Yulia is a Terran spellcaster who specializes in the distillation of magic potions. Also known as Baba Yuli, she is fairly long-lived relative to the average Terran and commands an appropriate degree of respect when in the company of other arcane practitioners. Yulia is giddy and joyful, taking great pleasure in pursuing her craft, but she takes the craft itself deadly serious. Men have long sought Baba Yuli for the power her potions can impart upon them, and witches of every stripe have sought apprenticeship with her, but she's not interested in taking on pupils, and her potions come at a hefty price. She tends to move from world to world collecting her own ingredients; she keeps a home deep in the forests of Ganymede but makes frequent visits to Titan Garden whenever she's feeling sociable or she needs some more credits in the bank. Find her tent set up at the street markets in the A-District when she's in town, she might have something of use to you.
Potion-brewing is a very old Terran practice that once fell out of favor among savvy sorcerers who preferred to sling their own spells, but in the age of the starfarer it's a skill that has found renewed utility, and those few who inherited the old knowledge are in high demand. Potions are, in essence, a fusion of spells and material components, suspending both a spellcaster's will and the mote of Terran arcane essence needed to power it into a conductive medium that allows a spell to be activated anywhere, even in the coldest depths of space. What this means is a spellcaster who can brew potions never has to worry about maintaining batteries of Terran energy, their spells are pre-loaded, and what's really handy is the person using the potion doesn't even need to be the witch who brewed it, or a even a spellcaster at all- the spell is already pre-cast, suspended in the potion, ready to enact its effects the moment it is imbibed. Through the power of potions, non-spellcasters can enjoy the effects of magic for themselves, assuming they can track down a potion-brewer to concoct the spells they want, and they don't mind the taste.
One of Yulia's key realizations as an elder spellcaster is that, while magic is an innately Terran phenomenon that depends on shaping a uniquely Terran resource, the ingredients that make the best liquid mediums to suspend those spells in could come from anywhere! Organic and mineral ingredients from other worlds have unique properties to them that potion-brewers of old have not had the opportunity to explore, and so Yulia has built an expansive knowledgebase of extra-Terran ingredients, their unique properties and what sorts of spells they resonate with the best. That's the real trick of it: there's no one potion ingredient that suspends every kind of spell equally, the right potion depends on the nature of the spell, and the temperament with which the caster prepares it. A compassionate healing spell has a different quality to it than a wrathful curse, and so ingredients with different qualities need to be prepared in different combinations, at different temperatures. The potion is a medium and it needs to be correct to the spell being contained, otherwise it won't contain the caster's will nor the Terran energy and you'll just be left with an inert and foul-tasting broth at best, or a corrupted spell loaded with side-effects at worst. It's a rare discipline for a pretty good reason.
Baba Yuli is notable for her full embrace of the space age, infusing her ancient practice with the modern technologies of the starfarer. She loves to putter around the Sol system in her clankering starship, "The Old Sow," collecting ingredients from various worlds and combining them into impossible combinations. She developed a unique portable heating element that fits around her favorite old cauldron, giving her extremely precise control and consistency in heating her brew. The thermal ring avoids hot spots at the bottom and circumvents the need to stow fuel for a cauldron fire on her ship, she can use modern fuels to sustain that heat; and what's most handy of all, is the thermal ring can be broken down into smaller pieces and stowed inside the cauldron itself, making it very easy to transport on a hover dolly. Yulia wears modern protective clothing while she's brewing her spells, in particular she is adamant about wearing a respirator while a potion is over the fire, since you don't want to be breathing a potion's fumes if you're not too wild about inheriting its effects for yourself, known or otherwise. She seems to have made her home on Ganymede either for the quiet isolation or for the abundance of native flora she can use in her potions, but The Old Sow is still a regular sight in and around Titan. Being a clanking old ship, and being that she's a witch and not an engineer, her return to Titan Garden is often preceded by a call from Carol dispatching Red Raven to tow The Old Sow into port, again. It's happened often enough, it's almost a bit charming at this point. Oh, The Old Sow's broken down outside Jovian space. Baba Yuli's in town again!
Potion-brewing is a bit of a rare discipline, and Yulia looks to keep it that way. Potions are very handy to have in space, but there's already enough bad actors who have committed to a lifetime of studying the ars arcanum, you don't need to be feeding potions to every two-bit Star Patrol captain looking to consolidate their power. Fewer, wiser potion-brewers means more discretion in who has access to this sort of power, so apprenticeships are hard to come by on purpose. This is true of a few other potion-brewers, but for Yulia in particular, she decided she'd had enough headaches teaching potions to apprentices after her last student- an otherwise exemplary pupil- decided to play around with subspace and wiped out half of a Terran city thirty-something years ago. That one didn't even have anything to do with potions! It was a matter of discipline, in knowing the boundaries of what can and shouldn't be done, and when you're distilling magic into a form quaffable by anyone it's hard to keep a thumb on who should and shouldn't be using your magic. So rather than take on more students, Yulia decided to focus on her own craft, on what she can control, and push the boundaries on how extra-Terran ingredients interact with her cauldron-stirring artform. She does try to check in on her last student from time to time, since they let her out of space jail for the whole subspace thing. She likes to make sure her legacy is doing alright, that she's using her potion-brewing responsibly, and importantly, that her captain and first mate are keeping her grounded and safe, that she doesn't repeat her hubris or go completely off the deep end. Baba Yuli isn't taking on new students, but she does want to be sure her old ones are being taken care of. So far she's pleased enough that her appearances are rare, which is probably for the best, given the puttering state of her old starship.
