Muiri expected as much, but at least the Captain had the courtesy to hoist her over the wall. Her feet were sore already and the wooden pole of her weapon was already giving her blisters and cuts. The blood seeped into the links between the plates in her armour soiling her undergarments. She had half a mind to roll her eyes as the Captain barked fresh orders at her and the other one, and certainly had no mind to listen to them. The moment he left she did so too, practically following him down the ladder just a distance behind. Except she was not headed for the front gate, rather a small room within the walls of the keep itself.
The sound of her polearm being flung against the wall disrupted the work of green and white-robed men, their heads buried in work. Some sat, scribbling away in parchments and thick books and some stood at tables surrounded by infinite amounts of herbs and bugs and sorts.
"Out of my way!" Muiri snapped, shoving a little man with a big hat away from a table, making him drop a bowl of brown liquid on the floor.
"What do you think you're-?!" He began to exclaim, interrupted by Muiri flinging her hand nonchalantly in his face. Currently, she didn't possess the patience to listen to small men in big clothes or to tell them what she intended on doing, for that matter.
The man began to scramble on the ground, making poor attempts to scoop up the liquid with the bowl. "You have obstructed a fine line of work, girl, and this is a restricted area," he sqwaked, his high voice thick with fury but Muiri had already begun to combine a reagent from the heap of items on the table.
"Fine line of work?" Muiri scoffed, grinding the ingredients in the bowl together. "Wheat, Empire berries and hollock, most common components of a healing remedy, yes?" The man nodded, rising from the ground with only a few drops of his brown liquid remaining. "You have heard of Ira berries, distant cousin of the Empire strain?" Nod.
Empire berries, an appropriate name for the abundance of berries that flourish within the Empire. A hybrid of that particular berry, named "Ira", grow within the deserts of Blackford and are deadly poisonous when consumed. The Hollock river runs parallel to the Hogol just east of Rivergate and is the source of hollock, the name given to the sweetwater tapped from there. Commonly used in meads and ales, storage of hollock is seemingly endless.
"Yes, but what do they have to do with-"
"Quiet, let me continue." The man looked taken aback, but did not argue. "Using Ira rather than Empire produces an entirely different effect, in fact the complete opposite." Muiri pushed back a clump of her mousy hair, showing her left ear, or what was left of it. The entire upper half was missing, leaving merely a stump of distorted flesh. She let the man gawk to himself before continuing to grind away. A tap in the centre of the table labelled "HOLLOCK - USE SPARINGLY" on a silver plate was the final step, and Muiri did not hesitate to turn it. Only a few drops dribbled out from the tap and into a glass bottle, but it was enough. Combining the rest of the mixture, she stormed out of the lab and back into the blazing sun, squinting to find the person she needed.
"Captain!" Muiri called, slightly struggling to catch up with the man, who had his worn eyes set on the charging horde of beasts, making their way straight for the keep. "Take this," she puffed, holding out the bottle. "Please, test it on one of them. But whatever you do, do not let it touch you. At all!" She thrust it into his hands, refusing a negative answer and left to retrieve her weapon. Yet what she failed to tell him was that such a small concentration of hollock could possibly have minuscule effects on the tough-skinned savages, but mammoth impacts on the soldiers. Not that she would know - after all, her skin had been the only test subject to date.