Patent Medicine Bottle

A late-nineteenth century medicinal flask made of glass and bearing a label with a wide-smiling Mitch Hort on it. Mitch found it inside a wooden crate in a secret room in the History A version of the Stanley Hotel. Mitch forced Marshall to drink its contents after the Houdini Kusarikku gored Marshall’s legs. The drink healed Marshall instantly, though it left him with a psychosomatic limp.

Future bottles of this Patent Medicine, if discovered, will provide Major Healing (GURPS Magic, p.91) with no roll required, but at a cost of permanent Mental Disadvantages totaling the number of hit points healed. The elixir bonds to the primitive ape-brain of the human subject and renders them more pliable to the ploys and blandishments of the Anunnakku.

Specific Study: Charley has to laugh when she first looks at the label on the empty bottle that Mitch and Marshall brought back from the temblor event in Colorado, with its etching/engraving picture of Mitch, looking a little bit older than his History A self—bearded, but not as old as Alpha Leonis is supposed to be now in History A—and smiling. Charley has the weird dissociative thought that Mitch on this bottle looks a little like the picture of Colonel Sanders on a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. But when Charley touches this weird object, all her bemusement at its funny label fades away. She sees where the bottle was filled; right near a huge Sumerian temple-looking complex in some very high mountains; they do look a bit like the Rockies. Human slaves of the Anunnaki draw up vast buckets of iron- and copper-rich water from a deep mountain spring while other slaves, working under the lash of human overseers and a few watchful girtablullû guards, move huge barrels into a processing center where the liquid is decanted, filtered, and refined for its eventual placement inside these bottles.

The elixir is clearly meant for human, not Irruptor users; it’s “marketed” to the human subjects of the Anunnaki in History B as a natural cure-all due to the powers of these springs, a quite effective panacea for all nagging ailments that (limited) human medicine can’t quite heal on its own. But that “refinement” process Charley witnesses, done under the watchful frog-like eye of a kulullû in the laboratories at the springs, also puts an outside additive into the medicine, one designed to make any human who drinks it even more helpless to the “caretaking” impulses of the Anunnaki. In some people this chemical might bond with their amygdala, hypothalamus, and pituitary to carefully release oxytocin to make their personality more psychologically dependent on Those Who Provide by making them into hypochondriacs, or giving them a psychosomatic injury or pretext for Munchausen syndrome. Effectively, drinking enough of this elixir will render a normal-Will human into a willing dependent whose body, mind, and psyche shout “take care of me, pity me!”… care and dependency which their Anunnaki masters are more than happy to provide.