Frost 21st, Year 119, Age of Steel
It had taken Alyssum a couple of days to get back into the forest after her last adventure into it. The general overflow of work had led to a busy couple of days not to mention general craziness of life, but she was more than happy to get back into things to try and find that last ingredient she was missing for her potions. Once she was done she'd be able to actually settled down and start brewing them. Which she was extremely excited for. It'd been a while since she'd done some brewing by herself. Let alone the likes of which she'd be able to keep the full income of. She'd likely be selling them under the table, so she'd undoubtedly be making less, but she considered it worth it if it meant she got to keep the fruits of her labor. She might even be able to keep the full worth if she traded instead of sold.
That was one of her favorite workarounds, trading instead of selling. As long as there was no monetary transaction, what were the guards going to actually do? Best of all she could convince people they were getting way more than she was actually giving them.
Step one was her final ingredient. As paradoxical as that statement happened to be.
Luckily it was a pretty simple ingredient to get. Anywhere you could find Rabbitwood trees, these little critters were practically guaranteed to be. She maneuvered through the wintery forest, keeping her eyes peeled for fallen logs. Specifically, she was looking for Rabbitwood trees that had died and ended up falling. It tended to happen a lot during the winter months because they were trying to shed their bark, which often left them less protected against the ingredient Alyssum was actually looking for.
Rabbitwood trees despite their toxicity still made for amazing homes to some fungus, insects, and various other critters that had adapted to live inside them.
What she was looking for were relatively small little creatures that lived in the corpses of Rabbitwood trees. A little bit of searching found one such tree. Carefully she unscrewed the lid of a jar she'd had carefully tucked under her arm and set it on the ground beside the fallen tree. It was exceptionally old, decayed and full of holes. Weak enough structurally than Alyssum could pry her nails under a portion of the bark and rip it upwards.
Teeming under the bark were small little things. Rolly polly looking bugs that didn't roll up when their home was so rudely destroyed. Instead, they started to freeze up, large plates on their back rising up to make them look larger. Every time her fingers hovered near one of the creatures it would hiss at her, as though it was a cat. The noise was shockingly loud. Alyssum wished she could be as loud as these bugs. She didn't know the name of the bugs but when she was younger a lot of the children who lived in the colder portions of Atinaw would call them Buddlelumps. She'd typically heard it from the kids who lived in the Hopsfel mountain range, where it got cold enough during the winter to actually snow and grow Rabbitwood trees.
Despite their hissing, the bugs themselves were by no means dangerous. Quite the opposite in fact. Kids liked to keep them as pets up in Hopsfel because when the puffed up and started hissing they were apparently 'cute'. Alyssum... couldn't really see the appeal, but she supposed she didn't really have to.
Carefully, one by one, she started to pluck the bug up off the wood. They were slow-moving by nature and came to a complete standstill whenever Alyssum's hands got near them so it wasn't hard to pick them up. She used her claws like tweezers, plucking up the bugs and dropping them into the jar. They were luckily adapted to the tree, and couldn't climb up the slick surface that was the glass so they just fumbled in their attempts to escape, crawling over top one another as they tried to flee. As she filled the jar up little by little she piled snow around it.
She didn't need them alive, not for this kind of potion. All she needed was for them to be whole so that their entire bodies made it into the mixture after being crushed up into a fine paste. That included any bodily fluids that might escape if she stabbed one with her claw. That said, they didn't need to be alive prior to crushing as long as they hadn't molded or dried. it would kind of be unethical to keep them in a tiny jar and slowly crush them one by one, so she piled up the snow on the outside and little by little the bugs on the bottom of the jar got cold and started to fall asleep. It was the most ethical way she could really think of. Painless and less terrifying than crushing them quickly. She hoped so anyway. The bugs weren't really adapted for snow. They liked living in their nice warm tree. So they would freeze. Such was the way of life. Just as these bugs had killed the tree in order to sustain themselves, she would be using them to sustain herself.
She didn't mourn the dead as long as their deaths weren't vain. That was part of why she again liked being an alchemist so much. A skilled alchemist could find a use for anything.
The buddlelumps themselves were useful because of the fact they lived in Rabbitwood trees. Their bodies had the unique property of being able to filter the toxins of the Rabbitwood tree and actually turn it into the compound which caused a spike in libido. When mashed up and boiled down into a potion with Rabbitwood, it was what neutralized the toxins and actually brought out the effect of the reagent. In that regard, she supposed they could technically be called activators in this potion in particular, but their most important function was just making it nonlethal.
They could neutralize the toxins in other noxious plants as well, but not as well as they could with Rabbitwood since it's what they were literally adapted to do in life. She hummed as she worked, ripping off pieces of wood and capturing the little bugs with ruthless efficiency, filling up the jar to about halfway before screwing on the cap and burying it fully in the snow so the chill could do its work. There wasn't anything useable left of the tree proper since it had, for the most part, rotted and decayed to become a home for the bugs. She was sure that it had some kind of use, but she didn't know it, so she didn't bother. Instead, she piled the ripped off wood back onto the log. It would become a home for the next generation come spring. Buddlelump colonies tended to be large. Half a jar wasn't really taking a substantial portion when the entire fallen tree was probably teeming with them.
She was always careful to always leave behind enough material that the next generation would recover if she happened to be taking something that was living. The one exception was invasive species which really shouldn't be in the area where they are. Like Sugar Grass, hence why she took a lot of it.
As she was on her way out after retrieving her bugs, heading for the Skyforge, her foot came into contact with a rock that was sent skittering towards a tree. A rock that... screamed.
Now, this wasn't unusual, but it was without a doubt rare. She did recognize the rock though, just because it was one of the things that were pretty useful. Not to alchemy, but to Runeforging actually. The cricketstone was a stone that as an alchemical ingredient was nothing more than a simple base. While certainly useful in a pinch, there were cheaper bases of a similar quality that one could track down a lot easier if they were just willing to look around.
That wasn't why she knew about them though. The cricketstone was something that usually formed up in the Astralar Mountains and it was well known as a component in Runeforging because when made into a tonal fork it would give off an odd noise whenever it was struck against a weak spot in a created item. It interacted with the aether where it was weak and as its name might imply when made into a tonal fork it would give something of a chirpy screech whenever it struck the point. With the proper runes inscribed onto it, it could also resonate at the frequency of the aether. It was a pretty useful little rock, more so for runeforging than alchemy.
She'd never actually seen cricketstone before, but it was a common go-to for tonal forks she'd learned about it while she was studying basic runeforging practices.
She picked up the rock and carefully weighed it in her palms, looking it over. It was a little cracked, probably from its trip down the mountain, but it looked to have survived in a mostly solid piece. A large enough piece to make a single fork, that was for sure.
Alyssum smiled, slipping the rock into one of her waist pouches. She finally had an idea for a gift to give Talon.
