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WHO: Cosima Niehaus - and you?
WHAT: Catch-all log for August
WHEN: Handwavey depending on when your character will be around Skyhold
WHERE: ...Skyhold
NOTES: While Cosima is going to be ill in one of the starters, it is fair to assume she'll be back on her feet within a week or two, so feel free to assume she looks fine if you run into her outside the healer's tent. (Alternately, if you'd like her looking a little peaky as a hook, that works too!) If you want something other than the hooks below, or want to chat first, DM me or grab me on plurk.

I. Healer's Tents

Cosima has been instructed to rest, and at first, the instruction is unnecessary; she's too weak to do much else. But spirit healing seems to have done the trick, at least temporarily, and as her strength starts to come back, it brings her curiosity with it. Thus, whenever no one is there to order her back to her cot, she wanders - mostly respectfully keeping her distance, but occasionally asking a question if she thinks she can get away with it. Some of the healing is related to medicine as she understands it. Some of it she has no frame of reference for at all. But concerns like "not wearing herself out" are secondary to learning more about what's going on as they patch people back together. She's not as well as she'd like to think, but she's well enough to get restless.

II. Kitchens

It is well known that convalescence requires baked goods. Cosima is still hesitant about overstepping, since she technically hasn't joined the Inquisition; she's a refugee, and she's well aware of how long she wouldn't last if someone decided to kick her out. So she is very scrupulous about asking first before she takes anything and about trying not to be unreasonable in how frequently she asks.

It's not her fault that those little buns with the jam that tastes like peach in the center are so addictive.

III. Various Around Skyhold - Roommate Search

Once she's determined that she's eligible for a barracks room, Cosima has decided to get one. What she hasn't entirely resigned herself to facing is a randomly assigned roommate. She's too old for that nonsense. On the other hand, she doesn't exactly have a huge roster of acquaintances to ask. So she's compromising by asking around. If someone else is looking for a roommate, at least they can have a beer together and make sure they don't hate each other before committing to cohabitation.

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She concedes the point, grabbing a chair as instructed. "Oh my god, please, hit me with details. Details were my life, back home. Plus I've never heard of Dragonthorn, so literally everything you say will be interesting."

That's not only the cabin fever talking, either; she really does seem genuine. In fact:

"Do you have to crush it, for the stabilizing effect? Or is it some sort of oil on the leaf, and you're just trying to increase surface area?"

Now he smiles. Someone who wants to learn will always win approval for him, and he nods to the latter.

"It's what the leaf contains, and the more surface area exposed, the more potent it is. Which also means you've got to be careful what size you cut it into. For most potions, you want larger slices of Dragonthorn, to balance them out enough to not explode when they're bottled, or fizzle into uselessness in an hour or two." Anders takes one of the leaves off to the side and cuts it into three, gesturing toward it. "That's the cut you'd want for that."

Meanwhile, the rest of his board holds very finely chopped Dragonthorn. "Now, there are potions that cause fire to spread, and then fire's naturally inclined to spread as well. What I'm looking for is something that can stop the spread, contain the flames, or, if I'm lucky, put them out completely. Throw it, bottle shatters, no more fire." A beat, and the smile goes wry. "That's the hope, at least. The goal."

A sigh and a shrug. It clearly hasn't gotten there yet.

"That has to be a pretty spectacular experimental process, when you get to the practical stage," she says with a small grin. "So you're basically looking for like... something that does to an accelerant what an antidote does to toxins?" She scoots a little closer so she can examine - but not touch - the chopped herbs. "Not something it would occur to me to use a leaf for. But then, I'm not a chemist."

His smile widens.

"The testing phase is fairly fun, so long as you make sure you're playing with it carefully. I'd like to not set the whole mountain on fire. And yes, basically. But it's not a regular leaf. Dragonthorn is not like... a leaf picked from any typical tree. The herbs we work with have magical properties that have been identified and tested over the years. You can't grab leaves off the ground and toss them in and expect them to do anything."

The finely chopped leaves go into the flask before he shakes it to stir them up a little. Then he's setting down the flask and resting his hand on it, fingers glowing green.

"There's precision to it, which is why this project is going to take some work. I don't expect to have the ratios right for a time. What is it you used details for 'back home?'"

"Mm," she says to his explanation - he didn't lose her, not as basic as he's able to make it - and then turns to his question. "So where I'm from, we've developed a lot of tools to look at or measure things people can't see. What I do, personally, is study the way organisms - animals, mostly - are related to each other based on the most fundamental building blocks of their biology. This guy a couple hundred years ago figured out that similar animals are descendants of one common ancestor species, but it's actually way more complex than he had the tools to measure or describe."

She perks up a bit, when she's talking shop. Even if she's not recovered yet, engagement definitely feels better than lying around or restlessly wandering the tents.

"I..." He wants to say he sees, but it's not true. He doesn't quite see, as much as he wants to. "Building blocks of their biology. What they're made out of that's... similar?"

There are similarities in a lot of living things. Everything that didn't live underwater breathed air, after all. As did, apparently, one large thing that lived underwater - whales. So they all had lungs, so maybe...

"Like heart, lungs? Except you can see those. I'm sorry. I want to understand but I'm not following yet."

"No, it's fine. I'm still catching up on your guys' methods, to be fair." And then there's magic. For now though:

"So, um, if you think of an animal like a building. A building is made up of bricks and mortar. The analogy doesn't hold up if you push it too far, but you can think of cells as the bricks that make us up, except they're so small it takes millions and millions of them. And different kinds do different things. The cells that build your tongue are different from the cells that build your hair. But both are you."

Millions of tiny 'bricks' make up his hair and his tongue. It's not the easiest to picture, but people are made from small things. He's monitored every stage of pregnancy; he'd know.

"And you look at these things? For similarities? What does that tell you?" The potion has steeped, and Anders carefully strains the used leaves out, bottling the liquid and reaching for a basin. That gets set down and another bottle pulled out before he pauses, listening for the answer.

"I look specifically at how organisms develop," she says, watching him work. "Because a lot of organisms start out really similar to one another. So the differences tell us a lot about how organisms are related, and give us a reasonable basis to conjecture about whether they both came from a common ancestor on a scale of millions of years."

Millions of years. He pauses in what he's doing as he looks over at her with a little surprise. How much older must her world be than Thedas? But now isn't the time to barrage her with questions; she needs rest rather than being taxed.

"I've so many things to ask you later. For now, brace yourself. The bowl is about to hold fire."

There are a few sticks he'd left off to the side earlier, and Anders snaps two in half, putting them in the bowl before he pours a few drops of the just-grabbed potion on top of them. A gesture of his hand later the sticks are merrily burning away. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, looking for any reaction. He's a bit of a showoff.

After that, though, he's picking up what he'd made and dripping the dragonthorn potion over the fire. There's some fizzling... but it doesn't go out. Anders sighs. Not there yet, then.

"I can counter the magic of what I dripped on first, but it doesn't deal with the natural elements of the fire itself yet."

It's impressive, and she lets herself be duly impressed. "I imagine there are a lot of practical applications for that, even with its limitations. So the fire acts like regular fire once you start it, more or less?"

"Yes. I can influence it," he holds out his hand and makes in increase in size a little before shrinking to smaller than it had been, before finally putting it out entirely, "but I can do that with small amounts of natural fire as well. For all intents and purposes, that was a regular fire once I started it."

At least she looks a little impressed. It's fun to have an approving audience.

"The liquid I poured on first could have sustained it for far longer than anything naturally would, and I was able to neutralize that, at least. But it would be nice to eliminate the fire entirely."

He exhales and looks at the things around him, contemplating. After a shrug, he gathers a few more dragonthorn leaves and starts chopping. They'll be a base, and he'll add something else this time.

"So if it's regular fire, you're either getting rid of the heat, getting rid of the air, getting rid of the fuel, or a combination of those," she says, thinking aloud. "If the liquid is like magical accelerant, then countering it should most likely be a matter of making it have less affinity for the fuel. Theoretically. I mean, magic could just violate the laws of what I understand, too."

What she understands so far, at least.

"I'm modifying the heat," he says slowly, mulling over everything she's saying. "Eliminating it, or increasing the amount of it. Magic has laws, but I'm not certain the laws fit other natural things."

He breathes in and out, continuing the cutting and his contemplation.

"For instance, I could rain fire from the sky. I can create spikes of ice that stab up through the earth. I can close wounds, cause a seed to sprout, and so on. Magic is... magic."

"Okay, fair, but like... it has rules, right? Different rules, sure, but it's not just chaos." At least not this kind. "And it still interacts with the rest of the world, which as far as I can observe, is subject to a lot of forces similar to those where I'm from."

Gravity still seems to work, as does combustion. Friction. She assumes magnetism is around, though she hasn't seen that one in action here yet.

"So the natural laws and the magical laws have to have some sort of intersection."

"Yes. Magic has rules, and it behaves in specific ways. Generally. There's... room for improvisation, adaptation, but they follow some basic guidelines."

The knife gets set down and he holds out his hand toward her, palm up. A moment later, there's a blue orb hovering over his hand, crackling with electricity.

"Lightning is most drawn to metal, and its natural inclination is to spread. When holding it, you have to fight what it wants to do. On the other hand," the blue vanishes to be replaced with a frosty spike, "ice's spread is slow. It can be shaped, it's dormant. You push it forward, while you hold back lightning."

The ice spike vanishes as well and Anders wipes his palm on his robes to dry it off and get it a little warmer.

"Is that what you're asking after?"

"Sort of - I mean, both of those make some sense, based on what I know about the nonmagical versions of each of them. Metal's a good conductor for electricity, generally, though some metals more than others. Ice is something that needs conditions just right to form and grow, you'd have to push against entropy. So things that take more energy seem harder to do. Makes sense, even if I can't do it."

"I'm glad." It's nice when things make sense across worlds. Sometimes they don't, and that's as frustrating as it is fascinating. Life and nature aren't always life and nature.

Anders finishes with the dragonthorn and contemplates what else he has. After a moment he starts pulling out strands of another herb.

"This is spindleweed. A potion made of this can lessen the effects of magical elements if they're used against you. Therefore..."

He tilts his head toward the bowl with dragonthorn. "The reason I didn't try the combination initially is because sometimes dragonthorn can be too much of a neutralizing agent. But we'll see." He starts smashing the spindleweed with the flat of the blade, letting the juices out before adding it to the bowl.

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