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0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.

We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.

Find some Penicillium mushrooms!

Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.

First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.

Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?

So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:

Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.

2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms

Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.

First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:

Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)

1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)

1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)

If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.

Pinch of salt

1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)

3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)

Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.

Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.

When you're done, you should have something like this:

Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.

Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!

You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).

3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms

If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:

Well, realistically, it will look something like this:

We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.

IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.

Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.

Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.

The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.

4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom

We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.

(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)

You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.

Ideally you get something like this.

This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.

Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.

Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:

This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.

So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.

The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.

The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html

We have evidence of soap having been created as far back as 2800 BCE, in ancient Babylon. So you should be able to source some. If not, hit up your butcher friend and get yourself some animal fat. Doesn't really matter what kind of fat, pretty much any will do.

If you're squeamish or vegetarian, hopefully you wound up somewhere with a decent trade route to the Mediterranean and can get yourself some olive oil.

But really, any animal fat will do. You're gonna render it by heating it until liquid over a low fire and strain out any meaty bits, then before it cools you're gonna add lye (obtained by letting water seap through layers of cheesecloth and wood ashes in a barrel. Collect it from the bottom and store in a not-metal container) and mix until combined and let it set until the lye is done reacting with the fatty acids in your fat or oil of choice. Tada, soap.

But odds are if you've time traveled to some point in the past after 2800 BCE, you're gonna find someone who knows how to make and sell soap. It's not used super frequently as a cleaning agent before people started switching over to coal, but it's probably available.

Distilled alcohol doesn't hit the market until later- 1200 BCE at earliest (evidence is fuzzy on that point, we're probably looking at muuuuch later). Um- definitely outsource this process, alcohol distillation can get pretty dangerous. And flammable.

Don't ask the baker for yeast. They're gonna tell you to go get it from the brewer. Odds are the brewer is gonna be right next door. Historically they're the ones to provide the baker with yeast (at least in societies with food cultures built around leavened breads). You might also try the vintner (wine maker) or whoever is responsible for making the preferred kind of local booze. If you're in East Asia, you may also have luck sourcing yeast from soy sauce brewers.

Before the mid-1800s you're gonna have a hard time getting gelatin from a butcher's. What you can probably get is hooves, trotters, poultry feet, and assorted cartilaginous bits- joint ends work well. Gelatin is literally just rendered connective tissue (aka collagen). You're gonna take these bits, dump them in a pot, and boil them for literally hours, just enough to cover the bones. If your assorted bits aren't literally falling apart at the joins, keep boiling. Strain out your discarded bits and boil down the liquid until it's starting to get viscous, then cool. If your resulting gelatin isn't solid enough, you can reheat and reduce it down further.

Agar (which I'm told is a superior growth medium for microbes) can be similarly rendered from certain kinds of red seaweed, particularly the Gracilaria, Gelidiella, and Gelidium species.

If you can't get good-quality or appropriately heat-resistant glass, hit up the local potter, they can probably make you something that will hold up to boiling.

Alternatively, lead-free pewter can apparently be made with a mix of 94% tin, 1% copper, and 5% antimony. You'll probably want to team up with a local blacksmith for this- honestly you probably should since you're gonna need someone to make your tools anyway...

But instead, I propose ftm Future Rise Leo assisting 2012 mtf Leo. This elder trans man helping her figure herself out and work on the self-esteem issues she has with his decades of experience

But instead, I propose ftm Future Rise Leo assisting 2012 mtf Leo. This elder trans man helping her figure herself out and work on the self-esteem issues she has with his decades of experience

But instead, I propose ftm Future Rise Leo assisting 2012 mtf Leo. This elder trans man helping her figure herself out and work on the self-esteem issues she has with his decades of experience

starblind fanart!! for the incredible fic by @/dancingthesambaa

some art for my current au :3

found a cute art summary template and went "well....what if?"