Cupid Love Potion

The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Love Potion, at the heart of their romanticisation process, was a mysterious chemical which had the effect of temporarily making sentient beings feel nothing but unconditional love for everyone they met.

Nature

The love produced by the Potion could just as easily be platonic as romantic, depending on the inclinations of the romanticised individual. The immediate effect of the Potion would wear off after a short time, but even then, the new dispositions acquired while under the spell would remain locked in, feeling as real and indestructible as natural feelings. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel) The effects could wear off more quickly and thoroughly if the subject experienced a shock soon after romanticisation, although even then, they were liable to remain aimlessly giddy and erratic for some time. (PROSE: Pessimist and the Dromedaries) The Potion could explode if exposed to cold air at a crucial point in the brewing process. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth)

The Cupids usually used Cupid Arrows dipped in Potion to enact the romanticisation process. (PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel, The Toymaker's Labyrinth)

History

The original Love Potion was a biochemical formula developed by the Crew's Creator, (PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids) based on a formula she had acquired from her colleague in the First Horde, Irving Scarper. Scarper's creation was “a substance which could genetically override a subject’s brain and cause them to feel any pre-programmed emotion in immense quantities”; after refining the substance to produce more specific mental conditioning proved impossible, Scarper had discarded the invention as useless, with, ironically enough, the brainwashing machines built by the Creator proving rather more suited to the Horde's purpose. Scarper thus thought nothing of trading away the formula to his colleague in exchange for her building him a robot assistant. (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata)

However, the formula was misplaced early on by the Prefect of the Department of Chemistry, #257. Subsequently, the goddess Aphrodite herself kept the Cupids supplied with a purely magical substitute with identical effects. The interchangeability of the two forms of Potions puzzled the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Wizardry and the Department of Theology. (PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids)

During the “Great Arrow Crisis”, the Cupids were temporarily reduced to lobbing bottles of Potion at their targets in the hope that they'd break on impact, which was cumbersome and only occasionally effective. (PROSE: The Mélange of the Mauve Muskrat)

When she first met the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in the form of Pessimist-242 and Larrikin-1029, Madame Tarsa attempted to reverse engineer the Love Potion from the sample on the Cupid Arrow with which Larrikin had attempted to hit her. However, before she could finish brewing her first sample, Larrikin loosed another arrow at the beaker, exposing the brewing Potion to the air and causing an explosion which destroyed the sample and the rest of Tarsa's research notes on how to duplicate Cupid technology. (PROSE: The Toymaker's Labyrinth)