Electrolytes

Victoria curled over the table in the basement at Craven Manor, her head woozy, her thoughts flowing wild. It was the first time she'd been down there in nearly the whole week, and she was pleased to find the spiders hadn't yet made a new home of the place in her stead; but, if her recovery was to get set on course, she'd have to figure a way to replenish her identity and decloud her aching spirit.

A noise behind her, near the stairs, signalled the arrival of another: her modified-goblin compatriot, Ingmar Gorwin, occasionally known to the residents of Grimshaw as the Demigoblin.

Cast in a white coat and ratty cloak over it, he approached her side and extended a hand out toward her, while she leaned over the table for useful support.

"Here," Ingmar said, handing over a vial filled with a swirling pink-tinted liquid.

"What's this?" Victoria asked, staring at the pink fluid with furrowed brows.

"It's an electrolyte potion," Ingmar said.

"When did you make this?" Victoria asked.

"When you were locked in your room for three days, making sounds no creature should make, human, snake-beast, or Fae."

"And it's not poison?"

"No," Ingmar said. "Although many of the ingredients did come from Carraway's Potions & Goods, so if it worsens your condition rather than helping, you have Blythe to go after, not me."

"What's in it?"

"Electrolytes," Ingmar said, his deep, black, glassy eyes staring at her heaping form. "Sodium chloride, magnesium, potassium, some calcium and vitamins as well. And I think it tastes like cherries."

Victoria reached out for it, and he let her have it, transferring the vial over to her hand so she could uncork it and take a sip.

It wasn't easy to get down, as her stomach was still churning, and she didn't take it all at once. The taste was nice, though, and the texture was like a sugary, semi-solid ooze that coated her throat as it went down.

"Thanks, Ingmar," she said, setting it in an empty rack and refocusing on her other laboratory glassware. "There's still work to be done."

"But you need to recover from this first," Ingmar said. "There's plenty more of that potion if you need it."

She focused on her flasks and boiling tubes and distillation arrays as he went back up the stairs, then turned her eyes to the pink-hued potion, fell back into a chair, and took the vial with her until she needed to sip the rest of it too.