Everybody in Adara knows that when the mist rises, ships should not be on the sea. Everybody, that is, but Adanan Arbadi Almos, alchemist.
Adanan knew next to nothing of the sea, which as someone who resided in Adara, the City of Alabaster, was a great point of pride of his. Adara squatted, like a bloated, sun-dried krill lizard, at the coast of the Sundered Sea, and just about every citizen of the city earned their living plundering that gently festering body of water, robbing it of one of its dwindling treasures or another. It wasn't a proud living, nor a usually a very profitable one. Certainly not a safe one, but a living it was nonetheless, which on the shores of the Sundered Sea certainly accounted for something, for most of Adara's residents at least.
Not for Adanan. Adanan despised the sea, and made every effort to avoid contact with it whenever possible, and sometimes even when it was not.
He staunchly refused to eat any of the sea's produce, which in Adara, at least to someone of Adanan's limited means, meant that his diet was limited to razor-nut fruit, ash-serpent youngs, and sand. Adanan considered this a worthy sacrifice, and didn't even mind that as his business dwindled, he could only afford sand on every other meal.
He also chose to reside in a set of rooms that had no windows facing the sea, which was a rarity in Adara, and for a good reason. Sure, the lack of sea-breeze made his quarters so unbearably hot that his glassware bubbled, and his only view, on those rare clear days where a view of any sorts was offered at all, was of the Aarach Desert and its bane-clouds, but at least Adanan didn't have to ever set his eyes on that revolting, churning ochre puddle of a sea.
Adanan's friends, few though they were, sometimes wondered why the alchemist chose to live in Adara at all. The man obviously hated the place, and it wasn't like the city was an easy place for an alchemist to make a living in. Gold, the alchemist's main forte, was utterly worthless in Adara, seeing as it was dredged from the sea by the tons on a daily basis by the sea-dentists. You could literally pave the city's streets with the stuff, if it wasn't so soft and didn't get so hot in the sun. Lead, on the other hand, the only stuff any self-respecting alchemist would transmogrify into gold, was much sought after, as there were never enough diving weights for the drudgers, sand scrapers and other bottom feeders that kept the city fed. In short, an alchemist in Adara was about as useful as a virgin sacrifice to a sea god, meaning not very useful at all.
The truth was, Adanan was stranded in Adara. He was once a respected citizen of the Republic