Solo [The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Wherein the Healer devises the perfect lure for murder.

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Built into the cliffs overlooking the Suvan Sea, Riverfall resides on the edge of grasslands of Cyphrus where the Bluevein River plunges off the plain and cascades down to the inland sea below. Home of the Akalak, Riverfall is a self-supporting city populated by devoted warriors. [Riverfall Codex]

[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Kavala on February 28th, 2016, 8:40 pm

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Late Winter, 515 AV



The young Denusk horse shifted, snorting, as Kavala maneuvered it with her knees. The Konti was down riding along the Bluevein River looking for all the world like she was searching for something lost. She wasn’t, in truth, though the warhorse was indeed losing patience that he didn’t possess to begin with. “Let’s hurry. Want to run.” He muttered under his breath causing Kavala to react. The Konti shifted in a nearly invisible simultaneously action of the hand, seat and legs to capture the stallion's attention in a half halt. He corrected his balance which was falling out from under Kavala and started paying more attention. The Konti bent him in a travers maneuver, around her inside leg so he was looking upriver in the direction they were traveling. His legs crossed slightly, his outside legs passing in front of the inside legs. She moved him into a canter to get this done, automatically making the young horse’s mind busy enough to stop letting his attention waver.

The Healer often took out young horses on these types of errands. It was good for their minds to get out and about in the world without the four walls of the arena closing in. Arena work was great for core skills, but in the wilds with changing terrain and conditions from minute to minute was everything. They were looking at the riparian areas along the river, searching the shadowy dampness for the fly trap plants that graced the area. Kavala corrected the horse again, shifting the Denusk into renvers so it was flexing opposite of how it had been under travers. Kavala half halted and then brought the horse to a stop when she thought she spotted what the Konti was looking for. Slipping off the young stallion, she placed a hand on his forehead and whispered “Stand.” Then Kavala smiled as he lipped at her hand, throwing his head in the air and snorting. “Guard.” She gave in, knowing the young stallion didn’t want to hold absolutely still. The Konti didn’t blame him. It wasn’t quite spring yet, but the air sure felt like it. The horse, whom she called Music, snorted to clear his nose of a fly and looked right at her. He spoke softly.

“Glad I got chosen to come. I’ll guard. Make sure no one comes without you getting my warning.” He said, turning slowly in a circle. His big size didn’t inhibit him at all. The horse was as flexible as he could be. Music should have been, she’d been working on his flexation since he was foaled.

“Thank you.” Kavala said quietly then turned to scurry down the embankment, looking for what she’d thought she’d glimpsed from his back. Sure enough, sliding to a stop down on the wet fringes of the river. A profusion of the fly traps grew, their hungry maws open with sticky jaws, sweet rotten scents luring insects to their sudden doom.

Kavala knelt and began to collect them. It was their scent the Konti healer was interested in using in the philter, needing something to lure the flies to the trap. It was, remarkable enough, the same scent that warned honeybees away. So if Kavala included this component in her philter, she could make the sticky mite board as well as the philtered fly paper from the same substance and not worry that the bees would get caught on the mite board.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
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Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
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Kavala
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[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Kavala on February 29th, 2016, 5:08 am

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Kavala took twenty of them, which was nowhere near what grew as far as the eye could see. They wouldn’t live a full season, but their short time was glorious along the river where they bloomed in a profusion of color. The Konti tucked the harvested plants into her belt pouch after carefully wrapping them in parchment that had been waxed. Once the plants were safely in place, Kavala scrambled back up the embankment to the waiting horse.

“No one came.” Music assured her and she gave him a piece of apple compote from her bag. It was a hardened journey kind she used for horse treats.

“Thank you. Shall we head home now?” Kavala asked, grabbing a handful of his mane and lightly jumping back up on the tall horse’ back. He bobbed his head in agreement and she wheeled him around, in a graceful pirouette. Kavala was pleased the young horse responded correctly to her que asking him to spin collectedly. He remained leaning forward and spun his forehand in a circle around his hind limbs. It was a graceful move, one that would allow a fighter to cut an enemy out of the saddle behind him without much effort yet with a sudden element of surprise. Music was good at such things and would make a fine Kuvay’Nas mount one of these days. The Konti Healer collected him up, stretched him into a canter, then asked him to extend it out. He began to cover a tremendous amount of ground this way and before she knew it they were riding through the horse gate and Kavala was brushing him down.

“Thank you for taking me.” The Konti told the young stallion who simply nodded and glanced at the barn. He was wondering if it was feeding time yet. Kavala nodded, lead him through the big doors, and into the first clean stall she had. There she gave him fresh water and a nice measure of grain along with fresh hay to munch. “Relax. Work will start again tomorrow.” The Konti said, leaving the horse and heading with her treasures towards the Isolation Lab.

Kavala moved across the arena with a smooth gait and disappeared down into The Within. The quarters were close but she was down the hall, down the ramp, and making two turns before she was through the door to the isolation lab. The Konti had made a pit-stop in the kitchen to pick up two of her ingredients – sugar and honey – which she had neatly tucked under her arm. Both got set upon the counter. Then she pulled down her recipe book for philtering and turned to a blank page towards the end.

Kavala carefully took down a jar of ink, drew a quill out of its holding stand, and dipped the pen to ink and began to write.

“Fly Attracting Sticky Parchment” The Konti titled the work and then carefully wrote down what she decided the ingredients were going to be.

Fly Attracting Sticky Parchment


• 1 /4 cup each of honey, sugar and water
• essence of fly trap plant
• heavy duty parchment sheets
• small pot
• scissors
• an ice pick for making holes
• string
• paintbrush

Once she has her supply list all written out, Kavala began to gather the things she needed. The Konti already had the sugar and honey from the kitchen. The pot was no issue since there were many to choose from down here in the lab. The parchment sheets she had, though she had to take ten of them and cut them into the size of the bottom of the beehives. Then she took four more sheets and cut them into strips. The strips she left thick, knowing full well she would need what she could to hang in the barns with the horses and perhaps even some of the other buildings with the cows, goats and chickens.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
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Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
User avatar
Kavala
I am more than the sum of my parts.
 
Posts: 3025
Words: 3295757
Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
Location: Riverfall
Race: Konti
Character sheet
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Medals: 17
Featured Thread (1) Mizahar Grader (1)
Trailblazer (2) Overlored (1)
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One Thousand Posts! (1) One Million Words! (1)
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[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Kavala on February 29th, 2016, 5:08 am

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Kavala had to run back to the kitchen for the ice pick. And then Kavala had to run to Chalce’s room to borrow a paintbrush. With everything assembled, the Konti was back and ready to make her fatal attraction brew. Fatal, that is, to flies. The Konti laughed. She truly was happy in her lab, discovering recipes and philtering away. And if it benefitted the animals of Sanctuary, especially her bees, more power too them.

Kavala studied the ingredients, and because she was making the mite boards as well. Kavala decided that she’d double the amount of sticky material she’d make. Instead of a quarter cup of each, she’d do a half cup. That being said, Kavala fed some wood into the potbellied stove in the lab and with a flare of her reimancy, coated the wood with res and then ignited it. With the fire burning happily, the Konti carefully measured the ingredients out and added a half cup of water, then sugar, and finally a half cup of honey to the mixture. She stirred it lightly then took out her fly trap plants she’d harvested. Gently teasing the plants apart, she went through and cut off all the heads of the plants, wanting only the fragrant flowery head with its sticky stinky sap. Those Kavala added to the philter and concentrated as she did so, watching the sap in the flower blossoms tint the mixture red and turn the sweet pungent smell of honey into something that smelled a lot like a rotting corpse.

The Konti half smiled. Philtering was fun. Had she been a bit more advanced, for a good measure she would have added a bit of rotten meat or perhaps some fresh visceral cavity organs from something they’d just butchered for food. As it was, the mixture of the fly traps and the sweetness had tainted the mixture into something truly loathsome that would attract flies from yards around and lure them to their deaths on the sticky paper.

Once the mixture reached a boil, Kavala let it cool slightly and then brought out a big drying rack she usually used for the laundry. Kavala wanted someplace to hang the papers by their strings so they could dry without touching anything. The drying rack was a perfect size and height.

The Konti then took the ice pick, poked a hole through each of the paper strips at the top, and then cut the string to a length that would work for suspending the fly strips around the barns and buildings. Once she had enough papers cut and strings cut, Kavala ran the strings through the holes and tied them in nice knots so the papers could dangle once they were dipped. Then the Konti took one last spare piece of parchment and lined the floor beneath where the papers would drip dry.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
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Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
User avatar
Kavala
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Posts: 3025
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Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
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[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Kavala on February 29th, 2016, 5:09 am

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Finally, one at a time she quickly dunked the papers, holding one end by the string and the other guiding the strip as it got slowly dipped into the mixture and pulled free. The Konti hung the papers to drip dry on the rack and kept working until each strip was coated. Then, she took a moment to wash her sticky hand, the one that had been guiding the dip, and picked up the paintbrush. Laying out the parchment, she dipped the brush in the remaining Philter solution and began to brush on the sticky mixture to only one side of each of ten parchment papers. These would line the bottom of the hives and catch and adhere any sticking mites that would fall due to the powdered sugar grooming test.

It was meticulous work, but Kavala kept at it, adding a thin even layer of basic fly and mite attracting glue to each paper and laying them out to dry on surfaces all over the isolation lab. To be honest, the scent or attractant didn’t matter in the hive papers. The Konti just needed the mites to stick and be unable to crawl away and re-infest the bees. What was special about the scent was that it warned the bees away and they would be far less likely to crawl across the paper in the short time it was in the hive than they would be otherwise.

When she was done, there was only a small portion left. The Konti placed it in a jar, labeled it carefully, and put it on the shelf. It would comfortably coat another six or seven paper strips if she was careful. Like everything else, Kavala saved scraps. It would come in handy later. The Konti always made use of the leftovers. Kavala had a whole shelf of leftovers. The strips would fill up and more would need to be cut. More parchment would need to be purchased. It all worked out in the end.

At the Sanctuary, the work was never done. So even when this task was done, other things awaited. Kavala got busy with those things while she waited for the strips to drip dry.

Kavala waited a full day for the strips to dry. But the parchment papers in full sheets cut to the size of the hives, she delivered by hand one at a time to each hive and installed them even before they were dry. That was part of the reason she waited to hang the fly papers up. Kavala just didn’t have time to hang them.

The grinding and powdering of sugar for the grooming test with the bees took most of the day. By the end of it she was definitely removing sugar and mites stuck to the sticky paper at the bottom. She found more than she thought, though she figured the little ‘test’ of hers took quite a beating on the mite population.

For that she had a deep satisfaction over.

Less mites meant healthier bees, especially for the brood still sealed in the comb. The mites often crawled in before the egg was laid, hid out, and then fed on the larva after it was capped off, resulting in a scarified bee emerging as an adult. And if they had torso scars, were weak, or even had deformed wings, they worked less, had less vigor and health, and died early doing no good for the hive overall. It was a tragic cycle that Kavala was glad she could help with by doing the powdered sugar grooming test.
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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
Reverie Isle Wolf Creek Training Course
Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
User avatar
Kavala
I am more than the sum of my parts.
 
Posts: 3025
Words: 3295757
Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
Location: Riverfall
Race: Konti
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Medals: 17
Featured Thread (1) Mizahar Grader (1)
Trailblazer (2) Overlored (1)
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One Thousand Posts! (1) One Million Words! (1)
Riverfall Seasonal Challenge (2) 2014 Mizahar NaNo Winner (1)

[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Kavala on February 29th, 2016, 5:11 am

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So the next day Kavala was out, delivering the strips one at a time. The Konti hung one each at either end of the barns. Kavala had to drag out their homemade ladder, lean it up against the ceiling stones and try to walk up it without falling off. It was frustrating and slow work until it dawned on her that moving the ladder, fetching the strips, and then climbing it was a huge waste of her time.

Kavala had reimancy. It hadn’t simply donned on her to give it a practice. Kavala wasn’t very comfortable with her fire element, but air was the second one she’d gotten. Cushions of air were fairly easy for her to manage. So after struggling with the ladder, running back and forth with the fly strips, and climbing…. Reimancy seemed pretty fantastic. Kavala concentrated, having already fetched a fly sticky strip and after notedly NOT moving the ladder, and let the air solidify beneath her and whisk her upwards. Res oozed from beneath her, hardening underfoot and lofting her high enough long enough to tie off the fly strip. She laughed with delight, lost her concentration, and nearly fell. Grabbing onto the main stone beam supporting the roof, she laughed dangling as the fly strip stuck to her face, tangled in her loose hair, and ripped down from its hanging spot as she got her concentration back in order and eased herself back down.

One ruined. There were more left. She fetched them, repeated the process, this time more than willing to focus and concentrate, and in record time the Konti had them all hung throughout the facility. It was a job well done, one that utilized all her skills… creativity, philtering, magic, and a bit of ingenuity. Just getting the bees selected to breed the day before was satisfying enough, but also having these fantastic new pest control devices was left her with a deeply satisfied feeling.

2618/46393 thread total

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The Sanctuary The Sanctuary Forum Riverfall The Cytali
Reverie Isle Wolf Creek Training Course
Please Note:
  • This pc is maxed out in Animal Husbandry, Medicine, Observation, Rhetoric, and Socialization.
  • Kavala a Master Teacher. Students she is teaching in thread can earn more than the maxium 5 XP per thread.
  • This pc has a Konti Gift of Animal Empathy. She has a superpower from a Riverfall city event that allows animals of all sorts and Kelvics (in kelvic form) to speak clear understandable Common around her.
  • Kavala is a Konti but was raised in the Drykas culture so her accent is entirely Pavi though she can speak Common, Pavi, and Tukant well. She's only conversational in Kontinese.
User avatar
Kavala
I am more than the sum of my parts.
 
Posts: 3025
Words: 3295757
Joined roleplay: October 25th, 2009, 1:46 am
Location: Riverfall
Race: Konti
Character sheet
Storyteller secrets
Scrapbook
Plotnotes
Medals: 17
Featured Thread (1) Mizahar Grader (1)
Trailblazer (2) Overlored (1)
Master Merchant (1) Donor (1)
One Thousand Posts! (1) One Million Words! (1)
Riverfall Seasonal Challenge (2) 2014 Mizahar NaNo Winner (1)

[The Sanctuary] Fatal Attraction

Postby Gillar on September 19th, 2016, 5:32 am

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Riding 2
Herbalism 1
Cooking 2
Philtering 4
Beekeeping 1
Lore: Making Sticky Attractant for Mites/Flies
Lore: Cutting and Preparing Paper for use in Fly Traps
Lore: Philtering: Blending a Philter with added materials (paper)
Lore: Harvesting exotic plants for use in Philters

You also have enough of your creation to adequately tend to your beehives.
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Gillar
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