#remember when i was wondering if erik's element leaned more towards poison or venom? good times

[ostensiblyfunctional]

The range of Erik's potential diet is once again fascinating me, on the basis of the sheer number of things that can highly inconvenience/kill a human. Obviously there's the chemical/plant/animal poisons that first come to mind—y'know, arsenic, belladonna, the unpleasantness that happens if you try to eat a monarch butterfly, that sort of thing. And I do have fun wondering if Erik's the type of guy to just … snatch some poor, poisonously bright insect off the side of a trunk and pop it in his mouth, as is his due as a Dragon Slayer who are just kinda like that sometimes.

However. The thought of Erik carefully harvesting and making his own wild licorice and monkshood tisanes, making use of a well-loved copper teapot and his treasured, antique tea service painted with lead-based glaze … kicking back with a cordial of pure ethanol, and the cordial is of course made of lead crystal … Meredy wandering over to an unsupervised, brightly-colored cookpot because whatever's in there smells amazing, then suddenly Erik is tackling her away and shouting about the cyanide he just spiced his quail and grass pea soup with, did Oración Seis not tell her to not touch his cadmium-painted cookpots?! Just, Erik being fancy about his poison consumption, because humans sure have figured out a bunch of ways to really inconvenience themselves and he might as well take advantage of their mistakes.

Also, what counts as poisonous enough to use? Humans can intoxicate themselves on too much water. Can Erik use that? There are so many things that are nonlethally, and even unnoticeably, harmful to us, so how trace can a poison be before Erik can't convert it into magic? Carbon monoxide is a notoriously odorless, colorless gas that is very bad for us—can Erik convert a poison he can't perceive? Can he straight-up eat rotten food because it would otherwise be harmful for literally anything else to eat? Relatedly, does this mean he really likes fermented food, because that's essentially rotten food that humans like to eat? I have questions