Acting potion

Mortal tier recipe. No cultivation requirements

A mix between a psychedelic and emotional enhancer, although some would argue the former counts as both. Acting is not just about conveying a story, but the emotions within which is often the hardest thing about it. An amazing, yet monotone, actor will never contain the same energy as someone with true passion. That intrinsic desire is what sells a story, what allows someone to fully engross themselves into a made up life, and at its core is what some consider acting.

Of course, I am not an actor. But learning what some actors need and making potions based around that is something a competent alchemist should be capable of. I often recommended this stuff to method actors who require that extra level of depth with the character they just cannot yet understand.

Ingredients and recipe Lacing wire stems, 2 stems – non magical plant Antisocial eviscerator blood, 50 ml – natural gathering stage fluid Mind splitter juice, 1500 ml – non magical fluid Ethereal lifestone, 25 grams – natural gathering stage mineral Calming moss, 50 grams – non magical plant

I believe you can see the pattern with most these ingredients already. That being their effects on a person’s mind. This is a pretty long recipe to manufacture, especially if using these base ingredients, but it can be sped up by buying some pre-manufactured parts. We’ll look into that later.

Lacing wire is a root vegetable which sprouts a thin stem above ground. This stem then grows a flower which blossoms for 6 days before wilting and marking the root’s full ripening. It’s name obviously refers to the wire-like stem. Their natural habitat was destroyed over 500,000 years ago, now we just farm them in similar reproductions to those environments.

Antisocial eviscerator is the main psychedelic component in this recipe, in that it does pretty much what the name suggests. The slug’s blood sends you into an almost crazed desire to interact with people. It’s pretty common for the socially awkward few at parties to drink a shot of this stuff to actually have some fun and join in, although it does often form some… questionable memories. They live somewhere, that’s all I really know. Like any garden slug they appear pretty much everywhere, but far more rarely.

Mind splitters are a vegetable that grow above ground like cucumbers or peppers. They contain a large volume of fluid within their bodies like cucumbers as well, diluting the mental effect to quite a degree. This is useful overall as it transforms the chemical’s harsh Multiple identity effect into a gentle coaxing of a dissociative identity. Do be careful with this stuff, there are more than a few people every year that gain a permanent addition to their mind.

Lifestones are a great and utterly amazing product. Containing massive quantities of pure vitality and life essence, if you ever want to nurture something there is rarely something better. Of course, this is all on the precondition that the thing you’re nurturing is immune to cancer. The intense vitality is indiscriminate, and if left to its own devices is almost guaranteed to start an upsurge of some cancerous cells. That’s why this ethereal one that can only target spiritual being is so useful. They often form in small nodes in deep tombs, specifically ones where lots of people died.

Good old calming moss and its slight mind restorative effects. Like in many other recipes we use this light healing to mend you of any possible damages, thus ensuring your mental stability whilst you screw with everything else. Most often grows on trees in snowy lands, it is farmed en masse at the moment.

Now for the recipe. You can start by fermenting the Mind splitter juice for 6 weeks and up to 28 weeks. This will of course require a batch of yeast to begin the fermentation process, however such things are purchasable almost everywhere so it really should be easy. This component is the main time sink of the recipe and buying it instantly reduces the shortest 8 week recipe to a mere 2 week process.

Fermenting any juice is rather easy, just seal it in an air-tight container, preferably wooden or stainless steel, with the yeast and leave it to slowly improve in alcohol content. Furthermore, make sure the room’s temperature stays around an average of 20 C. There’s no specific content requirement as long as it hits 2% ABV at minimum, but some people like to go higher for personal reasons.

Wrap the ethereal lifestones in calming moss, doing your best to make the minerals covered entirely, and use the lacing wire stems as string to hold the shards in place. You may be lucky enough to obtain one solid chunk of lifestone, or you may have a small bundle of shards, either will work but the former is easier to contain for obvious reasons. Only use a single Lacing wire stem to tie up the bundle as the other is needed elsewhere.

Drop this tied pouch into the finished brewed mind splitter juice and leave it to diffuse for a week. At this stage you should avoid buying the pre-formed ingredients as we are now firmly in the territory of alchemy over general alcohol brewing. The latter skill is useful in the long-run, especially if you like fancy drinks, but won’t exactly help you in making more advanced stuff.

After a week of brewing you can add half the antisocial eviscerator blood before leaving it once more for another week. Whether you use an air-tight container does not matter after the brewing step, just that it remains in the same warm room.

This last step is why we use lacing wire stems over any fine plant fibre. The thin fibres hold a strong adjoining property. This is a vague term, and quite literally hell for me to understand when I first began, but I will do my best to explain it.

Adjoining is an ingredient property that everything has. If it can be mixed with something else then it has an adjoining value. For ease we normalise this value such that it will always be a number between 0 and 1, this part is purely for mathematical aid. By extension, ingredients that cannot be mixed with anything else are given an undefined value instead of 0. This is due to a nuance in the definition of ‘no adjoining ability’ and ‘impossible to adjoin’.

Nonetheless, at this stage we can simply consider adjoining as a sort of bond between it and all other ingredients. Stronger bonds make mixing it all together easier, and therefore increase the likelihood of a stable recipe. For this reason we often seek ingredients with high adjoining values, leading to some ingredients being used often in different tiers. One such ingredient is calming moss, with a value of 0.88 it can be added to pretty much any mind related product without any destabilisation of the end product. This does not include mental attack products which will instead clash with the healing effect, even if all ingredients have similarly high adjoining values.

In general I will avoid talking about these values, and if you want to find the value of any ingredient there are dozens of indexes filled with those things. Lacing wire stems have a value of 0.78, so not incredibly high but still good. However, this becomes invaluable when combined with the stem’s rare effect to attract the properties of materials with lower adjoining values.

More information regarding this rare effect is well-documented in various books. This guidebook is not intended to teach you the theory behind alchemy, although some theories will be included when recipes require modification on the fly.

Cut the stem into 32 equal sections and coat it in the remaining antisocial eviscerator blood. Make sure all sides are properly coated before dropping the stems into your main mixture. Stir it all together and leave it to rest for 12 hours. The product is now ready.

The average potion size for an adult is 100 ml. Bottle it according to such.

Usage

Let us start from the effect upon drinking it.

After half of it sinks past your throat a faint buzzing will fill your mind, like a fly is stuck by your ear. This sound is actually a mental disorder as you cannot process the sudden effects ongoing and your mind is still trying its best to interpret the changes. Half a minute after it starts it will stop. It causes no permanent damage.

By this point it is likely you have completely drunk the potion and all that’s left is to nurture the necessary personality. This can be done in one of two ways, the first is easier for a method actor.

Simply play the role. Your act of being the character will inevitably warp the newly formed mind into becoming that person and as long as that secondary mind exists you will genuinely believe yourself to be that person. This heavily depends on your ability to become a character though, so those lacking the empathy and skills will realise a failure instead.

The easier method is a slow nurture by reading about the person. Reading out loud to yourself works best, and even going over the same passage over and over will work. In fact, some people just watch a short scene from a movie using the character to nurture the secondary being. I don’t need to explain how useless that is if you’re an actor who will go on to act out this character.

With your second personality formed you can now give it majority control over your mind (and body by extension) to watch and understand how they behave. This can be rather dangerous if you create a diabolical or extreme secondary personality, and some upstart actors have killed themselves because of this. The extremely depressed personality simply could not be stopped in time, and well…

This potion cannot allow you to learn more about someone more than you already know, however it gives you access to their rawest being. If you struggle with empathising with words on a page then feeling the direct emotions can change it all for you.

This effect lasts 16 hours before the secondary personality dissipates and your mind reverts. This reversion includes another half minute of buzzing.