Science

Science is broadly divided in to two discplines, alchemy and biology. Physical sciences and engineering are comparatively underdeveloped. Dr Frankenstein would be at home here, but steampunk engineers not so much. The science aesthetic in Obscura can be described as "Leonardo da Vinci meets Dr Frankenstein", or "better living through absurd biochemistry".

Alchemy

Alchemy is the quite involved science of fusing elementally active ingredients together to get interesting properties.

Biology

The main focus of biology is study of the human body. Surgery and medicine is an obvious practical application, and health care in the world of Obscura is very good as a result.

More extreme applications of the study of the human body are Grafting and Reanimation.

Grafting

Elemental Touch is an extremely new phenomenon that’s only been sighted recently, and is currently extremely rare. Humans have been seen that are touched by the elements, changing their appearance and behaviour, and occasionally giving them unusual abilities.

It's possible for those skilled in biology to graft elemental material in to the human body, deliberately causing the person to become elementally touched. This will likely take quite a bit of elemental material for all but the simplest grafts, and so far such material has only been found in small amounts at random, limiting the progress made in this field so far.

Those skilled in Advanced Grafting may be able to come up with personal, experimental grafts based on elemental material or even surgical implantation of alchemical substances. These could be much more powerful, but will likely require regular infusions of material to continue to function.

Reanimation

Biological sciences have also managed to reanimate dead bodies, in a limited fashion. There are two remarkable applications of this discipline - the ability to animate a body to speak again as if it were alive. This is known to only work a relatively short time after death.

The second application is the reanimation of complete corpses to perform very basic tasks. A reanimator can only maintain a small number of workers at a time. Attempts to use these workers for combat have always been dismal failures, since while they can be strong, they're not tough, and are also slow and very stupid.