Day 93 - Potion

 POTION

Prompt - Potion : Write about a magic potion.  What is it made of?  What does it do?  What is the antidote?

Turns out these olden times alchemists knew a thing or two after all. They never learned how  to turn base metals into gold. But one of them, one name long since forgotten, had found the secret of making the basest of humans appear golden, to make them shine to one pair of eyes. 

In 1593 the Castilian doctor and alchemist Xavier Genista Alvarez has been working on plague cures for more than two decades.  His records suggest he'd done more harm than good in that time, with scores of deaths of his experimental subjects.  But, like the dedicated scientist he was, Alvarez didn't let a few minor setbacks discourage him.  He died in 1601, of what sounded suspiciously like plagueish symptoms, with little to show for all his years of compound mixing and guttural chants.  He was little mourned, soon forgotten.  Until a Perthshire research student, digging deep into the archives of the University of Valladolid, uncovered his records for the period when he turned to some of the new herbs and plants from the South American colonies which had come into his laboratory.  His name was Steven Allison.

Allison spotted the importance of a couple of lines Alvarez had written that everyone else seemed to have missed.  The good doctor hadn't found the cure he was looking for, but he did find one for ugliness.  When he fed one of his old serving women with his most recent concoction he had soon found himself filled with irresistible lust for the wrinkled widow, and persuaded her to come to his bed where he did everything in his power to satisfy her sexually. The attraction only wore off once the woman had fallen asleep.  With a big smile on her face no doubt.  Embarrassed at what had happened, but driven by his scientific duty, he had made a note of the results, but in terms that needed careful interpretation.  Allison felt sure he had seen through the coded nature of the old Spanish prose, and wanted to try out the formula.

While his discovery was ground breaking in scholarly terms, he had a more personal reason for being excited by his discovery, and decided this was something he might hold back from his professor until he was more certain of his ground.  Steven was short.  Steven was plump, with rolls of at set in motion by his waddling gait.  Steven's head had suffered slight damage at birth, leaving his neck at an angle, one eye slightly above the other.  Nobody had even found Steven a pretty sight.  Steven, at twenty six, was as far removed from losing his virginity as he had been at six.  Steven had his reason.

Three weeks later he was back in Glasgow, and set about trying to satisfy his curiosity.  His first challenge being to assemble the requisite ingredients.  That took time, for they were not common items.  But one my one he added to his store.  Roasted and ground sweet pepper seed was an easy one to start with.  Lemon juice he could get any time.  Smoked saffron was straightforward.  But crushed cedron, paico leaves and peyote took him months to find on the internet.  And the final agent was listed as aguardiente - water of life.  But exactly which spirit Alvarez had used, and how critical it was to get the right one, was not indicated.  Experimentation was required.

Allison gradually got hold of the necessities, and patiently set about trying to mix them and see what the results might be.  But who to try it out on?  There was nobody he could share his secret with, nobody he dared face ridicule from.  He settled on Mrs Reason, his seventy two year old neighbour across the landing.  Although they passed one another frequently and she always said hello, might even have a brief exchange about the weather or the cleanliness of the tenement stairs, she'd never allowed him to be on first name terms.  If the magic were to work on her it would be a definite indication of the potency, and she'd be too ashamed to ever tell anyone what happened.  Wouldn't she?  

It took twenty seven different variations, spread over four months, before something happened.  Something?  It was an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, the discovery of the century.  He'd made up the capsule and sat to wait until she came home.  Three minutes after her door closed he'd gone across and rung her bell.  Was about to ask if she had any coffee to spare when he quickly found he'd really rung her bell, and set off all the alarms.  

"Steven" she breathed, and pulled him to her, slammed the door and started to open his jeans.  before he could say a word she'd creaked to her knees and taken his penis into her mouth.  For a second he wondered why he'd been so stupid, to let this woman near old enough to be his gran, until he swiftly realised that Mrs Reason - now Maureen -  really did know what she was doing... 

He was there for three and a half hours, until she finally slept for the exhaustion of her activities.  And Steven crept back to his flat, dazed by this old lady assault on his now defunct chastity.  His magic potion worked.  And if it worked on Maureen...

He now wondered what her reaction would be when they next met.  He held himself back expectantly, but Mrs Reason was her usual self, until he called her Maureen.  He got an earful for that one.  She hadn't remembered a thing.

It wasn't easy to work out the best way to use his new found 'ability' in a public setting, not that easy to get himself  alone with the women he desired, but he gradually figured out a strategy and became an unrecalled night of passion for more and more women, of all ages, including some beautesl who he wouldn't even have been capable of talking to before.  He had sex with more women than he'd dreamed off, and none of them remembered a thing.  If he went back to any them without his magic capsule on board they'd dismiss him, ignore him, laugh at him.  He soon learned that nobody would believe he had ever been to bed with a single one of them (even Maureen...), and he wasn't going to sink so low as to take photographic evidence.  

It had all become too much, these brief, near overpowering, sexual encounters lacked any sense of affection, lacked any sense that he was wanted by anyone.  So now he was pondering sharing his discovery with his professor, relinquishing the secret.  Too much of a good thing, he thought.

Rachel, his younger sister came to visit, brought along her friend Shona.  His sibling shared his short statured plumpness, and had a welcoming rosy cheeked face.  Her pal was a flat featured copy.  The chat started off friendly enough, but then Rachel gave him the look, the one that told him he was in for an interrogation.  She asked about the stories of him being seen with all these different women, of going off with them draped all over him like koala bears, of every one of them denying, vehemently, that they'd ever been near him.  What was going on?  Much as she loved him, she knew the chances of even one of the names she'd heard about finding him attractive were way way less than  Douglas Ross' chances of being First Minister.  He tried to evade the question, change the subject, make out he'd no idea what she was talking about, gabble nonsense if frustrated embarrassment.  

"Why would they not find him attractive?"  Shona suddenly demanded.  "I think he's cute."

Rachel stared at her friend unbelievingly.  Steven stared at her unbelievingly.  He hadn't had a bit of Xavier's magic for six days now, so there couldn't be any lingering after effects.  Anyway, this sounded more like real affection than lust, he thought.  And realised that, other than from his family, he didn't really know what real affection was.

But it was real enough.  Steven and Shona became a thing, and ended up moving in together.  Steven was having sex with a woman without using magic, without her forgetting and denying it all, and with something he hadn't experienced before - love.

He never did reveal the discovery to the faculty.  Some things are best left to their place in history.