Instant Hero Potion

The First Incident

The Grand Vault Library was an ancient construct whose age laughed at the span of most history books. The indomitable structure had outlived basic civilization at least a dozen times over as various apocalyptic events decimated the population and forced the straggling survivors to rebuild over and over again. The most ancient secrets of magic from each new civilization, the most twisted and powerful of enchanted artifacts, and countless sealed away demons and assorted evils were housed within its depths. It had been an impressive structure from the beginning, countless armies had exhausted themselves outside fortress like defenses in futile attempts to break in, but the years of housing so much magic and often forgotten evils had warped it, the architecture now couldn't sit still as it liked to change the layout now and then often condemning visitors to wandering lost in their final days or simply sealing them away in its reshaping walls. It wasn't a big stretch to think that the building itself was probably sentient and aware, and quit possibly filled with a horrible, terrible malice. Loreane had worked the day shift four days a week for about the last six years.
Loreane walked up to the doors of the outer wall without any particular enthusiasm but her long legs had a tendency of making the walk seem a little too short. Menacing shadowy forms could be seen darting about the windows. So, the ghouls were active today, but not overly worked up, they'd be screeching in their blood-curdling, hair-raising manner if they were agitated. She grasped the heavy door ringer with her slender fingers and banged it down on the ancient unidentifiable wood of the door 7 times in a rhythm that would identify her as an employee. An indent about half a foot above her head changed, convulsing into a blood-red eye that proceeded to look her over. Fighting a yawn, she lifted a gleaming silver pendant into its range of vision.
"Purpose here...work. You may pass," a voice rumbled from seemingly everywhere in the structure before her just before the doors swung open.
"Thanks, Bob," Loreane said as she passed the threshold, taking a couple quick steps to make sure the doors couldn't clip her with a swing-back.
A loud sigh echoed around the courtyard, "for 15,000 years has the spirit of B'batharg'rak, the watcher of eternity played doorman for this building, and you insist on that ridiculous nickname."
Loreane turned to face the doors and flashed a brilliant, gleeful smile, "Only because it annoys you so."
"You know the eternal watcher has contacts in the underworld, your afterlife could be arranged to be extremely unpleasant," the words sounded like a growl as the cobblestones under her feet rumbled.
"But, I'm an elf, we live a really long time, and I'm not yet thirty, might be that no one remembers to torment me when and if I go there," Loreane teased, flicking back some of her brown hair with a contemptuous little gesture.
There was no rebuttal, just a tired sounding sigh. Loreane smirked, there was something reassuring about her little ritual morning spat with the guardian of the outer wall. It made it seem less likely that one of the horrible magical accidents that happened in the library from time to time were less likely to happen to her somehow, that she'd always have to come back to fight the doorman spirit.
She walked up with practiced caution to the sentry Gargoyles outside the western front door. The stone warriors guarded the main building itself, and mostly spent their time looking intimidating in all their granite glory. The prominent sharp jewels embedded directly in their knuckles was intended to add to the effect. She stopped, allowing them to look her over, they'd be scanning for potential threats with their odd reflective single eye. She scanned her somewhat warped reflection in the eye of the Gargoyle on her left, her own green eyes appearing to large for even the wide eyes of an elf on the curved surface. The Gargoyles nodded and resumed their neutral position and she walked in.

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The first floor of the library actually wasn't all that weird, not when compared with the rest of the building. In fact, the whole area above ground was relatively normal – it was the deep complex of labyrinthine basements and sub-basements where the architecture became a living nightmare. Anyone wanting to steal some ancient forgotten relic to conquer the world from the building would have to get past the guardian of the courtyard and fight past the Gargoyles outside unless they had acquired a pass somehow or another. Actually, Loreane had no idea if the outer guardian spirit could even do something if someone didn't have a pass – some people had been able to talk their way into the courtyard to talk to library staff without one in the past. If someone could do that, then they'd be in the public area, which was mostly fairly normal research and artifacts, they'd have to figure out how to get to the secret concealed doors that led to the deeper reaches of the building. From there it could be difficult to survive just what lived in the Library especially in the oldest sections. And yet there were still precautions that if anything were ever to be taken from the Library there were various nasty things that could be sent after the thief. All in all, it was a very safe place to hide things like artifacts of doom, not so much for keeping employees intact.
The place sold itself on the principle of keeping the world safe, that it was a way to preserve ancient knowledge and rituals without letting them out into the general populace where someone could get their hands on them and cause mass murder and mayhem. Ancient evils that couldn't be defeated by heroes and were only sealed away for some thousand years were also generally taken here, where an eye could be kept on them. When magic went wrong field agents would go out and round up the item or sometimes a beast of some sort and bring it back, where they would have to go through a new items admission with the Library's various defenses and guardians. Most people even in the fields of organizing and bookkeeping tended not to live terribly long. Loreane had missed the fine print when she'd signed up for a ten year position, one that would end on a note of very nice pay – but only if one were to survive to the end of it, as it turns out. The recruiter had not been particularly upfront about how dangerous the job was in her case. Though, to be fair, only people with an insane desire to seek out danger would really want to work here – people who in another world or life would take to jumping off of the highest things to be found with only the barest of safety measures for fun.
"Got some new stuff for you today," greeted the gruff voice of one of her supervisors, an old veteran of library duty called Trent. The short and heavily scarred man was pushing a cart with several vials and vases of strange liquids. "Going to need whatever ingredient analysis you can pull off so we can categorize some of these potions and dispel some others."
"Alright, tell me what we know," Loreane took control of the cart and walked beside him.
"That purple stuff we've got no clue about, someone went into their friend's lab and couldn't find him, only a smoldering pair of shoes in front of a table with that container on it. Those in the box at the end are screwed up love potion attempts most likely, we can probably guess what went into them, the analysis is just to be safe. The orange goop was meant to be a hair-dye, but also caused uncontrollable hair growth. The capped container holds some attempt to create a living cement, apparently to make statue-building or odd brick designs easier, who knows. The green stuff though, that's interesting, has a bit of a story to it."
"Oh yeah, what's the story to that?" Loreane asked, managing to feign interest only halfway.
"Seems there was this bloke that wanted to play hero, see his village was being harassed by some ogres," the man leaned on Loreane's desk as she pushed the cart beside it.
"Somehow or other he manages to make, buy, or steal that potion you see there. He drank some of it and he grows to twice his size, ends up with giant muscles bulging out all over the place."
"Hmm, it's odd, but that's not exactly the strangest result of a potion I've heard of," Loreane said as she sat down in her chair and starting pulling out her analysis kits from her desk's drawers.
"It gets better, after using his newfound super strength to beat up the ogres and send them packing..."
"Wait, ogres? 11 to 14 feet tall, tend to claw through weaker stones, wield battle clubs that weigh about 200 pounds, ogres?" Loreane interrupted.
"Yeah, so the story goes," Trent snapped impatiently, "anyway, after he sends them packing it seems he couldn't get enough of the heroics, he just sort of kept going. Looking for deeds to do, people to save, and monsters to fight. He kept fighting and generally beating bigger and bigger things until eventually he skipped a few weight divisions and went up against a tarasque."
Loreane winced, "Ouch, hence his untimely and horrific death and us getting his formula post-mortem huh?"
He nodded, "Easy call on that one. Poor fool must have just lost it," he trailed off for a minute before remembering something and said, "I'll leave you to it, I've got to help corral some books that got loose in the third subbasement."
Loreane didn't pay too much attention to the older man as he walked off, he'd have the help of the janitorial staff. In the case of the Library, the "messes" that needed cleaning were often things like magic spells run amok, insanely dangerous potions that spilled and were melting through stone and emitting gases that turned living things inside out or creatures with names like Gorudak, Devourer of Orphans escaping the bonds meant to hold them away from the fragility of mortal-kind forever. Being one of the most dangerous people on the planet was one of the basic job requirements for the place's janitors.
She was rather curious about the green potion, affecting the body and the mind like it did was an oddity. Essentially it made a person into the worst idea of a hero, flex the muscles, bash things' heads in, save and bed the virgins all the while giving them the means to be very physically dangerous. Trading muscles for brains maybe? She'd put off its analysis though, get the duller basic potions sorted first and in the afternoon she'd get to the interesting ones, also scary when it came to that purple one.
She looked around her workplace to make sure no one was looking and reached into her lowest desk drawer. She moved the carefully organized stacks and pulled out a small wrist band that was completely obscured from casual inspection. It wasn't something she was really supposed to have, and the library was very old school when it came to punishments even for small infractions, but it was useful. She slid the small wrist band made of golden scales onto her arm and hid it under her sleeve taking comfort from the protective spell it was putting on her. The scales had come from a legendary creature whose name probably wasn't too important now, but at the time it was famed invulnerability. The monster was impossible to so much as scratch, the belief had come about that the creature was completely indestructible, which was only disproved once it had died of old age. Various magic users had discovered how to remove and change the shape of the scales, able to shift patches into pieces of clothing that could be worn, but nothing had ever been able to outright destroy them. Interestingly someone wearing the scales had their own skin affected, the more scales a person wore the harder they were to harm – one could keep a person safe from paper cuts, according to rumor a full outfit had let a man take a crossbow bolt to the eye without permanent damage. The library had over the course of 700 years rounded up all the known golden scale armors they could find, and most had been moved into the deeper vaults but some of the employees kept small stashes for extra security.
The day went by without major incident, nothing even spilled out of the container to kill everything around it, heck none of it had even made an escape attempt. A potion would be lifted from the cart and it would be subjected to various tests to determine what went into making it and offer guesses at how. After determining the kind of potion it was it was labeled with a small tag marked with a code to indicate the method of unmaking it and the potion was set back on the cart. Repeat process, yawn. Loreane took lunch with her usual tea and took the kettle back to her desk. Work went on until it started to get dark outside, by then she was down to the last and now cold cup.