Show me the Dreamroot!Mak please :3
Merle used to be a night manager for a convenience store near the Neverwinter Community College. He got fired from there because... well... because of this.
It was getting so late that it was nearly early. Mak’arune, working on her degree, prowled the aisles for any and all over-the-counter pick-me-ups. Coffee, Monster, some pep pills, anything with guarana in it, and anything with taurine in it.
“Late night hitting the books, huh?”
“Worse than that, said Mak’arune. “My laptop imploded and now I have to do my entire thesis from scratch.”
Merle whistled backwards. “Tell you what. I know a little something-something that can help you out. It’s pretty strong stuff, so you gotta go easy on it. But it’ll definitely give you energy to do all that thesis stuff.”
“Anything,” said Mak’arune, tears in her eyes. “I need this degree. I need it so bad.”
“Cool your jets,” Merle grumbled. “Just wait there.” He clambered down from his tall chair and waddled on all the way into the back room. Moxes rattled, curses uttered, and after a few minutes of this, he waddled back with a small bottle with no label and an eyedropper lid. “Here it is. One of my little extracts. It’d knock a Dwarf or a Humanman out so hard they could sleep through the apocalypse, but you Elven types? Wired to shit and back.”
The bottle, contents and all, couldn’t weigh more than two ounces. That such a small thing could be so important.
“Yup. Big-ass energy boost,” he said. “Now you gotta be careful with this shit. It’s distilled, so it’s extra potent. No more than one drop per drink per hour, even if you’re not mixing it with the rest of that noise. If your sternum starts to feel like it’s gonna shake apart, you fuckin’ quit, got it?”
Mak’arune nodded. “M’kay. And I can stay awake all night with this stuff?”
“Miss, you could probably stay awake through a sleep dust storm. One drop an hour. You’ll be fine.”
Mak’arune handed over her money and took the entire bag of legal uppers back to the residence where she was attempting to salvage the unsalvageable.
Two hours in, Mak’arune yawned and, in a complete panic about one yawn, sank the entire little brown bottle in one go.
On the plus side, she got her thesis reconstructed.
On the minus side, the campus security had to fish her out of the main Quad fountain, where she was (a) dressed only in her underwear, (b) yelling about things coming out of otherwise solid objects, (c ) sending misfiring magic all around the area, and (d) doing all of the above during a tour of potential donors of wealth and privilege.
It took some major league tranquillisers to get her to even chill. Even then, she was in something of a torpor for the majority of the next day.
Mak’arune would never touch anything stronger than a cola ever again.
[TAZ Prompts Remaining: 9]
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