yoda

Between the crazed reaction to him when he joined, and more recently the sudden and unexpected death of one of the very pups that one of his family had been accused of siring, Seth had judged it to wise to be discrete and lay low, venturing out away from his den only to eat and limp quietly across the border to collect herbs outside of pack lands. He spent as little time as possible in the pack lands anywhere except immediately outside his den and in a beeline for the border, not wanting to run into any of those who objected to his presence, lest someone remember he was an Abraxas an accuse him of murdering the child. Once things calmed down and people began to forget who he was, he could carefully integrate into the pack. For now, well, it was better for his own safety to avoid notice.

That was all well and good, however, as it gave him time to himself to experiment. He had taken note some time ago that the presence of certain smells tended to effect a wolf's mood - any healer knew of the effect of lavender's scent, for instance, but there were other scents he had noted to have a subtle effect on mood. He had begun experimenting with ways to separate the oils from the herbs, though he was somewhat stymied by his lack of materials and his desire to remain unnoticed within pack lands. Steam, he had hypothosized, would be the best way to separate that oil, but a fire to boil water for steam would attract attention he did not wish to attract just yet and the few hot springs he knew of were too far for him to easily travel with his misshapen and crippled form. He'd made due with the weak "tea" he could achieve by placing water and herbs in a container out in the sun - something that was getting easier now that the hot summer sun heated the water more efficiently. He still wasn't satisfied with the results, though, and he was continuing to experiment with the efficiency. He had seen hollow metal pipes on old human ruins that he could perhaps use to funnel the steam to a secondary container to separate the water from the oil... but only if he could travel far enough to find some, figure out how to enclose the container to force the steam through the pipe, and find a way to heat the water to make the steam to begin with... It might be simpler to simply burn the herbs, as he'd found that released some of their scent, but it also had a strong smell of burning grass that was often unpleasant. He preferred the idea of isolating the scent entirely for a more subtle effect.

He'd woken up this morning with pain radiating down his back, the product of a restless night sleep that had him sleeping in positions that left the muscles in his crippled back cramped and painful, so he was outside his den in the morning light, carefully stretching out each painful muscle while reviewing his latest ideas as a distraction. The day was already warming up, promising to be extremely hot by the time the rain would hit this afternoon. It helped relax the spasming muscles, and Seth made a mental note to look into the benefits of capturing heat for more than just his herbal oils experiments. Perhaps steam could be used for the muscle and joint pain that plagued him, with a big enough container for him to step into...