Venomous Gaze - Chapter 9 - Poison or cure? (Patreon)

There were close to a dozen greenhouses of various sizes spread out across the manor grounds. There were several smaller buildings for private research, and a moderate one attached to the school building so the children could learn the basics, but the conservatory was, by far, the largest of them. It actually consisted of five interconnected glasshouses, an insect house, and even a menagerie to handle the various poisonous creatures we used and milked for their venom. 

As I stepped into the central hub, a small girl with oversized glasses and long, messy brown hair looked up from one of the processing tables in the middle of the room. “Dahlia? When did you get back to the estate? You should have sent me a message and let me know!” she said, carefully pushing her glasses back up her nose while being careful not to touch the rest of her face. “I received a shipment of new plants from the north, and I was hoping you’d review them with me!”

“I’d love to, Marielle, but I don’t have time right now,” I said, striding towards the far side of the room. “Why are you here, and not at the house. Didn’t anyone tell you there was a family dinner today?”

“Oh, Aunt Helena gave me permission to skip family gatherings unless she personally summoned me. I guess she was tired of all the accidental poisonings that happened when I was around,” Marielle laughed. 

“Please, no one believes that those poisonings were accidental,” I replied. “In fact I’m pretty sure most of them were just because you discovered a new herb, or toxin, and decided to test it on the most convenient target possible. Which just happened to be one of our relatives.”

“Can you blame me?” Marielle pouted. “I need test subjects, and since I only get volunteers when Aunt Helena sends someone to me as a punishment, I need to get creative. I never intentionally test lethal compounds, and honestly everyone I poisoned had it coming. They should have known better than to let their food sit undefended in this house.”

“You’re not wrong,” I muttered, before shaking my head. “Anyways, I’d love to stick around and talk shop, but I’m kind of in a rush. I need to collect and process a ton of herbs as quickly as possible.”

“Oh? Why?” Marielle asked, tilting her head to the side.

“Someone attacked the council and poisoned the participants. Apparently the locals haven’t been able to identify the toxin, and Uncle Andreas is in bad shape,” I said. “Kathrine and I are being sent through the gate in order to work with the other houses and investigate.”

“Cooperate? Really?” Marielle asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, give the impression that we’re cooperating anyway. Kathrine and I are fairly sure Aunt Helena plans to send several of our cousins to investigate behind the scenes. We’re just the distraction,” I said.

“That does sound like her style,” Marielle agreed. “Well, it would if you replaced ‘investigate’ with ‘figure out who’s responsible and murder both them and their immediate families’.”

“True. I just hope she sends someone subtle enough to avoid getting caught by the task force, because I really don’t want to have to explain why a couple of my cousins are running around the city unsupervised when the houses are supposed to be working together,” I said.

“You make our cousins sound like a bunch of incompetent children when you put it like that,” Marielle giggled. 

“Depends who we’re talking about,” I grumbled. “Anyways… would you mind helping me? You’re one of the few people that I would trust to collect and package this stuff without risking cross-contamination.”

“Do you have a list?” Marielle asked curiously.

“I started putting a mental one on the way over,” I replied. “Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?”

“Of course,” Marielle chirped before stepping over to the side table and rummaging through the pile of scattered papers, bottles and other miscellaneous equipment scattered across it.

“How can you be so meticulous when taking notes about herbs and alchemical formulas, and so un-organized when doing anything else?” I asked. 

“Because I enjoy herbology and alchemy, and organization is boring,” Marielle grumbled before pulling out a pen and a crumpled piece of paper. “No writing on the alchemy tables!”

“I know, I know,” I said, before stepping over to an empty desk on the far side of the room. I quickly scribbled out a list of all the herbs I might need, stopping a couple of times to consider the different esoteric toxins I’d studied before.

“Why not include Buforotoxin or Arthrotoxin?” Marielle asked as she watched over my shoulder. 

“I considered them; however, they’re only effective against a very specific subset of organic toxins, one that’s extremely difficult to work with, and if Buroro or Arthro are given to a weakened patient that’s NOT affected by those organic toxins, they’ll almost certainly kill the patient,” I said. “And while I doubt I’d ever misdiagnose a patient to that extent, the truth is I don’t have the time to milk a bunch of poisonous creatures in order to harvest a significant amount of either toxin right now.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Marielle replied. “I was harvesting a bunch of venomous creatures earlier today in order to replenish my personal supply. You can have a vial or two, as long as you pay me back later.”

“Wait… what are you working on that requires a significant amount of both Buroro and Arthrotoxin to create?” I asked, looking up.

“A new serum for the troops,” Marielle replied with a grin. “One that accelerates the enhances the user’s strength, speed and reaction time, in exchange for a small chance of a heart attack.”

“So you’re using the toxins to deaden the users nerves, while some other compound drives the muscles and nerves into overdrive?” I asked.

“That’s the plan. If everything goes as planned, it’ll be fifteen to twenty percent more effective than the current generic combat drugs,” Marielle declared proudly. “Unforutately it’ll still be far less effective than the tailor made serums many of our family members make.”

“Well, that’s not a big surprise,” I said. “Most personal serums require extremely rare materials to create, and we need to spend months building up a tolerance to the ingredients before be can even start testing the mixture. Even if it didn’t require months of preparation, and testing, most of us still wouldn’t share our formulas. With all the backstabbing that goes on around here it doesn’t hurt to have a something up your sleeve to give you a little bit of an edge.”

“Is that why I’ve only seen you use the generic serums? You don’t want to reveal what your personal ones do?” Marielle asked.

“That’s one of the reasons,” I admitted. “A lot of my serums tend to push my body to its very limits when I use them, and require a long recovery time afterwards, so I don’t like using them unless I don’t have any other choice.”

“Now I really want to know what you’ve put together,” Marielle said, before leaning forward and resting her chin on my shoulder. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me a quick peek at a couple of those formulas the next time you drop by the estate, would you? Pretty please?”

I turned and gave her a bright smile. “Absolutely not,” I said, before letting the smile fall. “Although you’re one of the very few people that I trust around here, I made the decision to never share my formulas with anyone. I don’t want all my hard work to end up in some grimoire in the family library, where it can be stolen and misused by future generations.”

“I see you’re still bitter about Aunt Helena adding your mother’s personal lab journals to the family archive,” Marielle grumbled.

“Even though she claims it was my mother’s last wish to see her work preserved, anyone that’s read them can tell that’s a lie. They’re filled with my mother’s personal thoughts and musings. They’re practically a diaries. Not only that but they mention compounds she didn’t want the rest of teh family to know about,” I said. “It’s obvious my from the tone taht mother never intended to hand them over to the family. In fact, it sounded like she was trying to keep them from falling into my Aunt’s hands”

“Yet they did,” Marielle said. “And there’s nothing you can do about it now. At least you got to read them, I’m still waiting for Aunt Helena’s permission to access the restricted section.” She snatched the list off the desk and glanced through it. “This all seems reasonable enough. There are are a couple restricted herbs here, but nothing from the restricted section, so it shouldn’t take us too long to collect it all. How about you collect everything from buildings one and two, while I grab things from three and four? Once we’ve got everything we can meet back here and pack it up for transport.”

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

“Of course not. I’m not working on anything important right now, this just gives me an excuse to stand up and stretch my legs,” she replied.

“In that case: Thank you, I appreciate it,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it, we’re family after all,” Marielle grinned. Before I could say anything she spun on her heel and marched towards building three.

“Don’t remind me,” I grumbled. “If the rest of our family was half the person you are I wouldn’t feel like throttling them on a regular basis.”

“But it would also make things a lot less interesting around here,” she called over her shoulder. “See you soon!”

“Later,” I replied as she disappeared into one of the heavy glass doors on the other side of the room. After she was gone I pushed myself to my feet. “Well, no point in putting this off any longer than I need to, time to get to work.”