Subscribe to download
Moderate Analgesic - Research into Unconventional Alchemy XIII

Journal of Conrad Azohi - Day 807 after embarking

It seems that Takik is not a city, as I would have thought of it, but more akin to a trading hub. What I would have pointed to and called the leadership do not actually govern the city and it's people. Instead, they govern those who come here to trade, and those who come here to trade, in turn, "govern" the city and it's people. As you might imagine, this makes for a very chaotic environment, where each new merchant group who arrives brings with it it's own rules and temperament. It has taken me far too long to piece together this fact. I've been here through fall and most of winter, and all along, I believed that there was a static government and I was simply failing to understanding the intricacies of the culture here.

This realization came during a conversation with my neighbors. They remembered how, after only looking at their emberstone for a moment, I had been able to create duplicates of it. So they came to ask if I could do the same for a type of medicine. It seems the men of the family had been beaten fairly badly by the guards of a newly arrived merchant caravan. The thugs apparently wanted to partake in a street brawl, as though it were a sport. The merchant brutes apparently considered it honorable to give medicine to those who they have battered, but they gave very little. The medicine had almost ran out in a single day, so the rest of the family came to me in a panic. Naturally, I made as much as I possibly could. I also made some more traditional medicines to try and speed their recovery along.

It was during the conversation about how this had come to pass that I finally managed to piece together the way the rulership in Takik works. Now that I understand, I have grown worried about living here. Just looking at what a belligerent merchant caravan did to this family makes me worried about what other merchant caravans might do. I'm not sure what my next steps should be. It will take some time to decide, that is certain.

Though, the social environment in this place aside, I am including an entry for the medicine that I was tasked with replicating. It's a decently strong painkiller, numbing the body and making the user sluggish and sleepy. It's different from analgesics I've seen, being much more thick and viscous, due to the large size of the molecule. I was almost unable to recreate it with my tools. I am curious as to how it is initially synthesized.