Stain

“Tracking a distribution chain of stain is like watching a bruise spread across Human Space. At first it’s depressing, then it gets annoying, then—when you get close to the core—you realize it isn’t a bruise at all. It’s a wound that’s still bleeding.”

— Investigator H. Ardesh, House Helicon Narcotics Division

Origins of Stain

Stain is a combat stim and narcotic derived from thollins corrupted by Redspace exposure and parasitized by the degraded psychic imprints of entities once human—or nearly so. Flowers For Ixion, a syndicate native to Ixion’s underbelly, discovered that these thollins could be broken down with custom enzymes into a resinous red-black tar. This tar, once refined and stabilized, forms the basis of Stain.

Unlike Ixion’s other notorious exports, Stain is not consumed recreationally in public. It must be injected, delivered directly into the bloodstream, and once inside the body it acts with terrifying efficiency. Ixion’s isolation and stigma made it the perfect cradle for such a product: the authorities could not or would not stop Flowers For Ixion from perfecting it, and by the time Stain began to leak offworld, its reputation preceded it.

Immediate Effects

A single injection of Stain brings three immediate waves:

1. Personality Shift: The user’s conscience is suppressed or inverted, making them cruel, predatory, and sadistic—RAI-like in demeanor. Empathy is obliterated, replaced with an alien detachment.
2. Temporal Warping: The user experiences “perfect clarity” across a three-second buffer in either direction, able to act as though anticipating or correcting time itself. Memory beyond the last sixty seconds, however, is rendered inaccessible. Mission parameters, friendships, or even the difference between ally and foe vanish into fog.
3. Euphoria: The surge of distorted time and predatory confidence produces a rush of joy. This pleasure is compulsive, highly addictive, and immediately begins to rewire the user’s sense of self.

This trifecta makes Stain appealing to mercenaries, desperate militias, and Criminal enforcers—anyone who values brutality and reaction speed more than long-term survival.

Prolonged Use

With daily use, Stain reshapes both body and mind.

• Months of Use: The user’s fluids become toxic. Sweat, saliva, tears, blood, even the oils of the skin cause painful chemical burns to others. White blood cells and platelets are neutralized by casual contact, making wounds from Stain-users highly infectious. The user’s time-warping clarity grows to encompass several days into the past and thirteen seconds into the future.
• Years of Use: The user mutates. Body proportions warp, flesh becomes unstable, and their psychology settles into the Dark Triad profile common to RAIs—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellian cruelty. The ability to “see” into Redspace strengthens into visions, and psychically attuned users risk becoming conduits. Through them, verminous RAIs may seep into realspace.

The final stage is effectively permanent. A Stain veteran ceases to be human in spirit, and possibly in flesh.

Distribution and Trade

Flowers For Ixion controls the production, processing, and distribution of Stain, calling it the “Blood of Ixion” in their internal slang. Offworld, however, it is almost universally known as Stain. The name reflects both its appearance and its indelible effect on users.

Smuggling routes spread like veins from Ixion outward: pirate freighters to the Wolf System, hollowed-out haulers into Jovian space, couriers bribed through the Belt. Stain is profitable enough that Flowers For Ixion has become one of the most dangerous cartels in Human Space—not for their firepower, but for their reach. Attempts to choke off supply only splinter it, like trying to cauterize an infection that runs too deep.

Cultural Reputation

Among the Astro-Landing Force, Stain is whispered about with disgust. Soldiers scrawl TSU (“This Sucks as Usual”) graffiti beside the tag STN whenever they discover its presence among militias. Corpo security calls it “a liability wrapped in profit margins,” despising its destabilizing effect but unable to resist exploiting addicts for black contracts.

On the streets, it has its own mythos. Stain is seen as both curse and crown: it grants vision, cruelty, and clarity—but at the cost of one’s soul. For some, that is not a trade-off but a bargain.

A Growing Wound

To House Helicon investigators, the problem is not simply the addicts. It is the networks that thrive around Stain—the way entire cells, gangs, and even planetary militias bend around its presence. A Stain addict is dangerous. A Stain cell is catastrophic. And at the heart of the web lies Flowers For Ixion, quietly bleeding poison into Human Space, one shipment at a time.