Kaddar reaches out to Iovetra for mushrooms and flower solution. "Walk me through the process, please? I assume this too is more complicated than it seems at first. I know well the value of expert instruction."

Iovetra has a second set for demonstration purposes! They get handed over.

"It is, yeah - it's important that all of the mushroom meets the solution, and then it all burns off. If mushroom that hasn't met solution is burned, it leaves some toxins behind. Any of the solution remaining isn't exactly toxic, but if it's not burned off, it is pretty flammable. It's also not great for plants if just burned off, so the ratio is a bit tricky if you want to avoid wasting it without introducing too much risk -"

She's so happy to explain all of the details of it, and walk him through another round of Systematically Burning Things For Fun And Profit!

He follows along happily!

"Oh that's how that works."

"And now those combine? That's very clever, and it definitely releases some properties and brings out others. Let me see if I can amplify those..."

"Daine, can you tell how well this worked?"

"It still has the right color, and a fair bit more of it. Can't tell you how well it'll work for plants, but I'm fair sure it will."

"Iovetra, your examination may be more detailed. A stronger effect which amplified only the duration could have this result in Daine's view. Can you discern how productive this will be?"

"My castle can! It might not be able to see if there's anything unexpected going on, but it can judge this by alchemy's metrics perfectly well. I can't guarantee it'll catch everything though, so I recommend empirical testing along with wafting it in front of my castle to look at."

"Most certainly, but every growing cycle of delay comes at high cost. While the University can of course consider many samples, a faster iteration time is still valuable if you can provide it."

This particular sample will turn out to have most of its power focused on effectively multiplying the materials so the sample can be spread over a larger area without diminishing the effects. It does have a little bit more of every useful compound than it should contain, and there's a slight layer of simply amplifying how much it helps the growth of plants, but both of those are minor by comparison.

"Of course, I just didn't want to give an inflated view of my castle's ability to predict results accurately when we're dealing with introducing multiple kinds of magic."

After wafting things past her castle:

"So this seems very scalable? We might want to check to see if you can enhance the ignilos solution, though I'm not sure... what would happen there, exactly? It does also take time to brew, and might not be worth the resource cost of someone with a Gift watching over it during the whole process."

"My Gift with plants is strong, it may not be as effective in the hands of others. I would expect the ignilos to burn brighter as with blazebalm — I suppose it might hasten the reaction, but probably not worth the Gift. What is it intended to contribute?"

"It forms the other half of the reaction necessary to neutralize the toxins present, and is the main fuel source for the reaction itself. I actually worry that if it burned brighter, it might destabilize things? So probably not worth it, my inner alchemist just wants to be thorough with testing."

"Testing is always worthwhile. Do you have enough to spare for extra tests? I can keep empowering for a while."

"Hmmm. Not very many more tests - one or two, if we stretch it. I used most of my stores making these for demonstration purposes."

"Then I suspect we are best served using what tests we have available on results with more certainty, and perhaps the University can suggest new options. What were the necessary growing conditions?"

Kaddar will talk about proper growing conditions and setups for roughly as long as Iovetra wants. He seems to like this, and has an impressively deep understanding of what Carthak as a whole, specifically the University, and average small villages in particular have available to them.

So, good news! The ignilos flowers (or fireblossoms, if those are more pronounceable for the locals) grow extremely well in Carthak's climate. They love heat and sunlight, expect periods of drought, and can survive in extremely rocky soil. ("It's known primarily for its flowers, but it's technically a type of grass," explains the vampire who also likes talking about plants.)

The inferibucina mushrooms are a little harder - requiring things to be both dark and damp, but in the appropriate setup can essentially be left in a warm, damp, dark box as long as they're kept fed. The tricky part, explains Iovetra, is keeping out competing fungal colonies, or the wrong kind of bacteria flourishing; aside from that, though, they can and probably should be fed on garbage.

She is happy to go retrieve and hand over little starter samples of both, packed for travel. While she's mostly packed seeds, she has also set up one little pot of flowers, which she uses to demonstrate how to retrieve the seeds from the mature and fertilized plants. They actually might become popular as decoration - they're a brilliant combination of yellow and orange, almost sparkling in the sunlight. The box for the mushrooms is much less outwardly showy - because of light conditions, it basically is just a box. Inside she's organized several little colony starters to be distributed in appropriate conditions, but they really shouldn't open the box to look at anything unless they are in near darkness.

Dark and damp does not come naturally to much of Carthak, and the rainforests are not ideal places for any sort of agriculture. There are some areas which will come by it naturally, but most mushroom growth will have to happen in prepared environments. Boxes seem like a practical option. Could the Gift help? Probably. Protective circles from a weak caster can still be nearly impenetrable from the outside — light isn't typically hedged out but it doesn't seem impossible to train for. On the other hand, protective circles are incredibly fiddly when you try to do anything clever with them. They really are meant to protect — this only has a chance because it's protecting mushrooms, and would still be a tricky working. It's almost certainly not worth the time when straightforward boxes are simple and easy. Selective weeding is a much easier task. 

Kaddar is very excited by the flowers. Anything which can usefully be grown in near-desert conditions has an enormous amount of possible range, and if the flowers have any useful properties besides fertilizer they're almost a side benefit. (Or being used for large explosions. They can probably be used for large explosions. That doesn't count as interesting.) The biology which lets them do so much on so little input is also probably useful for something — he has some experience working with combinations of plants, and a single type of grain which shared that property would vastly ease Carthak's recovery. Opals? What are opals? This is way more fun. 

Over the course of this discussion, Iovetra will get the impression that Carthak is enormous. Kaddar is planning for biomes hundreds of miles wide, each with delicate balances of existing plants (or a more robust lack of plants in the case of the desert). Some of his plans are for forested and chilly areas in the south, where apparently Carthak reaches the 'Frozen Sea' (the place where the is no more land to the south, not even anything across the sea like Tortall is across the Narrow Sea except for ice). Physically getting seeds to the areas farthest from the sea is slow enough to be a substantial constraint. Daine's descriptions of Tortall sounded nowhere near as sprawling as Carthak has to be for any of this to make sense.

Big fancy mushroom boxes do seem like the easier solution than... all that Gift related stuff, yeah. She does recommend separate, discrete fungal colonies, even in singular facilities, so that if one colony fails, it can be recovered from.

The flowers do have some alternative uses! (Besides explosions. Because, yes, they can in fact be used for explosions, not that Iovetra is bringing this up in particular.) Interestingly enough, despite their flammable properties, they can also be used to make a sunscreen, a topic very relevant to vampires in particular. It is not to the level of Gift magic sun protection, but precious seconds before combustion are still nonetheless very important to vampires who want to not be on fire. Iovetra similarly expects there are other uses for it, her previous research just didn't involve that kind of exploration. (Because her sire wanted explosions, see.)

See, she might be persuaded to try out the colder regions of Carthak, except it is so incredibly salient to her that slavery is a thing, here. Everyone is being very polite about not reminding her of it, but she knows, and that is enough. She does not want to live in a place where slavery is a legal thing.

Weird! If nothing else, the flowers will surely be a useful magical reagent. In sun-related spells, maybe? Sunscreen and fire together does have a very strong theme. Maybe he'll name them for Mithros, some extra propitiation wouldn't go amiss.

Kaddar can be so extremely polite about Slavery Opinions. He has practice. There are certain topics which come up when convincing two Tortallan mages to come with him in what everyone involved knows is a show of force, even if officially it's just an introduction and a chance to set up some initial magistrates so the whole system won't be corrupt from the start.

Honestly, compared to the Tortallan mages present, Iovetra is much more outwardly subdued and polite about her Slavery Opinions. She just very mysteriously is very sure that she does not want to stay in Carthak, even as she's happy to assist Carthak in acquiring new magic flowers from another world. Relatedly - yeah, the flowers are very sun themed (they were engineered by vampires to be, not that she mentions this), and she is not against them being named after a local deity. Though, for fairness's sake, if he's going to do that, she has a flower for the Graveyard Hag and it should therefore be locally named after her. (Iovetra does not want to offend the Graveyard Hag.)

She does have some other useful flowers that are worth spreading, actually! Would Carthak like some other magic flowers? There is the maelium (mourning lilies), rosanguis (blood roses), and nivalia (snow) flowers. The maelium are the one she recommends naming after the Graveyard Hag, since they are traditionally grown in graveyards (historically in Vardoran, graveyards are places with minimal sunlight) and signify the soul leaving behind the worldly ties keeping it tethered to the material world, where it moves on to the afterlife.

These all have alchemical applications, of which she is very happy to talk about. These ones aren't even explosion related!!!!

Kaddar would like every interesting flower he can get. Flowers are a much more convenient display of wealth than Ozorne's menagerie of exotic animals, and it's always good to have options for particularly significant offerings to the Hag on hand. (He seems quite certain she likes flowers more than the incense blends he is considering for other gods.)

He might actually name the maelium for the Black God if the University can produce a hybrid. She is a minor trickster god everywhere but Carthak, and the child of the Black God. She might like a flower which follows suit? Souls moving on to the afterlife is really more his domain than hers. Does maelium have any useful properties they might want to pull from it? 

Yep! It is also used in the sunscreen, wards off most insects, has anesthetic properties (it's what makes up the bulk of the topical anesthetic she used earlier), and has some uses relating to magic, mostly around strengthening things that are undead.

The undead are newish! Those appear to be a thing in the case of (1) direct Graveyard Hag intervention, (2) no actually that's it Numair corrects him on the other case. Does Iovetra's magic make animated dead things. (Is she really sure she isn't the Hag. He doesn't say that.)

Uh.

Well, she is an animated undead thing. So.

If it turns out they can use it to create undead somehow he will definitely name it after the Hag, and then probably destroy all supply of it unless the Black God gives his approval. ...maybe they should take that one slowly.

She really didn't, and still doesn't, specialize in the creation of undead, so she really can't say! That is vampiric magic, not alchemy, and she is an alchemist that just so happens to be a vampire. She knows it was pretty trivial for vampires to raise small undead armies of skeletons and ghouls, though controlling them was much harder. Just: not her specialization.

(Do they understand why she said a flat 'no' to studying vampirism now. Do they understand.)

Maybe he will wait and ask the gods before spreading anything. ...except the fertilizer, that one seems important, he'll wait for a great holiday in case anyone wants to bring something up but every harvest matters.