Welcome to Gaia! ::

Aire had left home to see the world, to find his passions. Later, he stayed because he'd found them. Chymistry was his calling, its uses his att and music. The slender young man had already discovered so much in mere eploration and talking to the herbalists, the hunters, the naturalists of this continent! Even if they were typically standoffish to start, the shifters had been kond to him on his travels. Even here in famously belligerent Oba, they had a rough but solid hospitality to them. And a kindness for stranded travelers who discovered that OBA IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO LIVE! WHY DOES ANYONE LIKE IT HERE?! IT'S HOT, IT'S DRY, AND EVERYTHING'S POISON! UUUUURGH!

He'd been helped back to the nearest town after a trader found him stuck, the broken axle of his rickety cart snapped. For a modest fee, he'd persuaded the trader to allow his supplies on the passing cart, hopefully to sell and pay for retrieval, repair and repayment of the kindness. That graitude hadn't worn off, much like the angry sunburn that began to rival the redhead chymist's hair. So here he sat, under the modest shade of a temporary stall, plying his trade.

Suntouched as he was, it took a few moments for the new customer's question to penetrate the fog. "...Hmm? I. Blue spark... that's the burn salve, yes? The deeproot stuff?" Aire pulled himself up, trying to shake the cobwebs free. "Right, right, I need that. Ran out of the stuff I'd normally use for burn salve. Wasn't much call for it in Jauhar.
...What can I help you with again?"

In hindsight, Aire was aware what he'd done wrong. Personally, anyhow. Having been burning up in his protective gear, he'd stripped down to the undershirt when attempting to fix his wagon. That had been the main mistake. In Jauhar there was often a canopy, and you weren't exposing yourself to the sun by doing so. That, apparently, made all the difference. He hadn't quite been raving in the desert, but the trader had stuck him under the shade anyway. It so happened that the only available one was a spare stallfront, so...

The short chymist might have imagined the agreement to pay him back, come to think on it. Cotton-packed in the brain as he was, however, he was still a trained physician. Zasha's delivery and explanation did not fall on deaf ears. Hands unsteady had pried the cap from the salve jar and begun applying it to his arms as the easiest bits to reach. Setting the burns to heal would set the rest to cool more efficiently. By the time her worried face was passing a tin of water, he'd got one done.

"Desert. Not... I'm not so used to the sun, y'know? Figured taking layers off would help when my cart broke down." The relief of cool water sparked a few neurons from the half-baked brain. He needed focus to infuse something with magic, which heat exhaustion neatly nixed. The trader had done what he could, and checked in every so often, but the man was no healer. Presumbly, that's why the girl was here. "Thank you. My back, if y'could?"

In this case, he'd already begun forming water blisters about the back and shoulders. Even though his mouth no longer suck like sandpaper to his tongue, Aire was still slurring a bit. Apparently he was one of those that took to heat exhaustion like it were strong drink. "Came out here for the same reason I did Jauhar. Biodiversity! There's new substances t'my folk, an' maybe new processes t'here. This continent's got flora n' fauna we've never seen, an' techniques we never learned on Belrea. 'Cos it's temperate, see? Cold an' rainy most times, when it ain't snowin'."

Jauhar ain't got mountain winters, barely got a winter at all. Came here 'cos I was curious. Gotta be an ecosystem out here if there's people, yeah? An' with how many things I've already seen die o' poison, an your backin' up the nights, looks on the money." The more water he downed, the more the salve sank in, pushing the soreness back into his skin. Nothing much it could do for the weariness and ache, but rest and water and salt helped that. The red brows turned down, wrinkling bright orange skin. "...I'm bein' rude. Thank ya again. Didn't get yer name? 'M Aire, travelin' chymist." The less-clammy hand reached back, his torso twisting slightly so as to get Zasha in sight.

Still thinking of home, Zasha's patient caught himself, pulled back to the now. One hand had absently reached up to finger his earring, though she might not see that. "Mmm? Nah, wasn't the weather. Not havin' t'swim through the air sometimes' a bonus, I'll grant ya. But y'can always bundle up against cold n' wet. Can only take so much off t'cool down. Nah, I came here for curiosity. ...Prob'ly should'a left more'n letters for the family, tho'. If Da could'a sent a screaming fit by messenger, he might've."

Aire's arrival in Jauhar had been a bad idea. There was no 'maybe' there, even if things had turned up alright. But he was drifting again. "Good t'meet'cha, Zasha. What field's your master in? Er, speciality. Bonesetter? Herbalist? Surgeon?" His shake was a bit uncertain, but then, so was the fellow just now. The salve and water did their work well, only they worked at their own pace. It would be some time before this forigner might be called well.

"Might need to do my experiments in the day, then. Wouldn't wanna ruin all the peace y'got at night. Lower-yield samples, maybe? Ain't as much cover out here, either, an' empty distance only does so much..." By the second sentence, Aire had begun thinking out loud, rather than commenting on anything in particular. "Sand, maybe? Soft, good compacting material. Yeah, gonna need t'see about baggin' up sand in sacks."

He nodded amicably as family came up. Much the same problems. In broad terms, anyway. One could never be comfortably certain how much was turn of phrase out on the continent, and what was just accepted truth. Culture shock still hit pretty hard, even without a touch of sun. "That's how my teacher got me started, too. Was thanks to him that my stay in Jauhar went as well as it did. Crusty ol' coot that he is... 'There’s a chemical for every situation', he kept sayin'.

Hmm?" Aire paused in his woolgathering. He didn't actually make a secret of his experiments, luckily, as dissembling had never been a strong point of his. "D'you guys have fire-tricks here? Throwing metallic salts or dried saps into it to make it change color?" A moment, and the rest of him caught up to what he'd said. "Er. Not 'cos you're fire-tribe or anything, I'm just trying to find out what sorta parallel concepts you might have. So's I can better explain."

A fuzzy brain was wrangled into something resembling logical pattern, searching for an acceptable phenomenon. Marshes? No, they don't live around those, wouldn't know about marshgas. Mining, maybe? Worth a shot, gems can form near coal veins, an' they might well mine for gems. "...Okay. y'heard of firedamp? The gas that causes explosions in a mine?"

"Alright, that's a start." He nodded to himself, took a deep breath and another dram of water. And promptly lost his train of thought when a warm breeze crossed salved burns. "Where was I...? Right, firedamp. It's a poison on its own, an' it explodes when someone brings an open flame too close. Did'ja know it won't do that without wholesome air mixed in? That it happens in swamps, too, and can light up even there?"

Another pause, to straighten out the rush of fact and thought. "Dangerous stuff. A detonation can take out half a mine easily, or just incautious miners on its own. But what if you found it early? Cleared everyone out and set it off yourself? Might need to redig parts of the tunnels, but it might also open up natural caverns or other seams of metals." Aire grinned here, bright and excited, if a little unfocused. "Now imagine you could do that without needing to watch for a hazardous gas pocket. Just place a cloud at a fissure and get clear. Boom! Does a month of work for you! Just clearing rubble, then.

Now imagine it's not a cloud at all, it's a jar of that gas condensed into a liquid, or frozen solid. You could set the spark off with a bit of twine. How much safer, more applicable would that be?" While he awaited an answer, the lightning chymist fished around in his wares for a papered over cone. He fingered it, checking the markings before pointing it out at the market sky. A pull of a string at the back, and POP! A mess of diced paper confetti for the wind to toy with! Shaking the singed fingers of the holding hand, he turned that childish grin back on Zasha. "I experiment with that kinda force, those sorts of substances. Y'see?"

Thin shoulders shrugged, the unfocused passion still in his purple eye. "As y'said, yer not a miner. Wouldn't pick up that much on it. Besides, Oba doesn't seem like a place you wanna experiment with flammable substances much anyhow." A sheepish quality entered the smile, unsinged hand coming up and scritching at the tangled mass of his thick braid. "I didn't figure out the similarity between swamp an' mine gas 'til my master was goin' over patient records with me. Couple folks burned almost the same way in a marsh an' in a cavern."

The conversation wound around to safety concerns, at last. Here even the suntouch couldn't keep him loopy for long. Aire had begun as a healer himself, after all. "Mnn. Ideally y'don't drop that stuff, or your biggest worry will be someone finding a bucket for your ashes. You run for it, if nothing sparked an ignition. Better yet, keep it in something studrier than a glass jar. The jar was an example, nothin' more.

Actually, so's firedamp." Picking up the spent shell of the popper, the chymist offered it to Zasha, to examine or keep, as she chose. Wasn't exactly reusable anyway. Wisps of smoke still rose from the interior, stinking of burnt hair. "Too unstable, too difficult to collect, condense, or just work with. Ain't gonna say mine are that much better yet, but I'm not dead. Probably says somethin'. Know it ain't magic, this is just how bits of the world work sometimes. Alchemy's just figurin' out how the world works, usually startin' small."