>You are Nazrin, a newly inducted member of the Seeker's Guild, and you are dying. But at long last, you may have found your first real clue as to fixing this problem. Too bad it seems to require finding a second improbable thing....
>Your career got off to an interesting and busy start last week, between stolen cats, missing cattle, and sword-wielding fairies, but things took a much darker turn when an encounter with a wild spider youkai left you infected with a mysterious and deadly illness. Thanks to Minoriko's creative thinking and the power of an ancient sword found buried in the spider's lair, the Blight has been kept at bay. For now. But you were told you had no more than a couple weeks to live unless a cure could be found, and one of them has already passed.
>Your search for this cure has been a long and frustrating road. You could find little useful information about your affliction or its treatment in Braston, so you sought passage to Val Razua in the hope that its Grand Academy might house the information you desperately require. While the journey was marred by a bloody and near-disastrous struggle with tengu pirates that resulted in the Blue Maiden's defeat and the capture of a curious relic it had been transporting in secret, you still arrived in Val Razua more or less on schedule and in one piece.
>Fortunately, some of your hopes were realized when you discovered a passage, buried in the rare books collection of the Voile Magisterial Library, describing a medicinal mixture which can cure 'the ragged blackening of the veins'. Unfortunately, after consulting with a knowledgeable but somewhat incoherent professor of herbalism, you have learned that bittercress blossoms, a critical ingredient of this mixture, occur only once every seven years and are not due for another three. A thin ray of hope may still shine on this possibility, however. According to a reliable rumor she conveyed, there is a garden hidden in the southwestern reaches of Val Razuan territory where plants of all kinds can be found in perpetual bloom; perhaps this might include even bittercress. Unfortunately, it is also rumored to be tended by a powerful and dangerous youkai, and no one knows
specifically where it can be found. Still, you have a general direction, which is more than you had even this morning. Maybe you'll only need to seek two or three more impossible things before this is all over and done with....
>Currently you are concluding a conversation with Professor Bosqueverde about the details of the more mundane components of this cure.
>Then we may have to look into a 'proper' vessel, but dude at the alchemist store can tell us about that.
>"Well, I think that covers all the issues I had with those two items."
>Crack a wry grin. "I bet I sounded a bit like one of your first year students, but, I pride myself on being thorough."
>That seems quite likely.
>"I hope I was able at least to be of some small help, then," she says.
>She smiles gently. "Oh, you should not mind that, even were it the case that you were. No, not at all - quite poor form indeed it would be to hold against one the not knowing of that they do not know. The very reason there are teachers at all, this is, yes."
