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Xanadu Weyr - Waterfall Cave

Cleverly hidden behind the illusion of stone, a cave has formed at the base of the waterfall itself, large enough to host several individuals comfortably, or one person and a dragon. The walls are moist and textured, with small rivulets of water draining from the cave floor down into the pond beyond. Moving further back into the cave finds a dry floor and a smooth rear wall. Two sturdy camp chairs lean up against the back wall, along with a generous bedroll, wrapped in water-tight animal skins. A small bundle of firewood rests off of the floor on a makeshift stand, drying.

The roar of the falls is loud here, making conversation difficult from any range other than close, and the sheer volume of water makes it almost impossible to see through to the forest beyond. The only way out appears to be via the water, back the way you came.


Several days have passed since the waterfight and the chase, and between lessons concerning the plants found in the deep forest clearing that he calls his garden, Tenebrous took a brief trip back up north, to Ista. (Morl was there, and may have told her he saw the Fetch there…) But now he's back, somber and all about doing the mentor thing as they sit in the cave, waiting for the sun to reach a warmer height in the sky. "It was the most…impersonal thing I think I've ever seen," Tenebrous mutters. "I remember when I impressed little Cila, and I don't think I would ahve wanted to be in a giant crowd of people for that to happen. I don't remember standing being that…much of a show when I did it all those years ago."

And for some reason Phylicia didn't go to Ista for the hatching most likely having been caught up in some chore around the Weyr for the brief time she skittered back. But now she's sitting in the cave with her mentor again, wrapped up in a blanket as usual until the sun manages to warm things up a bit more. She looks at Ciaran and Estevan, both curled up in her lap in the downtime. "I've never been Searched, but I'd imagine they didn't really notice all the other people?" She ventures forth with her opinion. They being the candidates. But then again, she doesn't know the full details of the Istan hatching, so its hard to say.

Tenebrous waves a hand. "It was a damned carnival. NO respect for what was going on, but…perhaps that's the way it's done these days. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. And at around 21 turns…that's a little sad." He rubs one side of his face. "…Thea was there," he offers after a moment, his voice somewhat subdued.

Phylicia lifts her shoulders in a shrug again. "I only heard vague things about the hatching." Her tone only sounds mildly helpless. She wasn't there so she really can't say much at all. "Not that I've ever been to /any/ hatching besides a 'lizard's." Which is enough of a fanfare. But she smiles then, leaning back carefully enough not to disturb the 'lizards in her lap. "And…?" She prompts gently, letting him go there if he wants to.

Tenebrous shrugs. "There was no 'and'. She nodded to me once, and then went about her way." He rubs the back of his head. "I keep expecting something to happen, but it doesn't…which is probably good. I left not long after my friend impressed her green. The galleries, that is. Stuck around Ista long enough to congratulate her at a pub up there, and then caught a dragon transport back here in the middle of the night."

"Probably." Phylicia nods in agreement. All the girl can be thankful for is that at least her two friends aren't going for each others' throats upon sight. It's enough that a different pair of healer apprentices are going through 'turbulent waters' and making some of the classes a living nightmare. "I'm sorry it doesn't sound like you enjoyed it." She apologizes for something she has no control over. "But good for you friend!"

That brings only half of a smile to his face. "Yes. Very good for her. Hasha has been wandering for a large part of her life, and while I can sympathise with that lifestyle…it's not something I'd wish on anyone. Her and her rambunctious Green have a place at Ista now, and she deserves that."

Phylicia is watching his face, as well as listening to him. Her smile fades just a touch as she doesn't drop her gaze. "I know you want to wander - or at least you did - but it doesn't mean that you couldn't have a place here." As usual, her tone is gentle. And in her opinion, he actually does have a bit of a place at Xanadu, even if it is just to teach her. "You always make it sound like you don't deserve things, Ten." And in this, she's lightly chiding him.

Tenebrous shrugs. "I watch people around me and see that they expect much from the world, when the world has nothing it owes them. I like to think that, doing things my way, when I actually get things, it's a pleasant surprise, rather than wondering why I didn't get more." He gestures towards the younger girl. "Look at you. Do you see me complaining about how bad a swimmer you are? No." He smiles a little. "I'm just happy I didn't get … you know…" He purses his lips. "A bronzer."

Phylicia's lips lift in a grin. "In all fairness, I don't think you ever asked if I could swim at all." She's teasing him about that face, because while she's not a strong swimmer, she can swim. And she looks thoughtful for a bit before nodding. "It's more or less enough for me, living day to day." For she probably has no real plans to life other than staying in the Healer craft. But then his phrasing has her a little confused. "You didn't get a bronzer? What d'you mean?"

Tenebrous grins. "A prat. A git. A loon. God forbid, a male." he shudders. "I don't knwo if I would have taken a male apprentice. We're idiots in large numbers, Phy, take my word for it." Then he smiles slyly. "I didn't feel like asking if you could swim. Worst case scenario is mouth to mouth. Either way, I win."

Phylicia echos Ten's sly smile. "I already figured most of you were idiots." She laughs lightly as she shifts her weight on her hands in her semi-reclined position before one of her eyebrows shoots up and she laughs again. "You win either way? How? Worst case scenario I'm half drowned. What am I in the best case? Or a better case at least."

Tenebrous coughs once, and has the decensy to look a little embarassed. "A bad swimming with low inhibitions?" He tosses a plant sample to her with a waggle of a finger. "DO your homework."

Phylicia's cheeks flush to a nice low-key red, skipping by all the shades of pink. "Don't think you'd be the only one winning…" She mumbles under her breath to herself. Of course, this also means her reactions are a moment delayed and the sample lands on Ciaran's rump which makes the blue sqwuak indignatly. "Oh, hush Ciar. You'll live." She strokes the blue on his headknobs anyways for a moment before picking up the sample from her lap and looking at it for the distraction that it is. "Homework, right. What d'you want to know?"

Tenebrous points to the little chunk of plant in her lap. "Indentify. Tell me what it is, what it's used for, and if I'd make you drop your pants for rolling around in it." It is, for the record, a sprig of Meadowsweet…

Phylicia shifts all of her weight onto one hand as she picks the sprig up by its base, looking at it carefully, and actually lightly sniffing it once or twice. She doesn't answer right away, though it isn't long in coming. "Meadowsweet." She says to break the silence as Ciaran finishes resettling his head on Estevan's rump and resuming his doze. "Mmm, uses?" This one takes a few more moments as she's shifting through the information in her head. "Usually made into a tea for headaches and fevers. Some of the old folks like it for their joints too." And then she looks up with a grin, pretty sure she has it right. "And if you make me drop my pants for this, I'm missing something."

Tenebrous mms. "Correct. As an aside, and I only mention this because of our recent brush with the glasscrafters, you can use this particular plant to produce not one, not two, but THREE different colored dyes. And the plant is relatively plentiful in the woods, so finding large quantities of it shouldn't ever be hard. You know." He waves a hand. "Unless it's…the winder."

Phylicia nods her head to that one, flicking the sprig carefully back in his direction. "So you'd be checking to make sure I wasn't colorful, then." She teases him. "It'd probably make a nice scent, from the way it smells." Something light, instead of what some ladies like to dose themselves in. "Yeah, winter makes it hard to find a lot of things." She chuckles, her tone a little on the dry side. Imagine that, the lack of harvesting in winter.

Tenebrous ehs, weighing his hands. "If it makes you feel better, I can make up any number of excuses for you to drop your pants. BUt the more I do it, the less you'll believe me, and then the day'll come when you DO need to drop them for a real reason, and you won't. So…" He smiles. "There will be no gag pantsing."

"Like the adonis." Phylicia murmurs with a nod, giving him another smile as she puts her hand back down, spreading her weight evenly again. "But I appreciate that, the no gag pantsing." She may do it without a second thought now, but he understands the more he does it without reason, the less quickly she'll do it the next time. And now her head tilts to the side again. "Next one?"

Tenebrous picks up another bagged sample, this one of Illex, and tosses it over. "Run it for me."

Phylicia manages to shift her weight quickly enough this time to clumsily snag the bag out of the air, even if it almost looks like a clean catch. This one takes quite a bit longer for her to guess at. Apparently she already had a small knowledge of plants that typically get turned into some sort of tea. "Shards…" She grumbles to herself, turning the pouch over. "I…Illex?" She finally guesses, waiting for his confirmation before she continues.

Tenebrous grunts once. "Good. Give me the numbers and tell me if it's pantsable?"

Phylicia scrunches her nose up briefly at the grunt she receives before continuing to scronge her brain for the necessary information. Okay, so she did learn /some/ things from books, but the time in his garden has been helping too. "Not pantsable, but I certainly don't want to eat any of the berries. And it makes another tea. For…" She pauses again. Hey give the girl a break, she's no super genius like Ten. And after a few moments her brows furrow and she frowns slightly. "I can't remember what the tea is for."

Tenebrous nods once. "Well done in regards to the berries, but that's only because there are so many varieties. Still, the tea part is the bit of information you want to hold onto…pneumonia. Illex serves as a fantastic ingestable expectorant. It's insanely valuable during the winter time, especially with the frail or elderly. In hard times, people have travelled all over the south continent, on foot, to find it."

Phylicia nods as she listens, her gaze intent on the bagged specimen for a little while longer. "Pneumonia. Expectorant." Her head bobs again before she holds the bag out to him, to take back. "So I take that it doesn't keep particularily well, if people are always hunting it down?" She asks like a good little student. "Does this one grow all turn 'round?" She asks, trying to remember if she heard something of the sort. She knows one or two plants never fully go into hibernation.

Tenebrous shakes his head. "It can be grown all year around, and I do, at the healers' hall. Master Fraille has several greenhouse lamps that she allows me to use for samples that I bring during harder times. NUmbweed, Illex and a few other plants fall into the catagory of things I try never to be without."

Phylicia's gaze turns a little inwards and thoughtful at the mention of the greenhouse lamps. "Has Master Fraille ever tried a large-scale greenhouse?" The gears in her head are turning indeed as her lips perse together and she stares at the mixture of blue and brown in her lap. "I'm not sure if I ever remember hearing more than herbs and small plants being grown in a greenhouse." Or if there was ever a greenhouse built large enough for such a thing.

Tenebrous grunts once. "There's a greenhouse on the grounds back in Xanadu proper that some of the Farmcrafters use, but, to be blunt, their care is a little below my standards. I grow my own stuff so I can monitor the soil, each individual plant and harvest when the time is right. Unfortunately, without a bunch of people trained like you and I…" he shrugs. "Much of the detail that the Master and I are familiar with isn't known to many."

Phylicia breaks out of her inward 'trance' to grin up at her mentor. "Picky, picky!" She teases him, knowing full well that a carefully tended plant tends to yield both a more pleantiful and powerful harvest. She continues on with her teasing. "Well, if you two wouldn't be so stingy with the information, you might have a few helpers… or at least one." But she seems to more or less wave off the idea of a large greenhouse purely for the Healers. The project is just a bit daunting, and there's perfectly good soil steps away.

Tenebrous points a finger. "We have at least one helper now. Even if she is a rotten swimmer." He sighs. "And we can't just spout this stuff off to everyone, Phy. Everybody knows that you can O.D. on just about any medicine out there, but almost no one knows which ones are the best to do it with." Read: Poison.

Phylicia smiles a little wider, before she slips into a mock pout, her words not holding any real weight to them. "Well excuse me for not swimming laps everyday ontop of classes and running so I have the possibility to keep up with you." And then her face falls into more serious lines as he brings up the topic of an overdose. "Any healer who actively persues /that/ information beyond needing to know how much is too much needs to have their knot taken away." There's no squiggle room with her on that topic. And theres a good reason the poison and narcotic levels are very closely watched.

Tenebrous looks at her for a long moment, his face even. "Ever wonder why there are only two of us?" It's a question that positively screams not to be answered. And suddenly the boy fetch that's spent so long in the woods takes on another face of personality entirely.

The possibilities loaded into that question are apparently enough to disturb Phylicia enough where she actively shifts her weight, disturbing the two napping 'lizards in her lap who complain sleepily and are paid no heed. Phy is a fan of looking at someone - more or less - when she's talking to them, but this topic has her staring very intently at her lap now in vague uncomfortableness as her brown and blue slink off of her lap, moving to curl up elsewhere that won't move on them.

"Someday," Tenebrous murmurs, his voice distant, "Someone may come to you. Asking about a medicine. Specifically about a medicine that does X, or Y. It'll be a medicine that requires exact doseages, one that needs to be administered carefully…Fraille told me that once, a long time ago." He eyes Phylicia. "Ask the question."

Phylicia doesn't lift her face up any, but her eyes are now looking through her eyelashes at him. Watching without really looking. "How many people? How many of them Healers?" She doesn't really want to know which 'symptoms' these people were trying to 'treat'. There's another uncomfortable - but brief - pause. Her hands, even though she's still leaning on them, start to curl inwards to form a fist. "How many abused the information?" Her voice actually croaks slightly through all of her questions. And if there was another question she was supposed to ask, he's going to have to ask and answer it for her.

Tenebrous is quite still when he murmurs, "I don't know. If anyone ever approached the Master, she never told me. Just…warned me that, one day…someone might approach me. She never flat out said they'd be asking about creating a poison. And that's what they're asking for, Phylicia. Say it. Say the word, so that you understand exactly what I'm saying to you."

Phylicia's hands have fully curled into fists at this point, and her voice has hardened. "There's a few words I could say, sir." And she lifts up her chin stubbornly at least, looking at him full on instead of through her lashes. "Poison. Suicide. Murder." Her jaw visibly clenches. "We could make any of those a possibility, just by knowing what we do." And the tension running through her muscles makes her arms quake. Her voice however, loses its hardness in a heartbeat, leaving her to sound hurt instead which reflects in her face and eyes. "I don't like how people twist something that's supposed to be good and helpful into something… bad!" And to call those options 'bad' is an understatement.

Tenebrous mms, standing slowly. "Do you not…" He stands up from the fire slowly, pacing over to his own, personal satchel, and he moves within it for a moment before coming up with a small, sealed metal tube with a screwcap and waterproof latch on it. He stares at it long and hard before turning and pacing back over to Phylicia. "We can make such things a reality, Phylicia. Not a possibility." He holds the metal tube out to her. "Ignorance is bliss. And knowledge is power."

Phylicia stiffens, if that's even possible with all the tension currently running through her, as she looks at the metal tube offered to her which she makes no move to take if it's what she thinks it is. If she took it, it might very well get hurled into the fire's coals, minus for the noxious fumes that might create. She's actually not sure she could move her body right now, it's that locked up. "Please.." Her voice cracks as she looks up at him. "Please say that's not poison in there." Because she's not sure she wants to know why he's carrying a vial of it around. Call the girl niave, because she's likely missing the point that poisons in small controlled doses treat some ailments better than regular medicines.

Tenebrous closes his fingers back over that metal cylender, offering no answer to her question. "Bliss then." He straightens a little. "And that's probably a good thing. Someone like you doesn't need Power. You're destined for other things…" The tube disappears somewhere on his person then, certainly not back into his satchel.

Phylicia relaxes minorly as the vial disappears, but she still seems to be locked in place. There's a noticable quiver in one arm as if she is trying to move and that prompts a frown before she closes her eyes and starts to breath deeply to relax the more major muscles. Or at least try to. "I want the ability to help people." She says eventually, even though her eyes are still closed. It's coming to the five minute mark, and her body hasn't yet shed most of her tension. "Not kill them."

"And yet you will. You will…kill someone, Phylicia." He squats down in front of her, eyes level with her closed lids. "One day, as a journeyman, or perhaps even a master, you will misdiagnose, nisdose or mistreat someone. The statistical liability of this is almost undeniable. The master has done it. I have come close. If you can't handle that, then I need to frog-march you back up to the healers hall and let them know that you're going to teach, rather than do clinical work."

Phylicia's eyes remain closed, and she unconsciously licks her lips to moisten them. As he points out the inevitable that she will eventually kill someone by mistake, her body fights to regain some of that lost tension, but instead she takes in a deep breath through her mouth, to slowly let it out via her nose. "I…" She pauses, her brows furrowing again as she thinks before she opens her eyes, starting a bit to find him so close. "I can handle a mistreatment, or a misdiagnose." She says softly, but in no way wish-washy. "Or at least as well as a person can. I can't handle handing someone poison or the information to it." One side of her lips quirk downwards. "I'd rather kill on accident than on purpose." Not that she'd rather kill at all, but that option just isn't open to her.

Tenebrous nods slowly, standing. "Within one turn, you will come to me and ask for that tube." Footsteps slide on the floor of the cave for a moment, leading back into the murmur of the waterfall, and then the tell-tale scuffing of boots on rock momentarily fills the cave before they, too stop.

Phylicia watches as he retreats from the area, leaving her to fight with her muscles for control. "Don't be too sure about that one." She grumbles to herself as her eyes slide close again so she can concentrate on relaxing.

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