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There is a book, in the tea shop, filled with a handful of Greek myths -- and one of them, it turns out, applies to this exact situation. A story of Circe, and the tale of a strange bloom that Odysseus used to turn his men back from their strange transformations -- the story is long, and not entirely accurate, but there is one piece of information that can be gleaned from its pages:

The Moly Flower holds the solution to the strange outbreak that has turned so many of their friends and companions into wild beasts. It is a small bloom as white as milk with a black root attached, and seems too fragile to hold the fate of so many in its tiny petals.

This is the source of the cure -- but it has an incredibly strong, powerful scent that is only overshadowed by the taste. Anyone who tries to eat one straight will be unable to swallow, will have to spit before they get to that point, and might just lose their lunch along with it.

Obviously, using the flower alone isn't the solution. However, these are the Chosen: those few, from many gods, who might have experience taking something inedible and disguising and turn it into a brew or a potion, something usable.

Of course, anyone is able to try, even if they're not very good at this sort of thing. Who knows -- they might just get lucky....

At the tea shop, Briiva frowned at the book she was reading. She hadn't actually read much mythology, so currently she was at a complete loss. Reading the tale of Ulysses at least gave her the hint about the flower she had been picking up. How to blend it of course, was a different matter entirely. Still, she was at a tea shop.

Briiva made herself busy taking one of her flowers and pulling off the petals. Heading over to a mortar and pestal, she went about grinding the petals down. Grinding the petals down proved to be rather difficult, as the flower hadn't dried out much, and wasn't actually very brittle. She worked at it for another few minutes before giving up and taking her mutilated petals over to the counter to mix have steeped in some boiling water.

Once her concoction was ready, Briiva paid for her use of hot water and gingerly blew across the cup that had been provided for her. Once she was confident enough that the water wouldn't burn her tongue, Briiva took a small sip, only to spew it back out, almost dropping her cup in the process. It tasted absolutely terrible! Dejectedly, Briiva took her cup and threw it into the trash, now down one flower.

Mal wished Jonesy was here. Jonesy would know what to do with -- whatever it was. He took a pot and some water and sugar. He'd seen Gio make that rosemary simple syrup for drinks maybe a thousand times, right? So it shouldn't be hard to make it.. and maybe the sugar would help balance out the smell and taste of it?

He boiled it-- and took it off the rock closest to the campfire and waved some of the steam at himself, the way they were told to do in science classes with labs. The stench of it made him gag and he wrinkled his nose and took the pot to tip it off to the side at the base of a tree.

That was definitely not going to work. Maybe if he disguised the next try with aromatics? Rosemary-- maybe mint? Or lemon? Something -- they were in a swamp, what was in a swamp? Mal stared at the mess cooling at the base of a tree and ran fingers through his hair and tried to figure out what aromatic herbs or bark could be found in a damn swamp so he could maybe not screw up the last batch.

[1/1 - SUCCESS, 3 cures received)

Izzy pored over the photo on her phone - a screenshot of a page in a strange book, which someone had spied at the tea shop and then texted around to anyone who was interested. The picture in the book looked exactly like the flower Izzy found in the aftermath of her and Songtao’s fight with the cougar. The flower was a real stinker, wafting with a big gross aroma, but it hadn’t occurred to Izzy before that it was meant to be eaten.

She didn’t really touch much of the stuff at the campsite before, but now she was tearing through packs and supplies. She found what she was looking for in an overstuffed camouflage duffle bag - a black, medium sized box that looked like a sideways toaster oven, and a small generator to go with it. Izzy pumped her fists into the air, then grabbed the bag and ran into the inn, to a relatively abandoned room that she could treat like a lab for a few hours.

Once upon a time, Izzy was in a nutrition course in college, as a padding course to fill out her credits. There was a section about the limited ways that ancient civilizations had to prepare and store food. There was one method she thought of immediately, that would be true to Greek times, though unfortunately she didn’t have a clay pot and a hot, blistering sun to work with. This dehydrator though would do the job better, and relatively faster.

Maybe whoever owned this pack thought they might find berries or frog legs out in the forest, and planned on drying them out to pad out the food stores here. A nice enough idea, but clearly didn’t work out for them in the long term. Izzy found a clean tray in the dufflebag, set the flower in the center of the dehydrator, and got the generator cranking to life.

Hours, and hours later. Izzy had found a book in the guy’s rucksack - it was a Dean Koontz novel that she never, ever would have voluntarily picked up. Not unless she was stuck slowly cranking a generator in a half-rotted room in the middle of nowhere, that is. When she heard the little *ding!* of the dehydrator, she finished the chapter she was on, and then carefully opened up the glass door of the little machine.

The Moly Flower was almost prettier now, shrunken and delicate like pressed flower. The root looked something like a vanilla seed now. Now that she had dehydrated it, was it the shrivelled petals that she would give to the afflicted Chosen? Or pieces of the root? That part would be pure experimentation. Izzy breathed a sigh of relief, and touched the stem of the flower...

...and it crumbled apart. The entire flower dissolved into a fine powder, white and black. Izzy froze in place with her mouth agape. Silently, she grabbed a plastic baggie by her side, and hurriedly dumped the powder into it before it had the chance to blow away.

She sat with the baggie in her lap for a few minutes, wondering what could be done. Eventually, she poked her finger into the baggie, and licked the powder at the tip of it. “I guess it is sort of sweet now.” The smell and taste was more like cotton candy now, light and airy in total opposition to how heady and dense the flower had been. Perhaps the liquid of the flower was the source of the stank? She looked around at the food she had brought in with her, and had a terrible idea.

Izzy rolled out her remaining three pieces of fruit leather she had brought with her to this trip. Then she thickly sprinkled the white and black powder over the long strips of gummy fruit, rolled them up, then put it back in the plastic baggie. It definitely looked like she went insane, and dumped a bunch of salt and pepper on top of Fruit-by-the-Foots, and then made a weird cinnamon roll out of it.

She shrugged, and figured at least she wouldn’t be making a turned Chosen’s life that much worse for eating it.

using moly one

It wasn't like he hadn't noticed the smell. Zan had been carrying around a bouquet of these gross-a** flowers for some time now, but even after one of the goths had practically brewed him a cup of tea made from the things and told him it would cure the furries, he hadn't believed. When you had something to hide, you... hid it. You didn't just give up your secrets the fourth time you were asked. Sometimes he forgot how trustworthy people could be, considering that he wasn't.

He had made it halfway back to camp before he'd realized that they were going to need a lot of sugar. Even he, Master of Not Barfing Under Any Circumstances, would likely have a problem ingesting whatever cure they came up with, and some sort of sweetener was the most obvious way to counter a little of the flowers' natural foulness. Zan returned to the tea shop, grabbing one of the ceramic sugar bowls off of the table and heading back with it.

It was nothing to boil some water and pour it into the half-filled bowl, and Zan did so, stirring until all of the crystals were dissolved. He then retrieved one of the flowers from his bag, asked Hermes to "make this s**t work" because it seemed like the thing to do, and shoved the entirety of the bloom into the sweetened water, root and all. The dark color at the flower's base began to spread to the liquid around it, turning the mixture into a soupy, black mess. Zan frowned. Maybe this batch could be given to the animals that lacked a sense of taste. Those existed, right?

[ using flower 2/2 ]
If you get a 5, your attempt is successful! You get 3 cures.

The tea shop would help, Brian had decided. After going to talk to some of those a*****e teenagers he had decided to see if the big empty store might yield something worth trying to make a potion with.

This was stealing, of course, but it was for a good cause, right? In another life he would have had to arrest himself for this.

He found a sugar bowl and a bag of kids' cookies that appeared sealed and headed back to camp. With a small pan of water be began to create was he was 80% sure was called a "simple syrup." He had watched late-night Food Network enough times to know that "reducing" water and sugar (whatever that meant) got you some sort of sweet syrupy madness.

He tossed the flowers in there and waited. The stem began to color the sugar a sickly grey, but beggars couldn't be choosers, right? He took out a couple of cookies, fished out some bits of flower, and made a cookie sandwich. The cookies would be sweet. He remembered them from childhood! Hopefully, though, the sugar-water he had soaked the flower in would keep them sweet enough to ingest. It was an embarrassing attempt, but he'd had to try!

Back at camp, ?Briiva was holding one more of her flowers, examining it. Her drink had been unbearable, so she didn't want to try that again. However, she had been working on distillation, maybe she could do something with that!

Of course, without any proper tools, this was easier said than done. Briiva followed the same steps she had last time, grinding the petals of the flower down as fine as she could. The next step was admittedly harder; there was nothing available at the camp to distill with. "Ah well, nothing to do for it right now." Briiva poured the petal dust into a pot, filled it with water and mixed it in. Putting it over the fire, Briiva watched and waited, hoping that the water didn't evaporate the curative properties of the flower along with everything else.

It would be easier said than done. When she came back to the pot several minutes later, she found a bone dry pot with nothing inside to show for her attempt. Groaning, she pulled it from the fire, set it down and flopped on the ground not far off, making sure not to accidentally squish Arthur in the process.

Flowers left: 1

The flash-freezing didn't go too well, Ernst learned. He ended up peeling the flower into its component petals instead. They were at least very pretty, and they looked like they'd belong in someone's very hipster blooming tea. He picked a few sticks of cinnamon to pair with, and of course saved some sugar - they were in the south. He had to try to make some kind of sweet tea!

Of course, Ernst wasn't really from the South, and try as he might, the cinnamon and moly didn't really come together in a way that was palatable. It was almost like they each highlighted the weaknesses of the other: the sheer bitterness of the moly seemed only magnified by the relentless spice of cinnamon, which seemed to lose its warmth and approachability. The sugar...uh, somehow it only made sludge.

This didn't make any sense. Ernst knew how to make tea!