the tools on hand, Kori found everything she would need, and many things she would not, or didn't even recognize, to produce her ointment. She did need to do some creative reaching and reorganizing so that what she did need would be at hand, but it was at least there.

Imelda retrieved the packaged moss that she had left by the door earlier in her rush to assist and Kori began explaining the steps they would need to take to proceed.

"First we'll need to dry a portion of the moss, maybe about a fifth of it." She instructed. "Do you have a drying rack or similar? Or just the lines you use outdoors?"

"We can dry it in my oven, as long as I only activate the weakest of heating runes it shouldn't get too hot." Imelda offered.

The oven was much more elaborate than anything Kori generally saw within the caverns. Baking wasn't exactly a common manner of cooking for kobolds; aside from the small quantities imported, they lacked the grains usually involved and generally prepared their food steamed or over an open flame instead.

Similar to the engraved plate that they had used to heat the tea earlier, the oven used recognizable, if more elaborate, runework. This time instead of singular runes they were arranged in chains, interlinked and interwoven in a greater pattern in ways that Kori could barely track. She watched with rapt attention as Imelda tapped a small section of the runes at the front of the oven, her mana senses letting her follow the energy as it gathered from the air and spread through a limited few of the runes. The more she observed the clearer the effect became to her, the runes were creatively linked in such a way that there could be multiple levels of activation, depending on which of the central nodes were activated mana would flow to some, or all, of the engravings.

Her observations and efforts tracing the flows of mana within the engravings was rewarded with the long awaited fifth level of one of the first Skills Kori had obtained.

<<Skill proficiency improved. Mana Sense level 4 -> 5. Maximum level reached>>

She exclaimed excitedly at reaching the maximum in another skill and explain what happened to Imelda, who congratulated her on the achievement, when she noticed the woman's curious expression at her outburst.

With the oven heating and the moss arrayed on a metal sheet, there was little else to do but wait. Without the tincture from the dried moss, she couldn't begin preparing the fresh after all.

Thinking on what would come after demonstrating her process, Kori asked the herbalist questions about what they should try first in their attempts to recreate it with surface ingredients. "What do you think we should start with when we look for alternatives? I was thinking maybe replace just the fresh moss first and still use the tincture, or do you have an herb that you use both in creating poultices and brewing tinctures to treat bandages that we can try first?"

Stolen novel; please report.

After a brief thought, Imelda replied with her suggestion of a starting point, "Not that is used for both, no. There is a moss I was thinking of though, sphagnum moss is fairly plentiful around bogs and has similar uses to create a poultice, though unlike the luminous variety, it needs to be dried before use."

"Sounds like a good place to start." Kori agreed, if it worked it wouldn't even alter the process by too much.

The pair chatted a while longer as they waited on the moss to be sufficiently dried, checking on it periodically, Imelda extracting the metal sheet from the large oven and letting Kori determine its doneness. They discussed interesting ingredients that the herbalist kept on hand, most of them useful for various ailments but a few stood out as being primarily used as seasonings for foods. One particular specimen stood out against the rest, both in that it was one of the few things on hand that was stored in a sealed glass vessel, and that its name contained the word 'deathshroom'.

"Why the scale do you even have that?!" Kori asked, she recalled that the herbalist had told her that her more toxic ingredients were kept well out of reach from curious hands.

With a laugh, one that said this was not the first time she'd been asked such a question, "It's not what it sounds like." Imelda replied, shaking her head. "It's not actually poisonous. Though most people probably wish it were after trying it." She continued chuckling as she retrieved a small vial of the ominously named fungus, a vial whose stopper was notably sealed over with bright red wax. "It's actually edible. Not that I'd recommend it. The 'heavenly deathshroom' is a rare subspecies of the peppery bolete from the far south, one that was apparently cultivated specifically for its intense, and I mean exceptionally intense, spicy flavour."

"Like chili oil?" Kori asked, recalling the spicy condiment she'd tried at the festival.

The woman laughed harder at the inadequate comparison, "Only in so much as a candle is like a house on fire."

Kori began choking on the laughter she had joined the herbalist in when she pictured the taste of something so incredibly intense. "Seriously?!" Eyeing the brightly sealed vial apprehensively; a thought occurring as she took in the crimson wax, thought about the redback spiders that Bolst had kept, then down at her own scales. "Why is it everything that's red is so ominous…"

"Bright colours are eye catching, so things that use them to signify their dangerous nature are more likely to be noticed and left alone. Plus, it's the colour of blood; well, for most of us it is." The herbalist replied, having missed Kori's glance at her own deep red scales. "Regardless, let's check the moss, hopefully it's ready by now."

Checking on the oven they found that it was not yet quite right; close, and fast approaching that perilous point where the seconds between done and burnt could be counted on your claws and you had to watch it like a hatchling watches a beetle, but not yet ready.

Even once it was finished in the oven, they still needed to let it cool before they could break it apart gently and it would be ready to steep, but at least they could move on to other things while they waited instead of having to stick close by and keep an eye on the oven. It might have been better if Kori were more familiar with the runic apparatus, which was much more consistent than she was used to and changed the timing of things too much to accurately judge how long it would take. Especially with the moss already somewhat dried from just sitting on a shelf for as long as it had.

She gave Imelda a hand with tidying the shop, separating and grinding or processing any of the herbs that she'd assisted bringing in earlier, and other busy-work while they waited. It didn't take too much longer for them to finally be ready to begin and once they were she was back climbing atop her perch on the stool, the trusty cask keeping her from repeating the earlier mishap.

"The first step is to steep the dried moss in the water, generally we just use a handful to a liter of water, but measured out it should be around fifteen grams." She explained as she began working with the scale, unused to the particular device Imelda did the measuring, her Skill proving its value as she almost immediately balanced it. Watching the woman's quick and assured actions, "I kinda want that Skill now that I know about it…"

"It's quite handy." She replied a bit smugly.

"The tincture will need five minutes to steep before we begin mixing, but we can start chopping the fresh… well, not dried… moss and getting it ready while we wait." Proceeding to do just that, Kori cut the moss as fine as was practical before scooping it into the waiting mortar, another of the porcelain ones so she could only fill it so far. Though even partially filled, the larger mortar allowed her to complete an entire batch at once rather than piecemeal as she would with one of Bolst's smaller ones; though it would make it much harder on her wrists.

"Your knife skills are a little lacking, you may want to try your hand at picking up a cooking Skill." Imelda commented, "Or there's the combat [Dagger Mastery] Skill, though it's difficult to raise outside of fighting."

"Would those really help?" Kori asked, a bit skeptical at the Skills usefulness.

"Of course, a cooking Skill, especially one like [Butchering] is always going to be useful for learning how to handle a knife and keep your hands steady and cuts consistent" She responded with a self-assured nod. "I'll probably never take a Job to raise my own beyond tier two, but even that is enough that to handle everything I need and that I've never severely cut myself."

Kori thought for a moment, glad to finally have someone advising her on a broader approach to Skills, unlike the Elders who were all concerned with their apprentices learning the specific ones from their discipline, before grinning and responding. "Guess I'll have to add that to my list then, thanks."

By the time they were done with chopping and chatting, the tincture was steeped and ready to be strained. With all of the ingredients finally ready to go, it took no time at all for everything to come together and the moss was quickly ground into a paste with the tincture.

Glancing up at the herbalist as she worked, Kori let her know she was about to add the mana. "It's time for the mana now, I can feel where there's space for it waiting to be filled in the paste." True to her word, the feeling of a void waiting to greedily pull her mana into itself was just at the edge of her senses. Ever since she'd gotten her imbue Skill it had become easier and easier to feel and her failures to detect it had lessened until she could near guarantee a success if she didn't make any mistakes in the process.

Imelda watched attentively, staring hard at the smooth paste that the young kobold had produced and waiting for whatever spectacle would accompany her invocation of mana upon the material. She stared so hard that when Kori set aside the pestle and let out a cheery "Done." She looked at her quizzically, like she was playing a joke on her elder.

"What do you mean, done?" She asked. "All you did was grind it into a paste, I didn't see any magic, no burst of energy or puff of smoke, no glowing runes or anything… shouldn't there have been… I don't know… something?"

Kori just tilted her head in that curious pose that everyone who knew her could read what was coming next and uttered the most common word of her vocabulary, "Why?" Obviously not understanding why the human thought there should be some grand showing of magics when all she did was channel a fraction of her mana into the still slightly glowing, if only to her magical senses, paste.

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