Perilous Philters
Thirtieth Day of the Fifth Month 294 AC
It would be a bit of a misnomer to talk about alchemical factories for all the hexagonal walled structures certainly fit the bill if one only had an eye on the door in, constantly refilled from carts and cisterns of strange substances and the way out, always delivering goods of a sort the world had never seen, yet which all the citizens of the Imperium embraced with a verve unmatched by any other magic.
Who, after all, did not need insect warding fumes, a cure for nausea, a reliable match, a simple philter against unwanted pregnancies, a balm against wounds and another against toxins? And that was without considering some of the more restricted applications, the ones that filled the enemies of the Imperium with dread, or simply made them too dead to feel anything at all.
Yet for all the bounty that left these halls for good and for ill, it was not a place of manufacture as most would understand it. Each of the Transmutation Complexes were built of nine layers, three of igneous rock, born and bathed in fire, three of sedimentary rock, the fingerprint of life long past, and three of metamorphic stone which in its nature held the essence of transformation that would define the alchemical arts.
Now six and nine were numbers mismatched in one element and that was with intent, for a system in balance is a system in stasis and it was the task of those who worked within to craft by not quite ritual, by spell so soft it was almost imperceptible, the works of arcane excellence.
Denys Trainer had been given a hell of a task, and not just because he was somehow to work with mages of Volantis, and those of Braavos and Naath, and keep them from each other's throats. The pumps and the grinding wheels, the arcane torches and the vats of ever bubbling acids, where the refuse of one process could be made the reagent of another, all these had been designed with a careful hand and with an eye not just to productivity, but to safety.
The failure states that would in a ritual of tens or even hundreds of unaided participates go ill only for them, could for mass transmutation be a blight upon land, air, and water for longer than the grandchildren's grandchildren of those alive today could recon. It was not that Denys and Naria between them, with the aid of their many willing assistants, had not found means to make the processes of accretion and distillation more effective, it was that those means were necessarily more energetic, more volatile, and more dangerous in case of accident or sabotage.
"More dangerous than the forges in Lys or in Gogossos?" the lady Naria had asked, not in accusation, but more in thought, getting Denys to consider the implication of his fears.
"No, not that..." He did not fully understand the processes that gave the flesh forges their arcane vitality, and if he were entirely honest with himself he did not want to, but there was one major distinction. Flesh forges were mostly ran by their masters and various servitors who were little more than hands and eyes for the task. Alchemical factories were run by minor scholarum graduates with a skill and an interest in alchemy. Could they be trusted with lowered tolerances for higher productivity?
"It's not our call anyway, Master Trainer," notes one grey haired Braavosi mage who had never gotten the hang of saying 'winoted'. "We sent the announcement to Sorcerer's Deep down south and then the Imperator makes the call, or maybe the new Minister of Magic they've been talking about."
It was not, as it happened, on the desk of the Minister of Magic that the letter arrived, but on the Imperial desk, awaiting for an Imperial seal. What do you choose?
[] Leave productivity where it is for now, you can slowly increase production as more alchemists become available
[] Increase production, you need more production now not later, the security of the factories against accident and sabotage is more than sufficient
OOC: Just a binary choice this time to show the greater level of abstraction, also because even a success in research does not have to be unambiguous, just like in real life. Not yet edited.
