The skull marked yearling had to travel a distance out from Aerie for his next experiment, too uncertain on whether the adults around (read: Riva, the senior healer) would be gracious about his porcupine's lesson plans. They had taken the long trip east to the prairie with him, for privacy, each carrying a portion of the materials he would need for a day of extracting potentially deadly herbs into a potent tincture. He had been forced to trade away some of his herbal concoctions to gather the proper supplies, which was a bit silly in hindsight - what was he spending all this effort on crafting shit for, if he had to trade it away to craft the next? His porcupines assured him it was all part of the deal of learning, and begrudgingly he accepted their wisdom and carried on.

Settling down in the middle of the prairie, he spread his materials out around him in a circle. A cluster of the soft blue flower wolfsbane at his left, a reclaimed air-tight(or so the trader assured him) jar and sinew in the middle, and some vodka he had pilfered from Aerie's stores on his right. The porcupines were chattering quietly to themselves a few meters off, rattling their spines occasionally like they were having a disagreement on how to proceed. Acacius was used to their squabbles and sat himself in the grass, awaiting the right time to begin.

Whatever she had expected to find when she followed the sound of chattering on a hunt, a yearling wolf loafing around with a pair of porcupines had not been it. It was safe to say, however, that hunting the porcupines was out of the question, since they were clearly companions to the wolf watching them quietly. She didn't make it a habit of trying to kill peoples' friends, after all. "Hello," she said to him instead, smiling in greeting. "What have you got there?" For he had with him a jar, a container of a strong-smelling alcohol, sinew, and flowers, and was clearly planning on doing something with the lot of it.

Acacius was eager to begin, tapping his paw softly upon the grasses as he watched his companions discuss amongst themselves. He was so focused on watching them for some sign that he'd nearly missed the stranger's approach, spinning his head toward her and blinking in surprise. At least it wasn't an Aerie wolf, expecting an explanation on what he was doing way out here. "

"Hi." The boy gave back happily. "I'm learning how to pull an extract from a flower." The bickering porcupines paused in their argument at the overheard conversation, glancing back to their charge and the stranger. They wobbled back over to where his supplies were strewn about, one taking it's place to his side and the other before him, to instruct. "A tincture." The instructing porcupine elaborated. She took a moment to look over the woman, quickly determining she was not a threat, and then proceeding with the lesson. "We have agreed that you probably want to crush the flowers first," The porcupine sent a dagger-like glare to her other half. "And then fill about a quarter of the jar with them."

Acacius quickly got to work, grabbing the lid of the jar as a surface to crush on, assembling the flowers atop it, and smushing them thoroughly with his paw. "My name is Acacius. Do you live around here?" There had to be some reason the woman had come up to greet him, he wasn't in a pack's territory, was he?

It seemed that the porcupines were his instructors, so it was definitely for the best that she had abandoned her hunt for them so quickly. Even if she hadn't killed them before realizing, it would certainly have disrupted the boy's lesson. While it was healthy to learn to deal with setbacks and disappointments like that, she didn't need to be the one to cause it. "I'm Corbie," she greeted in return. "I live further west, on the coast. I was just here... hunting." At first she hesitated, not wanting to make the boy worry for his friends, but to lie about her purpose would be worse than worrying someone and he might not even put the two things together anyway. She idly watched him crushing the flowers, then blinked. She was no healer herself, but she'd been raised by one and knew well enough what to avoid and what to keep the sheep out of. "Is that monkshood?" she asked incredulously. That was awfully dangerous to be teaching a yearling to use, wasn't it?

Acacius' bright brown brows furrowed briefly as she admitted she was hunting. He blinked, looking to her, back to his porcupines, then back to her once more. Hesitantly, he ventured. "But.. you're not hunting anymore, right?" Poke and Prick were some of his very best friends, and not even the friendliest stranger would be allowed to harm them.

She questioned him then - or maybe the porcupine, Acacius wasn't sure - and the skull-marked boy glanced in panic back to the porcupine leading the lesson. What the hell was monkshood? His gums slapped together absently as he tried to come up with a reply, but without knowing what this other herb was, he couldn't say whether it was better to be extracting then the wolfsbane was.

Thankfully, his porcupine caught his glance and gave the woman a reassuring smile. "It is. He knows to be careful, and to respect the dangers of it. Once the tincture is complete, we mix a very small portion into a much larger batch of lotion. Applied topically, it's used to manage certain types of chronic pains." The porcupine nodded down to his gloved paws, made from material that was near color-matched to his fur "Now they go into the jar, Acacius. And then the vodka."

With his companion fielding the difficult question, Acacius moved on to the next step of the process. He carefully tilted the jar's lid into the container, allowing the flower to fall to the bottom, and then poured the vodka overtop it until the porcupine nodded to alert him to stop. To the woman, he spoke once more. "Is it nice living on the coast? I live by a lake, it's kind of cool, but I bet nothing compared to the ocean."

"No," she assured the boy, "I'm not hunting now." She sometimes had trouble getting herself to hunt animals that she'd seen as companions for people before as it was - she doubted she would be hunting porcupine for a while after seeing them training a wolf to heal. But a wolf needed to eat, and they were prey. It was a constant balance.

The porcupine teacher assured him that he was aware of the dangers of it, and told her what they were planning to use it for. She supposed that was sensible. After all, Tornach had always said that - during her periods of intense curiosity before she'd decided that healing wasn't for her - 'the dose makes the poison' and that many dangerous plants were healing in small doses. They knew more about it than she did, anyway.

The boy, Acacius the porcupine had called him, asked about living on the coast, and if it was cool. "I don't really go near to the water much," she admitted, obscurely embarrassed. "The moisture coming off the ocean just makes really good grazing for sheep, so I live on the grasslands there. Honestly your lake is probably more interesting than endless seas of grass," she added with a laugh.

Corbie was not intending to eat his porcupines anymore and for that, the boy was grateful. All in all the stranger did not prove a burden to his lessons, nor an annoyance in conversation. Even if her presence was superfluous, it was good to get to know others who roamed the landmass.

With his vodka poured, the porcupine continued. "Now we close the jar tightly, and wrap some of that leather around it as well. Bind it tight with the sinew. We'll need to be tipping it, and better to be safe then sorry when dealing with an extract this dangerous" Acacius did as directed, placing the jar's lid back upon it tightly, wrapping the leather around the seam, and then doubling up on sinew for extra security.

It made him nervous to rely entirely on his own handiwork in such an important matter, and when the jar was 'sealed', he tested it by tipping it over with a gloved toe. It fell gently to it's side in the grass, and he toed the base of it once more to roll it, to see if anything had leaked out. With the grass below it dry, he continued his cautious poking to shift it upside down resting on it's lid, and then back onto it's base upright. The porcupine nodded. "Good. Now we take it home and put it somewhere dry and dark, and check on it in a few weeks." She lectured.

Letting out a heavy exhale of relief, he turned back to Corbie. "There's grassland on the shoreline? I thought it was all sand." His understanding of the shore was mostly the deserts west of his home territory, it was odd to think of a sea of grass alongside a sea of water.

There was a pause while Acacius concentrated on finishing up the jar that would hold his tincture, and Corbie found herself surprisingly invested in it as they watched to see if it was going to leak. She found herself holding her breath as he tilted it around and onto it's top, and expelled a sigh of relief at the same time as the boy, which prompted a laugh from her. "Oh, there is a strip of sand, dunes and such, where the water transitions to the land, but those are right on the water. Once you get a little away from the high tide mark you start getting grassland, and then there's a big dip in the land that leads down into a kind of valley, which is where I live, and up north a bit is another grassland too, and some tar pits, though the area south is sand and rock and probably not terribly interesting. What is your home like? With a lake, I bet it's pretty there."