The brew is ready. I feel like we’re a pair of witches ready to cackle over their cast iron pot. Double, double, toil and trouble. Cauldron burn and cauldron bubble, and all that, I think with amusement to myself, my boyhood participation in the Scottish play coming back to me abruptly. I feel a sudden urge to turn widdershins and spit, but suppress it with a wry grin. Who would have thought that I’d actually be brewing a magical potion in a cauldron?

Well, sort of a cauldron. Of course it’s not a cast iron pot – I haven’t even got that far with my metal processing. Though that’s something to add to the list, I decide. And it’s just a couple of plants which have been stewing long enough to colour the water they’re cooking in a faint green.

“So, how are we going to test it?” I ask River.

I’ll cut myself a little and then take a mouthful, he tells me decisively.

“Would you like me to do it?” I offer, clearing poison being easier from my own system than anyone else’s. He sends across a sense of negation over the Bond.

No, you have never used the original concoction, or tested any of my previous failures. It would be hard to know how this new technique compares.

Understandable – he needs a fair trial. He picks up the bowl and tilts it towards his mouth.

“Wait!” I interject, but a little too late. He jumps as the boiling hot liquid touches the inside of his mouth and some of the scalding liquid splashes out of the bowl. Although he has the presence of mind to bear through the pain to place the bowl back onto the floor, he makes disturbing noises of pain throughout.

I grab my canteen from my Inventory, filled with cold water that I haven’t yet boiled – fortunately.

“Drink this,” I order him, passing him the canteen. He does, splashing the water particularly on bits of his mouth that are already going red. I see that, despite his scales, he’s also showing small signs of injury to the areas where the water splashed over the edge of the bowl.

Placing my hand on his shoulder, I send my consciousness into him, taking a chunk of mana with me. Healing the burns to his scales isn’t difficult – the injury is only slight. The injuries to his mouth are worse since the tissue there is softer and more vulnerable, but I’ve had enough practice with Flesh-Shaping by now that it’s easy enough.

I pull out of his body and glare at him balefully.

“Don’t drink scalding hot water. Honestly!” River just looks at me, his expression dismayed.

I…I didn’t think, he finishes lamely.

“Clearly!” I breathe explosively, throwing my hands up in disgust. Is this a case of disjointed thinking? He knew that fire was hot and could burn, but didn’t realise that hot water could also burn? Ah well – lesson learned now. “Just for future reference, anything that is heated by a fire can itself cause damage. That’s why we used those rags to take the bowl off the heat in the first place. And the contents of a pan heated on the fire will need time to cool down. And the more of a substance there is, the longer it generally takes to cool, especially if it’s a liquid.”

I will remember, he promises. I believe him. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on him – I’ve had to learn my own sharp lessons from experience too. And I’ve made stupid errors with far more serious consequences than drinking boiling water.

River makes a second attempt. This time, he’s clearly taken my words about more substance taking longer to cool as he tips the bowl to allow a small amount of liquid to fill another, smaller bowl. This, he eyes cautiously.

How do I know when it is safe to drink? he asks me warily. I shrug and point at the steam rising from it.

“That’s often a good indicator that it’s hot, though not always completely reliable. The warmer the day, the hotter something has to be to steam. Equally, the colder the day, the lower the temperature needs to be before it will produce steam. Heck, on really cold days, even our breaths steam like we’re dragons. Have you seen that?”

A dragon? River asks, surprised.

“No, your breath steaming,” I clarify. The lizard-man looks thoughtful.

Once, perhaps? We did not leave our huts that day; we were too uncomfortable. We just huddled together and shivered. We thought we were being attacked by spirits, that they were summoning our very souls with every breath we took. The Shaman blessed us the next day, returning our souls to us, she said. Those who survived, that is – not everyone did.

Depressing.

“Well, this isn’t anything about souls or spirits,” I tell him, doing my best to be cheerful. “It’s just about difference in temperature. So, if something steams, approach with caution. You can also hold your hand nearby. If you don’t feel much heat, try holding your hand above it. If it’s still not too hot, you can lower your hand and then, eventually dip your finger in the liquid to test its heat.” I eye his scaled and clawed hands. “Though I’d see how good your ability to sense heat is first – it’s not a good idea to accidentally burn yourself because your scales are so protective they don’t allow you to feel it’s hot.

“Basically, just try different things, but approach it with caution. In this case, you can blow on the liquid, as that hastens its cooling.”

Blowing on it? Is it some sort of magical technique?

“Not magical, just…” I sigh, wondering how on earth to explain about energy transfer between atoms. Then I give up. “It just works, OK?” Of course, as we’ve established before, blowing isn’t quite so easy for the crocodile-mouthed lizard-man. “Or you can wave a fan at it. Any air movement works.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

After that little discussion, it doesn’t take long before the small quantity of liquid is cool enough for River to drink it. He does so with more caution than before. Then, taking his knife, he makes a small cut in his inner forearm. Funny that that seems to be a soft spot for both of us.

Watching intently, he waits until it’s fully closed before pronouncing his judgement.

“So?” I ask, impatient to know.

Weak, very weak…but it does have the effects of the original with none of the downsides of the venom, he concludes.

A sudden bout of curiosity seizes me. The brew is entirely made of plants and water. Could I….? Inspect Plant.

I feel the pulse of mana go out from me, hit the bowl of mixed aslebellum and harash and return to me. There’s no notification, but the pulse does return some information to me. It’s confused, however, disjointed. I get hints of healing, and edible, and health, but nothing clear. Hmm.

Tapping my chin with a finger, an idea occurs. I consider it for a moment and then mentally shrug. Might as well see what happens. Inspect Plant, Inspect Environment.

This time, I feel a double pulse of mana pulse out of me, one directed at the bowl, one expanding out from me in all directions. When they return, I feel a moment of acute discomfort. It’s like…I’m listening to music, but there are two pieces playing at the same time. They’re discordant enough to actually hurt my ears, but some instinct tells me that they are actually meant to fit together.

The information I get is much the same as the first time. Interestingly, though, it’s a little clearer, the aspects of health, healing, and edibility more definite. The golden glow around the bowl is stronger than usual, too, with the glows around the plants themselves and the venom – gold and red respectively – being significantly weaker than normal. It seems like, even if Inspect Environment expanded all around me as usual, it didn’t do so equally.

Deciding that there’s no point stopping there, I next activate all three, trying to do them as quickly as possible, not quite able to do them simultaneously. This time when the pulse returns, I actually get a notification. Kind of.

Po!&o% §ame: Les(%? &eal+$%

I#gre!§ie&@s: Aslebellum, Harash, Water

Ef”/§s: &eal+$% for 3u of h%§lth o#&! 5 m§?ut

S§&e-ef”/§s: none

Close message? Y/N

“Well, that’s a bit of nonsense,” I murmur.

Master? River asks in confusion. I wave at him distractedly.

“Just a weird notification,” I explain.

Notification? Is his next confused question but I ignore him for a moment, trying to work out what I’m looking at here.

The only words which are clear are the three ingredients of the potion and ‘none’.

“‘Les something eal something?’ What could that be about?” I stare at it, my mind working over the problems. “Les eal. For something that heals. Could it be saying Less something heal?” I count the number of indecipherable characters. “Actually, could it be ‘lesser healing’?”

Things start slotting into place. ‘Po!&o%’ might easily be ‘potion’ – it has the right letters in the right places and the right number of characters overall. I’m not sure about the second word, but maybe ‘name’? So, the potion name is ‘Lesser Healing’. That makes sense.

As for the next line, being able to read the ingredients makes it very clear what the word preceding them is.

The third line is a bit of a blighter, but having worked out healing, I see that the same indecipherable characters are repeated. Though, given that % is used as the ‘n’ at the end of ‘potion’, and then as the ‘g’ in ‘healing’, I don’t think the symbols are themselves used as any sort of code. Unless I’m wrong about ‘potion’, but I don’t think I am.

“So, ‘healing for 3u of something something 5 something’,” I think out loud. “Hmm, could that last one be ‘5 minutes’?” I wonder, eyeing the vague shape of the word. “And if that last one is ‘minutes’, it would seem that it’s talking about the ‘effects’, which would work with the beginning of that line…. What about the other two words?” I look at ‘h%§lth’ and think that I might know what it is. After that, the final word falls into place.

“So, ‘Effects: healing for 3u of health over 5 minutes.’”. Makes sense. And that simplifies the last line which says ‘S§&e-effects: none’. Side-effects, I’m sure.

I dismiss the screen, a grin on my face of pleasure at managing to puzzle that out. I’d certainly managed to think through that much faster and more easily than I would have been able to do before I gained all those points in my mental stats.

Good to know what the effects of this potion actually are. Though, it didn’t say anything about whether the effects are stackable or if there are any cooldowns involved, I note. I guess we’ll have to test that ourselves. It’s also illuminating to realise that the three Skills used together are able to offer more information than each used separately, or even two used together. It’s not something I’ve tested up until now, but I make a mental note to do so – when I have time.

That reminds me that I have other things I wanted to do today. I did have a couple of other ideas for River, though. They occurred to me while we were watching the potion brew and I’d like to talk River through them before leaving him to get on with experimentation. I think this could be an interesting turning point in his potion-brewing – the use of boiling.

“OK, sorry about that,” I tell the patiently-waiting lizard-man. “I have this…thing…which gives me information sometimes. This time, I had to put more work into deciphering it. Anyway, apparently this offers three units of health over five minutes which…is pretty weak.” My first Lay-on-hands did better even than that, even if it is a little above my original regeneration rate.

Yes, I noticed that, he commented.

“Exactly. I have a couple of ideas that you might like to try?” He just watches me expectantly. “Alright, first, you could try reducing the mixture, see if that strengthens it,” I tell him.

Reducing?

“Continuing to boil away the liquid until the contents of the bowl are concentrated. It makes a stronger-tasting stew; it may do the same to a potion, for all I know.”

I don’t know either, River replies thoughtfully.

“And perhaps you could try grinding the leaves with a mortar and pestle,” I suggest next. “Do you have one of those?”

This? River asks, turning to his log-chest and pulling out a smooth stone and vaguely bowl-shaped stone.

“Yeah, that looks about right,” I tell him, not too surprised that the lizard-folk might have discovered this particular tool – it does seem to go hand in hand with alchemy. Or herbalism, or whatever.

I shall try your suggestions, River tells me with an enthusiastic glint in his bronze-coloured eyes, his clawed fingers already reaching for more ingredients.

“Sure, but let me just make breakfast first, OK?”