Posted by Civilian Thyr Th’arialat (Resident) in Pernicious Shenanigans
It was almost a week after the day Shivan and Jezem had gone to the shooting range. Shivan’s shop was coming along nicely, mostly thanks to Jezem’s gifts and style. The med kit Jezem had gifted him had a permanent home in the front of the workshop, where it was likely to be needed.

Shivan had made a promise and he intended to go through with it. It had taken him this long to acquire everything he needed. These kinds of underhanded plans weren’t Shivan’s style but after Pavlajia, he’d had to find his own competence in them. After Jezem disappeared out of the sky. He found it funny he was now using those skills against Jezem, for fun.

Shivan had bought him three coffees already. Said he was trying to be nicer and all that garbage. And pay him back too, for all the dinners. Today the coffee had a little something extra in it. An Orion poison, enough to make him sick for about a week, but definitely not enough to be lethal.

Shivan entered Jezem’s house as he usually did and set the coffee on the counter. “Jezem! Coffee’s here!”

~ Thyr

“One minute,” Jezem called from another part of the house. The orion was in his room, sitting before an ornate gold and white wood vanity. Spread across it were various jewlery boxes and stands with clusters of various Orion beauty products and body oils filling the empty spaces in between. With a little cotton swab Jezem applied a thin white powder to the underside of his nails. Once the bottom of each nail was covered he applied a thin, clear coat of another liquid that caused the powder to turn transparent.

It was cute how Shivan thinks he’s being so underhanded. Insisting he couldn’t poison Jezem then bringing him drinks to ‘pay him back’. All Jezem had to do was discreetly dip a nail into the coffee and test for poison. There were only so many poisons Shivan could acquire with relative ease and without alerting authorities with any suspicious purchases. Oed wasn’t a bastion of criminal activity either so any offerings provided by local black markets would be similarly limited. What he couldn’t detect by the powder test could be smelled or tasted in coffee.

Jezem entered the main part of the house, “You know, I’m starting to get a little tired of all the coffee. Would it kill you to bring me a tea now and then?” Jezem pried the lid off the top of the cup to add a sugar mix with one hand while rooting around in another drawer for a spoon. And if he just so happened to accidentally dip the tip of a fingernail into the drink then that could be excused. Jezem stirred the sugar into his drink and oh, it was no effort to keep his face perfectly relaxed.

He feined a sip of the drink, not letting the liquid touch his lips, then retched, “Sisters, this tastes disgusting.”

Jezem