KORVOSAN CARRIER
OATHDAY, SARENITH 11th, 4708

BLOOD VEIL DEATHS EXCEED ONE HUNDRED FIFTY

The alchemists claim to be making progress on their cure. They expand the offer to purchase blood from only Varisians to all humans. The first wave of deaths has begun. The corpses will be burned, as burying them in Gray risks spreading the plague further. The Queen is rumored to be considering candidates for a new royal senechal. The hunt for the King's murderer continues, and the Queen increases the bounty on information about them.

Well, that's nothing new. Have they not planned a killer to find? That's... another reason to think they might not have planned for the cure. Maybe they're just being slow. Hopefully. (Hopefully not? It's not actually good if they know what they're doing, but it's somewhat absurd to see such incompetence acquiring the throne. Enough magic and you don't need skill, but still.)

What else might they be doing? The blood offers are understandable only in context of the plague, and those have been very obvious. Possibly they're looking for a reason to collect blood? They should still be able to just send blood to a reclusive wizard, but that would be a little weirder. They might well worry that people wouldn't sell their blood to a mystery the way they will to an obvious visible process, however visible the alchemists are being. She should probably check at some point. If they're visible to the public, that's an explanation for why this whole thing matters.

And does the Bank have anything for her today?

Tencednil has a letter and a small package waiting for her at the Bank.

The letter is from Anton and Julio. They've loaned her copies of Topological Disentanglings with Pseudonatural Forms and Fundamentals of the Natural Elements. This is not technically against the Acadamae's rules... but they would prefer nobody find out. Demonic Lessons of the Material Shape has the unfortunate property of having been written by a demon lord. It is thus proscribed and illegal to possess. The Acadamae has exemptions to such restrictions, but proscribed books cannot leave school grounds. The books need to be returned within five days, and they would very much appreciate them back earlier than that, if possible. The package contains two books, checked out from the Acadamae library.

She can do nobody finding out! Books, and then back home to read them as quickly as possible.

She's spent enough time with Detect Magic to get a better grasp of the arcane, but these books are still a stretch. The shadow hovers over her shoulder, every so often pointing out something important she missed. It seems to be keeping up about as well as she is, which is... impressive. What is going on with it? She's heard of familiars, but familiars are not supposed to teach their masters magic, are they? Possibly some familiars do, but it can't be usual. She's not usual either, though. Maybe this is normal for sorcerers with familiars.

By the end of the day, she has... some understanding of Topological Disentanglings with Pseudonatural Forms. The references to what must be Julio's alchemical items are still mostly going over her head, but she can take notes and refer to them and sort of understand what must be happening.

She'll be spending another day or two with this, though. Hopefully she can get everything she needs copied out.

The next day, when she wakes up and calls her shadow, she finds it covered in odd symbols shaped like the ones in the books. She still only understands about half of Topological Disentanglings, but when she's lost, the shadow flits over, points to a few important parts or signs a short explanation, and it usually clicks into place. Bit by bit, she makes the connections she needs, starting to understand what this is going on about and what it all means. Spells which look like this can be augmented by physical objects with these properties, and alchemical manufacturing can create those properties like that, and...

Behind her, the shadow spends its time paging through the Fundamentals of the Natural Elements. It seems to be having a lot of fun! It doesn't seem to think any of what it's seeing is directly useful, but understanding the basics of these ideas makes Topological Disentanglings much easier to get through, and it's very interesting. (She's a little jealous. Her talent for magic is undeniable, but there are many supporting skills she isn't as good at, and she really would like to be.)

By Sunday, her third day with the books, she thinks she understands enough of this to work with it. There's definitely more to learn, but there always is, and she won't have the time. The shadow has picked up what it reads far faster than it reasonably should have, and with its help, she can probably reconstruct the important parts. (Today it was patterned with spell signs, and it flew through Topological Disentanglings in hours. She likes to think her notes helped, but it was impressively fast.) 

Off to send the books back, with her thanks and a few of her own notes on what might help an Acid Splash in particular. She doesn't know what actually does it yet, but she can see the properties the substance would need to have, and Anton and Julio probably know actual alchemists. They can find something which does the necessary things. She might not be able to on her own, but the shadow was quite definitive that it would have an answer for her tomorrow. Given how impressive it's been with the books, she's inclined to believe it.

The city spins on, even amidst disaster. Over the next week, the Queen's alchemists and wizards harvest what must be a vast amount of blood. Only a little per person, but a lot of people give their blood. You help cure the plague and get paid to do it! Who wouldn't take such an offer? The rioting calms down in Old Korvosa, only because most who would riot are busy being either too sick to move or dead.

The beasts and monsters don't stop being a problem. For every ten the Guard and the Sable Company and the Hellknights kill, eleven more emerge from deeper and deeper beneath the earth. Wizards and clerics are hired to cover the breaches in walls of stone, but there's simply too few fifth circle slots and too many holes to cover them all. Even if you could, the sewers must to keep flowing, otherwise another problem will simply be added to the list. Korvosa's exotic monster parts industry is booming like never before; perhaps the only silver lining.

Eventually, the city runs out of Urgathoans to execute, and the King's killer is still nowhere to be found. The people cry for justice! Eodred wasn't exactly popular, but his seneschal Neolandus was well liked, and nobody likes Ileosa. The Queen hires Togomor, a powerful foreign wizard from Kaer Maga, as the new royal seneschal. He takes the lead on the search for the King's killer, who he suspects is an Urgathoan lich from the central Varisia of some infamy. There is a mixed response from the public. They want results, not more promises.

By Starday, the cure for the blood veil is finished, only a day before the summer solstice. The Queen announces the funding of its production. The death toll has reached 1,400 when the cure begins its work. The quarantine is promised to end once the disease is eradicated.

KORVOSAN CARRIER
SUNDAY, SARENITH 21st, 4708

QUEEN'S CURE EFFECTIVE, THOUSANDS TO BE RELEASED FROM QUARANTINE

The public opinion turn is well done, but the money spent on the blood is substantial. Either the cure really does need enormous amounts of blood and they didn't have it or the entire cure is just to justify blood harvesting. Either way, the cure release helps her position recover from the missing Urgathoan. Could they just not find someone to claim to have done it? They have the ability to possess people and work magic through the possessed! Attributing fault to someone who shows up, is dramatically capable of casting, and then dies conveniently and quickly due to "clever preparations" really shouldn't be difficult! Oh well.

Togomor is presumably the wizard with the conspiracy. (One of them?) Killing the seneschal is a substantial cost to public opinion, and they were definitely aiming for it. They could have some other reason to eliminate Neolandus, but opening the position for Togomor is the obvious option, and the second vision was quite clear that there's a strong wizard among them. He needn't be underperforming in the public eye, a proper application of high-circle spells would help him there — directly and obviously ensuring optimal weather would be easy, if nothing else — but perhaps he has other priorities. That would be remarkably foolish if he was still reliant on public opinion to take the position, but if he can rely on his coconspirators, it makes much more sense.

If she wants to know more about the blood, the only lead she really has is the cure. That means she needs to start investigating it. Who is the alchemist the papers are crediting with its invention? They have to be publicly known for there to be any benefit over just finding an unspecified foreign wizard (or attributing it to Togomor, which would easily swing public opinion in his favor as well), and there's no way they won't be credited for such a success.

The cure is credited to the Queen's Physicians (the alchemists and wizards the queen hired) as a group. They're composed of about a dozen notable people, plus a fairly large supporting organization that includes distribution and manufacturing of the cure.

The queen will want as much as possible of the glory to shine on her, but the physicians are the ones who will actually know anything. That means she might be able to get somewhere talking to them. Surely someone is a bit angry about being robbed of their rightful glory, and can be induced to talk over beer.

She makes her way over towards the group's standard working places. (As, apparently, an average half-elf, no particular drow to her skin.) What bars around here know them? Wizards aren't known for moderation, surely they went out to drink regularly.

After quite a lot of searching, she finds one of the notable Queen's Physicians seated at a bar in North Point. His appearance matches the description of the alchemist Martin Vasi. The seat next to him is empty.

She sits down and orders a drink. For both of them.

"It's been a busy week for all of us. I hear you deserve a drink, though! Impressive work. This one's on me."

He looks over to her and nods. "Thanks. Who're you? I don't believe we've met?"

"No, I'm sure we haven't! Sadauna, I'm rather an amateur, just interested in the subject. I want to bond a homunculus as a familiar but I couldn't make one myself, obviously. I did find this, it was mostly broken in the sewers, and helped put it back together, tried to work a bit of myself into it. I don't really know if it's a familiar or a bonded item at this point, but it's something like that, and I'm hoping it's practice for a better construct. As you can see, I've done some work on making it better-associated, it's a better helper now, and maybe as I iterate I can get there eventually!" She reaches down and lifts up the shadow, currently engraved with alchemical symbols. It's a pale greyish brown, clay-colored, somewhat resembling the substance she's pretty sure alchemists use to produce their homunculi. After showing it to Martin, she sets it down next to her. It keeps shifting shapes as she does so, most of them completely meaningless. If it sometimes signs her a hint at what to talk about, everybody here should be too drunk to notice.

It turns out the skin-recoloring cantrip works just as well on the shadow as it does on her. (Though it's more of a repainting cantrip at that point, perhaps?) It gives a different set of possible tones, but they're still wide enough to make this sort of subterfuge possible.

"Ohhh. That's an ioun wyrd, if I'm not mistaken. A fairly customized one." He sips from his drink, which arrived moments ago. "I'm Martin Vasi. Call me Martin. Nice to meet you."

"Is it! I've definitely customized it a ways, I didn't look much into what it was before. I thought it would be an object at first, actually, and then it turned out to float around and have opinions at me. Nice to meet you too! So how's the life of a real practicing alchemist?"

He groans. "Busy, recently. At least I'm getting paid well. The crown is generous with their purse, these days."

"Oh? You do deserve it, if what the paper's saying is true." She sounds a little skeptical, but only a little.

Believes in the power of alchemy to solve problems, but didn't actually believe in it that strongly until just now. Easily convinced that he's impressive, he's done something impossible, he's discovered something groundbreaking... but does need to be convinced, doesn't just believe it immediately.

"I knew antiplagues specialized to a disease were a thing, but I thought they took quite a while to design, and you managed a cure in only a week and a half! That's incredible!" If it's real, she doesn't say.

"Thank you." He drinks and sighs. "Well, this was no normal plague. It was real nightmare... incurable, partially magical, possibly cursed. But it had a fatal flaw, and we found it."

"Oh? Is that how you managed it so quickly! Did the Urgathoans leave a magical control of some sort— no, the cure is alchemical, it can't be that." A young wizard's assumption will be magic first, and she's still (apparently) a wizard.

"Could it... hmmm..." She looks lost in an intellectual problem.

...no, there's no reason to risk it, she's better off looking interested in him than not. She waits a little bit, sketching things in the air with her fingertips, but quickly enough turns back to him. "So what did you do? What was it that you found?"

"It's... uh... quite a long story." He drinks. "So about sixty years ago, there was this guy. Vorel Foxglove. Fairly renowned adventuring wizard at sixth circle. He retired up near this small town called Sandpoint, about fifty miles northeast of Magnimar. The story goes like this: Vorel had a minor problem—he was evil, his wife was not. He was supposedly quite upset that he would not get to spend eternity with his wife in the afterlife. He had a... genius plan... simply turn himself into a lich, kill his wife, reanimate her as an undead, and live with her forever. Or something, I don't really get it. We don't know exactly what happened, but no lich ever emerged. Their home was found empty of life, except for a particularly terrible fungal disease, which was then named Vorel's phage."

He pauses to take another drink.

"That... certainly seems like a sixth circle adventuring wizard sort of solution. I do hope it's not too infectious, I wouldn't want to end up like that. ...no pun intended." She looks somewhere between amused and appalled. 

It's not like this habit of wizards is a mystery or anything, everyone knows about it. That doesn't stop it from happening anyway.

"Right. Well, then the town's mortician finds their bodies, and buries them in a graveyard. A few days later he dies of Vorel's phage. Now, Vorel's phage is not very contagious—it kills fast but needs long physical exposure or an open wound to infect. Not a huge threat, most of Sandpoint was perfectly fine, it didn't spread. At some point after all that, cultists of Urgathoa stole some of the fungus from Foxglove Manor and started growing it and shipping it around. Blood veil was originally based on Vorel's phage, but they modified it quite heavily. They bound some particular nasty daemons of pestilence and infused the fungus with daemonic power. And then, well, we think they may have cursed the fungus. The Urgathoan notes are written mostly in Necril and in their own notation that comprehend languages doesn't really help with and it was a real pain to figure out what was going on."

That would be what the daemons were for, then. Good to know. "And Vorel's phage is... vulnerable to positive energy because it was made by a necromancer? No, that would be obvious. Vulnerable to something Vorel didn't like, because of how he made it? And you could alchemically synthesize the effects of that?" She leans in, interested in his story. She doesn't seem to expect she guessed correctly, but she's interested in the right answer, whatever it is.

"If only it were that easy. The Urgathoans noted that around one in twenty Varisians were immune to their perfect disease. It just didn't work at all. This is very strange, and they had not figured it out why." He drinks more.

"Well. Long story short, it turns out the souls of Vorel and his family ended up in the fungus. Don't ask me how. I don't know. The Varisians that are immune are not actually immune, the disease is partially sentient and infused with the broken minds of some evil wizard and his poor family. We believe the fungus doesn't infect people it thinks are Vorel or his family. That is: people who's blood is similar enough to theirs. So we sent a wizard teleporting up to Sandpoint and he dug up Vorel and his family and used restore corpse on them and collected their blood. Then we cross-tested it with all this other blood we harvested and eventually synthesized a quite exotic alchemical concoction that tricks the disease into thinking the sick person is of Vorel's bloodline. Or something like that. It works. It's stupid, but it works. The disease kills itself shortly after the cure is administered."