Quest Report - Nara
Many people tended to think that Nara was the absent-minded type of girl, which was both true yet totally wrong. Although it often looked like the nineteen year old shrine maiden had her head in the clouds, Nara was actually always hyper-focused, and her attention span was on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Currently, Nara was focused on gathering herbs for the Adventurer's Guild. She was so absorbed in her current task that she wasn't really paying attention to anything else.
Take a look at all these plants, for instance.
How many varieties of plants do you suppose there are growing on a single fallen log in the forest?
By Nara's estimate, she could spot some plants with round leaves and other plants with pointy leaves. Some plants look a little bit like ferns, whereas other plants seem to grow like lily pads. If the nineteen year old really took her time to serious catalog them all, it would take her at least an hour to examine all of them in detail.
Nara wasn't a herbalist.
How was she supposed to know what a healing herb looked like?
Moreover, a "healing herb" didn't sound like a very specific or unique plant name. Perhaps the quest had meant it in a way that
any herb with healing properties would be okay? If so, it was probably very similar to the linguistic usage of 青菜 ("Green Vegetable") in an esoteric ancient human language that Nara had previously studied. Terms like "青菜" frequently appeared on restaurant menus, but the meaning was something akin any kind of green vegetable. If a customer ordered "青菜", a chef might cook anything ranging from cabbage, spinach, yu choy, ay-ay choy, to bok choy and present it on the dinner table in front a crowd of hungry diners.
Perhaps all vegetables that appear green are all interchangeable?
Is that the true meaning of 青菜?
Was a "healing herb" something similar?
However, this confused Nara immensely.
Obviously, there were different kinds of healing plants with different nuances and potencies. For instance, it could be argued that dandelions and willow bark have healing properties, as willow bark is well known to contain salicylic acid which is the active ingredient of a pharmaceutical remedy known as asp*rin. The issue is that there's too little of it inside willow bark, so chewing on willow bark isn't necessarily guaranteed to cure a patient of their headache.
If fact, many biologic substances have bactericidal properties.
Human (animal) saliva has healing properties, so if you cut on your finger on a knife, it's perfectly reasonable to suck on on your wound. Most creatures in the wilderness will lick their own wounds, and in many senses this is nature's natural way to prevent infection. Every plant and animal has a biological response similar to this, although some species are better at combatting certain pathogens than other ones. Almost every classical ant*biotic known to humanity was derived from nature, in the sense that pen*cillin is actually "fungus saliva" in the technical sense.
Saliva is wonderful.
But which plant's saliva did the adventurer's guild actually want? Every plant is useful in it's own way, but the bigger question was whether you wanted the plant to cure headaches, ease constipation, increase stamina, or placate food poisoning.
...Nara seriously couldn't decide.
In the end, Nara plucked
three bunches of dandelions, mainly because Nara recognized them. There were dozens of other plants that Nara didn't recognize, but she wasn't going to harvest herbs that she knew nothing about.
Mhm. Indeed, dandelions have healing properties. They have dozens of health benefits, including:
So in short, they're healing herbs!!!!!
Nara clutched her healing herbs and confidently brought them back to the Adventurer's Guild.
Word count: 697
