#uhhhhhh MC is also non-binary if that's your bag

[aromantic-pantyanarchy]

Making Love Potions for Fun and Profit

For @aroacelibrary‘s Halloween prompts.

The tale of a witch, dealing with the hassle of modern day, who makes a living by making love potions out of their garage. The only question is what’s more of a pain to deal with, the process of making them or the clientele.

Amaranth Cassiopeia Melancholia snored loudly in their twin mattress, the one that lacked an actual bedframe under it. Their lower body was wrapped tight in the covers while their upper body seemed to have attempted to throw them clean off the bed. A perfect half and half, restless sleepers could work miracles at times.

Amaranth Cassiopeia Melancholia often had to assure people that, yes, that was the actual, legal name that they had been born with. People could still call them Amy though, if Amaranth didn’t quite roll off the tongue. The most common assumption following this revelation was that Amy’s parents were hippies, and they usually told them, yeah, something like that.

People asked if that’s also where the no gender thing came from, and Amy would tell them that no, that was an unrelated thing.

Amy was, in fact, not the child of hippies, though the end result was more or less the same. Actually, Amy was a witch. And they would be sure to tell you that being a witch sucks, or they would if it wasn’t supposed to be a big secret. So to elaborate further, if you were also a witch, they would be sure to tell you that being a witch sucks.

The world of witchery had never quite gotten over that whole pocket of history that involved stakes and burning, you know, the one that lasted for most of recorded history, so globally, witches had more or less decided to keep the existence of their powers under wraps. Amy was of the opinion that if they had to keep their magic a secret, then they might as well not have it to begin with. Yeah, it made household chores a lot easier, but these days anyone can have a magical self-using vacuum cleaner, it’s called a Roomba.

Whenever people got past the whole name thing, they seemed to get stuck on the money thing next. How, they would wonder, could a person so young and so independent afford a house in the suburbs? In this economy? With no roommates? No rich parents? Amy might tell them, perhaps a little sardonically, that the business of love never ran dry.

They’d then ask if they meant, like, dating apps? And Amy would say yeah, something like that.

It wasn’t actually dating apps though.

If there’s one thing witches love, it’s specialty shops. The nature of witches means that, when it comes to magic-related commodities, there’s a high demand, low supply situation to be had. If there was one thing Amy appreciated about magic, it was this fact.

Amy’s alarm went off, and they shot up with a surprised snort. After coughing the morning breath out of their mouth and blinking last night’s dreams out of their eyes, they began trying to remember why the alarm had been set to begin with.

Oh, wait. It was mixing day.

Amy stretched, mentally preparing to tackle the adversity in front of them, then turned over, pulled the covers back over their body and closed their eyes again. Mixing didn’t take that long, they could afford to sleep in a little longer.

Perhaps the single most important development in the past decade of witchcraft was the jailbreaking spell. With the witchery community as secretive and insular as it is, communication is critical. For this reason, a witch, who’s name has been lost to the witching community’s obsession with secrecy, created an easy to use spell that since has mostly passed around through word of mouth, that when applied to any device capable of internet access allowed it to access data normally unobtainable. Thus, the .wic boom, well, boomed. With the internet, witches were able to spread information and resources all over the world while still keeping their big secret a secret.

This is important as it relates to Amy’s financial situation, as well as their living situation. To say that Amy could afford to live in the suburbs was a bit of an overstatement, they could barely afford the house and were honestly much more of an apartment type person anyways, but the space was necessary for their work, as was the witches’ internet. Amy’s website was amaranthapothecary.wic, and while they offered a number of various potion types with a range of effects from transmogrification to anti-depressants, the focal point of Amy’s little store was the love potions.

Love potion suppliers were rare. It was a substance that was dangerous to make and dubiously ethical to sell. Not illegal to sell, mind you, and to be sure that was Amy’s go to phrase whenever the issue arose, but that was because, well, it’s really hard to prosecute lawbreakers in a completely hidden society.

Like Amy told all those people, the business of love never ran dry. They never asked why customers needed or wanted these potions, and honestly, they really didn’t want to know. As long as the potions were selling, they just had to keep making them, keep selling them, and keep ignoring what people were actually doing with them.

Alright, Amy was getting up for real now. They shambled into the bathroom and started brushing their teeth, falling into a familiar, very half-awake type of rhythm.

The biggest rule for mixing love potions was not to wear anything that you were going to be wearing while interacting with anyone else at any point. The fumes would sink into fabric and even the smallest whiff could have an adverse effect on a person. When it came to magical concoctions, everything ran on the better safe than sorry rule. As a side note, the biggest rule for using love potions by the same measure was to hold your breath while dispensing the liquid.

Amy spat out the toothpaste, washed out their mouth, took a quick leak, and thusly concluded the morning’s preparation. They opted to stay in the tank top and underwear that they’d slept in, given the biggest rule for mixing love potions. It was best to go with something light that you were planning to take off soon anyways.

Finally, they grabbed a granola bar from the pantry, wolfed that down as some semblance of a breakfast, and moved on into the garage.

To reiterate, the reason Amy absolutely needed to move into a house that they probably couldn’t afford was for the work space. The garage was filled with stacks of shipping boxes with only narrow spaces cleared out to be walkways between them. Along the walls were metal shelving units that were each filled with sets of cardboard half-boxes which were filled with rows of plastic bottles which were filled with brightly colored liquids. The neon pink love potions had an entire unit all to themselves, but half that shelf was empty now.

The garage also had a second room in it. Through a set of small double doors was where the actual equipment was. On one side of the wall was a big steel drum with hatches on its top and bottom, suspended in the air by two legs leading into a base on wheels. Next to it was a floor scale. In another corner was a stack of plastic buckets. There was a cart that floated around everywhere in the garage with two levels, one cleared off, the other full of random junk. And of course, the most important piece of gear, a water cooler.

The process was simple but tedious. Amy would go out and grab a cardboard box full of a specific ingredient (most of them weighing around 50 pounds), pour a specific amount of it into a plastic bucket (measuring with the scale), pour that into the mixer (the steel drum thing), tape the box back up, replace it and move onto the next ingredient. Lugging around so many heavy boxes usually meant the day after mixing day was recovery day for Amy’s poor, stiff back.

But the first ingredient to go in the mixer was actually pretty light. It was a bath bomb. Amy had to admit, they also weren’t immune to the captivating charm of specialty witch stores. Magical bath bombs especially were really handy for potion making when you didn’t want to kill yourself with water and heating bills.

The first bath bomb was a small little crusty orb of aquatic blue with white waves and teal flecks. Amy tossed it into the bottom of the mixer and spit on it. The orb expanded immediately into about a hundred gallons of water, filling the mixer up immediately. The spit also apparently qualified as “a dallop of hatred” for the recipe, which, Amy wasn’t sure about, they didn’t really feel hateful, maybe they should feel offended.

Next came the much harder part, the part involving the heavy stuff. Amy added to the mixer: 20 lbs of dried egg yolk (the easiest thing on the list to get their hands on, made a good chunky base, absorbed a lot of the other ingredients’ effects, good protein), 17 and a half lbs of phoenix gizzards (these had to be ordered from a potion-specializing witch shop with jacked up prices, requiring Amy to jack up their own prices in response), 16 lbs of rock salt, 12 lbs of calcium, 6 lbs of cow eyes (fortunately still obtainable from a normal Chinese supplier), a pound and a half of rose petals (synthetic, bought in bulk from a wedding supplier, it’s the romantic connotations more than the actual flowery parts that have an effect), a pound of fairy wings (see note on phoenix liver, double the price jacking), a cluster of hair from a fair maiden (from one of those donated hair wigs, the potion was actually a lot less strict on the source than you’d think), and a dollop of hatred (already covered).

Finally, Amy added another bath bomb, this one was a bright orange with red and yellow patterns around it. As soon as it hit the oddly colored soup, bubbles began streaming to the surface. Within seconds it had reached a frothy boil. These were meant to help fire-enchanted witches actually, like, bathe themselves, but Amy couldn’t be faulted for being creative and frugal on this part of the potion making process.

They fixed the top hatch back on, sealing the mixer up completely, then smacked the big green button and the whole thing began spinning around its arms. After waiting for a moment to make sure nothing went horribly wrong, they left the mixer to its work and left the garage.

The mixer, it is worth noting, was not meant to hold boiling liquids. It wasn’t meant to hold liquids at all actually, this kind of machinery was only meant to mix powders. Amy had to give it a couple of enchantments to suit their needs, though it had taken them a bit of time getting the actual enchantments just right, learning them as they were from witchipedia.

No, go ahead, laugh. That was a joke. Seriously, you think any self-respecting magical encyclopedia, online or no, would call themselves that? Witchipedia? Really? No, the site was called Encyclopedia Arcania Terrarum, a bit hard to remember as a url but Amy could hardly talk.

No, it was everyone else that called it witchipedia. It was such a common shorthand for the website in witching circles around the web that the actual Encyclopedia Arcania Terrarum put the word in its header, and now redirects from witchipedia.wic, which was a lot easier to spell consistently.

Amy was lying face down on their mattress again, half-listening to the entomology podcast playing from their phone. The potion would have to mix for the next half hour, and until then Amy had nothing much to really do. And while adding the ingredients was certainly physically taxing, the bottling process required more of their attention, and was the point when the job became some actual, real, work. They needed to rest a little more in preparation for that.

But yes, the mixer, Amy had enchanted the mixer with two primary spells. One gave the mixer some additional heat resistance, love potions needed to be boiled after all and outside of getting an old-fashioned cauldron and setting up a bonfire pit in their backyard (bad idea on multiple levels) this was the best solution.

The other was a bit more vague. It was a common cheat used by witches on all kinds of equipment, but Amy had no idea how it actually worked. The effect was that their mixer was now much more watertight. For as much as it was spinning, so long as the hatch lids stay on, not a drop of the potion would spill out. It also made the mixer completely stainless. So long as Amy made sure to completely empty the mixer after use, they didn’t even need to wash it out.

Amy snorted awake as the podcast wrapped up and transitioned into silence. They checked their phone to see it had been a full 45 minutes since the potion had been set to mix. That wasn’t really a problem, the bath bomb would burn itself out in the first 10 minutes, but it still felt like a waste of time.

They went back into the garage, pressed the big red button below the big green button to bring the mixer to a stop, then opened the top hatch and peered into the mix.

The liquid below glowed a bright neon pink, an errant bubble still drifting its way to the surface before breaking. Amy reached down, dipped a finger in the mix and poked it in their mouth.

They shuddered. It tasted like sloughs of wet ash, deep fried for too long, burnt to a crisp, dragged through cold grease, then flash frozen and microwaved for too long. They gagged and stepped away from the mixer. Yep, the love potion had come out perfectly.

Amy reached onto the lower level of the cart and pulled out a loose garden hose. They dropped one end into the mixer, then dragged the other over to the water cooler. The bucket that fed into the cooler had its top cut off and was currently sitting empty. Amy placed the other end of the hose to their lips and sucked. Motivated by not having to taste any more love potion than was necessary, they counted out the time to the second, then dropped the hose into the water cooler’s bucket. Pink liquid gushed out and it began to fill up.

Amy ducked out into the garage and grabbed a huge stack of cardboard half-boxes and unmarked plastic bottles. This part required speed and efficiency. They would use the water cooler to fill up each bottle one by one, put 20 into a single half-box, fill the cart up with three half boxes, run out to put the half-boxes on the shelf, then run in and start the cycle over again until they’d emptied the mixer, all while keeping ahead of the potion filling in from the mixer so that it didn’t overflow and spill everywhere.

The water cooler was a decently helpful device, cheap of course and functioning like an overly large funnel with a gallon’s holding capacity, but more than that, it helped by actually cooling the potion down a little. The love potion’s potency wasn’t affected by the temperature it was kept at, but those who were in a position to give reviews and testimonials after using it commented that it tasted much better when chilled to an extent. Amy didn’t exactly know what they were talking about, it tasted the same to them regardless of how they tried it, but it built up customer satisfaction at the very least and those results were never arguable.

A pretty big proportion of people who bought Amy’s love potions were repeat customers, surprisingly. Perhaps not that surprisingly, even when fully ingested a love potion’s effects generally wore off within 5 days, so of course it had to be reapplied if one wanted the affects to have any sense of permanence. But the surprising part was just how many of them were using the potion on themselves. Amy got at least a dozen testimonials every month from people who had been slipped some of the love potion without their knowing and now couldn’t bear to imagine losing the intense feelings they held for their new partner.

Amy didn’t get it, truly and honestly, but it was business. They couldn’t make any kind of living without people like that. Though they had, eventually, added a caution label to their bottle’s wrapping. “Product is designed to simulate desirous feelings and may have addictive properties.” It was a formality given how this stuff was usually used, but it was the most Amy could do to massage down the guilt.

After all, if they didn’t make love potions, someone else would. Someone probably less equipped to deal with its affects at that. Amy just wished that their target demographic wasn’t so… like they were.

The doorbell rang. Amy muttered a curse, having almost finished two half-boxes by now. They pulled the hose out from the water cooler and stopped the flow with their thumb.

Amy ran back to their room as fast as they could and threw on jean jacket and sweatpants. It wasn’t perfect protection against the potion’s aroma, but it should smother what was there long enough for a short interaction.

They opened the front door a crack, just enough to see who was there. It was a woman, older than Amy by a bit, heavy makeup, blonde hair tucked into a big, brown trenchcoat, and big, black sunglasses hiding her face.

“Can I, uh,” Amy started. “Can I help you?”

“You’re the one I need to talk to, right?”

Amy blinked.

“The weed guy is a block down.”

They attempted to close the door, but the woman stuck her foot out and stopped it.

“I’m not looking for - weed. You make love potions, right?”

Amy looked at her with concern.

“I have a website, all transactions go through that.”

“I have money.”

“That’s good. You’ll need that. Please let me close the door now.”

“Look,” the woman said as she stepped closer. “I don’t have time to wait for a delivery. He’s leaving tonight, I need your help.”

“Well I’m sorry, but there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with deciding to use a love potion, it shouldn’t be made on a snap judgement.”

“Please!” She was all but bodily forcing the door open at this point. “You don’t know him, you don’t know what I’m losing. He’s perfect and kind and funny and beautiful and – and the one. He’s the one for me and I’m the one for him and the only thing bad about him is that he can’t seem to realize it. Haven’t you ever loved someone so much that you would do anything to keep them to yourself?”

“Uh,” Amy coughed. “Yeah, no. No not really. Now could you please, get off my property?”

The woman just scoffed. “How can you call yourself a creator of love without knowing anything about the real thing?”

“That’s not really how that works.”

She sighed. “Fine. I’ll leave you to it then.”

Amy eased away from the door, getting ready to close it, and the woman barreled right through them and into the house.

“Wha- Hey!” Amy shouted up from the floor.

“Where are they?”

“You can’t-” Amy started, shakily getting to their feet. “You can’t be in here.”

Amy had already completely lost track of her. All they knew was where they didn’t want her to go, so that’s where they immediately went.

“I’m calling the police. This is a – You really can’t – I -”

Oh hell.

The woman stood in the middle of the garage, her eyes wide and vacant. As soon as Amy stepped through the door, her head snapped towards them.

God dammit.

“You…” she muttered.

“No.”

“You’re so beautiful.”

“No.”

She darted forward and grabbed Amy by the hands. A shudder ran up their spine.

“Please, I’ve never met anyone I’ve cared so deeply for.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I need you in my life.”

“You really don’t.”

The woman looked like she was about to cry.

“If this about that other guy, I don’t care about him anymore. I belong only to you now!”

“Well that’s – fine actually considering the circumstances. But, no, you really need to le-”

Before Amy could finish, the women grabbed one of their love potion bottles and splashed the liquid onto their face. They spat and coughed and sputtered and did everything to get the vile taste out of their mouth.

When they could finally speak again, they gave it a few heavy breaths to calm down before saying anything.

“You’re paying for that,” they muttered.

“Yes of course, anything you want.” She was already digging through her pockets.

“No. Okay. If you want to know what I want,” Amy said, already pushing her out of the garage and towards the front door. “I want you to go home, sleep on it, and until then, get out of my house.”

“I’ll wait for you for as long as it takes.”

“Yep. I’m sure.”

Amy shoved the woman out the front door, who took a few stumbling steps, turned back, and whispered “I love you.” before Amy slammed the door in her face.

They leaned against the door and sank to floor, sighing.

Mixing day.