20 Eleint 2993
Vogelvina
Vogelvina returns to Gosterwick on the 13th of The Fading, ready to train to level up to second level. The next morning she wakes, completes her hour-long stretching, meditation, and fighting routine, smokes a cigarette, and heads out into the wilds of the New Forest with a tent and gear. For the next seven days, Vogelvina wanders the forest, training her body and mind to the next level in meditation, combat, and learning. Over these days she becomes intimately acquainted with the cycle of life and death in the natural world, studying both the prolonged process of birth and the at times undeniable cruelty of the long death.
Early in this week she stumbles upon a small ramshackle shack in a small clearing. Approaching cautiously, she sees no one about. As she is about to knock on the door of the shack, a voice, thin and reedy, calls out from inside and bids her enter. Vogelvina opens the door and crosses the threshold. An old woman, aged beyond anything Vogelvina has seen before greets her from a chair at a rickety small table. Intrigued, Vogelvina approaches and sits at the other chair. Hours pass as the two talk about life, death, birth, and rebirth. The old woman tells her about the ways of poisons and healing and how one must start with knowledge of the latter before embarking on a quest for mastery of the former. Sliding a worn and dog-eared copy of Pheetersin’s Guide to Medicinal Plants of Northern and Central Irthuin, the old woman bids Vogelvina start her training. Vogelvina offers to pay for the book, and the old women accepts 50 gp in exchange.
Vogelvina spends the remainder of her training collecting plants, preparing poultices, balms, unguents, ointments, and reductions as she starts to learn proficiency with an herbalism kit. Her studies that week culminate when she happens upon a wounded rabbit, bitten by a snake, making its way down the path of the long death. Taking pity on the bunny, and eager to apply her limited knowledge, Vogelvina prepares a paste of the bulb of the goldbark bud mixed with a dash of minced darkberry and feeds it to the quickly fading woodland creature. Returning to Gosterwick with the rabbit, Vogelvina continues to nurse the creature back to health and wakes on the 20th of The Fading a 2nd-level monk with the love and companionship of Tularemia, level 1 bunny.