Wind rose and the clouds slowly started their migration to the west and slide over the crimson hills to journey towards the burnt up steppes that separates the last line of urban area from the salty deserts of the Munas Drah. There they will be evaporated by the suns. It was a slow, crawling afternoon and Jezera Mil-Na sat on her balcony in large sunglasses to enjoy the weather. On Aschere every afternoon was long, as if it was engineered this way. She however, did not regard much of the notion that the World has been created by some plan or intelligent clockmaker. For her, it was simply unfortunate that this planet made her slow rounds around her parent satellites: a gigantic white main sequence star and a white dwarf who themselves were locked in a waltz that paced fifty years for a single turn. It took a staggering ninety years (measured in the years of Anu) before the Aschere completed one full circle around them. Therefore seasons were exchanged to a strange eternal autumn which granted the red and tangerine hue of the plants here. This sounded neat; however she knew the true reason why the pigments of leaves are on this specific visible spectrum, but that killed the romantic tone. Other than scientists, nobody cared for such things.
She laid her blanket over her shoulder again to get a better cover against the rising wind and she glanced in the direction of the ornamented glass door next to her only to note that her coffee was late. She decided to let out a long audible sigh once her apprentice returned with what she ordered, although she was in no hurry.
The shadows were short under the emerald sky and she kept thinking about the new recipes. It was a nightmare to create homunculi without the needed materials. Enzymes were harder to come by than ever before and she seriously contemplated sending her apprentice to Nineveh with a list of insects to buy. It was not the first time she ran out of the fundamental building blocks and was forced to resolve keeping bugs to produce the necessary enzymes for her. She was no longer used to it since they relocated. These estates up here in the picturesque hillside of the Western-Silvercoast created an abandoned paradise for an alchemist. Abandoned but with an intact electrical grid. They moved into an estate that was used as a secret laboratory of some outlawed scientist. It has always been illegal to practice such 'dark arts' around here. The Akkadian Dominion has banned alchemy since the day it was invented because it was 'against God' and other primitive reasons. Amusing as it was, the Dominion was not so much in the hurry to ban the products of alchemy, especially the ones which gave various life extensions to the population. She herself was six hundred years old. An age considered quite average in the Old World. People kept changing their body parts for artificial implants and extensions to keep them healthy and young with the help of the Blood of Kingu to revert aging and when conflicted with a terminal illness, they uploaded their consciousness into the Astral so they could live on in digital form. Some people even returned from there, downloading their minds into a homunculus or mechanical body and the cycle renewed. Asking the age of anyone became irrelevant and families were seen as temporary partnerships on a long journey. As much as the criticism of how this was not the 'natural way' and the fear that everyone will into a cold psychopath, crazy or suicidal one day never came true. Instead, a lot of people were enabled to grow and build the world and it was also helping to fight overpopulation. It is important to note though, the possibility to live forever does not equal immortality. Accidents, war, sicknesses and many other lethal factors were still at play, so people never lost their survival instinct - at least not in the way the naturalists argued. Nothing proves that theory wrong better than the current age we are living: almost a century after the Third Apocalypse there is an effort in survival and renewal. The restoration of the civilization is in progress with all its ups and downs. Seems like throughout history everything always turns out better than what the doomsayers forecast. Even the End Of The World. Still, without organized healthcare and a collapsing digital world above us, the option of life extensions remains out of reach. It is curious how we had to relearn the process of grieving and the understanding of loss through the many new instances of death around us. Most importantly, how nobody talks about longevity. She wondered if anyone thought about planning thirty or a hundred years ahead nowadays. Maybe everyone was way too occupied with the hurdles of today and simply wanted to survive the next harvest. Eventually we will seek out the same answers and she honestly questioned if it is going to be any different next time.
