>If she's asleep, then let's try not to wake her.
>Can we do this without her?
>Yes we can. She got us this far, now it's up to us.
>We have what we need, and we know how to put it all together. So take a breath, Nazrin, and get down to it.
>You decide that Kyouko has earned her rest; the last step, you can finish on your own.
>You fumble through your pack for the materials you'll need - the bottle of Athran's Vigor and your heatstone - finding them more by feel than sight. Then you lay the heatstone on the nearest flat surface and nearly give yourself a heart attack by dropping the Vigor onto the ground as you attempt to open it. No cracks, no spills - you hadn't managed to remove the stopper at all, miraculously. You remember to breathe again; after all you've been through, watering the grass with your potion would be the most horrifying way to ruin everything.
>On the second attempt, you are even more slow and cautious, holding the bottle firmly in both hands to compensate for the small tremors that keep running through them. You open it, place it upon the heatstone, and inch a safe distance away. Now... how many flowers are you supposed to put in here? You size up the liquid in the bottle compared to the delicate blooms of your bittercress. Do you just put in the petals or the whole thing? The book never said, and there's certainly no time to do experiments now. You're only going to have one shot at this, so it's going to have to be guesswork; and the guesswork of someone who's never brewed a potion in their life and can barely remember their own name anymore. But it'll work. It has to work.
>You pluck a dozen flowers from your bittercress and drop them gently into the bottle, and then add in another dozen or two for good measure. Better safe than sorry, right? Your voice catches in your throat as you try to activate the heatstone, but it seems to respond on a second attempt. Now you wait.
>The scent of the mixture is unpleasantly pungent, and only grows worse as the flowers steep. Under the circumstances, you suppose that is better than smelling sweet; it is difficult enough to keep yourself from drifting into unconsciousness as it is. Time passes slowly, formlessly. How will you even know when it's done? When the flowers are all shriveled up? Were you even supposed to brew it this hot? Somehow, although it felt as if the cure were already in your hands once you left Yuuka's garden, now you are less sure. Too many questions. Too hard to contemplate them all. Just... pretend it's tea. Yes, tea; you've made tea before. A nice cup of hot bittercress tea. And if this tea leaves you for dead, well... then nobody can say you did less than your best.
>Tea's ready.
