Alchemy

Alchemists Guild
there’s a right and proper Guild of Alchemists, but they’re very choosy about the sort of person they let in, and the sort of work they let them do.
 * Sugared milk of the poppy - a rich ladies vice mad from Jeremite poppies.
 * Descriptions: A small crowd of alchemists' assistants brushed past him, hogging the street. They wore the trademark red skullcaps of their profession, and displayed the chemical burns along their hands and faces that were their badges of pride.
 * Alchemy is revered in every corner of our world, is it not? It lights our rooms, salves our injuries, preserves our food ... enhances our cider.

Black Alchemists
Illegal purveyors of things alchemical - usually unpleasantly so. Black alchemists are sort of the reason the guild has such strict rules. They do business in false shop fronts, with people like us. Drugs, poisons, what have you. The Capa owns them, same as he owns us, but nobody really leans on them directly. They’re, ah, not the sort of people you want to upset. Jessaline d’Aubart is probably the best of the lot.
 * Janelline & Jessaline d'Aubart's Illicit apothecary shop is located above a scribe's collective in the respectable Fountain Bend neighbourhood. A winding staircase leads up from the scribing floor and is guarded - requires the relevant hand signals and copper barons.
 * The second floor has a reception room, windowless, walls and floor both paneled with a golden hardwood that retains a faint aroma of pine lacquer. A tall counter divides the room precisely in half; no chairs in evidence on the customer side and nothing at all on display on the merchant side, just a single closed door.
 * Jessaline stands behind the counter, a striking woman in her mid fifties with a cascade of charcoal coloured hair and dark, wary eyes. Jannellaine, half her age, stood to her mothers right with a crossbow pointed your direction.
 * Barrow robbers blossom, a purple powder - Sickness and severe vomiting - put it in water as an emetic - 5 to 10 minutes to work its magic.
 * Somnay pine bark - Removes sickness - crumble it and steep it in a tea. 3 Crowns and 20 Solons for the two (friendly rates)

Descriptions
Pale Therese, the Consulting Poisoner, kept a rather comfortable parlour in which to discuss confidential business with her clients who were seated cross-legged on soft, wide cushions, holding (but not sipping from) little porcelain cups of thick Jereshti coffee. Pale Therese, a serious, ice-eyed Vadran of about thirty, had hair the colour of new sail-canvas that bobbed against the collar of her black velvet coat as she paced the room across from her guests. Her bodyguard, a well-dressed Verrari woman with a basket-hiked rapier and a lacquered wooden club hanging from her belt, lounged against the wall beside the room's single locked door, silent and watchful.

'Oh, come now, you mustn't think me unsympathetic.' Pale Therese held up her left hand, showing off a collection of rings and alchemical scars, the fourth finger of that hand was missing. 'A careless accident, when I was an apprentice, working with something unforgiving. I had ten heartbeats to choose - my finger or my life. Fortunately there was a heavy knife very close at hand. I know what it means to taste the fruits of my art, gentlemen. I know what it is to feel sickly and anxious and desperate, waiting to see what happens next.'

Alchemical Uses

 * Alchemical hair dyes
 * Alchemical wine - He marvelled at the way the taste of apricots transmuted to the sharper flavour of slightly tart apple in mid-swallow.
 * Alchemical fruit - Sofia Orange - makes it's own liquor, very sweet and powerful.
 * Alchemical lanterns
 * Alchemical glue
 * Alchemical hearthstone - Heats up to cook from without fear of fire.
 * Beta paranella - a colourless, tasteless alchemical powder also known as 'the night friend'. It was popular with rich people of a nervous disposition, who took it to ease themselves into deep, restful slumber. When mixed with alcohol, beta paranella was rapidly effective in tiny quantities; the two substances were as complementary as fire and dry parchment. It would have been widely used for criminal purposes if not for the fact that it sold for twenty times its own weight in white iron.
 * Black Lotus: 'An assassin,' she continued, 'had dusted the inside of Requin's costume with something devilish. The blackest sort of alchemy, a kind of aqua regia for human flesh. It was just a powder ... it needed sweat and warmth to bring it to life. And so that woman wore it for nearly half an hour, until she'd just begun to sweat and enjoy herself. And that's when she started to scream. 'I wasn't there. But there were artificers of my acquaintance in the crowd, and they say she screamed and screamed until her voice broke. Until there was nothing coming from her throat but a hiss, and still she kept trying to scream. Only one side of the costume was doused with the stuff... a perverse gesture. Her skin bubbled and ran like hot tar. Her flesh steamed, Master de Ferra. No one had the courage to touch her, except Requin. He cut her costume off, demanded water, worked over her feverishly. He wiped her burning skin clean with his jacket, with scraps of cloth, with his bare hands. He was so badly burned himself that he wears gloves to this day, to hide his own scars.'
 * Shipbane Sphere He was holding a grey sphere, perhaps eight inches in diameter, with a curiously greasy surface. He cradled it in his left hand, holding it over the open cargo hatch, and his right hand clutched something sticking out of the top of the sphere. Whole thing goes white-hot. You can't touch it; can't get close. Leave it on deck and it burns right through, down into the innards, and it sets anything on fire. Hell, it can probably set water on fire. Sure doesn't go out when you douse it. That thing he's holding is the twist-match fuse,' said Ezri. 'He moves his right hand, or we kill him and make that thing drop, it comes right out and ignites. This is what those damned things are for, get it? One man can hold a hundred prisoner if he just stands in the right spot.'
 * The sphere was incandescent, a miniature sun, burning with the vivid colours of molten silver and gold. Locke felt the heat against his skin from thirty feet away, recoiled from the light, smelled the strange tang of scorched metal instantly. She ran, as best she could run; as she made her way toward the rail it became a jog, and then a desperate hop. She was on fire all the way, screaming all the way, unstoppable all the way.
 * She made it to the larboard rail and with one last convulsive effort, as much back and legs as what was left of her arms, she heaved the shipbane sphere across the gap to the Dread Sovereign. It grew inbrightness even as it flew, a molten-metal comet, and Rodanov's crewfolk recoiled from it as it landed on their deck. You couldn't touch such a thing, she'd said - well, clearly you could. But Locke knew you couldn't touch it and live. The arrow that took her in the stomach an eyeblink later was too late to beat her throw, and too late to do any real work. She fell to the deck, trailing smoke, and then all hell broke loose for the last time that day.
 * There was an eruption of light and fire at the waist of the Dread Sovereign; the incandescent globe, rolling to and fro, had at last burst. White-hot alchemy rained down hatches, caught sails, engulfed crewfolk and nearly bisected the ship in seconds.