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"Are you familiar with the plant?" Dinah asked the alchemist who had a hand pressed to his nose.

"No." It was hard for him to admit it but Syryn wasnt the encyclopedia of knowledge that he wished to be. "I\'ve seen similar flowers but none that stink like it."

"It doesn\'t stink," Dinah good naturally rebutted. "That\'s just your picky nose talking."

Right then, the door to the house that the garden belonged to was thrown open. A woman came out to see who had entered her garden.

"Hey, what are you two doing there? Get away from the plant," the woman shouted from where she stood.

"We have some questions for you," Dinah yelled back. "Can we have a moment?"

"I\'m busy right now. Why dont you come back tomorrow?"

"It\'s an emergency, lady. The village headman sent us," Syryn replied. "We just need you here for a few minutes."

The woman looked inside the house where Syryn heard the sound of a baby crying. She went back in and came out with a toddler in her arms.

Closing the gap between them quickly, the tired-looking woman stopped beside the plant and eyed the two trespasses with suspicion. "You\'re the priestess and the healer. What business do you have with my prized trumpets?"

She looked perfectly healthy save for her tiredness. Even her young toddler appeared as lively as a child its age could be. The alchemist was touched by a moment of doubt about the plant and its suspected nefarious abilities.

"Are you the only one in the village who grows this plant?" He asked her.

"Yes, why?" She looked confused at the line of questioning that came from the healer.

"Where did you get it from?"

"I got the seeds about half a year ago from a group of passing merchants. They told me it was an exotic plant that had been found by adventurers. The seeds were still being studied by some botanists and they weren\'t sure if it would have any use for a perfume maker. What\'s wrong? Is the plant bad?" An unfriendly look passed over her expression. "I spent a lot of money buying the seeds."

"And did you let people touch the plant or give away cuttings of it?" Syryn asked as he stepped closer to the plant and carefully observed the flowers.

"I didn\'t give away anything. The other villagers know about it though. They began visiting and touching the plant when it started to bud."

The alchemist squinted and bent his head to take a better look at the receptacle of the flower where it merged with the stem. "And did it include the hunter, the builder, and the first guy that died?"

"What are you saying?" The woman\'s reply was acidic. She frowned at the young alchemist.

"I\'m just asking you a simple question," Syryn turned to the woman. "Answer it."

She looked to Dinah but the priestess was a silent spectator. "How should I know? Most of the villagers came to my garden to look at it. My trumpets couldn\'t have killed them. I\'m alive, aren\'t I? If they were poisonous, I would have died first."

It was reasoning that Syryn could not argue with. He didnt want to be wrong about the plant but the alchemist couldn\'t explain the hole in his theory which the woman had pointed out.

"Can I trouble you to let me have a sample of the plant?" He asked the woman. If Syryn was wrong, he was wrong. But right now, this was all he had and he would investigate it thoroughly.

"What do you need?" She asked.

"Leaves, a petal, some pollen, and sap if it has any."

"Let me get my tools," she replied. "And don\'t touch it while I\'m gone."

When she left, Dinah watched in disapproval as Syryn quickly removed a glass tube and a knife from his bag. The alchemist put the knife away as if he had second thoughts about what he was doing. But he hadn\'t. Syryn broke a twig from a nearby tree and bent close to the flower.

"What are you doing?! Syryn!" Dinah whispered.

The alchemist was scraping something into his tube with the broken twig. A few scrapes on the receptacle of the flower and he was done. The twig was crushed under his foot and the tube put away in his bag.

"I didn\'t do anything," Syryn calmly replied after he was done stealing samples. "Stop acting suspicious, Dinah. If she comes over and sees you looking so flustered, she might think we tried to steal her precious trumpets."

The woman came back and saw the unwanted guests standing far away from her plant. Throwing another frown their way, she clipped off a leaf. "Do you have something to put this in?" She asked Syryn.

He handed her four glass tubes. "Put them all in separate tubes. I dont want the samples to contaminate each other."

"There\'s nothing to be contaminated," she replied sourly but did as Syryn instructed.

When he received the test tubes from the woman, Syryn gingerly wrapped them in a piece of cloth before they were stashed away. "Thank you. We\'ll come back again."

The duo left the garden through the gate like respectable folks. They left behind a woman who gloomily stared at their departing backs.

"What are you going to do with the samples?" Dinah asked Syryn.

"I have to test them but I\'m not sure how. I\'ll maybe run parallel tests on the plant samples and the dead insects just to see if anything pops up."

"Let\'s get you the insects then," Dinah replied. "Can I stay at your cabin for tonight?"

"Why? Have you run out of money?"

"I\'m just curious about what you might find," Dinah answered. "And it\'s boring all by myself at the inn."

"Pay rent for a night," Syryn replied.

"I want to freeload."

"Then you\'ll be my assistant. Here-" Syryn materialised another empty tube. "Stuff it with dead insects. I want the dried ones, fresh ones, and those with the grey fungus on their bodies."

"How many tubes do you carry with you?" Dinah asked as she crouched down and began to search the grass.

"I have another twenty-two tubes."

"So many!"

"It\'s not even half the number that most alchemists carry around with them. We always have plenty of tubes for samples and ingredients that we might stumble upon while going about our lives."

Dinah shovelled dead insects into the tube with a stick she broke off a tree. "What are you planning to do with all the samples?"

"I want to establish a connection between the dead insects and the plant. Can you not get mud inside? I said insect samples, not mud samples."

"Why don\'t you do it yourself then?"

"I\'m not the one paying off a night\'s stay at the cosy Nigh\'hart cabin. Look, there\'s grass inside the tube-"

"I will shove this up your asshole," Dinah held the glass tube up.

"That would be funny. Rowan beaten by a test tube."

"I don\'t even want to know." The priestess turned her back to the chuckling alchemist. She found a few more insects before calling it day.

----------

Back at the cabin, Syryn and Dinah set up a working space far away from the others. Rei and Gosan were enjoying the cool evening air while Akida sharpened a kitchen knife on a whetstone. Lucien had reportedly eaten lunch and fallen asleep again.

"Dinah, do you have an extra robe? We might have to burn that one after we\'re done with the testing."

"I do have an extra but I can\'t burn my vestments. That\'s disrespectful. Give me something of yours to wear."

Syryn handed her one of his shirts and when Dinah wore it, the material stretched too tight across the chest.

"That\'s no good," Syryn muttered. "Can you breathe?"

"Yes. I\'d rather wear something else though."

"Who asked you to have such massive boobs? All my shirts are of similar size," Syryn dryly replied.

"The same reason you are such a brat. You didn\'t choose to be born with that attitude, did you?" Dinah was a patient woman but Syryn sometimes tested her like no one else could. She was a well-respected member of the fire temple and had never been told off by anyone for being well endowed.

"Let\'s get going before you tear the shirt while heaving in anger." Syryn turned around and left, unaware of how close he was to getting his head busted open by an irate priestess.

"Oi, Akida, sharpen my knife." Syryn tossed his folded blade at the avian\'s feet and lead Dinah towards their makeshift lab.

The alchemist laid the test tubes out on the plank that served as their table. Three more empty tubes, watch glasses, forceps and an assortment of tools came out of his dimensional bag.

"Bring some boiled water from the kitchen," Syryn told the priestess.

While Dinah did as he bid, Syryn took out all his remaining test tubes and arranged them carefully on the makeshift table.

"Here. Water was already boiling when I went in. Your avian guard wasnt too happy about me stealing his hot water." Dinah placed the pot of water on the ground next to Syryn. "Are we using all those tubes?" she asked him.

"Yes. And they\'re not going to be enough for what I want to do."

"And what is it that you want to do?" Dinah asked him.

"Well, to make it simple, I will test the samples with several reagents. When a patient comes to me suffering from an infection that I cannot diagnose from his symptoms alone, what I do first is perform a test for the family of microbes that it belongs to. We already see fungus-like growths on the insect so that narrows down the possibilities."

"So you think it\'s a fungus?"

"We\'ll test for the others too."

"But there\'s got to be hundreds of different kinds of fungus."

"That\'s not the objective of our test, priestess. Remember what I told you about making a connection between the insects and the plant?"

"Now that you mention it, I do."

"Anyway, as I was saying, we\'re going to add seven different kinds of reagents to a sample each of the leaf, pollen, insect, and the powder that I scraped off. We\'ll wait overnight and see what happens to the samples by morning. If the insects have been infected by something on the plant then we\'ll find the same reaction from the same reagent added to both."

"So it\'s not the plant but something on the plant that did it?"

"Just a guess," Syryn replied. "The necrosis we saw cannot be achieved by floral poisoning, either through touching the plant or inhaling its pollen. Do you know what that means?"

"That something else caused it and it\'s growing on the plant?"

"A possibility." His suspicions originated at that moment when he saw the tiny grey nodules on the plant. The colour also matched what he had seen on the insects. The connection he was making between the creatures of interest was tenuous at best but Syryn didnt believe in coincidences lining up so nicely. And if he was wrong about it all, they would find out soon enough.