The Sugar of Adzikis in Winter

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Bleys' commentary of The Sweet Flora from the Diners of Amber.

The Sugar of Adzikis in Winter .

This world has a plant called the Sweet Flora. Really. The Sweet Flora. There is no linguistic reason for either word, or for ‘The’ to be put in front of it. It’s just spoken of that way.

“Hey, Jed, what’s that plant over there? It sure smells good. “ “Well, Zeke, that’s The Sweet Flora.”

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Linguistically it is pronounced ‘thesweetflora.” In Thari it comes out as The Sweet Flora and that’s the common pronunciation. You’re not kidding anyone, sister.

This is a plant like a sunflower. Tall and thick stalked, with a gigantic pale yellow flower with bright purple seeds in the middle. It blossoms when the sun rises and follows the sun through its passage.

The lower stalks sprout bulbs the size of cantaloupes that contain an unpleasantly sweet sap of a dark yellow color. The roots are comprised of a deep straight taproot and a collection of tubers like potatoes right on or below the surface.

It grows in all climes though it prefers temperatures around 40 to 50. It seems that there are aficionados’ that can tell what temperature the flower was grown in by tasting its various produce. Snobs. What I do know is that if you plant a sprouting of this it will grow in frozen tundra as easily as cool tropics of this world. It does not, however, transplant well into other shadows. Funny thing that. It can be done just takes some doing. It is grown in large quantities at Vulsar Base.

The flower can be harvested in several ways. First off; the stalk and its taproot are generally left alone for a couple years. The stalk may be two feet across. The stalk and taproot are harvested after 5 years worth of seeds, leaves, petals, bulbs and tubers. It makes a reasonable paper, like a poster board.

The leaves, which grow big and thick, are used as a paper product, mulched and pressed into sheets. This is not terribly efficient and is usually only done for certain religious ritual reasons and for stylistic reasons. There is a type of poetry only written on Florimel Paper. I shit you not, it’s called Florimel Paper. Do you wonder who found this world first?

The leaves can be dried and cut and seeped in hot water and makes a very nice tea. It is the base of a wide variety of floral tea blends.

The leaves can also be cut into chunks and chewed to produce a slightly hallucinogenic and euphoric effect. A lot like cocoa leaves. This process is extremely common in the industry though frowned on and is thought to be a drug of the lower classes. It is also a bit disgusting, involving large oily wads of chaw and lots of sweet tarry spittle. It does, however, get around and is often found at fashionable soirées in a modified form.

Usually the tubers are harvested in warmer weather. They have a texture like potatoes and can be used like them. That is if you like your mashed potatoes to taste like pureed maple candies. That said, there is an extremely large volume of culinary lore that uses the Flora Tubers. Many of the dishes are extremely tasty if a bit too sweet for my taste.

The bulbs can grow to be 8” to 12” in diameters and can be harvested year round. They grow quickly. A clipped bulb leaves a stem attached to the main stalk that can be replaced in 10 to 15 days in a cool and watery climate. This is the main source of sugar on this world. The sap is easy to process and easy to store. It does not freeze in survivable temperatures, becoming a slow and thick syrup. Barrels are filled with the rendered sap and shipped off for refining. The bulb husks are considered a perk of the growers and harvesters and has plenty of culinary uses. These uses do not rise to the level of respectability though which is why the harvesters get them. Still, the husks are used in a variety of methods similar to tamales. They are also a main ingredient in fertilizers on this icy planet.

The flower petals are easy to render into both sugar and scents.

• The sugar has a very strong and pleasant floral smell. It can be used in any preparation sugar can in most universes. A refined and strained form is nearly identical to unscented white sugar.
• The seeds can be roasted and eaten whole; shell and all. It is nutty and sweet. A common preparation of flora seeds is roasting them and coating them in a ginger sugar. Clove, rosemary, and pepper coatings are also quite good. Seeds are also ground into a flour and used accordingly.

Flora seeds and petal are often used to flavor the filtered pure alcohol made from the bulb sugar. Sort of a floral rum and quite tasty.

One last comment on the Sweet Flora.

In the front article I commented that a base alcohol could be made by filtering the pruno-pure alcohol made from almost any vegetable matter through a scented charcoal. This is the charcoal made from the woody stalks of the Sweet Flora plant.

A bit time consuming, and not the easiest way to make alcohol drinkable, it is still a common practice, with a wide following on this make-do-with-less & waste-nothing world.'

Recycling is not as fanatical here as on Taxorami, though it is an ever-present activity, but the Adziks would understand and admire the Taxonomist thriftiness.

((GM_Note: This world was going to be a part of a campaign centered around Flora. And the battle of the black road, the wizards stopped the world from being consumed, but it might be hard to explain to the survivors on this ice block of a world.