Drugs/Pharmacopedia

Pharmacopedia

All the drugs so far listed, in alphabetical order for quick reference.

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1*UP

• A variation of Sprite, it is a green fizzy drink, typically mixed in a glass. People can share trips by drinking from the same glass. It turns the perceptions of the users into those of an epic RPG, as per Final Fantasy or those created using RPGMaker. Usually, this involves text boxes, cutscenes, and the transforming of random items into useable things.
• SavePoint

A manner of continuing a 1*UP trip. It appears as a star. Break off the points. Eat them later to resume your trip where you left it off.

Alcohol

• Never goes out of style. The robust physical endurance of most Mess residents is combined with the evolution of mechanisms and medical technologies that have dimished alcohol's more dangerous side effects and addiction profile. Though not as widespread as some other intoxicants, it deserves an honorable mention for the fact it is still in use even when so many other options are available. Particularly popular among Eisenstimmen.

• Here's an interesting method of ingestion: the [AWOL machine] (Alcohol WithOut Liquid) - Echo

AnvilKitten

• A software artifact from another universe. Administered in the form of a small black feather, which is tickled at the back of the user's throat. Projects the user into a reality that consists entirely of scowling black cats and falling slabs of iron. Originally imported to the Mess by N'kenge?

Blue Lightning

• "It's a fairly powerful hallucinogen with a relaxing, stare-at-the-pretty-lights sort of effect... chemically structured so that the least bit of stress will drop you out of the trip, so no bad experiences. It's more cerebral, although I'd say it's pleasant." - XOR

• "Blue Lightning. Great. Get to know the number 27 on an up-close and personal level. For an hour. Trapped in a kaleidoscope. Drunk. As six different people at once." - OR

• Comes in capsule form. Has been known to make people mildly suggestible.

Boojum

• This is a drug associated with the Neo-Boreals. It induces species-atavism and is used as part of the Neo-B's quasi-ritualistic explorations of complex ecologies and systems. Naturally, a disturbing amount of recreational usage has been found for it too.

Bubble Tea

• Bubble Tea comes from the Charm-native Bubbleflower, whose enormous trumpet-shaped pink blossoms exude fist-sized gel-like bubbles full of piping hot, rainbow-colored liquid. Imbibers pierce the bubble's thin, soft shell and sip the effervescent nectar, which tastes and smells floral and sweet. The initial effect of the liquid is to make its drinker giddy, exuberant and effusive, prone to fits of giggles and lightheadedness. Once the entire bubble's worth of tea is drunk, however, the user begins to dissolve into a flotilla of rainbow-colored bubbles. The bubbles are nearly identical to soap bubbles, save that they are slightly tougher. When the last bubble has popped, the drinker re-forms, usually only a few feet away from where they started.

Cannabis

• From genetically pure varieties of the ancient sativa and indica plants to n-th generation hyperevolved, semi-sentient dope that WANTS to be smoked, the wacky weed is, without doubt, one of the most popular intoxicants in use. The historical connection between pot and Art? appreciation (especially music) is probably one factor responsible for the drug's popularity in the Art-saturated Mess. Whether this is a temporary fad or not remains to be seen.

CharmLibrary

• A variation of Library, with similar properties. It looks like a lot of slightly muddy silver string resting in the glass, and retains much of that appearance even when in motion, though it is indeed fluid. Instead of simply being a library, it is a slew of useless (but generally entertaining) information on a very specific topic. Popular topics include, are not limited to, and sometimes are a comination of:

Outdated gaming systems (D&D, Tri-Stat, Shadowrun, etc.)

Membership in certain Factions (all freely available, of course) (Bubbledolls, Bonobians, etc.)

Raising certain animals (Dogs, snakes, rats, etc.)

Outdated video game platforms (NES, Sega Genesis, Playstation, etc.)

Chutzpah

• Inhibition inhibitor. Comes in a largish, blue pill, about as hard as rubber, dissolves slowly in the mouth. Can be chewed on for a long and mild buzz, or swallowed for the harder hit. Some do both. At the same time. Comes in several purities and strengths.

• "Great stuff. It's like a pure shot of confidence. Don't worry, this is the milder stuff, so you won't go screamin' into the night naked. You gotta' build up to that level." - shinsei

Deadly Lampshade

• "Party-zombie thing, like Solanum3... a pretty typical hyper-suggestible trance simulation, with weird little side effects. Like wanting to dance on tables and a fascination for other people's brains." - Mirqur

Digital Cannabis

• Created by Sel after hearing complaints that there are not enough 'soft' digital drugs. Digital Cannabis comes in a index card like IC board and chipset with a data port. Chips with multiple ports (Digital Hookah) and local wireless area network versions (Contact High) both exist. The experience is pretty mundane as fair as digital drugs go, typical with simple cannabis use.

Electricity

• For a cheap, dangerous and much less sophisticated high than software drugs (see Digital Intoxicants), some droids 'spark' or 'spark up' by applying high voltages to themselves, either directly through their circuits or indirectly through their chassis. The 'buzz' in the latter case comes from voltages induced in their circuits.

• Related jargon: "Eddy" (from "Edison"; as in "to do some Eddy") - 120-volt power. "Two-four" - 240-volt power.

Entaulolly

• Entaulolly is exactly as it has always been, garnered from the depths of a particularly twisty section of the Puzzle, the one that is guarded by those moths that have been waiting so long for that certain someone, and is taken exactly in the same way it always has been, the end results being that you become more like you till eventually you are exactly the you you have been searching for. An experience that is the culmination of a Wheel's search, to be sure. (Creator's notes: I got the name from Entelechy and Tautological).

Epiphany

• "You know that moment when you're working on a problem, really immersed in it, right, and suddenly -- click! -- for a moment, everything makes sense, and you feel full of enthusiasm, you love the problem, you could work on it forever? Perfectly satisfied? That's what Epiph does. Doesn't give you the idea... but makes you love your work, and feel like you could happily plunge yourself into it forever."

Garden

• Artwar of the VRC, but ask one and they'll deny it as being vulgar and quite beneath them, publically, that is. It manifests as a fixed-picture set that is adhered to flaps of cellulose that are bound by a foul-smelling sticky substance and bound in some kind of plant hide. The fixed-pictures are very archaic in manner, showcasing brightly-lit images in water-soluable dye that are of larval sentients living in states of bucolic bliss in hidden, secret gardens where more mature sentients cannot gain access to. It is rumoured to be activated by sweat-contact (which, of course, the VRC denies even further, how gauche) and results in archaic feelings of following orders, of being spoken to but not heard, and a whole history of larval sentients that is a creation upon a creation (that the sense of freedom of the larval sentients is a creation and that the natural state is of being property). The sentient becomes more worried about exposed skin, of loud outbursts, and of strong, expressed emotions, yet they become furtive and long for that long ago secret place...in effect, becoming in all but a physical sense a larval sentient of the fixed-chronological, exothermic, ametaphorical, simulated-sentient naked beach ape.

Generic Hallucinogens

• There is no one type that is King, but overall, light-to-moderate strength hallucinogens are sufficiently popular that they get one big group mention. Ones which cause the user to see colorful visual distortions or generally add sensory 'depth' to activities such as sex, music and dancing are commonplace, and often invented out of whole cloth on the spot.

Golden Falcon

• "...a martini glass containing a bright gold drink, with three little silvery slabs bobbing slowly in it. The scent is faintly sweet, and a bit peppery. The silver, whatever it is, dissolves slowly into metallic swirls, and gives off a vapor that's a little dizzying in itself. 'Straighten your head out' may not be the exact term that springs to mind, although you're starting to feel as if you could count your own tastebuds without looking..."

GridSnap

• Induces awareness of the supracontextual grid inhabited by aex.rat. Higher doses allow manipulation of this grid. Overdoses can disrupt a user's alignment with the supercontext; this may induce chronosynclastic infundibulation, improper corporeal animation, semiotic slippage, 3-letter-shift encryption, or worse. Curiously, habitual users often report (or try to) an inability to use concrete nouns.

Halcyon

• Halcyon is a mild mood-alterer common in Up (where it's taken as a gentle recreational relaxant) and Top (where it's commonly used to smooth out inelegant and unseemly strain and irritation). Halcyon is served in the form of pale pearls, which are chewed to release a sweet-salty liquid. It leaves its user feeling serene and calm, pleasantly detatched from their surroundings; it also causes them to drift a few feet off the ground, as though buoyed in calm water. Larger doses induce avian traits, which wear off gradually as the drug wears off.

Imprint

• An engram-fixation drug designed to be delivered to the central nervous system by injection or infusion. Applied, the first use of the drug takes a current snapshot of what's happening to / is surrounding the user. From then on, the user will have a deeply rooted desire to return to those environmental conditions, as closely as possible. Further doses of the drug will reinforce the snapshot, and how strongly the user will want to return to that ideal, based on how much of the drug you take. Have a little, and there's an inclination to try and return to that snapshot ideal, but not a very strong one. Have a whole lot, and you'll become obsessed, trying to return to or recreate all of the exact conditions contained in the snapshot. Not taken at all, the drug and it's inclinations are normally flushed out in about ten days, plus or minus.

Joypad

• Joypad makes people into happy robots. Its effects include "strobing" of consciousness, selective amnesia, extreme suggestibility, literalism, monotone speech, and the breaking up of time perception into "packets." Small doses allow the subject's core personality to remain intact and leave considerable free will; large doses induce trance-like command automatism. It's not difficult for an unwilling user to resist the effects, but since the drug is also a powerful euphoriant it can be very difficult to remain unwilling. Memories of a Joypad trip are intact but dreamlike.

Key Logo

• This is a chemical substance that forces the user to confuse words with the concepts that they represent, ultimately leading to a blurry line between reality and the written word. When presented with a signifier, the user directly perceives its referrant. The map becomes the territory. (Reference: [The Invisibles] by [Grant Morrison])

Library

• A physically-strange substance - it behaves like a fluid, but at rest seems nothing more than a number of silver doilys and lace ribbons stacked in the glass. Effects biologicals and software beings alike; tends to make the user sesquipedalian.

• "Library," Kalinda says, peeling another silver doily from the sometimes-fluid stuff in her past-half-empty glass, "is a smart drink. It's hierarchival substrate, the contents of a whole, entire library dumped into drinkable, pseudo-liquid form. It likes to be read, what book doesn't? That's why it jumps into your mouth."

"Linear"

• A nameless substance, applied through the skin via small squares of something paperlike. It linearizes one's thought processes, especially where language is concerned, and is used by the otherwise incomprehensible Far-spire to help communicate with air-dwellers.

Merge

• Causes the user to break down into a puddle of protoplasm. Two (or more) users can share a tub and experience a form of intimate telepathy during the melted period. The body reassembles itself in some arcane manner as the drug wears off. Usually. (From Rudy Rucker's Software et al)

Mirror-Muse {MM} and Logic-Liaison <LL>

• Mirror-Muse {MM} is basically a schizophrenic episode inducing drug, with a very specific attunement: It causes the user's subconcious right-brain creative urges to strengthen and manifest in a clear voice, whispering, urging, and encouraging. The opposite of Mirror-Muse, Logic-Liaison <LL> affects the user's subconcious left-brain intuition, analytical, calculating, and uncompromising in the same manner. {MM} has limited popularity with artistic types looking to flatten self-doubt and <LL> has found its way into the hands of exceptionally desperate Upwarp logicians. Using both together can be exceptionally disconcerting, leading to being a near-helpless observer to watching your own two 'purified' mental halves argue endlessly over what should be done. Prolonged usage can lead to permanant psychotic break, leaving the voice separation permanent.

Music

• If you don't believe this can have an effect on your mental state, you haven't heard what happens when the musically-inclined denizens of the Mess start jamming. Lingering physical effects are few, but synaesthetic experiences and guided hallucinations are extremely common.

Negotiation Foam

• A spray-on empathogen with a taffy-like consistency, absorbed through the skin. Invented by the Bubble Dolls to end needless conflicts.

Nymin

• Temporal sense affecting drug. As Einstein once said: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." Nymin just swaps the effect, making pleasurable times stretch out and painful ones pass by briefly. Very interesting when mixed with traditional stimulants.

Pnoom

• "...straightforward sensory candy."

Quasi-Opiates

• As with alcohol, these drugs have evolved over time into forms that, while 'safe' and not physically addictive, are no less potent than their ancestors. The Heliquary is especially infamous for having an atmosphere constantly saturated with these substances, as a way to encourage peaceful behaviour among the patrons. Old-world opium, complete with addictive qualities, is one of the few indulgences the VRC allow themselves in moderation. (It was fairly popular to use on children to keep them still for those long-exposure photographs.)

Real/UnReal

• Translates the user's body between digital and physical states, permanently, but the same drug will translate a person back. The effect occurs instantly, but temporary minor translation errors are a common side effect. These errors are actually a residue of the drug itself, and are removed by self-correcting decryption as it dissipates: usually two or three rest cycles are enough to clear everything up. Repeated use before error correction is complete incurs a risk that one or more errors may become permanent.

Simchips

• These items are often simply plugs which are designed to be inserted into neural-link sockets. Within them are chips which generate a scene or a situation for the user. Often games or relaxation/meditation scenes are simulated. There is usually a way to alter the amount of sensory override the chip generates. Some chips include subliminal programming of various kinds both therapeutic and parasitic.

• Lysette leans back slowly, her eyes closing.. "Its nice.. I can feel it warming me, even.."
• Echo says, "Yeah. Careful with that part. Apparently, one user was feeling a little chilly and plugged a beach in to feel warm for a while instead of turning the heat up. Froze to death during the snowstorm. So, basic warning for sensory overrides."

"Slowing Down"

• An herbal concoction, smoked. Tastes of bitter mint. Smoking it causes the user to feel one with the universe, including the worms twenty feet down that you didn't even know were there. Common sensations involve feelings of zenlike one-ness with the universe, giggly playfulness, and an urge to discuss deep philosophy. There have been instances of shared hallucinatory reality, with pieces of the hallucination leaking over into real life. Car-surfing is the preferred game of Slowing Down smokers.

Stable

• Stable is heavily used in Up, whose Gamma Sector prescribes it as a daily cure-all. Unlike the more powerful, temporary mood enhancers (like Conviviality or Halcyon) or performance enhancers (like Logic-Liaison or Epiphany) that the Sector distributes for recreational use, Stable is intended to be taken regularly -- daily, in fact. It is, in fact, a nanopharmaceutical, usually taken in the form of a pill; when ingested, the nanites determine the psychic and biochemical balances within the user, and flood their system with a dose of mixed stimulants, relaxants and mood enhancers precisely calibrated to bring the user to the Upwarp ideal: cheerful but not manic, relaxed but alert, well-adjusted and productive and, well, stable.

Strange Passport

• A very complex multi effect drug. Typically it takes the form of a stamp sized microchip, with an induction adapter for biological lifeforms. It was designed to aid people wishing to visit Strangewarp safely to do so. Mostly. The main effects of Strange Passport are heightened senses, reflex and response time enhancement and fear suppression. Also built into it is a virus scan trait, allowing the user to identify buildups of Strangevirus. The oddest attribute, and apparently a side effect of the combination of effects, is an increased resilience to Strangevirus infection, though by no means a complete immunity. A previous glitch in Strange Passport was that it would overstimulate the brain, making the user very jumpy/twitchy/easily excitable. A few of these are still in the current supply of Strange Passport, and its rather difficult to tell the difference between a "calm" passport and one that's not.

Sprite

• Delivered as a clear, fizzy liquid inside an aluminum can or plastic bottle. Causes the user to perceive and interact with the world as if it were an 8-bit video game, complete with power-ups, scores, and lives. When the last life is lost, the metaphysical effects expire. Typical effects of a post-Sprite "crash" include social ineptitude, solitary behavior, and pathological obsession with detail.

Squid ("Huffing Squid")

• A living drug, literally a fist sized squid-like organism which relies on its use as an intoxicant to proliferate it. Active on land, sea, or wide ranging atmospheres (varieties existing in near void have been noted as well), this creature generates a drug consisting of its very cells, which can be drawn out of it by simple contact along its tentacles, though actually shaking and breathing the powdery cellular substance is the preferred method (AKA, Huffing Squid, accomplished with head raised and squid spun immediately above). When chemically potent, the squid's bioluminescent interior flashes a variety of colours, attracting various users fond of its effect, which is addictive to unprotected lower species. Some of the cells collect and form new Squid within their hosts, and are released harmlessly later, through coughing, sneezing, or are otherwise passed before they become too large. The effects in higher order species include: A universal desire to share and introduce Squid (while high) to those around the individual, euphoria, physical stimulation, vastly increased pain tolerance, and a face powdered with the slight glow of bioluminescent. As per its role in biological reproduction, usage tends to be overall quite benign, or even beneficial to the user, to encourage repeat usage and thus species proliferation.

• Huffing Squid actually started at a Puzzlebox party, when I put a spinning flashing rubbery toy squid to my nose and literally 'huffed squid'. Soon, the whole party had huffed squid, and it was nothing but giggling and passing of Squid from thereon! -Ataxia

T-Chocolate

• A medicinal compound given to someone who has just gone through a traumatic event, to prevent emotional scarring. This drug is given within a few hours of the negative experience in question, preventing the formation of negative-stimulus pathways (but not otherwise affecting long term memory). At normal dosages, the memory of the event is clearly retained, but with a distancing effect, stripping away strong emotion and blurring impressions of pain. Has no effect on positive experiences. Invented by Flyte.

Tone Burst

• Co-authored by D, Tone Burst's code is 'aged' using selective mutation algorithms, and generally appears as a glowing drink. The effects vary according to the individual's own codebase, but include pleasantly distorted perceptions, and outwardly, glitches in one's visual representation and speech patterns.

• Mirqur swirls his glass lightly, filled with fractally glowing fluid, and downs it. His own outline slowly becomes less opaque, and the rendering of his body becomes a little cruder, an occasional miscalculated polygon spiking out into the air. "Whoa."

Tufts

• A cocktail of rabbit RNA, Merge, and temporal resequencers. Gives the user lapine mental and physical features, accompanied by wholly correct memories of having always been that way.

UnStable

• Certain disruptive elements, anarchists, and mischief-makers have reverse-engineered Stable, creating a lookalike drug, identical in everything but effect. The nanites in UnStable are compromised; instead of bringing the patient to Up-ideal balance, they flood the system with an overdose of one of the drugs -- with often unpredictable results. Most variants of UnStable are entirely temporary, causing inconvenience and embarassment but no long-term damage. The insidious thing about UnStable is that UnStable pills are present, albeit in small numbers, masquerading as Stable pills: there is a slim but present chance that any user of Stable might accidentally ingest UnStable.

Zoom

• Offered as a red, slightly glittery dust, Zoom is pseudocrystalline and, chemically, completely inert. Its preparation gives it a psionic "charge". When activated - usually by exhaling a pinch's worth of the ultralight dust and looking through the resulting cloud, but fixing attention on it while it's airborne is the main thing - it ensnares the user's conscious thought processes, slowing them down. The senses and involuntary processes still work at the normal rate, and that discrepancy in the subjective passage of time is what it's mostly taken for. Among beings whose eyes have a limited depth of field, it tends to result in some blurring of vision as the eyes overcompensate their own focus. Zoom can be prepared by anyone who knows how, as long as there are compatible minds in the general vicinity.

Zorro

• Induces an exhilariting sense that reality is very simple, all morality is black-and-white, and the user just happens to be on the side of the good guys. Sometimes used by malcontented factions to provoke conflict. (Gratefully cribbed from Atlas Games's Over the Edge RPG.) (From the word 'Zoroastrianism', a pre-Christianity religion from which Christianity took the idea of good and evil --pedagogical Zoe