5 Last Preparations (part 2)

After a long deliberation, she finally settled on Transmutation. It seemed the most generally useful, and in addition to being able to change her body composition, she could use any extra techniques she learned in combination with all of the spell fragments she'd gathered to come up with a host of other uses. Who knows? Maybe she'd even have extra uses for it once she graduated.

The Archmage of Transmutation Studies was a thin, sharp-featured man in his mid-fifties named Gellius Hawthorne. Apparently in the midst of his studies, which he started later than most, he moonlit as an adventure for one of the local up-and-coming guilds in Hawkport. Doing so, he was able to unearth long-lost transmutation techniques through acquired scrolls and books, and breezed through the trials of the Wandering Halls with relative ease. At least, that was the general consensus.

As Eleanor had learned from her time attending his lectures, he was not the type to offer any information save what was absolutely necessary for the instruction of his students, and was notoriously private otherwise. The idea of spending a full lecture alone with the taciturn mage was not the most pleasant thought, but it still seemed preferable to any of the other options. And as focused as he generally was on the minutiae and nuance of his chosen school, she could stand to learn a lot from him.

That decision out of the way, she still had four days left to use as she liked to prepare. Gathering components wouldn't take more than half a day, and the other half of that day could be used to prep rations and other survival gear.

She had full access to all necessary alchemical components to brew any potions she thought she might need, as well as all of the necessary tools to prepare scrolls and other magical devices. With the time investment required, however, she would need to be very picky about which items she prepared. It was not uncommon for even a simple potion or low-level scroll to take several hours to prepare, and the more powerful or complex the resulting product, the longer preparing it took.

She finally settled on using one day to brew several essential potions, such as antidotes, healing potions, and potions of cure disease. These would always be useful, and the spell components it took to prepare and cast such spells were far less easily found than many of her other commonly used spells. Plus, if she was suffering from a rapid-onset poison or illness, or bleeding out from some horrible injury, there was a chance she would not have the means or capacity to cast such a Restoration spell correctly, if at all. Popping a potion, however, was easier. If she couldn't do that, then, well, she was done for anyways.

The next day would be used to scribe up some useful utility scrolls. She settled on functional benefits, rather than on combat-oriented spells, and made a note of what she would likely need the most of. The easiest to make would be Mage Armor and Alarm, so she would make several of each. The Alarm scrolls would be to prevent her from being snuck up on or ambushed while she slept, and could even be used to set ambushes of her own, should the time come where it was appropriate to do so. She would also make a few combat scrolls of various kinds, probably of those spells that would be powerful to have, but whose components would be difficult to obtain or cumbersome to carry.

The last free day she had, she would take advantage of the teleportation circles in the top of the West Wing teleportarium, and go spend some time with her adoptive father and sisters. There was no telling what would happen to her once the challenge began, so, regardless of what happened, she wanted to make sure she spent one final good day with them.