🦊 Планета Флерантор, осколки человечества 🦊

"Damn it!" — Ida exclaimed furiously.

It wasn't like the girl to curse, but her hip, bruised against the dresser, immediately made itself known. She shouldn't have jumped out of bed so abruptly and rushed to the writing desk. That was definitely going to leave a bruise. Hopefully Mom and Dad didn't hear.

Fortunately, among the modest stock of elixirs Ida had acquired, there was a healing one. She gulped it down greedily. If the records were to be believed, by tomorrow there would be no trace of that nagging bruise.

Satisfied as the pain subsided, Ida remembered she had pulled herself away from the book for another purpose, and soon ink was splattering across her notebook for notes on her reading.

And she read just about anything. From historical and scientific treatises to delirium-soaked prose about the forbidden escapades of a Sortorian woman and a romantic Verdan. Ida didn't turn her nose up at any information that could distract her from the heavy, depressive realities. For the latter, she could get a scolding from her father. But her mother, more lenient toward such things, could always cover for her and claim that she herself had forgotten the frivolous literature when she stopped by her daughter's room.

The other day, Ida came across a book describing Sortorian alchemical experiments on humans. The things they poured into the test subjects, and the results they got! Fevers, fits of rage, arousal, rashes, migraines — the same elixir could produce such outcomes across a dozen different people. Horrifying, cold, as if they were describing experiments on laboratory rats. It was so fascinating!

Unfortunately, this book was only the third in the series, and it only described the names of the experiments and the reactions of the subjects. Ida dreamed of getting her hands on the other works and learning the contents of the flasks, but she never found the other parts. No one could answer where this work had even come from in the Great Library. Perhaps it was all just the product of someone's sick imagination.

That didn't matter. The main thing was that after this, Ida buried herself in books on alchemy and became fired up with the idea of mastering it. Because of that, she had to interact with people to get her hands on at least some elixirs. A lot of interacting. And Ida doesn't like that.

Her father even got her a beginner alchemist's kit, hoping that one day his daughter would get a grasp on the subject and start being at least somewhat useful to society.