Space Grandma's Tea House at the Nexus of the Universe

1st Selection • Soft Days

Arcad Alpine Needles

When ingredients are cured outdoors at a certain elevation on Arcad, high in the trees and swept by the evergreen winds for one cycling of the Seven Sisters, they are imbued with a flavor otherwise unpredicted based on the original tastes of the ingredients. With this touch they are transformed, and from there on carry the crisp notes of an alpine morn.

Bluenights

The ghostly-sweet inner seeds of a seven-sided fruit found overhanging the banks of the delta that the great river of Loalo empties into. If the rind is not properly peeled, the majority of the seeds will spill out instantly on opening. Though the rind itself is both airtight and waterproof, contact with water dissolves the seeds speedily. Preservation in turquoise sea salt draws out a sharpness of flavor.

Vycoria seeds

On o’io there is a tree with roots that creep, and which has a most unique reproduction ritual. The trees travel, roots stretching until they settle over the bubbling springs and brooks of the planet’s lower mountain slopes. Over a seven day period slowly open to reveal a string of seeds, number widely variable, which hang out and soak in the gently active waters until one by one they fall and are washed away. To make this tea properly, after the first three seeds have fallen gather the remainder from the root and then wait to crush them into a fine powder until immediately before serving. For a far more potent effect, gather your tea ingredients in a permeable bag and leave them to soak in one such bubbling spring for seven times seventy seven days. Then, when serving, introduce the freshly-ground powder of the seeds you harvested all those years ago to the steeping of the second cup, and watch your world go wild…

2nd Selection • River Bath

Rambunctious leaves

These leaves of Rambunctious trees can be found on all habitable planets lit by Zeta Leonis, in glades surrounded by crumbling sculptures pierced apart by the trees that grow through them. Branches stretch out from the stone, their leaves best harvested after the first snow. Each successive snow through the seventh produces reducing degrees of quality and flavor, requiring more quantity to make up the shortfall. The leaves are peeled and massaged to produce coalescments of droplets, which are used as a bath to soak any other ingredients of a given tea. Gloves sewn from leaves are recommended for enthusiasts making their own tea, as too much rub can spur symphonic associations as well as induce divisions of the old and/or visions of the new.

Shorrae

The buds of an Aerrohs plant if harvest is conducted in late winter, the outer plant cracked open and the buds plucked before they can even begin to bloom.

3rd Selection • You’re Welcome

Aerrohs blossoms

Found on Yorok. They grow during the winter up through another plant, in a symbiotic, semi-viviparous relationship where the outer plant protects the buds as they grow and begin to bloom while the inner plant secretes a sugary sap that is soaked up by the outer. With summer’s rays the blooms push apart the stem of the outer plant and spread to meet the sun. Gather the blossoms when the sun is at its zenith for the most luscious flavor.

Wyrmroot

Found on Yorok, if you’re lucky. To experience the true richness of Space Grandma’s tea as first composed, this ingredient cannot have any substitute. As it is a rare root, substitutes are often necessary to experience at least an echo of the tea’s full flavor potential. The root lives deep underground, encased in layers of what could well be called bark. Warmth in the soil from the sun, the vibrations of activity as ecosystems rise to vivid life, the rivulets of rain water that slip through the soil’s splits – all these signs awaken the root, and over the course of the first half of the summer it climbs up through the earth, shedding barkskins as it goes. As it reaches the surface it blooms a single hyperorange parasol-sized flower, low to the ground. The root gulps up sunlight through the flower until the start of winter, then detaches and descends back into the soil. The flower is the nexus for an entire small ecosystem, and its nectar lends longevity to the organisms that drink of it by reawakening cells that have slipped into more sluggish operation. In the last seventeen days before the winter switch, it becomes possible to detach the flower from the earth without destroying its true treasure: the sunsoaked root, bare before it grows new bark. A tea blend made by Space Grandma uses only this final form, though previous stages of the root’s life-cycle produce variants of flavor sufficiently subtle to spark the interest of the connoisseur.

Lumenfluent

The lumenhoney of an Aelio, received when at its most efferfluent. The flavor is due to how the unique composition of the soil along the banks at the base of Loalo’s waterfalls informs the flavors of the flowers that grow there. Glittering mineral specks flecked up by the falling waters fall in soft dust over carpets of lunarluminescent moss and fungi that grow out from the riverbank thrive a thousand decayed and reborn lives in the span of a hume’s existence. During the day, Aelio nestle in pockets of moss, shaded by fungi, drinking up the nectar that drips out in pinpricks from the underside of the moss. There are rumors that the tea experience transforms when the lumenhoney comes from those Aelio that have the curious taste for feasting on fungal gills. Whatever the lumenhoney you use, its level of efferfluence translates to an ascendence in a fluency with the languages of light. There are many, and fluency is not guaranteed to come faster the more lumenhoney used, but something about this wonder of nature somehow transposes across lines of species, organism, and being.

Genti petals

Genti grow in vivacious numbers on Avay. Imaged by Avay dreamers and encouraged by its horticulturalists, these are vines that climb and twist with alacrity and grace, and burst their greatest bloom in the first week after summer's end when stairways of juicy silver petals emerge in spirals that wind from the vine's root to its farthest reach. Harvest the petals in the last hours of night to enjoy at their most fragrant, or in the last hours of day for a more stone-dry taste. Whichever way your flavor feel swings, press them to release the juices - and gently, or too much of this precious nectar can far too easily be lost. Never harvest more than 33% of the petals.