Now then. Where were we?
24 August, 1928
The basket next to her is loosely packed with layers of spirit-soaked gauze and various wild-harvested items: a variety of deadly mushrooms, some brilliantly yellow shelf fungus, one particularly spritely slime mold, a green stick of yew, seven oak leaves, a handful of wild white strawberries. She creeps up behind the last of her acquisitions: an animated Amethyst Destroyer, engaged in sniping with a nearby patch of low-hanging mistletoe. She catches it unawares--not undisturbed, it was already disturbed--and slices it free from the base. She quickly turns and packs it into the basket, wrapping a separate square of gauze around the seeping stem. She leaves the forest carefully, but quickly, and returns to the Black Moth, dialing in the coordinates three 'verses over, and one to the left, and Gearhaven. Home.
This is her third trip into the hinterlands, but she thinks she has everything now.
30 August, 1946
She has spent the time since her return, a week and eighteen years forward, in the Red Queen's castle, chopping, dicing, scraping, peeling, soaking various amounts of various botanicals in spirits of vodka, gin, Strega, and absinthe. She's made a simple variant of Kyphi incense while she sat in circle, mortar and pestle in hand, grinding the wet ingredients into paste, pulverizing the dried ingredients into dust. She's kept a worn and tattered journal next to her, most of the pages loose, many of the pages older than the Black Moth, sketching when she needs to wait on a particular distillation or fermentation to properly develop, cutting out articles that contained helpful information, noting pages in the copies of Dr. Moreau's journals, acquired haphazardly over several decades.
Finally, she thinks she's done. She packs everything into small jars, vials, stoppered bottles sealed with wax, oiled parchment envelopes tied with striped twine. She drags the medium-size cauldron into the airship, heavily coated in an iron-defeating resin, and timeslips to the island. It's a short trip down to street level, where she lugs the heavy cauldron up the narrow stairs above Lecora, to the Sphinx-Templar Syndicate's satellite office. It takes a bit to set the cauldron up proper, and even longer to add in the neutral solution to start everything, and then, slowly, ingredient by ingredient, hour by hour, adding in everything she's collected and processed. No incense now, but there's always wisps of sage and cloves and cinnamon, cardamom and old bones, rum and wax, drifting up from the shop downstairs. She chants a simple spell to heat the cauldron, because starting a fire on the wooden floor of the building would definitely cause the rental association to seize their deposit.
And then the first moment of fear as everything began to heat, the liquid starting to swirl in glowing, occasionally pearlescent streaks: several small, whipping purple tentacles emerging from the mix, shocking her to her core: because no sealife had gone into the mix! She rapidly scanned her notes, checking amounts, times, preparation notes, but--nothing.
She looked dubiously at the cauldron, but knew she potentially had only one shot at this, because some of her ingredients were only available in certain times, every century--and for some others, every other century. She had to let it cook for the prescribed seven days. She had no other choice.
6 September, 1946
At last it was done. Ready to be decanted. Apparently no one on the island had noticed the purple vapors drifting from the upper floor of the building, something she was supremely grateful for. But before she poured out the mix into the waiting carboy, she ran to the desk, sweeping the books off in a rush and laying out the last two pages, the more esoteric and direct mix. If she'd done everything correctly...if she'd made all the proper adjustments for her fey genetics and the Duke's feline descent through the Moreau line...Well, then this would be the easier path to children.
She hoped.
Because he'd asked, and because she loved him, and because...maybe it was just time.
She carefully filled the carboy, vanishing the cauldron, and summoned the Black Moth to return her to Gearhaven and her workshop for the final concentration, ending up with a scant few vials for all her work. She shook her head and fell into bed exhausted that night, though, knowing she had done all she could.
8 September, 1946
She checked the notes she'd left on the desk again, comparing them to notes in the tattered journal. She set the vial down, the swirling liquid within casting iridescent flashes on the stained walls. And then she got the call that her Duke had adopted a ward, and she fled back to the Black Moth to return to Gearhaven posthaste to ask what, exactly, that would entail.
Leaving the notes, and the vial, out on the table, unguarded...
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