Smile

Ingredients:

2l of Water
350ml of Fish Oil
3 Sprigs of Lavender
2 Worgill adrenal glands
2 Worgill testicles
Half of a Worgill brain
5 Khafra’s Weeds
1 Angus Root

Instructions:

Begin by pouring your Water into a large cauldron and bringing it to a boil.
Meanwhile, finely chop your Lavender, Khafra's Weeds and Angus Root.
Once chopped, add the Lavender, Angus Root, and half of the Khafra’s Weeds to a bowl along with your Fish Oil, making sure that you mix everything together completely.
When the oil has been mixed, dice the Worgill Brain, grate the Worgill Testicles, and add them to the water once it has begun to boil.
Now, squeeze the juice from the Worgill Glands into your water, continuing to stir as you do so. Once completely drained, quarter the glands and add them to your oil.
Leave the mixture to boil for 2 hours, during which it should take on a slightly reddish-brown colour.
Once the water has changed colour, gradually stir in your oily mixture. Make sure that you say a prayer to Surur as you stir the solution to dedicate this batch to her.
Now that your potion is complete, pour it into bottles of your choice and sprinkle the remaining Khafra’s Weeds into each of these bottles before sealing them with a cork.
*A stronger variant of Smile was created once the original became more popular that involves enchanting a pint of Kuhul with a hallucinatory form/spell and adding that to the final product.

Background:

Smile is a potion that has caused some controversy throughout Atoom. It works by increasing serotonin, adrenaline, and dulling pain and was originally sold as a cheap alternative to Mild Curatives. Eventually, they would find greater use as a recreational drug regularly used by both the common folk and the nobility. The drug is, however, highly addictive and can be deadly if overused. Extended use of the drug has left people to waste away as they think of nothing else but their next fix and in the most extreme cases, if the drug doesn’t kill the user, the withdrawal effects will often lead to addicts taking their own lives.
As such, its use is now illegal by all except qualified healers. The reason for this exception is that scholars amongst the healers have discovered that Smile makes for a great anti-depressant in small, controlled doses. Because of this, there are clinics in most major cities that provide small amounts of Smile, for a price.
Those who take the drug speak of feeling a euphoric sense of nothingness, as though the world no longer has any effect on them. They state that they are filled with a sense of elation and strength, as though they could run for miles without running out of breath or lift a house. Any aches and pains that users of the drug had before seemingly disappear, some reports even stating that patients have walked into clinics with a leg severely broken or while holding their guts in, and yet they’ll still have a smile on their face and seem perfectly coherent.
The ingredients involved in making Smile are also highly restricted. Due to the fact that the Worgill are highly revered creatures and are used as mounts by the armies of the Three Great Powers of Atoom, the hunting of these majestic animals is strictly regulated. Any trespassing on Worgill breeding grounds can lead to imprisonment and poaching Worgill is punished even more harshly.
It took a great deal of work and personal risk to discover the recipe for Smile. As you can imagine, none of the healers who work with Smile are willing to give out the recipe for such a dangerous drug. As such I had to resort to approaching the only other people who sell it, the back alley dealers.
Now, I’m proud to say that I don’t have many associates or contacts within the dark underbelly of Atoom, having spent most of my life trying to remain on the straight and narrow. I do, however, know some people who do have those kinds of contacts and they were able to point me in the right direction. All I was told was that I needed to go down a specific alleyway and a “spokesperson” by the name of Altaajir would find me.
I found the alley easily enough and after several nerve-wracking minutes, a dark-clothed man seemingly stepped out of the shadows. To say that he gave me a fright would be an understatement, and worse still, judging by the look in the man’s eyes, he could tell, and enjoyed my discomfort. As I composed myself, I looked the man up and down as he did the same with me, mirth never leaving his eyes. Judging by the way he dressed, this Altaajir was clearly a Hedge-Sorcerer. Not that the Hedge-Sorcerers have a uniform, seeing as they aren’t an official organisation, but they do tend to err towards dark clothing and always seemed to wear a heavy dark cloak with a hood and mask that obscured the face. Altaajir, however, wore his hood and mask down, keeping his face, a rather handsome one I must say, open to the air. Uncharacteristically for a Hedge-Sorcerer, the man also wore his wealth openly, with every finger and thumb adorned with a flashy gold ring, along with several golden necklaces and earrings.
Altaajir clearly knew why I was there, as I assume there aren’t many people who seek him out for anything else, as he drew several vials of Smile from somewhere and asked how many I needed. I, naturally, turned them down, instead asking how much he’d be willing to sell the recipe for. As I asked, Altaajir’s smile left his face and I immediately thought that my time in this world was done, however, the man simply reached into his cloak and pulled out a roll of parchment. Complaining that I was no fun, Altaajir asked for a sum that caused me to choke for air for a moment but was fortunately still within my means and so ended our deal.
The origins of Smile date back only 30 years to a man called Masud Abdo. Much of the man's story is well-known thanks to his own ego as he approached a national newspaper to spread the word as a means to increase his own infamy, challenge his rivals, and sell more of his drugs. At the beginning of his career, Masud was a travelling salesman with a reputation for selling anything that he could get his hands on, including family members if the price was right. Not lacking in confidence, Masud had left the Sorcerer Academy to go it alone, believing that the Academy was a waste of his time. Instead, he decided to work on preying on those whom he saw as beneath him, the common folk, as he saw himself as a wolf amongst sheep.
He began moving from village to village, tricking the innocent villagers out of their valuables in exchange for hopes, dreams, and treasures that they could only have imagined, only for all of that to turn sour as they realised that what they had been left with was nothing but useless rubbish. To ensure that his disgruntled customers couldn’t catch up to him and demand a refund for the faulty pocketwatch or the out-of-date calendar that he sold them, Masud was constantly on the move and made sure never to go to the same village twice, if he could help it.
As time went on, however, Masud’s schemes began to run dry as his reputation preceded him and his potential customers began to get wise to his cons. He knew that he could risk taking his work into the cities, however, those are much more heavily policed, both by the guards and the “legitimate” merchants. Being a Hedge-Sorcerer, Masud’s movements would be closely watched as well meaning that it would be too great a risk for him to try.
As such, Masud began searching for a new trick that he could sell to the sheep. He spent the next year trying new cons and some of them even succeeded, while others led to him narrowly escaping brushes with the local guards. Every time, however, the people would start to catch on and word would spread to neighbouring villages and that would spell the end of his latest trick.
One night, Masud found himself sitting in a tavern, nursing a pint of ale that the barmaid had unknowingly paid for, hunched over his notebook as he scribbled down ideas for his next big con that would finally kickstart his ascent to the riches and lifestyle that he believed that he deserved. As he did so, a couple of healers from the local clinic strolled in to avail themselves of the local watering hole and celebrate the end of a long day of work. The pair were deep in conversation, only stopping to order their drinks and a bite to eat. Masud, becoming frustrated with his work, decided to take part in his favourite pastime and eavesdropped on this conversation.
As it turned out, the healers were relieving the stresses of the day by venting about their patients. It seems that every single one of them had come in with small aches and pains, light scratches and bruises. The healers were bored of the constant nagging and fussing over nothing and fervently prayed that tomorrow they’d get a patient with a real problem that might stretch their skills somewhat beyond just selling another Mild Curative for 100 Crowns.
Upon hearing the amount, Masud’s eyes lit up. The rest of the conversation moved on to moaning and groaning about their parents, but Masud didn’t care anymore as he believed that he may have just struck gold. Mild Curatives had become a part of everyday life, everyone from commoners to royals was using the stuff and if he could get in on that Masud knew that he could come away with a true King’s Ransom. Staying up all night and through most of the next day, Masud began plotting his next move. He knew that he couldn’t just make Mild Curative and compete with the healers as, while he had the skills to make the potion due to his Academy training, everyone knew how to make a Mild Curative in some form. No, Masud would have to do something special to appeal to the masses, an alternative to the Mild Curative that would be better and cheaper. It also had to be easy to make, however that wouldn’t be difficult to manage for someone with decent alchemical skills and loose morals to achieve. Why should he struggle to make some mythical potion like the Divine Intervention when all he had to do was make the sheep believe that they were feeling better.
And so Masud threw together ingredients that would leave his clients numb. He gathered components, many of which were incredibly illegal, that would the adrenaline of those who used his potion to soar. To top it off, he added just enough Angus Root to force the colour of the potion to at least approach the clay red hues of the Mild Curative.
Naming his imposter of a potion Smile, Masud took his first batch to the markets without even sampling his creation. Once there, the grifter turned on the charm and gathered a crowd of villagers around him as he sold the dream of a “miracle cure” to them that was stronger than any curative, mild or otherwise.
The people ate it up, especially upon hearing that Smile costs half the price of the curatives sold by healers. Masud would go onto sell so much in the first day that he was forced to take orders in advance for when he next made a batch. The next few days passed in a flash as Musad spent his days selling Smile and his nights frantically making more of it, but this did not phase the conman as he had finally found his golden goose.
His budding business would continue to grow faster and faster, especially after, for first time ever, Masud found himself catering to repeat customers. It was an odd feeling at first, but the money that was rolling in helped to ease the strangeness of it. Before long, Masud found himself in need of aid if he was going to continue building his business and so he approached another roving band of Hedge-Sorcerers that he had dealt with in the past as he knew that they would be more than happy to make money through less than legal means.
Within a year, Smile had spread throughout the Three Great Powers of Atoom. The year after, Smile was officially declared an illegal drug by the royals and was publicly denounced by the church. This did nothing to Masud’s power and growth however other than to allow him to charge extra and develop an even greater reputation as the nations first and most powerful Drug Lord. Today, Masud controls much of the criminal underworld, having expanded beyond the drug business and is feared throughout the continent and beyond, all built on the pain and misery caused by Smile.