It'd started simple, really. Mrs. Haden had been given permission by her husband to start up a small hobby of studying the rudimentaries of home medicine in preparation for when she would be with child for the first time. Mr. Haden had been such a caring husband... but he had not paid her enough mind to notice when she started to read the works of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus she'd loaned out from another wife who had a distracted husband. There was nothing sinister about this want. She merely wished to understand deeper why some diseases affected the body so harshly.

She came out of the reading with a newfound fascination of the subject of metaphysical transmutation. Just like that, her hobby became more secretive, for reasons that she could not exactly explain. It was only three weeks after she began attempting to transform a potted flower's color from blue to red that she realized she'd become an alchemist.

It was so freeing to think about. She eventually began to dedicate every free moment of her life not devoted to her husband to her. For his part, Mr. Haden was pleased to see she'd become so taken with her new work at home, never suspecting that her field of studies had changed so completely. Mrs. Haden, after all, no longer worried about such things as how her life as a mother in Victoria's Britain would play out... she was focused on such greater things. Things of the spirit! Things of higher realms, where physical boundaries faded away and only the real substance mattered.

Little did the snow leopard know that, as she breathed in the fumes of her practice and stained her hands with chemicals that even the greatest minds of the age could yet barely fathom, their latent properties still worked upon her. These byproducts coalesced within her little by little, until finally she realized, as she looked at her husband a decade later and saw him wrinkled while she still held onto her own natural beauty... somehow, she'd managed to pare the aging process from her own nature.

Mrs. Haden was rather glad that her husband's mind had started to go before he suspected anything. Her children were harder to talk to. Eventually she had to come out and tell them that their mother would outlive them, and would quite possibly be twenty-eight years old for the rest of eternity. Still, she loved them as best as she could despite that separation, and found suitors for each of them, and was with them at their death beds.

When her final child laid in the ground, Cordelia found herself at a bit of a loss. She was financially well-off, yes... Mr. Haden was a shrewd investor before his mind had gone addled, and she'd sustained herself quite easily with the interest made off of some of his funds placed within the iron industry, but... where should she go from here? She was a woman living in an age that only slightly intrigued her now. The Victorian period was a shining jewel in the past that she grasped onto like her soul, and she was loathe to give it away in order to modernize herself...

So she decided that she would be sheltered and continue her alchemy work as the world continued to change around her. Eventually, with her fortune sustained and as much time as she could handle, Cordelia found herself with an estate on every continent. Oh, she travels often now... Milan, Portland, Shanghai, Calcutta, Timbuktu... but she rarely leaves the house unless she needs to find a subject.

Oh, yes. She's found herself using many individuals as subjects in her experiments these days. After all, she managed to stop her own aging by mere accident. Cordelia's realized that she has the makings of an amazing alchemist, and the body's ability to reinvent itself has captivated her for quite some time now. She stopped feeling the hint of remorse over the way her test subjects struggle against her some decades ago. After all, she's always left them better off than they were before. That's what she tells herself, at least. If she cannot let the world take her life away, she will take life from the world instead, and enjoy what she manages to hold grasp onto.

The door is open, and it's tea-time. Won't you come in for a while and have a cup? Oh, don't mind the taste, or the slightly fuzzy feeling in your head. You're merely relaxing. It is quite warm in here, isn't it? Perhaps you should lay down. Ignore the cuffs that are on your wrists now. We're going to change scenery for a bit...

---

So after some inspiration from  wobbuvahi, I decided to make myself a dominant character to play around with. She's British because writing in the stereotypically antiquated British tone is fun as balls. You're probably going to see her in stories in the future! Who knows? I'm sure I'll be able to put her to good use...

Picture drawn and colored by  rusheloc, Joje-lover and weird person.