#potionomics robin

Not quite spicy enough for the sauce tier, but still a bit suggestive 👀✨️ full drawing up for patrons! 💖

Not like she's going to check on him right away. She's got a lot going on: debt's paid, post-competition attention, figuring out the Mavenbloom recipe for Uncle Oswald, figuring out whatever's happening with Finn. It's Roxanne who brings it up first, because of course it is. Roxanne collects information like breathing and she's still in Sylvia's basement and she's got things to report.

And she reports that Robin's being weird. His shop's been closed for a while, hardly anyone sees him, and when he's spotted in town he walks a bit stiff, speaks haltingly.

Because it's basically a horror story from Robin's perspective if you think about it. Two decades ago, when he's a kid living on Rafta under the despotic rule of the Witch Queen Maven, a bunch of adventurers show up on the island, defeat the kraken in the bay, and say they're going to liberate this island from Maven's rule, but they need a guide to help them reach her stronghold. And Robin's the only person who steps up to do it, there's a climactic battle and clash with the Witch Queen that ends in all the heroes present dying, and presumably the Witch Queen as well. Such a dramatic conflict that miles and miles of land around Maven's castle are irradiated with arcane fallout. And Robin's the only survivor, and he comes back to town with this little pet lizard he found, and everyone adores him and adulates him, and he becomes a master potion maker—except he's constantly under the control of the Maven, who was transmogrified into this pet lizard by the fallout of the battle, and goes undetected for years and years.

He's been a puppet, a passenger in his own body! He doesn't know how to interact with people on his own, without a voice in his head! That little slice we get of him asking what's happening after Sylvia beats Maven the second time is freaking heartbreaking, he sounds like a scared kid.

There's no way Sylvia leaves that alone once she finds out. She's the poster child for compassion, there's literally no one she won't help and no problem too large for her.

I just love the idea of writing this up as a mostly heartwarming tale that keeps getting jarred by the true horror of Robin's situation poking through...