Maladies and Conondrums: First Altercation

11. Your character develops a special weapon to fight the slime - from a blade to a sleeping potion, what would your character make? Draw or write about the item or the making of the item.

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In the top of the apothecary’s tower, Dr. Duscor Merlo was hard at work amongst many alchemical apparatus and many ingredients.

Taking a myriad of particularly odd ingredients like swine gall, hemlock stems, ‘popy’, mandrake and whatnot, he took three spoonfuls of each to a small cauldron to boil for a moment (which he was glad he was wearing his mask for) before transferring the bitter contents to a glass well where he would then mix in half a gallon of wine before calling it done.  This bizarre mixture was an old-fashioned ‘remedy’ named ‘dwale’.

Normally, dwale was meant as an anaesthetic, but with all of the flora he had documented as highly poisonous (hemlock, mandrake, etcetera), Duscor reasoned that instead of using this concoction on people needing surgery, it can be repurposed as a biological weapon instead, as grim as the prospect sounded.  With that idea in mind, he carefully filled a small bottle with the newly-brewed dwale, as well as a few syringes for his crossbow, and set off to the nearby woods.

 

Setting foot into the dense forest, it doesn’t take long for something to spring out of hiding to attack him; that something being a lime-green slime.  It did not seem the type to tolerate ‘venturers of any kind, it seems.

 

“Well well… that was fast.” Duscor remarked, “Suppose I don’t have to go very deep after all.

”

Seeing as they were both here, the doctor took the opportunity to test out the outdated solution crafted earlier.  He took out his crossbow, loaded a syringe into it, aimed, and pulled the trigger.  The syringe stabbed into the slime, but thanks to the slime’s gelatinous consistency, it did naught but sink right in, leaving the injecting mechanism dormant.

 

“Right, needles do not work on these.”  The masked doctor muttered under his breath, “That... That’s fine… ‘Tis what experimentation is for.”

 

Now taking the small bottle of dwale out of his leather pouch, he uncorked the bottle and threw it straight at his oozing opponent. He watched as the glass got absorbed right into the slime’s body and waited for a reaction, if there was one…

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, other than the dark concoction creating an inky blob within the slime.  The greenish-blackish slime looked up at Duscor with a baffled, if not perturbed look on its goopy face.

While he wasn’t showing it on the outside, the doctor started to worry.  Was everything he did in the apothecary tower today all for nothing? If it can’t do anything to a slime of all things, or safely knock someone out like people used to believe, what was this tripe good for?!

Before he could stew in self-doubt further, Duscor noticed a change.  The slime’s colour had not only completely changed from green to a muddy grey, but its demeanour had as well.  It seemed… slower than it was before.  Sluggish, even … wait. Sluggish?  Like under the influence of mandragora and hemlock?  Maybe the old concoction was doing something!

He waited just a moment longer to see what other reaction would reveal itself.  The slime moved slower and slower, sinking lower to the ground until its motion stopped altogether, and the once gelatinous creature steadily melted into the grass with a soft hiss till there was no trace of it left, save for the glass bottle and syringe.

The plague doctor breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that he hadn’t wasted his materials.  Going to where the slime once was, he returned both items to their rightful place before turning heel out of the forest.  Hopefully the next aggressor has a proper body to test this on.