For the ultimate drink-driving, how-the-hell-did-I-get-here experience

Fugue Booze

(2 significant charges)

This recipe was formulated in Zhou dynasty China, or so its current users claim. The story goes that it was used to a limited extent all over eastern Asia, and may account for the strange legends surrounding the disappearance of Lao Tze. It was brought to the west by two minor dukes who stumbled upon it during the Vietnam war in circumstances that they have never fully explained. One of those dukes is now a biker travelling the highways of Australia. The other is Dion Isaacs (see Lawyers Guns and Money, p. 77 and To Go pp. 26 – 28). Neither one is keen on sharing, but both have had people leave their orbits in the past and one or two may have taken the recipe with them.

The recipe

Take a vessel made out of any non-organic material. Carve on it the Han Chinese symbols for ‘East’, ‘West’, ‘River’ and ‘Pilgrimage’, along with another intricate character that has, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, no meaning in any currently extant language.

Use the vessel to distil some form of grain alcohol (the original ritual called for rice wine, but Isaacs has found that whiskey works equally well). The water used in the distillation process must be drawn from a river that is used for trading, which can make this ritual a little difficult to use in the developed world. The vessel can be re-used, but will be ineffective until all the spirits distilled in a single batch have been drunk.

When the distillation is finished, write the name of a place to which you want to travel on a piece of paper in an east-Asian language. Thai seems to be about the westernmost language that will work, and some followers of Isaacs have reported that Mandarin Chinese seems to produce the most reliable results. Place the paper in your mouth and use the spirits to wash it down. Spend the charges at this point. Continue drinking until you are well and truly hammered.

When you regain consciousness, you will be roughly in the place you named. About twelve hours will have passed, you’ll have a wicked hangover and will vaguely recall travelling very fast (and of lots of bones, for some reason). The maximum range of this spell seems to be about a continent’s width (ie. from the east to west coasts of the USA, Canada or Australia). Interestingly, any form of transportation that you own will have been brought with you, just like you’d gotten really drunk and gone for a drive, but the odometer will be reading the same as when you swallowed the paper, and no-one will have seen it (or you) travel from one place to the other.

This ritual can affect more than one person, so long as they all drink at the same time and all travel to the same place. The charge cost remains the same, but the caster has to distil enough spirits to get every target blind drunk.

Use of fugue booze by dipsomancers for charging purposes generates one significant charge, and is widely considered a waste.