Chapter Text
“I know Tango already banned these soups and honey's, but I’m really just curious on how far we can take this.” Xisuma said. “I knew they had good saturation, but my, I didn’t know how many combinations there were to these things!”
“It sure is fascinating.” Cub said. “I wonder if one of these will work better than the cup of coffee I missed this morning.”
“Trial and error my friend!” Xisuma smiled.
“More like trial and observation.” Cub corrected. “We’re learning a lot of new things, even if we don’t find a substitute for my caffeine addiction.”
“I wish we didn’t spend so much time on getting that blasted cow just for you to have beaten us to it.” Grian pouted, stirring a convocation of his own. “I felt so smart! Just for the idea! You had already gone ahead and done it!” Grian huffed. His current soup in progress was vaguely aimed to flip gravity for an individual, mixing a floating potion with a jump boost soup, made with cornflowers.
“Great minds think alike!” Xisuma laughed. “And at least this lovely lady-” He gestured to the mooshroom cow lazily eating mushrooms in the corner in her cute fenced area. “-gets to help us experiment!”
“Better than her friend's fate.” Grian mumbled under his breath. “Nether portals are the absolute worst.”
“Agreed.” Scar chimed in. “The headaches? The colors? Nasty. All of it.”
“Well, the nether hub is nice, I have to say.” Stress said. “I know I've been off-world for a lot of the season, but it's absolutely gorgeous! Tango ‘elped on it didn’t ‘e?”
“I believe so? He had help from a few others I think, but it was his vision. And he made the most of the hub part of it.” Xisuma recalled.
“He's done a lot this season, that's for sure.” Cub chuckled. “Maniac, he is.”
“As if you aren’t one.” Scar teased. “Bunch of amazin’ wackos on this server.”
“Which flower did you feed her this time?” Xisuma asked as he grabbed a bowl, milking her for the suspicious stew.
“A poppy, and then one of those new ones..” Scar said. “Y’know, the ones the snifferes find?”
“Does giving her one after the other change anything?” Stress asked. “I’ve dealt with potions plenty, but stews aren’t my expertise.”
“I’m not sure.” Cub shrugged. “I guess we can do some tests to find out. See how many flowers we can combine. How many combinations there are.”
“Someone should write a book on this sometime.” Grian said. “Lists and lists of the combinations and what they do.”
“That's what we’re doing my friend!” Cub smiled. “Still on the research portion of it though. I might have someone more eloquent make an official book once we have a decent list of potions and functions.”
Xisuma set the bowl on the table and picked up the potion next to it. They had been mixing a few stews with slowness to see if that could extend the saturation longer, or just made the player slow instead, and had mixed results thus far.
Poppies and dandelions mixed with slowness made the saturation last longer, but only if poppy stew was mixed with slowness ahead of time, and then added to the dandelion, and there were just so many combinations on both the types of ingredients, and the order they were mixed in. If feeding the cow multiple flowers at was was different than just mixing the stews, or drinking multiple stews, then they would simply have too many end results to explore! Of course they had milk on hand for the more dangerous combinations, because while respawn was on, it could be painful and need lasting recoveries depending on the death, and none of them wanted to go through that. Mixes like strength stew and poison potion were a mix of loopy painkillers that were an interesting find, so it was worth it to experiment with less loved soups.
Xisuma poured the gray liquid in, mixed it around, and brought the bowl to his lips. His mask had been removed for a while now, because everyone had agreed to set the air in the chunk they were occupying to end air for a short while for his comfort, and it felt nice to be around people without the tinted visor between them.
He finished the bowl quickly, ready to write down his findings as soon as the potion kicked in, when Cub gave him a concerned look.
“Wait- wait, that was a weakness potion.” He said seriously. “That wasn’t slowness, Xisuma. We haven’t mixed anything with weakness yet.”
“Oh..” Xisuma mumbled, starting to feel a little dizzy as black spots clouded his vision. His head felt very faint all of a sudden, and couldn’t really feel his legs as he felt his body lose some of his awareness of his balance. He tried to crouch down so he wouldn’t fall so hard, while also trying to express the fact that he was about to faint to the group.
“Whoops.” His knees buckled, and Scar, the closest to him, was holding his weight up in an instant, but he couldn’t really feel the hold Scar had on him.
Panicked gasps and “XISUMA!”’s rang out in the room, but he couldn’t hear more than a soupy whistle bouncing round his skull. It kinda hurt a lot. He blacked out.
---
“Was it the air?” A low voice asked, with a voice crack in the middle of it. “Do you think?”
“The air is still End air.” Someone with a more monotone voice answered. It sounded concerned.
“We need to call someone-” The low voice said hurriedly.
“Who?! Xisuma is the one we’d usually call!” A panicked squeaky voice exclaimed too loudly.
“Stress, do you know anything-?” The monotone voice asked.
“Weakness shouldn’t have made him pass out! And we already know the recipe for sleeping potions- this isn’t that. I- I don't know.”
“What do we do?”
His head hurt- void his head hurt .
A groan came from somewhere, and he took him a second to recognize the rumble from his own chest. The material under him was stiff and uncomfortable, and he reasoned that maybe he had hit his head? Maybe that's why everything hurt so much?
He shifted a little, groaning more, and savored the sweet relief of someone standing under the lights, shielding his eyes from whatever had been blinding him through his eyelids.
“Oh! Oh! He’s moving!” The squeaky voice said again. Whoever it was was too loud. The silhouette above him moved, and the light was back to blinding him through his eyelids. The light in the room was too loud. The boards creaking next to him as people moved around him were too loud.
“Wh’ts…” He hissed as he creaked an eye open. And the light was as bright as he expected, and his eyes felt too dry to close again comfortably. The shadows were there again, and someone was behind him, helping him up as he tried to sit up with his shaky elbows propping his upper body up.
“Shh shhh take it easy, take it easy.” A feminine voice told him, and he obliged, trying to blink his eyes open gradually.
“How are you feeling, Luv?” The same voice said in front of him.
“Uhh… awful…” He mumbled as his raspy voice rattled out the words. “What happened?” He asked.
His body was swaying, but a presence next to him kept him from falling over, which he was grateful for.
“You drank a bad soup.” Someone answered. “A bad soup indeed.”
He put effort into moving his head towards the voice, but he was still blinking the black spots from his eyes too much to take in details of their appearance. Everything was fuzzy.
“Right.” He hated how heavy his tongue felt in his mouth. “Right.” He repeated, just to make sure he could. “And uh-” His throat also felt kinda sticky and sore, longer phrases were harder than single words. “Where am I?”
The person who was supporting him shifted, as the silence dragged on, and the atmosphere felt a little stiffer, like he had said the most confusing thing in the world.
“Xisuma, you’re in a makeshift lab near your base.” Oh cool. That's what his name was. “ Ih-Zoo-mah.” It felt weird to have to think about it, but it was a comfortable weight in his mind. He liked the sound of it. “ Ih-Zoo-mah.”
“Uh huh.” Xisuma whispered. He blinked his eyes more rapidly, trying to clear the blur, and looked at the few other people in the room with him. The feminine voice was from a lady in pink, kneeling in front of him, and it seemed like the shadow was from a parrot hybrid with a bright red sweater, standing towards the side. He couldn’t see the person next him very well, but that was okay, he was sure he’d be able to look at them later. The person talking for the most part had square glasses resting on the bridge of their nose, and they had a pristine white lab coat over a tucked in black shirt. Bear-like ears poked out from their black hair, and overall, they seemed like a very high-class sort of person. Xisuma dubbed them as the one in charge, then.
“And uh, one more question...” Xisuma swallowed, and blinked his eyes a few times before squinting at the one in charge. His head pounded, but he needed answers before he could ask for something to sooth that, from these seemingly nice people.
“Who are you?”