Fisstech skill

Skill 'fisstech'.

• This is a passive skill, it works automatically.

Fisstech is a pale powder sold by the pinch. Take one with use pinch and cold fire runs up behind your eyes: your hands get quicker and surer and you move faster, but magic finds you more easily, and health and mana come back slower while it lasts. Then the comedown hits: weak, slow and craving another pinch. Each pinch gives less than the one before, and the habit grows (dependence, withdrawal). A pinch does not keep: carried around, it spoils.

Your heart pays for every pinch. Take them close together and it starts to hammer, and it can stop for good, sometimes before any warning comes. Alcohol on top makes it worse, so does a weak constitution, among other factors. You can slip a pinch into a drink you hold with use pinch drink: anyone else who drinks it gets the high, but not the habit, and it will not kill them. Drink it yourself and it is your own dose.

The seller is a shifty peddler who keeps out of sight by day and turns up after dark in some city, a different one each night. Ask him and the first pinch is on the house, once in a life. He sells each buyer only so many a night; thieves get more.

Some cities ban fisstech. Their guards search anyone high or carrying a pinch in plain sight, take any powder they find and fine its owner, and whoever can't pay ends up wanted. What sits in a bag is your own business. A healer can mute withdrawal for a while (the detox service), and a vampire tastes fisstech in the blood of someone high on it.