Omof’s face winced as he glanced through the list of ingredients: “Eye of blackorb, bakkar berry, petal of dream flower, Tayark bark! Tayark bark! I knew I’d forgot somethin’”, he snarled as he turned and put the list next to the large handcrafted wooden bowl on the workbench behind him.
His lab was small and compact; with cupboards filled with little clay pots and glass bottles. Some were meticulously labeled with its contents, and date obtained, others he know their contents by heart. Some contained powders. Some contained leaves. A few contained dried dead bugs. All the containers were sorted by color, content, and age, and declared his obsessive compulsiveness.
“Omof! Time to eat!” came a little quaint voice from the doorway at the end of the room. His wife poked her head around the corner of the door-frame, “You’ve been working all afternoon. Now put that stuff down, and come get a bite.” He was a very intelligent man. Kind of short, plump, with a round pudgy nose. “I’m comin’. Just give me three minutes to clean up.” They both knew that his three minutes would be more like thirty, but she said nothing as she made her way back to the kitchen.
As he turned to grab the wooden bowl from the workbench behind him his arm bumped a rack of dry chemicals, and a dark purple powder poured into his half prepared mixture. “Ah, Brall”, he mumbled under his breath, “Just what I needed”. He quickly grabbed the jar of powder and set it upright on the table. “Well, that wasted about—whoa, would you look at that,” he said to himself as the contents of the bowl began to foam violently. His amazement quickly turned to anger as he realized how unorganized this made his workshop look.
He cleaned up the spilt powder, put it nicely back on the rack, and quickly headed outside with the wooden bowl, as if to hide his failure from his wife.
The Dryson family’s modest little home was just a stone’s throw from the Mirros Sea and about three miles from Corgrande. Close enough to come under the protective umbrella of the town’s volunteer militia, but far enough away to have some privacy. He made his way quickly to the water’s edge, because there was only about a half-hour of sunlight left, and he didn’t want to be outside after dark. Most folks in Ferimond locked their homes up pretty tight when the sun went down.
Omof dumped his purple mixture into the sea, and bent down to rinse the residue from the bowl. He was careful not to touch the clingmoss just under the surface of the water. There were clingmoss beds peppered all around this part of the sea, and swimmers, fishers, and anyone else who wondered into the beach waters had to be extremely careful not to become entangled in their tendrils. As he stood and began to turn back toward his home, he noticed little silver patches bobbing on the surface of the water. “Flitterfish”, he said as he reached and picked up one of the fish that had floated to the surface.
He had discovered a way to catch the prized Flitterfish. They were a very tasty fish, but almost near impossible to catch because they lived only among the clingmoss.
Omof quickly made his way back to the shop. He walked back over to the workbench and picked up the jar of purple powder and read its label …
Well if I told you what the purple powder was then it wouldn’t be a family secret would it?