Poisoned: Arsenic & Strychnine

Strychnine, a full dose, the wolf-killer's measure. Within the hour your muscles begin answering to someone else: twitches, then great arching convulsions that bow your spine off the floor, and through every one of them your mind stays horribly, perfectly clear. The doctor pours tannic acid and chloroform, darkens the room, and forbids all sound, any touch or noise fires the next spasm. It comes down to how much they used and how strong your heart runs.

• Convulsions triggered by any light, sound, or touch, the room goes dark and dead silent
• Fully conscious through all of it, the most horrifying lucidity you'll ever play
• If you live, every muscle torn and aching, 7 days moving like an old man
• /me goes rigid mid-word, back arching, eyes wide and aware and fixed on the ceiling

Recovery The first three hours decide it, then 7 days of torn muscles and a dark, quiet room.·Doctor, urgently

A survivable dose of strychnine, barely. The convulsions come in sets, wrung out of you by the smallest sound, and the treatment is medieval and correct: tannic acid to bind the poison, chloroform when the spasms crest, and two full days in a shuttered room where nobody speaks, nobody knocks, and the floorboards are forbidden to creak.

• Confined to darkness and silence for 2 days, visitors banned
• Muscle spasms at any stimulation, a slammed door across the street counts
• Torn, wrenched muscles for 5 days after, moving like the morning after a beating
• /me flinches whole-bodied at the scrape of a chair two rooms away

Recovery 2 days in the dark, then 5 more unclenching, the quiet saves you as much as the medicine.·Doctor, urgently

A heavy arsenic dose, hours of gastric agony the camp first calls cholera, until the doctor notices nobody else who ate is sick. He saves your coffee dregs, borrows the assayer's bench, and runs the Marsh test by lamplight: a silvery-black mirror blooms on the porcelain, and the diagnosis becomes evidence. Somebody in your life measured that dose, and now there's proof.

• Bedridden and purging for 3 days, salt broth by the spoonful
• Weak as a kitten through 7 days
• The black mirror on porcelain, physical evidence, and the doc will swear to it
• /me holds the porcelain shard up to the light, studying the black bloom that means murder

Recovery 6 days of nursing to get your legs back, the investigation runs on its own clock.·Doctor, urgently

A sub-lethal arsenic dose, taken over days or in one botched cup, after the purging night passes, it leaves its signature in your nerves: hands and feet gone to pins and needles, buttons impossible, stirrups uncertain. The doctor calls it neuritis and prescribes patience, beef tea, and finding out who owns the sugar bowl.

• Numb, tingling hands, fumble buttons, cards, and hammers for 7 days
• Feet half-asleep, careful on stairs and in stirrups for 5 days
• Grip gone soft, no pistol work you'd want to bet on
• /me flexes their fingers slowly, frowning, like a man wearing someone else's hands

Recovery The gut settles in 2 days, the nerves take the full 7 and improve by inches.·Doctor required

Strychnine, caught at the door: your face starts ticking, your thumbs jump, and your neck keeps wanting to look at things you're not looking at. The doctor knows the signature, gets tannic acid into you fast, and prescribes the dark quiet room before the twitches can graduate. They never do, but you spend two days flinching at your own pulse.

• Visible facial tics and jumping muscles for 2 days
• Kept in dim quiet for 2 days, no crowds, no gunfire, no fiddle music
• Startle violently at sudden noises for 3 days, let people see it

Recovery 3 days from twitch to steady, it never got to own your spine.·Doctor required

The arsenic hits like the flux from hell and the first cry in camp is cholera, you're quarantined, your bedding's marked for burning, and the well is condemned inside the hour. It takes the doctor a day to notice nobody else is sick and start asking harder questions about who poured your coffee. You spend that day proving you're not a plague, which is its own indignity.

• Quarantined for 1 day until the diagnosis turns
• Purging and cramping for 2 days, salt broth and bismuth
• The doc's questions have started, everyone who handled your food is nervous
• /me argues their innocence of cholera from behind a rope line, between cramps

Recovery 4 days to strength, the suspicion in camp doesn't quarantine so easy.·Doctor required

The coffee was bitterer than sin and you said so out loud at the halfway mark, which is the only reason you're alive to complain. What half a dose of strychnine buys you is a night of jumping muscles and clamped jaws just short of true convulsions, ridden out in the doc's back room with tannic acid and nobody allowed to sneeze.

• A night of twitches and rigid spells, the doc's back room, lights low
• Sore, wrenched muscles for 3 days
• You now taste everything before you swallow, visibly, forever

Recovery 3 days, the other half of that cup was a funeral.·Doctor required

The doctor leans close during the worst of the purging and goes still: there's garlic on your breath, and you haven't eaten garlic. It's the old sign every physician memorizes, arsenic announcing itself. The dose was middling, the treatment is purging and milk, and the diagnosis turns a bad stomach into an attempted murder.

• Purging for 1 day, then 2 days weak on milk and broth
• The garlic-breath diagnosis is delivered in front of witnesses
• Your meals now come from sealed tins you open yourself

Recovery 3 days on the milk cure, the doc's report is already written.·Doctor required

A mild dose in the evening stew, gripes and vomiting through the night, wrung-out weakness the day after, and a slow-dawning certainty that this wasn't the meat. You pour the leftovers into a preserve jar, screw the lid down, and put it somewhere safe. Evidence keeps.

• One rough night and a washed-out day after
• The evidence jar, produce it when the moment's right
• Appetite shy for 2 days, you eat only what you watch cooked

Recovery 2 days for the body, the jar waits as long as you need.·Doctor advised

Whoever measured it lost their nerve or their arithmetic, half what they intended. You get a night of cramps and cold sweats and a morning of hollow-eyed suspicion, cataloging everyone who came near your plate with a new and permanent bookkeeping.

• A night of cramps, rough but never dangerous
• Weak till supper the next day
• You keep a private list of who touched your food, it's already three names long

Recovery 2 days, the wariness is the lasting symptom.·Doctor advised

Small doses, maybe more than once, there's a coppery taste riding your tongue for days, a gut that aches dull and low, and food that's lost all its charm. The doc can't prove the cause yet, but you've started eating from the common pot only, served last, from the bottom.

• Metallic taste ruins food and coffee for 3 days, remark on it
• Dull bellyache for 2 days
• New table habits: common pot, served last, watching hands

Recovery 3 days once the source is cut off, finding the source is the errand.·Doctor advised

A trace of strychnine, enough to set your left eyelid leaping and your thumb ticking against the coffee cup for a full day. The doc prescribes sweet tea, quiet, and no whiskey, and watches you closer than he lets on. Every door that slams makes you clear leather before you can think.

• Twitching eyelid and thumb for 1 day, visible at conversational range
• Flinch hard at sudden noises for 2 days
• The doc checks on you twice more than usual and won't say why

Recovery 2 days of sweet tea and quiet.·Doctor advised

A day of cramps and unease that you'd have blamed on the beans, except the beans never made your tongue burn. It passes, but it leaves a sediment: you find yourself watching who pours, who serves, who smiled when you sat down. Maybe nothing. You've started sleeping with the lamp trimmed low, just the same.

• One crampy, uneasy day
• Watch every pour and plate pointedly for 2 days
• The suspicion itself is the story, feed it or starve it

Recovery A day for the gut, the doubt has no clock.·Doctor advised

The first swallow was bitter enough to pucker a mule and you spat the second back into the cup with commentary. What little got down gives you a jittery, sour evening and a sleepless stretch listening to your own heartbeat, but the cup got the worst of your share.

• Jittery and sour-stomached for one evening
• You sniff and sip everything first now, make it obvious
• The abandoned cup sits where you left it, somebody will notice it's still full

Recovery Overnight, the habit of sniffing your coffee lasts longer.·No doctor needed

You drained the cup and found it at the bottom: a fine white grit no coffee ever left, gone gluey against the porcelain. Your stomach registers a single complaint, no more, but you keep the cup, unwashed, wrapped in a bandana, and start thinking hard about who filled it.

• A single evening of mild queasiness
• The unwashed cup, wrapped and kept, evidence waiting for its moment
• You take your coffee black, self-poured, from now on

Recovery Fine by morning, the cup keeps its secret till you're ready.·No doctor needed

The poison was old stock, a paper of arsenic that spent a wet winter in somebody's saddlebag and lost its teeth. You get a headache, a sour gut, and a vague wrongness that nags at you until the doc, half-joking, says you look like a man who's been poisoned badly. The joke lands strangely.

• Headache and sour stomach for 1 day
• The doc's offhand joke sticks in your mind, pull the thread or don't
• Mild and gone by tomorrow, but somebody still tried

Recovery A day, the attempt was full strength even if the powder wasn't.·No doctor needed

By dumb luck you'd eaten half a pound of fatback an hour before the tainted cup, the grease slowed the poison at the gate, and your body called the whole thing off with one short, decisive purge behind the barn. You feel wrung but whole, and oddly grateful to breakfast.

• One short purge and a shaky half hour
• Tender stomach till morning
• You credit fatback publicly, breakfast orders around camp change

Recovery Right by morning, breakfast gets the credit.·No doctor needed

Reaching for the deal, you knocked the cup across the table and got maybe a drop on your thumb, which you licked, and instantly regretted. That one drop's bitterness numbed your tongue for an hour, and told you everything about what the full cup would have done. Whoever poured it watched you spill their whole plan and couldn't say a word.

• A numb tongue for an hour and a cold realization for much longer
• You know it was poisoned, now play out finding the who
• You've stopped drinking anything you didn't pour, visibly, at that table

Recovery Nothing but the tongue, the knowing has no cure.·No doctor needed

Arsenic is a heavy powder and whoever dosed the pot didn't stir: it all settled in the dregs, and your cup came off the top carrying next to nothing, a queasy hour and a bad taste. The rest got pitched onto the coals by an incurious cook before anyone else poured, and the only sign anything happened is a white crust in the embers that you alone noticed.

• One queasy hour, nothing more
• The white crust in the fire ash, you saw it, and you kept a pinch
• Someone out there thinks they failed and may try again, stay watchful

Recovery An hour of unease, the pinch of ash is your head start.·No doctor needed

Your would-be poisoner worked in the dark of the pantry, and in the dark, saleratus looks just like the white arsenic on the shelf beside it. You get baking soda in your coffee, a fizzy, salty cup and a belching evening, and later find the paper twist of real arsenic still waiting in its hiding place, untouched. You know. They don't know you know. The whole hand is yours to play.

• Utterly unharmed, one comically fizzy cup and some belching
• The real arsenic, found and pocketed, evidence and leverage in one twist of paper
• You know who and they don't know it failed, the best cards in the deck
• /me swirls the coffee, watches it fizz faintly, and smiles at absolutely no one

Recovery Nothing to recover, start planning what you do with the knowing.·No doctor needed